Essay by Eric Worrall
So much for the big secret big oil conspiracy. Marathon Oil published an article in 1977 in a company periodical suggesting CO2 might cause mass starvation.
US oil company ran 1977 article predicting climate crisis could cause starvation
Marathon Petroleum predecessor warned of potential for ‘social and economic calamities’ in decades-old publication
Geoff Dembicki Thu 18 Jul 2024 22.00 AESTShare
The corporate predecessor to America’s largest refiner of oil, Marathon Petroleum, explained in a company periodical nearly 50 years ago that global temperature rise potentially linked to “industrial expansion” could one day cause “widespread starvation and other social and economic calamities”.
This decades-old description of climate breakdown is from a 1977 issue of the magazine Marathon World and is attributed in the article by an unnamed author to several experts including a scientist working for a top US agency.
“Although climatologists disagree on the underlying reasons, many see a future climate of greater variability, bringing with it areas of extreme drought,” said the magazine, previously published by Marathon Oil Company, which later split into Marathon Petroleum as well as the exploration and production company Marathon Oil.
Marathon Petroleum is among several oil and gas companies – including Exxon, Shell and BP – currently being sued by the city of Honolulu for allegedly engaging in a coordinated communications effort “to conceal and deny their own knowledge” of catastrophic climate impacts caused by burning their products.
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/18/us-oil-marathon-petroleum-climate-change
A company periodical is not exactly a secret internal memo.
Suggesting oil companies knew we were heading for certain doom back in the 1970s and tried to hide that knowledge is an absurd position even without this latest revelation, because climate scientists themselves were offering wildly differing opinions in the 1970s.
Well credentialed scientists like Gifford Miller, Stephen Schneider, Chester Langway and James Hayes appeared in the wildly popular 1978 documentary “In search of … The Coming Ice Age”. The scientists in the documentary defended their claim the world could be on the brink of a global cooling catastrophe. Schneider suggested using nuclear reactors to melt the polar ice caps.
I remember watching this documentary as a kid. The presenter was Leonard Nimoy, the original Star Trek Doctor Spock. All the adults were worried about this icy threat to their children’s future.
The lack of certainty about the science is further supported by the “secret” internal memos which are the alleged smoking guns of the fake Big Oil conspiracy narrative. For example, the following is a copy of the Glaser 1982 memo, which was circulated to Exxon management.
The memo, and bear in mind this was a private internal memo, is anything but certain that climate change will have catastrophic impact. For example, at the bottom of Page 4, continuing to the top of Page 5.
“There is currently no unambiguous evidence that the earth is warming. If the earth is on a warming trend, we’re not likely to detect it before 1995. This is about the earliest projection of when the temperature might rise the 0.5° needed to get beyond the range of normal temperature fluctuations. On the other hand, if climate modelling uncertainties have exaggerated the temperature rise, it is possible that a carbon dioxide induced “greenhouse effect” may not be detected until 2020 at the earliest”.
Why didn’t oil companies adjust their positions when global warming activists started to dominate the scientific debate, and scientists like Stephen Schneider jumped ship and joined the global warming camp?
There is a lot of evidence CO2 does not drive climate change – in the paleo record, CO2 follows climate change, not the other way around. Something else triggered the climate change which drove historical changes in CO2 level – including downward shifts in temperature when CO2 levels were high.
But there is a more obvious explanation for oil companies executives and other corporates don’t take every pivot of the scientific doomsday movement seriously – alarmists keep getting their predictions wrong.
Hardly a day passes we don’t discover yet another “settled science” disaster prediction turns out to be dead wrong.
Whatever happened to the 1.5C global warming safety limit?
The predictive failure and alarmism of the scientific catastrophe movement was as obvious in the 1970s as it is today. For example, Paul Ehrlich’s blockbuster 1968 book “The Population Bomb” predicted mass starvation within a decade.
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.
Many of the oil company executives who ignored global warming alarmism in the 70s and 80s would have been well aware of predictive failures like Ehrlich’s book, and would also have been aware of scientists like Stephen Schneider, who in just a few short years jumped ship from demanding fossil fuel be shut down to prevent the next ice age, to demanding fossil fuel be shut down to prevent the world from overheating. They would have all seen Schneider preaching global cooling in the “In search of” documentary, and their own researchers would have told them how Schneider flip-flopped between global warming scares and global cooling scares in the 1970s.
Wikipedia suggests the date of Schneider’s global warming awakening occurred in 1974, but if this is the case, why did Schneider appear in the 1978 “In search of” documentary and suggest melting the ice caps? Was it a case of “what is Schneider saying this week?”. No wonder oil company executives didn’t take it seriously.
Against this decades old backdrop of unsettled science and flip-flopping doomsday claims, there is one thing we do know for sure.
The year oil companies are shut down is the year six billion people die from starvation.
Fossil fuel is utterly essential for producing the fertiliser and pesticides, and transporting the food which allowed the world’s population of millions to grow into a global population of billions. Even nuclear power couldn’t replace all the ways fossil fuel makes our modern society possible, without trillions of dollars of additional investment. If fossil fuel was withdrawn today, or even over the next decade, food production methods would be forced to return to the agricultural practices of the 18th century, and most people alive today would surely die.
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“Entitled “World Weather Watch”, the article summarizes the debate, quoting J Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), a federal US government scientist who during the 1970s warned that industrial carbon dioxide emissions could melt the polar ice caps and pose threats to human civilization.”
Doesn’t sound like global ooling.
Are you sure that wasn’t J Murray Mitchell, a top EXXON official?
I’m quoting from Eric’s Guardian article. I believe he is accurately described there.
Nick,
It matters little what people try to make now of material dredged up from the 1980s.
I was working actively on global and Australian issues like these, as were many colleagues meeting in forums like the Australian Mining Industry Council and the Australian Petroleum Exploration Association APEA with combined meetings in this and that.
Before 1990, there was next to no global current awareness of any aspect of the coming Greenhouse mechanism. Colleagues and I noted the possibility of the mechanism being correct and that the globe might one day warm from anthropogenic CO2 emissions. On available advice, we accepted that a temperature rise of 10 degrees C would be serious, less than that trivial. There it was left until about 1990.
After 1990 there was an increase in activism that led politicians to start pressing for action to combat CO2 emissions but nobody took it too seriously because there was no practical way to reduce CO2 without massive economic harm.
That remains the case.
But please, don’t try to support incorrect theories of what energy companies did in those earlier years.
The Glaser 1982 memo was an attempt at an honest assessment of the science of the day.
“There is currently no unambiguous evidence that the earth is warming. If the earth is on a warming trend, we’re not likely to detect it before 1995. This is about the earliest projection of when the temperature might rise the 0.5° needed to get beyond the range of normal temperature fluctuations. On the other hand, if climate modelling uncertainties have exaggerated the temperature rise, it is possible that a carbon dioxide induced “greenhouse effect” may not be detected until 2020 at the earliest”.
“There is currently no unambiguous evidence that the earth is warming [caused by CO2].”
That was true back in 1982 and it is true today.
Surprised? Nick has perfectly morphed into a tin-foil hat wearing warminista conspiracy theorist.
On balance, the Cooling meme of the 1970s seems to have come from popular media sensationalism rather than a predominance of science opinion. However, when Gore & Hansen did their thing in August 1988 a cursory glance through literature suggested to me that isolated cooling predictions persisted into the mid-1980s, when the debate was still remarkably relaxed. Another reason for the persisting cooling trope was the concern of ‘Nuclear Winter’, incidentally the birth place of atmospheric temperature computer models AFAIK.
GCM’s were developed for Numerical Weather Forecasting. In fact they are really just forecasting programs run beyond their time of getting weather right, but they still have the right climate physics.
If they have the right climate physics, why do they stray? 😉
Because even the IPCC said that climate forecasting is impossible in a “coupled, non-linear, chaotic system”
That admission by the IPCC is just a scientific CYA statement . . . meanwhile, the IPCC merrily goes about doing its regular CMIP updates (no matter how much the climate models depart from reality) and their dire “global warming”/ECS warnings in their regular Assessment Reports with the hope that nobody believes/remembers their specific admission.
Such a farce!
If they have the right climate physics why is the weather wrong so often a week out?
If they have the right climate physics why do future weather reports change so often at the future days become more current?
Here in Ohio, the major news services that provide weather forecasts are often at odds at to whether it will rain or not. Recently, the forecasts have been changing daily for a week, and end up being wrong 24 hours before. What good is a forecast if it isn’t reliable several days before, so that one can plan around the weather?
When you take out the ‘forecast of same as today’ the predictions look not much better than a toss of the coin.
Its like wind renewables, you dont get reliability with the climate computer forecasts unless they are tweaked by long experienced meteorologists who can see patterns from the past
My subjective impression is that the error-rate of the false-positives (rain forecast – didn’t happen) is much higher than the false-negatives.
Because that DON’T actually have much, if anything.. correct at all.
Much of the junk is based on junk from Arrhenius and Wannabee.
NOBODY knows what the “right Climate Physics” are; and half of the (very) little that they do know is wrong. Trouble is they don’t know which half.
If you had anything to do with the CSIRO climate model…
… no wonder it is considered one of the worst of a truly garbage bunch of climate computer games. !
Bullshit. They all (except the Russian model) have nonexistent tropospheric hot spots and are admitted by their creators to run “hot” in relation to the actual Earth climate. Then they are flogged by activists with extreme emissions scenarios that are known to be gross exaggerations of the emission pathways we are currently experiencing. You need to buy more lipstick for that pig, Nick.
“You need to buy more lipstick for that pig, Nick.”
But if he uses it on the pig, he won’t be able to use it for his pretty pictures. !
“On balance, the Cooling meme of the 1970s seems to have come from popular media sensationalism rather than a predominance of science opinion.”
That’s not true. I read the scientific publications of the time and they certainly did promote both Human-caused Global Cooling and Human-caused Global Warming, without any evidence for either.
The Climate Change propaganda got so bad that I cancelled my subscriptions to Scientific American, Science News, and the National Geographic because I didn’t like getting angry every month when a new issue would come out and more climate change propaganda was hyped, and I knew by then that they had no evidence to back up their claims. I don’t like being lied to.
I started out with the Human-caused Global Cooling being sold by some scientists of the time back in the 1970’s. At the time, I had no reason to disbelieve what they said. I figured they must have some evidence in order to make these claims and I was very interested in learning the mechanism for how humans were bringing on a new Ice Age.
And I waited, and waited and waited and waited and watied, but no evidence ever appeared. Instead, we got what we get now with Human-caused Global Warming, nothing but speculation, assumptions and unsubstantitared assertions about the Earth’s climate.
That’s why when the Human-caused Global Warming narrative started up in earnest in the early 1980’s, I was extremely skeptical of their claims given the experience with Human-caused Global Cooling, and have remained skeptical to this day because to this day they have NEVER proven their case. Not even close.
Your take on the subject is climate change propaganda. Climate Alarmists don’t want you to take the Human-caused Global Cooling narrative seriously because it obviously failed, and they don’t want you connecting that failure to the current Human-caused Global Warming meme. If climate scientists were wrong once, then they could be wrong this time, too.
There is no evidence supporting either Human-caused Global Cooling or Human-caused Global Warming. They are both made up entirely of speculation, assumptions and unsubstantiated assertions. This is guessing, not science
Tom Abbott:
There is CONCLUSIVE evidence for both human-caused Global Cooling and human caused Global Warming.
The global cooling was caused by a large increase in industrial SO2 aerosol emissions, which dim the incoming solar radiation, and which peaked at 139 Million tons in 1980.
The global warming is being caused by the reduction in the amount of those industrial SO2 aerosol emissions due to “Clean Air” and “Net Zero” activities, and, since 2020, the low-sulfur fuel mandate for maritime shipping.
SO2 aerosol emissions fell from 139 million tons in 1980 to 73 million tons in 2022, and the more they decrease, the HOTTER it will get!.
If we accept that the SO2 caused cooling was indeed a real phenomenon, then the measures implemented to greatly reduce SO2 emissions would explain at least some of the apparent warming over the last few decades. But now we have massive increases in global coal burning in China and India with poor control of their SO2 emissions. We should anticipate global cooling returning as the concentration of SO2 aerosols increases over the coming decades.
Rick C.
You may be correct that the SO2 emissions from China and India will eventually cause cooling to return, but the 73 million tons of industrial SO2 aerosols in the atmosphere are currently being reduced, causing off-setting warming, so any cooling is probably decades away.
Of course, we may experience some temporary cooling whenever there is a VEI4 or larger volcanic eruption. The last one was the underwater eruption of Fukutoku-Oka-no-Ba on 2021 Aug 13, which erupted during an on-going La Nina, and, like Hunga-Tonga, had no noticeable cooling effect.
How does SO2 explain the temperature increase from the 1910’s to the 1940’s or from the end of the Little Ice Age, 1850 to 1880? The temperature increases during these periods is of the same magnitude as the increase from the 1980’s to today.
So, for SO2 to be the driver, it would have to decrease from 1850 to 1880, because temperatures were increasing during this period, and then SO2 would have to increase from 1880 to 1910, because it was cooling during this period, and then S02 would have to decrease from 1910 to 1940, because it was warming during this period, and then SO2 would have to increase from 1940 to 1980, because the temperatures were cooling during this period, and then SO2 would have to decrease from 1980 to the present because the temperatures were increasing during this period.
Can SO2 satisfy all those requirements?
Well, can it?
The only problem with your theory, Burl, is SO2 does not explain the cyclical cooling and warming that has taken place since the Little Ice Age ended in the mid-1800’s.
Correlate your SO2 with this regional U.S. temperature chart. Show how the temperature variations in this chart were caused by SO2 amounts in the atmosphere. If you can make SO2 explain this chart, then I’m with you.
Tom Abbott:
The “cyclical” warming and cooling does not exist. It is caused by random VEI4 and larger volcanic eruptions and their SO2 aerosol emissions.
Regarding your c hart:
There have been 22 American Business recessions between 1880 and 2020. During the recessions, factories, foundries, smelters , etc. are idled, causing industrial SO2 levels to decrease, and temperatures to rise because of the less polluted air.
The peaks on your graph coincide with those events.
For example, there was a recession between Jan 1920 and May 2021, and the GISS Jan-Dec temperature plot shows increased temperatures over the United States.
Another example: There was a recession between Jul 1953 and May 1954, and the 1954 Jan-Dec plot again shows a large temperature increase.over the United States.
I would also point out that your graph is just for the United States, and has NO relevance with respect to what is happening to temperatures around the world.
“The “cyclical” warming and cooling does not exist”
Ridiculous!
You see, in order for your theory to work, you have to deny that the Earth’s climate warms and cools on a cyclical basis.
What does the U.S. chart above show? It shows warming and cooling and then more warming and cooling, yet you deny this is happening.
And, over the years, I have shown chart after chart from around the world that shows the very same temperature profile as the U.S. chart. Did you miss all that? Apparently so. Or, you do just like other promoters of personal theories, and ignore any evidence that is contrary to your theory.
Just in case you missed it, here is a link to 600 charts that show the same temperature profile as the U.S. chart, and show that the climate *is* cyclical and does warm for a few decades and then cools for a few decades and then repeats.
https://notrickszone.com/600-non-warming-graphs-1/
Your SO2 theory does not explain this climate activity. Your SO2 theory is wrong.
And btw, CO2 does not explain the cyclical nature of the Earth’s climate, either.
Tom Abbott:
You challenged me to show how SO2 explained the temperature changes on your chart. This I did, giving examples.
Here is another example, for 1930. Due to the depression, industrial SO2 aerosols decreased from 43 million tons in 1929 to 30 million tons in 1932, and, as shown on your chart, temperatures rose.
The rise is also shown on the GISS Surface Temperature Analysis maps, which I have been unable to attach, for some reason. However, you can view them by googling them at Data GISS Surface Temperature Analysis. Compare 1930 to 1931.
Then, you go into a tirade about my comment that cyclical cooling and warming does not exist, but is instead due to random volcanic eruptions.
None of the graphs that you refer me to disprove my comments, but I can support them:
See: “The Definitive Cause of Little Ice Temperatures”. (It’s SO2 all the way down!)
https://doi.org/10.30574/wjarr.2022.13.2.0170
Tom,
In 1989 I cancelled my subscription and donated my 20-year collection of Scientific American to our corporate library.
It is sad that the owners failed to realise the value of that publication in educating many, many aspiring scientists and mathematicians about the proper ways to advance science. Some of the math articles even included a potent, near magic element for learning – they were fun.
Have we seen much fun in recent global warming discussion?
Geoff S
It was way back in the 1980’s that I too cancelled SciAm, having watched (read?) its decline into too little more than ridiculous advocacy. I had eagerly awaited the arrival of each issue for the decade or so preceding.
I was the same way. I loved Scientific American before the Human-caused Global Warming narrative began.
The Human-caused Global Cooling narrative of the 1970’s only lasted for a few years and nothing definitive was ever found, so it was dismissed by most, mainly because temperatures started to rise instead of fall at the end of the 1970’s, so it did not look like we were heading into another ice age.
Then along came Human-caused Global Warming, and since the climate was in a temperature upswing in the 1980’s, many people climbed on board this train.
A cyclical cooling spell will cure them of this fantasy.
Thanks for that personal history, Geoff. It sounds like we were seeing the same thing and were unhappy about it.
Yes, human-caused climate change has almost been the death of real science. It has tainted real science for decades, and is still doing so.
It’s maddening.
That is an attempt to rewrite history Orwellian style.
The debate in the seventies was between
The global temperature trend was down in the seventies.
The Alarmists are doing their level best to erase the Global Cooling Scare of the 1970’s from collective memory.
Yes, they are, and that’s because the Human-caused Global Cooling scare was just a fantasy, and was wrong, and the Climate Alarmists don’t want us associating the failure of Human-caused Global Cooling with their new narrative, Human-caused Global Warming.
The scientists were wrong about Human-caused Global Cooling taking us into another Ice Age, and Climate Alarmist don’t want people thinking the scientists may be wrong about Human-caused Global Warming, too.
So the Climate Alarmists dismiss Human-caused Global Cooling as a fad rather than serious science.
It’s all Climate Alarmist propaganda.
Please correct me if I’m wrong; but wasn’t it Tim Wirth, not AlGore who broke into the Senate hearing room and disabled the AC in July in order to prove Global Warming?
Yep, another democrat who served in both houses of congress who had to promote bias to argue their points.
Wirth left elected politics to serve billionaire Ted Turner’s invitation to be President of the newly created United Nations Foundation. Because the United Nations needed a private, independent and elite funded foundation in order to politically guide them into the 21st century.
In the book ‘The Complete Ice Age’ (Thames & Hudson 2009) edited by Brian Fagan is the following quote ( p209/210)
“As Lowell Ponte (1976) summarized:
Since the 1940s the northern part of our planet has been cooling rapidly. Already the effect in the United States is the same as if every city had been picked up by giant hands and set down more than 100 miles closer to the North Pole. If the cooling continues, warned the National Academy of Sciences in 1975, we could possibly witness the beginning of the next great Ice Age. Conceivably, some of us might live to see huge snow fields remaining year round in northern regions of the United States and Europe. Probably, we would see mass global famine in our lifetimes, perhaps even within a decade. Since 1970, half a million human beings in northern Africa and Asia have starved because of floods and droughts caused by the cooling climate”
Thanks for that history.
As you can see, climate scientists were speculating about what the effects of colder temperatures would be on the planet, just like they speculate today on the effects of warmer temperatures.
It was all speculation back in the 1970’s, which never panned out, and I would submit that the current speculation about the warming climate will never pan out, either.
It is no warmer today, that it was in the recent past. The Earth’s climate operates in a cyclical fashion, where it warms for a few decades and then it cools for a few decades, and there is no indication that this has changed despite increasing CO2 in the atmosphere.
Alarmist Climate scientists hype the climate alarm, but there is no evidence anything they say is true, other than that CO2 is a greehnouse gas, all the rest of it is pure speculation, including where the climate is going from here.
Sounds like you weren’t old enough to hear the constant threats of Global Cooling in the ’70s. If you had, you might have more insight into the alarmists need for scare tactics to control the population.
You’ve just won the Job Biden award for Realism.
and since the 1970’s…just how much of the ice caps have melted…recent reports are that the ice thickness on Antarctica has increased significantly in the past 20 years…as has the ice thickness on Greenland…and the North Pole ice is still there… Looks like those predictions are (were) totally WRONG!!!
Climate Alarmist predictions have been wrong since the 1970’s.
They make a lot of claims but produce no evidence to back up their claims.
Please add “and the IPCC” behind Climate Alarmists in your first sentence. WAIT . . . are they one-in-the-same?
Yes, they are one and the same. The IPCC rings the Climate Alarm Bell the most. They are trying to scare us into obedience.
It’s all about political power. Alarmist Climate Science is just the vehicle for them to get there.
Was Big Oil trying to break Big Coal and sell more natgas using fear mongering?
Who would know the answer to that?
Margareth Thatcher was trying to break UK Coal using the global warming scare.
“All the adults were worried about this icy threat to their children’s future.”
If you mean the adults in the documentary, including presenter Leonard Nimoy, they might meet the “all adults” characterization. However, from the 1978 news headlines, my recall is #2 & #9:
Around that time, after a high school tennis meet, our team bus would stop at a McDonalds for “dinner” (Zeeb road off of I-94) outside of Ann Arbor. I distinctly recall joking to others on the team that I couldn’t decide between the mercury contaminated Filet-O-Fish or the PCBs contaminated Big Mac.
It was around the time of the Edmond Fitzgerald tragedy and yes, global cooling was the accepted climate problem.
I was in high school or college during the 1970’s, and semi-technical sources like Scientific American were advocating for global cooling. What I noticed in the 1980’s, when the narrative was switched to global warming, was that the same “cure” was being proposed, leading me to conclude it was a pretext.
In my atmospheric chemistry circles, climate was superseded by the transition from acid rain to the ozone hole and concern about nuclear winter. Warming did not become a serious thing much before its major push by Manbearpig in the late 80’s.
Fast forward to today, it’s a given almost every research project has a warming component. The reason for this of course is moolah.
During the ‘70’s the argument over the SST was also going on. They will use up our oil too fast. They put out too much NOx which will kill us. They make too much noise we may go deaf.
In 1970 I was in college taking math and physics. One of my physics professors bluntly stated in class that ALL petroleum reserves would be exhausted by 1980 and all automobiles would be alcohol powered by then. There was no mention about global warming at all at any time.
This statement is contradictory because spending trillions of dollars inevitably involves burning lots of coal. The only substitute is wood and collecting wood is only possible at scale using fossil fuels.
If it is implying that there is something out there other than fossil fuel that vast amounts of money can be spent on, I would like to know.
Nuclear power could be used to synthesise fossil fuel, which if the carbon was sourced from the atmosphere would make fossil fuel a net zero energy source.
This is not economically viable with today’s technology, but could become competitive if money was spent on research. Perhaps such research will become a priority in the future when fossil fuels start to run out.
The US military have toyed with nuclear fuel synthesis for remote bases for a long time, because of the difficulty of shipping fuel to remote locations.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a43170367/air-force-jet-fuel-reactor/
They could use something like that at Scott Base. It takes a lot of fuel to transport less fuel to the base
Some of the modern Russian nuclear reactor designs should work fine, anything which can function safely in the middle of a Northern Siberian winter has a good chance of coping with Antarctic cold.
Well, I cannot vouch for Northern Siberian winter temperatures (or the performance of Russian nuclear power plants that might be stationed there) but it is a fact that the US currently has these operating nuclear power plants:
— Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant, Unit 1
Location: Monticello, MN (35 miles NW of Minneapolis, MN
— Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant, Units 1 and 2
Location: Welch, MN (28 miles SE of Minneapolis, MN)
Minneapolis winter temperatures can vary widely, from below freezing to as low as -60°F (-51°C).
I’m consulting for a company planning to make SAF. Essentially, all of the research is done, it’s just *** awful expensive.
That sounds really interesting please submit a story when you are free to talk about it.
I’ll look for something that’s in the open literature as I’m currently under an NDA that would no allow me to disclose any noteworthy detail.
Does Alvin Bragg know about this NDA? Be careful if you are in New York City! 🙂
Current nuclear power generators cost something like $35bn for 2GW. You cannot spend $35bn without burning lots of coal.
Twiggy’s hydrogen fantasy is dead. It hit the reality wall; somewhere between the cost of extracting energy from the weather and the cost of building electrolysers. Both are net consumers of fossil fuels over their lifetime so it results in a negative sum.
Nuclear plants may be better than break even on energy but making enough nuclear plants to replace the present output from fossil fuels would require a humungous amount of fossil fuels.
You cannot stop using fossil and spend trillions. They are incompatible in the world as it currently exists. All those engineers and scientist working on your synthesis process will burn a lot of fossil fuel before there is any synthesising going on. So my point remains. Your statement that I have highlighted above is a contradiction. It is as silly as the notion of making weather energy extractors using coal to save coal. They don’t save coal. They could break even on coal if they lasted more than 200 years.
Twiggy is nothing more than a rich grifter … my hydrogen fuel project is a failure, I need more taxpayer’s money! Honestly, he’s not even half smart.
Smart enough to pocket government money when available and pull out when not.
Possibly referring to synthetic biology and such fields. The funding is really fragmented and half-assed. I know, I’m working in it. Then you have the climate crackpots who think that they’re solving the problem by stealing money to fly off to conferences and the like and then government pedestrian “scientists” happy to have a job. So, it’s pretty slow moving but, even so, there are some pretty good advances in next generation sustainable chemical processes and fuels even. In fact, if the big vehicle manufacturers hadn’t spent so much money virtue-signaling on EVs, and had plowed the money into real sustainable fuel/ICE* programs, we wouldn’t be where we are now with the stoooopid EV fiasco.
* ICE = internal combustion engine for the lay reader
Organising funding just means accelerating the rate of consuming fossil fuels towards that objective. You have to be able to demonstrate that it will give an energy return on energy invested.
There is the possibility of supporting a good measure of the existing population through well managed forests but I do not know if such a strategy would support 7bn. Burning wood literally fired up the industrial revolution before burning fossil fuels became common. So going back to wood has potential but most believe it is limited.
The way society is currently constructed, it is not possible to spend trillions without burning lots of fossil fuels and predominantly coal.
Right, so here’s a funding example:
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/27/1210928126/oil-climate-change-carbon-capture-removal-direct-air-capture-occidental
I was being charitable using the word fragmented. I’m not sure why I didn’t just type “poured down the crapper”. In this case, over a billion bucks.
Ahem…..
Doctor Benjamin Spock was a US paediatrician and political activist who ran for President in 1972, Nimoy’s character was Mr Spock.
Idle hands are the Devil’s playground! Everyone knows that Spock was at first a Lt. Commander, then promoted to full Commander in the original series! All other crew of the Starship Enterprise should call him Commander; an obvious sign of today’s lack of discipline extending into the future!
According to one Star Trek franchise film following the TV series, they also should call him “dead” or, even better, “reincarnated”.
As for Schneider, he was a sensationalist and pure activist. To quote:
We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.
Stephen Schneider
Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth’s Climate (ed. National Geographic Books, 2009)
Honesty is not an alarmist trait.
Effectiveness is.
Until it isn’t. If effectiveness was the solution, we would all be speaking German.
Scare stories sell and bring in funds, interesting that Schneider considered “effective” to be the opposite of “honest”.
The opposite of honest is dishonest.
To be effective they have to be dishonest, because, as Schneider says, there are *doubts* that exist but to be effective, those doubts cannot be publicized, so the Climate Alarmists Lie by Omission.
Schneider is just giving himself and other climate activitss permission to lie to people. And that’s what they have done since that time.
Alarmist Climate Science is a Pack of Lies.
Also, Stephen Schneider fails to give credit where it is due:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
— H.L. Mencken
Excellent quote.
That quote should go in the sidebar on this website. It is Alarmist Climate Science in a Nutshell.
ExxonMr. Spock knew.“Doctor Spock”????
Star Trek had a “Mr. Spock” – Dr. Spock was a antispanking child/family psychiatrist, who may be one of the empty-headed experts from the 60s and beyond that helped create the core problems in society today.