“[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.…

“I have made it clear in this campaign that I am not calling for any tax increase on gasoline, on oil, on natural gas, or anything else. I am calling for tax cuts to stimulate the production of new sources of domestic energy and new technologies to improve efficiency.”

– Al Gore (2000)

“As long as I’m President, we’re going to keep on encouraging oil development and infrastructure, and we’re going to do it in a way that protects the health and safety of the American people. We don’t have to choose between one or the other, we can do both.”

– Barack Obama (2012)

For a very brief moment early in his first term, President Obama played the pro-oil card for some political mileage. Gasoline prices were on the rise, and Obama wanted to be all-things-to-all-people. …

“With the climate activists out of political power, they must regroup and turn to open debate and persuasion. Alex Epstein is ready when you are, Misters Brune, Gore, Hansen, Holdren, Musk, Nye, and Romm.”

John Holdren, James Hansen, Joe Romm: Since you are sure that planetary warming necessitates government rationing of fossil fuels, why not debate and expose the fallacies of the climate optimists, or the ‘deniers’ as you like to call them?

Alex Epstein stands ready (and he tried with Holdren, who surely has more time now as a private citizen.)

I was reminded of this when Alex sent out this email last week about a twitter challenge to Bill ‘The Science Guy” Nye:

Why Bill Nye “The Science Guy”?

Because he is the most prominent opponent of fossil fuels that has shown any inclination to debate.

“‘An inability to tolerate views different’? ‘Rage reactions’? Can we apply this mental health standard to Joe Romm and James Hansen, not to mention Paul Ehrlich in his diatribes against Julian Simon?”

“This is ironic to those of us who have encountered angry neo-Malthusians trying to wake us up to the coming food famine (1960s warnings), resource famine (1970s warnings), and, most recently, climate alarmism. Does this standard apply to them as it does to all things Trump?”

I have resubscribed to the New York Times. I received a 50 percent discount, and with Trump’s upset win in November I wanted to better understand what the intellectual/media elite were thinking. (And the answer is … they still don’t get it.)

In the Letters section of February 14th edition, I encountered “Mental Health Professionals Warn About Trump.”…