Samizdata

Recent posting at WUWT?

Gordon J. Fulks:

We learned over the weekend that chemist Nickolas Drapela, PhD has been summarily fired from his position as a “Senior Instructor” in the Department of Chemistry. The department chairman Richard Carter told him that he was fired but would not provide any reason. Subsequent attempts to extract a reason from the OSU administration have been stonewalled. Drapela appears to have been highly competent and well-liked by his students. Some have even taken up the fight to have him reinstated.

But the reason seems clear. Drapela is a climate skeptic.

Says commenter number one:

Green is the new McCarthy.

Except that I bet that more people have been fired by American universities for being climate skeptics than were ever fired for being Communists.

I favour a world in which people can be fired for any stupid reason at all, provided there is no contract saying otherwise. Employee beware. But this case does shine a bright light on what a huge industry-stroke-secular-religion Climate Catastrophism has become. The idea that the big money is all on the side of climate skepticism is ludicrous.

Who pays for Oregon State University? Do they know what they are paying for? Do they like it? Might they be persuaded to stop paying? Maybe if questions of that sort were asked loudly enough, and if they started to be answered, Drapela might get his job back.

Recently I wrote here about how the US Presidential campaign is hastening the end of the CAGW scare. One of the things I said in that piece was that I didn’t know if Romney intended to make a big issue out of the new energy sources that are now coming on stream in the USA. But, I argued, even if Romney’s only interest in enterprises like Solyndra is that they are corrupt and wasteful rackets for syphoning tax money into the pockets of Obama supporters, I argued that such policking would still have the effect of flagging up the CAGW argument, to the extreme disadvantage of those who still take the CAGW scare seriously.

The central problem for the CAGW team being that whereas until now, others have been trying to knock some sense into their heads, with little apparent success, now the CAGW team itself is going to have to convince a crucial cohort of American voters that CAGW is a problem, when those voters now mostly reckon that it is not. This the CAGW team will be totally unable to do, any more than they have convinced the people whom they describe as “deniers” to stop their complaining about all the dodgy “climate science” on which the CAGW scare has always depended. All that the CAGW people will do is publicise their failure so far to make any persuasive sense.

I learned today, from this article by Walter Russell Mead, that Team Romney is indeed well aware of how Team Obama’s fondness for Greenery has caused Team Obama to impede the development of new energy sources in the USA, and that Team Romney very much intends to make an issue of this.

Says Mead:

Republicans are seizing the opportunity to make energy politics a centerpiece of their campaign.

And then Mead links to an FT story which is behind a paywall, but also quotes from it, as now do I:

“Blue-collar voters were never that sold on environmental issues, and if some Democrats come across as not keen on economic development, it could lose them support here in Ohio,” he said.

Who “he” is there, I don’t know, not being able to read the previous bit of the FT piece that says this, and Mead himself doesn’t say. But I am sure that whoever he is, he is right.

Republicans, from Mitt Romney, the party’s presidential candidate, to the congressional leadership, have made Barack Obama’s alleged stifling of the energy industry a centrepiece of their campaigns this year. …

Mr Romney has said he will approve the Keystone XL pipeline as soon as he wins office and curb the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency.

So, it would appear that the intellectual pressure already being applied to the CAGW-ers is even greater than I said in my earlier piece. Good.

Dr Fred Singer says that Mitt Romney should exploit the energy issue to get himself elected President of the United States. You don’t have to agree with everything Singer says nevertheless to be optimistic about the impact that the kind of arguments Singer refers to might have during the campaign. I basically agree with Singer. The new energy Singer refers to is such a huge economic open goal (as we here in the soccer mad UK would say), and at a time when the entire Western world needs economic open goals like almost never before, that not even Romney will be able to avoid at least aiming kicks in its general direction, even if for some reason or another he would rather not.

The economy is the basic issue in this Presidential election, as it almost always is. If you are happy about how well you and your loved ones and friends and neighbours are doing, you vote for the incumbent or his younger friend. If not, not.

Meanwhile, a vast apparatus of energy sabotage has been created, the excuse or the reason for that being that energy of the sort that the modern world likes will ruin the climate and destroy humanity, in accordance with the C(atastrophic) A(nthropogenic) G(lobal) W(arming) story alluded to acronymically in the title of this posting. Only energy of the most non-energetic sort, such as solar panels and silly big propellers, should be allowed, say the CAGW-ers. President Obama either really believes all this CAGW stuff or has lots of supporters who really do believe it, or supporters who placed business bets at a time when they really did believe it, or when they reckoned that a lot of other idiots really did believe it, so Obama is now looking like a green saboteur himself.

It gets worse for Team Obama. Americans want their energy to stop being sabotaged into being much more expensive, and to go back to being cheap again. And, says Singer, new sources of non-green energy now coming on stream might make this happen. Singer’s argument may not be true, what with politicians being politicians, but it is at least plausible. Vast new underground oceans of stuff you can set fire to and power four wheel drive vehicles with have recently been discovered under America. Or, they have always known this stuff was there but now they also know how to suck it out. Or push it out. Or some such thing. The point is, here’s a potential economic bonanza. Do we bonanzify it and go with the flow? Or do we ignore it, to save the planet from climate doom? Although Team Obama has changed its tune about this new, bad, energetic type energy somewhat, it hasn’t changed it enough to be convincing. Fred Singer says Romney should talk up this new energy, and that if he does he will make Obama look an even bigger economic saboteur than he looks already.

According to Singer, not only is the story of the economy as it is now bad for Team Obama. So is the new story, of the economy as it might be. I agree with Singer. I think this is one of those situations where what the contending Presidential teams merely say might actually make a big difference. → Continue reading: Solyndra! Solyndra! How the US Presidential campaign is hastening the end of the CAGW scare