Guest “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” by David Middleton
Journalist Markham Hislop discusses one of his pet peeves: oil and gas professionals, especially engineers, who think because they have expertise in one area of the energy system that they are experts in ALL things energy.“
The video is mind-numbing. It’s just a closeup of Journalist Markham Hislop droning on and on about oil & gas professionals not being qualified to discuss the energy transition because they aren’t experts in energy transitions. Guess what Markham? Journalists aren’t experts in anything, with the occasional exception of journalism..
Regarding the energy transition (or lack thereof): You don’t need to be an “energy transition expert” or even an “oil and gas professional”… You just need to know how to download data and use Excel.
Let’s zero in on fossil fuels and renewables:
Figures 1 and 2 are modified versions of graphs I used in this July 4 post: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that” there is no energy transition! I was inspired to convert quadrillion Btu to something more American by this comment:
As an oil & gas professional, I don’t know why I never thought to do this before. 100 quadrillion Btu might as well be eleventy gazillion joules under the sea… It’s an unrelatable quantity. Now, 16 billion barrels of oil (or BOE) is something I can wrap my head around!
To the extent that there has been an energy transition, it was from renewables to fossil fuels. It occurred very rapidly from 1860 to 1920.
Here’s the full transcript of the video. I guessed at the paragraph breaks and I did not correct spelling errors or edit out the Uh’s and Um’s:
Today I want to talk about a pet peeve of mine. This has bothered me for years and years and years and that is oil and gas professionals who think and claim to be experts on the energy transition.
Now just because you’ve got ex expertise in the oil and gas industry which is basically uh extracting and transporting molecules to you know uh refineries or to natural gas plants or whatever it is. uh that that somehow that makes you an expert on all things energy. Well, I’m here to that is not the case.
And I’m going to illustrate my point with the dispute that I got into last uh last August with uh some folks who put together a course at the University of Alberta. So, somebody sent me a link to this course and it was on the energy transition and they said, you know, take a look check it out uh because we do a lot of energy transition work and reporting here at uh at Energy Media. So I did and I wrote a column and I said this course absolutely stinks. It’s terrible and the instructor uh who shall go unnamed to protect the guilty is not qualified to do it. And so the reason the ar here’s the argument though.
Uh this course posited that there’s only two ways of looking at the energy system. The one is sort of the oil and gas forever the OPEC view which is you know oil and gas is going to be around forever. or the global south is going to increase uh consumption and whatever new energy sources uh are added like wind and solar uh it’ll be added to not it won’t displace existing uh energy from oil gas and primarily and from coal as well I guess and then the other worldview is climate change which is basically the world is you know the environmental groups climate groups argue this the the world is burning up we need to phase out oil and gas, switch to renewable energy and and uh and do away with it.
So, and so the course basically argued that no, what we really need to do, what the energy transition means is decarbonizing oil and gas, reducing the emissions, eliminating the emissions from the production of oil and gas. Not the consumption, not the the actual combustion say of of gasoline in a internal combustion engine, which is where 80% of the emissions are produced. It’s decarbonizing the production of these of those molecules. And what they’ve what their cardinal sin here and I made this really clear in the column is that there is a third way of looking at the world and that is that uh electricity produced now primarily from a variety of sources uh wind solar hydro nuclear advanced geothermal all sorts of things. Uh and also coal and and natural gas when that’ll be that’ll take years before decades before we get rid of those entirely. But primarily you create electricity and then you have a whole new set of new technologies that turn that energy into work. So instead of an internal combustion engine, you have an electric uh vehicle motor. Uh instead of a gasoline tank, you’ve got a battery. Instead of a gas furnace in your house, you’ve got a a heat pump. Instead of a you know, that sort of thing. And and that’s a completely different way of looking at it. It’s the and in fact if you step outside of North America if you you know we interview experts in Europe and Asia and and that is the dominant way of looking at the energy transition. It’s very much an electrification of the of the global economy on both the supply side.
So you’re you’re you’re increasing the amount of electricity that’s gets produced in the power grid or or you know on your rooftop solar whatever and also adoption of new technologies like electric vehicles like battery storage like heat pumps.
Okay. So that’s those are the I would argue that there are only two real worldviews here. One is continue what the way we we’re going uh just add more energy sources or electricity and electric demand devices technologies will replace the commodities oil, gas and coal and the devices like internal combustion engines that turn that commodity into energy and into work.
Okay. So I wrote the column and the organizers of the course, one of them in particular was outraged, absolutely outraged, tore me a new one on on LinkedIn and said very very rude things and also and this is the key part of this is that complained to by basically by tagging me them in in the the LinkedIn post uh tagged our one of our our funders. We have two and this is one of the large uh foundations in in Canada because they were tagged was public. They felt obligated to check it out. Check out the accusation that I didn’t know, you know, that I had somehow impuged the integrity of this course and of the instructor. So they sent one of their staff, the foundation did sent one of their staff to take the course and they did that, reported back to the board and what did they say? Markham is correct. Markhamm got it absolutely right. That that’s exactly it. In fact, they kind of had a good chuckle over it. And and so here’s my point. I is that these guys, they don’t even know when they’re wrong. And when it’s pointed out to them that they’re wrong, they simply go and don’t listen to you and get all affronted. and and if you see them on social media, if you run into them uh in uh in real life, they’re absolutely sure that they’re correct. It’s Dunning Krueger.
If you’re an oil and gas engineer, for example, what do you know about electricity generation in China and the manufacturing of batteries, electric vehicles, and heat pumps or how efficient they are or what the cost is or how fast if you don’t look at the data, you don’t know. And these guys never look at the data. It’s astonishing to me that so many of them, and I’ll point out Brett Wilson as one example, because he comments all the time on social media, in fact, on my Facebook threads all the time, and he says, “No, you’re wrong.” Well, where’s the data, Brett? Well, he hasn’t got any because all he just It’s the It’s the sure he’s absolutely sure that he’s right even though he’s absolutely wrong. And this goes on on and on and on again. And it’s and so uh I want to make the point here that when you’re reading something or you’re engaged in conversation uh in social media or maybe you’re around the the dinner table, you’re in in Calgary or Edmonton or someplace and you have family that works in the oil industry and they will say with absolute certainty, look, I work in the I work in the energy industry. I know these things. No, they don’t. They absolutely don’t. I I talk to policy makers. I talk to people in the industry. I interview them. I have conversations with them. Uh, you know, sort of off camera. None of them know any of the data. None of them do any of the work and the research to educate themselves on what’s going on outside of North America. It’s quite criminal. And these are the people who are setting Alberta oil and gas policy, energy policy. Some of them are having a tremendous influence at the federal level. and they don’t know. They don’t the the emails I get late at night from people who run oil companies or make policy in Alberta would curl your toes. They are they’re that devoid of of evidence and and and information.
So, if there’s anything you take, there’s one I want to hammer this home over and over and over again, and that is oil and gas professionals aren’t energy transition experts.
If I understood the transcript, he seems to think that oil & gas professionals aren’t energy transition experts because we think we will keep adding new sources of energy on top ot legacy sources. He seems to think that we are replacing fossil fuels with electricity.
Well… Neither Bjorn Lomborg, nor Vaclav Smil are oil and gas professionals and it looks like they disagree with Journalist Markham Hislop …
Just remember: Life is Good!
(Wood for Trees, MacFarling Meure et al., 2006)
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First chuckle of my day (-:
David, seriously, how do we get across to this idiot that he’s a freaking moron who knows nothing about what he’s bleating about?
More and more it is exposing its bad self. Hahaha!!!!!!!
“I understood the transcript, he seems to think that oil & gas professionals aren’t energy transition experts because we think we will keep adding new sources of energy on top ot legacy sources.”
Thanks, I read the verbage. He used a plethora of words, sentences and paragraphs to say little more then that. His expertise is in using 100 sentences to never quite make a single cogent point. I do gather that he is upset.
That’s what journalists do when they don’t know what they’re talking about – which is
mostall of the timeSkeptical Science has several commentators that Utility generation experts can not be renewable energy experts and therefore they can contribute nothing to learning about the errors in renewable energy planning and operations.
Thus we should rely on renewable energy experts such as Marc Jacobson
Yet how much of an expert on renewable energy can marc jacobson be when he uses GW in his 100% renewable studies when the correct unit is GWh. Of course none of the peer reviewers caught his error.
Phew. I looked at that video and now I have a headache.
His primary point is, if you are an oil engineer, you cannot possibly know anything about anything else.
It’s actually worse than that…
He doesn’t even know what the oil and gas industry does.
Well ……Hi slop ….
😉
In a battle of experts, like CliSci, this useful idiots job is to diminish the “other” side’s expert. Mr. Hislop has no clue about energy systems, he only knows enough to attack the “other.”
Markham’s nonsense is why the phrase “you’re not even wrong” exists.
It would be fun to imagine just how Wolfgang Pauli would respond to the
current state of “climate science”.
Brings to mind the phrase [He] “doesn’t suffer fools gladly”. LOL
And remember the way to deal with journalists (or scientists) who mislead the public is to use RIDICULE. [from Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” – Rule #5]
Reminds me of an old ditty,
The Engineer’s Poem
I’m not allowed to drive the train,
The whistle I can’t blow.
I’m not allowed to say how fast
The railway cars will go.
I’m not allowed to blow off steam
Or even clang the bell,
But let the damned thing jump the tracks
And see who catches hell.
It’s actually worse than worse than that….
He can’t talk in coherent sentences.
What a maroon! What an ignoranimus! He doesn’t have the slightest clue. About anything. “Energy transition”? What energy transition? It’s not happening, and won’t, at least not the way he thinks. We will be “transitioning” back to coal, and to more nuclear, and gas. But he would have a hissy fit if you said that to him.
Yeah, because journalism curricula are chock full of physics, chemistry, etc. /sarc
My response to the journalist is that engineers carry over their general attitude towards measurements and defining terms to areas outside their particular specialty.
This Markham Hislop appears to be a typical journalist – scientifically illiterate and innumerate. He obviously has no idea of the depth and breadth of knowledge required to become a professional geologist or engineer. The problem with the failure of the so-called energy transition is it is being conducted without the guidance and knowledge of competent professionals who know what is both possible and scientifically and economically justified.
I’m a retired chemist. I’ve had family members and others say you’re a chemist what could you know about climate?
I am a retired organic chemist and I’ll be 81 on Aug. I have thus lived thru 2.7 climate cycles of 30 years. I have learned a lot about the climate by watching the weather reports on the nightly TV news.
I live in Burnaby, BC, which is east of and contiguous with Vancouver. The climate is moderate coastal rainforest modified by the massive UHI effect from Vancouver and is under the influence of the ENSO. By watching the TV, I have learned that coastal winter weather starts in the Gulf of Alaska, slides down the coast to lower BC and further down to WA, OR and CA. This is what I would tell my critics.
You should tell them you are scientist and have observed the weather and climate for many years.
I’m 78 and live in New Jersey USA
My wife enjoys watching a show about your area of Canada. Highway thru Hell about the Coquihalla highway and wreckers pulling semis out of trouble.
Any retired person has had several decades to read about and study many topics!
I am an electrical engineer. 50 years now and counting. I have learned mechanical engineering, software, radar, thermal management, modelling, EOIR sensors, batteries, EM fields and waves, and am currently employed as a Rocket Scientist, primarily due to the breadth of experience, aka a joat.
I am not an expert, but I have experience in almost every aspect of science and engineering and modelling, etc., as applies to climate research.
I am brought in by various (cannot disclose) organizations as a subject matter expert or to lead failure investigations. That requires learning new stuff on a daily basis, most of which have nothing to do with Ohm’s Law. Funny how failure analysis and trying to reverse engineer Earth’s energy systems are similar.
What do I know about climate, more than many. I’ve been studying it ever since Al Gore put out his Inconvenient Lie.
’Oil and gas experts aren’t energy transition experts’
Lets take a look as some self proclaimed ‘energy transition experts’.
UK has Ed Milliband, a non-engineer.
US has AOC, a former bartender.
US had Joe Biden, career politician.
US has Al Gore, failed theology student.
That explains why Gore hitched his star to the Church of CAGW.
Your forgot to add their career highlights
Ed Milliband,- politician, leech and idiot
AOC – politician, leech and idiot
Joe Biden – politician, leech and old man with altziemers
AL Gore – politician, leech and idiot
There is a common theme 🙂
This guy was on the wrong side of the mud bucket during a wet trip.
At KU, if you could not make it in engineering,law, math, or medicine you became a teacher. If you could not make it as a teacher, you became a journalist.
Be careful there, pal. Many of us have done our time in industry and are now teaching. Better that than the sophistry of career academics.
Uh, uh, Try this one. “Why the federal government is making climate data disappear
Under Trump, climate denial has given way to something even more dangerous: climate erasure.”
National Climate Assessments gone, Uh readers can listen, how is that data loss? Outside my window there still is climate, too hot but nice wind. Blame on culture war. Yesterdays post, there was still lots of data flowing, must be today since erasure means scratch or delete. Journalists used to be taught proper English grammar.
https://grist.org/language/trump-administration-climate-data-disappear-national-climate-assessment/?utm
The latest National Climate Assessment produced under Biden was awful. It did not agree with the IPCC summary report, let alone actually produce science.
It was chocked full of colorful propaganda.
The placement of the solar and wind on the charts does not look correct — they are placed high above fossil fuels, giving the VISUAL appearance, according to the y-axis, that they exceed these. There is a conflict between the thickness of the lines, which I assume better represents them, but that thickness is at the top. Shouldn’t these be UNDERNEATH, near the bottom of the colored layers?
It’s a stacked area plot. The energy sources are stacked vertically from earliest to most recent.
Wood/biomass was first, then coal, then petroleum, then natural gas, then hydroelectric, then nuclear, then geothermal, then wind and finally solar.
By the way, thanks for keeping hydro and nuke separate from “renewable”.
Also I noticed some graphs go out to 2100. If anyone knows how it will really be 75 years from now, please list some good lotto numbers here. (I bet Fusion power will only be a few decades away)
“(I bet Fusion power will only be a few decades away)”
If I drank coffee it would be all over the keyboard.
How-oh-how is it that Nuclear Power >>> Hydroelectric?
[ Magenta over the Sky-Blue ]
Looks like 10:1 (in the graph) whereas EIA shows ~ 3:1
Might be due to the graph showing primary energy sources. Hydro is probably 90+% efficient in converting potential energy of water where nuclear comes in about 33%. The 3:1 presumably refers to electric energy.
EIA shows nuclear at about 10 quads in 2024 and hydro at about 1 quad.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2025.07.02/main.svg
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2025.07.02/chart2.svg
This is primary energy production, not electricity generation.
The US Navy has 82 nuclear powered vessels (11 aircraft carriers and 71 submaines). Each carrier has two reactors and each sub has one, 93 reactors total. That’s as many reactors powering nuclear vessels as there are in 54 US nuclear power plants (93 reactors). Nuclear power has many other industrial applications as well.
Thanks for this. It’d be wonderful to know that EIA is including the Nuclear Navy into their totals. You may know — is the reactor on a submarine of the same size (output) as on a carrier, or that of a commercial (power) reactor on land? The question arises because of the (small) Modular Reactors as part of the next-gen nuclear. If the U.S. Navy already knows how to build & operate such power-plants, then why not put them in charge of the terrestrial program. [ National Energy Emergency (E.O.) ! ]
After looking into it some more… I don’t think they do. I think the discrepancy is entirely due to efficiency in converting energy to electricity.
There have been times in the past where those vessels have supplied shore power to various countries.
Speaking of quads:
I saw a news item this morning comparing the United States and China.
U.S. = 120 quads
China = 128 quads
I wasn’t sure what a quad was, but you explained it above.
My definition of a journalist:
A professional, innumerate wordsmith who knows little about anything, by virtue of not having the aptitude to pass undergraduate engineering and science ‘wash out’ courses. They typically are of the liberal persuasion, meaning that they give primacy to emotion (right-brain dominance) instead of rational, objective analysis (left-brain dominance). They are invariably ethically challenged, predictably acting as though the end justifies any means, and cannot therefore be trusted to tell the truth if it conflicts with their ideological agenda. Thus, they seek to manipulate the opinions of their readers by appealing to the emotions of readers through the use pejorative words, some of which they have been known to invent, either by conflating pejorative words or re-defining the long-held meaning. They have difficulty performing simple calculations; therefore, they rely heavily on the opinions of what they consider to be experts. They could not explain the Scientific Method if their lives depended on it. All things considered, it is often difficult to distinguish a journalist from a professional political activist.
That’s the kind of journalist Middleton is referring to. Not the ones who write for the Oil & Gas Journal, or Tilak Doshi writing for Forbes. Subject-matter journalists have extensive direct experience in the fields they cover. Even legal journalists, they’ve been thru law-school, had to pass the bar, which takes legal debates seriously. But the journalism-schools today take students who wouldn’t have the (uh) discipline to gain mastery of any particular field, even political science or law, and credential them to become the next Woodward & Bernsteins. Heck, they don’t even study History in any depth, even though the journalists main job is to produce ‘The First Draft of History’.
Luckily, the path to curing what ails journalism is not that complicated, e.g.
And the only units of measure they respect are “Olympic swimming pools”.
I am an engineer who works for an Oil company. Based on my conversations, There are many such engineers who know very little about the energy transition. But like me, they have curiosity and analytical tools that allow them to push back that ignorance. For example, days ago I heard about using Polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP)-coated nickel nanoparticles to capture carbon by dumping it in the ocean. It was news to me. What was the first thing I asked ms copilot? How much carbon a unit of that nickel compound can remove. Then I asked how much carbon the world generates each year from human activity. My third question was how much nickel there is in the world in proven reserves. My final question was how much carbon all the nickel in the world could remove from the atmosphere compared to the other numbers. The answer was one quarter of one percent of one years’ worth of carbon emissions. In just a few minutes of study about something I previously knew nothing about I learned something. In less time than a fawning journalist would take to write a glowing piece about this new marvel of science I had proved it is worthless. That is the difference between oil and gas engineers and experts on energy transitions.
“Polyvinylpyrrolidone”
Gezundheit!
Oh, dear! Not more plastic in the oceans…
Who?
What?
Where…?
Ah, but why?
When?
and
Why?
That’s reporting, which is apparently an alien concept to recently minted “journalists”.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/5250d6f2e4b00c64c3d1abcf/1405901476947-14R9LP3ZJ4QDT6R8S6V8/?content-type=image%2Fjpeg
LOL…. HU is on first….
Too funny. Brightened my day.
you asked —
Markham Hislop’s the name,
apoplectic reporting’s the game:
Again, who? Just because some nobody says blahblah doesn’t mean anyone should listen to it. THAT is precisely what has gotten America into this mess, listening to nobodies who have never done anything of use to anyone.
So who’s better qualified: academics who get funding to keep telling us that humanity is doomed if we don’t swear off fossil fuels? How about bureaucrats looking for excuses to introduce new carbon taxes whose revenue will be used to subsidize unproven green technologies? And let’s not forget green product peddlers who stand to make tidy profits if they’re manufactures are mandated? Yet who gets the shortest end of the stick except the consumer who pays higher taxes and higher prices only to find that the same weather fluctuations keep occurring as they always had before the climate change mythology gained any publicity.
Don’t confuse them with the truth.
It’s interesting to see that per capita energy use has increased about seven or eightfold since 1800. The population has increased eightfold since then.
So 50 or 60 times the amount of anthropogenic heat produced at the surface since 1800 – 24/7.
Thermometers respond to heat. Is anybody surprised that average minimum temperatures (increasing the overall average, of course) have increased, as the anthropogenic heat production has increased?
Of course, some people believe that CO2 creates higher temperatures, but that is a religious belief, unsupported by science.
Science or religious belief? The choice is yours.
I did a calculation a couple of years back. Just coal burned world wide in 1 year to produce electricity, accounting for electricity (becomes heat when used), waste heat (up the smoke stack) and water heat removal. The answer? In 1 year, just coal introduced enough thermal energy into the environment to raise the lowest 105 of the atmosphere 1 C (based on specific heat Cp).
So, yes. There is an anthropogenic contribution. CO2 is a symptom of energy production, not the cause of any thermal effects.
Thanks David.
The atmosphere involves energy transitions. Here is how I keep track:
f061d54adc5a3947cd13950e62e1e8e4b0c6dde6r1-720-387v2_hq.jpg (720×387)
I suggest Markham stick with writing, he can’t speak worth a damn.
I posted some of your info on his site a few times. It seems While he calls himself a Journalist, he is actually a paid promoter for the Net Zero Ivey Foundation. IVEY Foundation
“Ivey Foundation is a private charitable foundation dedicated to supporting Canada’s transition to a net-zero future while ensuring the country’s long-term economic competitiveness.”
So, if there’s anything you take, there’s one I want to hammer this home over and over and over again, and that is paid Net Zero propagandists aren’t energy transition experts.
“Oil/gas professionals are NOT energy transition experts”
Like Henry Ford wasn’t a transport transition expert. We had to wait for the university sector to get in on the act and anoint all the transport experts.
+10
Since the “energy transition” to date has failed miserably, can we even believe there is such a thing as an Energy Transition “Expert”?
My greatest objection to that idiot is trying to convey a false concept that engineers are programmed automatons/robots incapable of anything except their assigned (and implied repetitive) tasks.
An engineer, and this applies to a lot of other professions and vocations, is capable of learning, of expanding his horizons. An engineer knows rather quickly when he has made a mistake. He owns it. He finds the root cause and corrects it and passes that on to others so the mistake is not repeated.
A “climate scientist” has no skin in the game. Make a mistake? Waffle and deflect and produce another “peer reviewed” report and spend upwards of $1500 to get it published.
An engineer works to advance the well being and prosperity of people.
A “climate scientist” works to advance his funding and reputation.
Please note: There are many scientists that pursue knowledge and truth to understand the universe and all of its wonders. Those are not included in the quotation marks (i.e., they are not “climate scientists”).