By Robert Bradley Jr.
“In a rational and moral world, the catastrophe of the Los Angeles fires, fueled in part by climate change, would be one of many climate ‘Pearl Harbors’ that might help wake up the public to the urgent need for climate action.” (- Joe Romm, last week)
“Is it just a coincidence that the worst of the worst happened in California, the Climate State? The Green State? The DEI State? Joe, the mainstream is not buying your ‘Climate Ate My Homework’ reasoning.” (below)
Just add “policy” in two places in Romm’s quotation above, and substitute “inaction” for “action” at the end, and his conclusion can be fixed. But who is Joe Romm? And what is his track record? I have tangled with Angry Joe for decades (I am a ‘sociopath’ to him) and can address these questions.
Who Is Joe Romm?
Joe Romm has been a trenchant voice for climate alarm and forced energy transformation (wind, solar, batteries, efficiency) for many decades. [1] I have challenged him ever since the 1990s when his energy-efficiencies dreams led him to praise Enron (“a company I greatly respect”) and its most fraudulent division, Enron Energy Services.
I continued to spar with him until the ‘indispensible blog‘ Climate Progress (Center for American Progress) went defunct. (My suspicion is that his emotional, virulent style–“stunning” for the liked; “heads exploding” for the disliked–grew tiresome.)
His exaggerations are legion, including We Don’t have 12 Years to Save the Climate. We Have 14 Months, (July 2019). But go back to his “Mideast Oil Forever?” (The Atlantic Monthly, April 1996), analyzed here, where Joe (and his coauthor Charles Curtis) stated:
… let’s start by examining the likelihood that an oil crisis will occur in the coming decade. Forecasting is always risky, especially where oil is concerned, but consider what a variety of experienced energy hands from every point on the political spectrum have said in the past year alone [many experts quoted–all errant].
That “energy crisis” never happened except for government energy/climate policy increases prices and reducing reliability. The first two oil crises came from price and allocation controls–the third never came from an absence of the same.
And in Romm’s 2007 book, Hell and High Water:
We have no room for error…. Barring a major reversal in U.S. policies in the very next decade, come the 2020s, most everyone will know the grim fate that awaits the next fifty generations. [The alternative to inaction] is a [later] massive, sustained government intervention into every aspect of our lives on a scale that far surpasses what this country did during World War II.
Joe Romm Today
Joe Romm is an expert! Currently a senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media (PCSSM), Romm describes himself as
Former Acting Assistant Secretary of Efficiency and Renewables, Speaker, 2x TEDx, author, “The Hype About Hydrogen.” Economist Paul Krugman: “I have learned a lot of what I know about energy economics from Joe Romm.”
And:
2024 Ban Ki-Moon Award for Environmental Leadership, 2009 TIME magazine “Hero of the Environment” & Rolling Stone one of “100 people reinventing America.” Former Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. CNN host Van Jones called me “The communicator’s communicator” after reading my book “How to Go Viral and Reach Millions.” Bill McKibben said, “Joe Romm understands the secret of making things go viral.”
And:
Author of 10 books, including “Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know” (Oxford University Press) which New York magazine called “The best single source primer on the state of climate change.”
Never shy, often wrong. Romm’s professional life is as an expert versus the ill-informed public. The premise of climate alarmism and wind/solar/energy/efficiency to save the planet from fossil fuels (really CO2, the nonpollutant) is Romm’s multi-decade theme.
The Latest?
“In a rational and moral world,” Romm states regarding the southern California fire box,
the catastrophe of the Los Angeles fires, fueled in part by climate change, would be one of many climate “Pearl Harbors” that might help wake up the public to the urgent need for climate action. But in our world, the initial flame of disinformation that the fossil fuel companies lit over half-century ago to delay action on climate change has spread like wildfire until it’s a firestorm of falsehoods.
What disinformation! Is it just a coincidence that the worst of the worst happened in California, the Climate State? The Green State? The DEI State? Joe, the mainstream is not buying your “Climate Ate My Homework” reasoning.
Appendix: Romm in Action
“What Is the Difference Between a Psychic and a Climate Science Denier” (March 25, 2014), (expunged, but reviewed here)
I know what the similarities are between psychics and deniers. They both use unscientific methods, generally make stuff up with no evidence to support their views, and have consistently been debunked when scrutinized. What is the difference between a psychic and a climate science denier? In fairness, psychics sometimes guess the right answer.
Earth Day post:
With 7 billion people going to 9 billion, much of the environment is unsavable … the relatively stable environment and climate that made modern human civilization possible will be ruined, probably for hundreds of years … with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe. And that means misery for many if not most of the next 10 to 20 billion people to walk the planet (expunged, but reviewed here).
Enough said … for now.
—————–
[1] Romm, on the other hand, correctly dismisses new nuclear capacity, hydrogen, and carbon capture & storage. He also calls a spade a spade when it comes to the failure of climate mitigation policies. But climate alarm and industrializing the living space with wind, solar, and batteries–and energy-usage bans–is where this authoritarian lives.
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The longer we go with no climate disaster, the more catastrophic the climate predictions get and the more hyperbolic the climate catastrophists get.
It takes five to seven years to get a permit to clear brush in California. It should take five to seven minutes.
Chaparral will burn, with the only question being when. But chainsaws, grazing, or controlled burns are all doubleplus ungood to the greens, and therefore the feckless Democrat politicians who suck up to them. Neither take any responsibility for their depraved indifference.
Democrat politicians are no more ‘feckless’ than were Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks. Whether they call themselves Democrats or Greens or Progressives or whatever, they are Leftists whose only goal is to destabilize society by whatever means necessary in order to implement socialism.
My father was fairly political, and I met a fair number of politicians. The default is an insurance salesman, not a Social Justice Warrior.
Not quite. Not to implement socialism. The goal is to grasp and hold all power to themselves.
Don’t forget the fuel filled Eucalyptus trees which shouldn’t be there in the first place!
That is sorta true in Northern California, where eucalyptus took over the southern range of coast redwoods. But the native brush in Southern California is nearly as flammable as eucalyptus, so it was not a big change.
All are fire adapted, and the fantasy one can prevent all fires all the time is just that, a fantasy.
Much like the fantasy that humans can control weather on a global scale.
But some of those are very nice trees to live near when they are not burning. And the majority never burn. Floor clean up, one way or another, is a useful option.
Is not not a stretch to call these people “experts?”
In other words, “drips under pressure”.
(The old ones are the best).
“In a rational and moral world, the catastrophe of the Los Angeles fires, fueled in part by
climate change,La Niña ENSO conditions.
“and awful CA government.”
improved the sentence for you 🙂
The catastrophe of the LA fires were fueled by brush, wood, and other flammable materials.
Not to mention that piss-poor planning produces piss-poor performance.
The negligence shown over the years is, IMHO, criminal.
I don’t think much of Romm. I am frankly getting fed up with all the we need to take action and the oil companies stopped us from taking action BS. What the hell does he think the trillions of dollars pissed away on wind, solar, batteries, EVs and all the other CAGW claptrap is? Trillions of dollars and and nothing to see for it but less energy, more expensive energy, government mandates controlling what we can buy and on and on. Trillions of dollars and CO2 concentrations are higher, average global temperatures are higher our standard of living is lower, we have lost confidence in government, academia, mainstream media, international organizations, scientific community and any number of other outfits that we used to look up to. Romm is barking up the wrong tree. This joker doesn’t know what he is talking about.
I bet he doesn’t bother to plug his EV in when going for a haircut.
the grim fate that awaits the next fifty generations
Wow. If the fate is so grim, how can there be another 50 generations?
At 25 years per generation, that’s 1,250 years. We’re going to invent nothing to make our lives better for over a thousand years?
So this man purports to know the fate of humanity for the next 1,250 years. Hmmm. I smell a fraud hiding by pointing at everyone else and screaming FRAUD!
I thought the general standard for a generation was 20 years.
A generation is 20 to 30 years, so 25 is the mean.
On the Fallacy of Experts: Experience shows that the general population tends to be more reliable at predicting the future than experts.
So if climate change is a problem why didn’t LA prepare for it? Instead they made it worse, to sell the idea.
If the entire world stopped using hydrocarbons for 100 years, there will still be, during those 100 years and beyond major floods, droughts, storms and fires.
With respect to California. Newsom is done, gone, caput.
There would, however, be billions fewer humans, what with all the *freezing and starving in the dark* and all.
“Billions fewer humans” sadly is the goal.
The Population Bomb from the 1960s is the handbook for this.
I had forgotten about Romm. I thought he had gone to that great wildfire down below…
Economist Paul Krugman: “I have learned a lot of what I know about energy economics from Joe Romm.”
Guess that’s why Krugman was such an awful economist (yes, I know he won a Nobel prize. Doesn’t mean he wasn’t way out in left field on everything else.).