“[I]t is both pleasing and strange to see Joe Romm don a free market, pro-consumer, pro-taxpayer hat when it comes to nuclear. His (post-modernistic) dream is that wind power, solar power, and negawatts can usher in a post-fossil-fuel era. In reality, however, fossil fuels will replace nuclear to a large degree.”

“Perry Just Made Taxpayers Invest in a $25-billion Nuclear ‘Financial Quagmire.’” So read the headline of a recent post by Joe Romm (Center for American Progress). His subtitle: “Nuclear plants are money losers, but Perry is loaning billions more to the last new one being built.”

It is strange. Nuclear is the only scalable CO2-free electrical generation source known to man. Although it is the most expensive way to boil water (and hopelessly uneconomic compared to natural gas- and even coal-fired power), a stubborn, quasi-religious segment of the Climate Malthusians refuses to bulge.…

“When a liberal says it’s time for you to shut up, it usually means they’re losing an argument. When they want you arrested and prosecuted, well….”

– Steven Hayward, “Climatistas Double Down on Stupid,” Power Line, March 29, 2014.

When faced with a powerful, threatening argument to a troubled paradigm, those in denial will first ignore. If this does not work, they will ridicule. And it this does not work, they will shout and even use hateful talk.

“You just don’t get it,” Jeff Skilling would tell Enron’s detractors. Ken Lay, in the middle of his company’s implosion, likened short sellers and media critics to ‘terrorists’ (his last speech to employees was a few months after 9/11). The Enron duo wanted an undeserved peace. They were really saying: “Stop the criticism.…

“We need to defeat climate deniers like Ann Marie Buerkle and Dan Benishek to restore the place of science on Capitol Hill.”

– Gene Karpinski, president, League of Conservation Voters, quoted in Jennifer Yachnin, “Enviros Target Climate Deniers in Latest Ad Campaign” (sub. req.) Greenwire, July 24, 2012.

All but the most impartial and inflammatory participants in the climate-change debate disdain the term “denier” to characterize so-called climate-change skeptics.  Climatologist Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, for example, has complained:

Somebody needs to research the sociology and psychology of people that insist that anyone that does not accept [anthropogenic global warming] as a rationale for massive CO2 mitigation efforts is a “denier.” The complexity of skepticism (ranging from multiple aspects of the science, to the impacts that can be attributable to AGW and whether or not they are “dangerous” to the policies proposed for CO2 mitigation) seems to be completely missed by all of the “scholars” writing articles about ‘deniers’.

“This notion that the environmental movement — or any other major play in the media landscape — is pushing non-stop apocalyptic messages like a broken record is one I debunked ….”

– Joe Romm, April 29, 2012

“CONCLUSION: Unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases threaten multiple catastrophes, any one of which justifies action. Together, they represent the gravest threat to humanity imaginable.”

– Joe Romm, November 15, 2010

“Now that [James Lovelock] has dialed back his doomism — alarmism is a wholly inadequate word for Lovelock’s (former) brand of unjustified hopelessness.”

– Joe Romm, April 23, 2012

“… the alarmists have ‘won the day’ scientifically.”

– Joe Romm, January 11, 2012

Confused? Even dizzy? It is not your fault.

The alarmists’ alarmist Joe Romm is trying to soften a bit to have it both ways. …