“Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren, take note. Look who is in the mainstream now! Julian Simon, step by step, is becoming the intellectual king of the sustainable development hill. First came Bjorn Lomborg. Then Paul Sabin. And now Bill Gates.”
Julian Simon, with his revolutionary theory of “the ultimate resource,” was far outside of the mainstream of sustainable development thought in his lifetime. But Simon’s marketing prowess and business acumen went to work, culminating in the most famous bet in the history of economics against Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, et al. on the future scarcity of mineral resources in a more populated world.
Such is the subject of a recent book by Yale history professor Paul Sabin, titled The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future, which was reviewed by Bill Gates (see below).…
Continue Reading“Tell me, JJ, what’s this capital request all about?”
“Boss, this is for a heat exchanger that will use our cooling-tower water for meeting our air conditioning needs when it’s cold outside. I figure it will save 5% of the power we now use for operating our chiller. The project should come in at around $10,000 and have a payback of less than a year.”
“Saves energy, does it? We can use this project to get greenie points towards obtaining Polar Bear level on our Politically Correct Building certification.”
“Maybe, but getting that certification takes a lot of paperwork and costs about $50,000.”
“Include a bicycle rack in this project, which gets points also. And does this thing use electricity?”
“A little bit, for controls and automatic valves.”
“Good. Include a solar panel to power it and put it over the entrance to the building so it can be seen. …
Continue ReadingA passion of mine is defending my profession (Science) from assault. Such is approaching a full-time job, as those promoting political or economic agendas are painfully aware that real Science is a major threat to their aspirations — so they are aggressively attacking it on multiple fronts. (See ScienceUnderAssault.info, which was my talk to Congress sponsored by the House Science and Technology Committee.)
We now have yet another distressing example, where a leading scientist has lost his job — apparently for the crime of being a conscientious, competent academic, focused on quality research (instead of chasing grant money).
Dr. Henrik Møller is an world-renown expert on infra-sound, and has published several high-quality studies on low-frequency acoustics (like here, here, here, and here). More recently, some of these have dealt with industrial wind energy noise (e.g. …
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