Former presidential candidate Tom Steyer

In this little gem, former presidential candidate Tom Steyer points out the folly of investing in fossil fuels.  He accurately points out that every single thing that engenders public wrath falls apart financially with great speed.  Want to invest in ozone-depleting chemicals?  Asbestos?  DDT?

The handwriting is on the wall for coal, oil, and natural gas.  We’ll always need energy, and all that money has to go somewhere–thus the rationale for investment in renewables.  It simply makes good sense.

Yes, we’re distracted by the coronavirus, but it won’t be long until the world’s attention goes onto other phenomena that are in the process of damaging our civilization.

 

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How valid is a liberal arts education in today’s world?  The subject comes up more often today than it had in the past, for a few reasons.

First, even before the coronavirus, we lived in a tough economy.  High-paying jobs were hard to find, and plenty of highly educated people found themselves brewing coffee or driving trucks.  Many recent college graduates are wracked with enormous amounts of student debt.  Knowing this going in makes one more likely to begin training in a specialized field, perhaps engineering or computer science. (more…)

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In Michigan, thousands gathered for a stay-at-home protest in downtown Lansing on Wednesday, calling for the imprisonment of the state’s governor, who had ordered the lock-down.

Today, our president tweeted his support for this lawlessness, which could be construed as solicitation, i.e., soliciting others (many millions of others) to commit crimes.

We’re more than six months away from the November election; that’s a lot of time for things to heat up even further.  Anyone who thinks Trump is going to slowly recede into history without some unbelievable histrionics is soon to realize that he’s sadly mistaken.

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Fox News is under an aggressive legal attack, principally from the State of Washington, on the basis that it broadcast a long series of lies minimizing the impact of the coronavirus and that, thus far, this has cost thousands of people their lives.  (more…)

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How can we achieve our quest for 100% clean energy?

Let’s start with the understanding that nuclear, while it’s very clean, is baseload, i.e., it can’t be ramped up to address the quite significantly changing loads that we experience through the course of a day. (more…)

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There are some ironic benefits brought to us by the coronavirus.  Before last month, if you wanted to see what our air looked like without a city full of internal combustion engines, you had to look at photographs taken 120 years ago.  Now, city-dwellers need only look out their windows.

It’s conceivable that this may spur electric vehicle sales, as many people may look at shots like this one from Ahvaz, Iran and think: Ya know what?  I don’t think it’s right to contribute to that mess.

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The State of Virginia is taking aggressive action to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy in the coming decades, pledging to get to 100% clean energy by 2050. (more…)

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I thought readers might be interested in a conversation between senior energy analyst and political activist Glenn Doty and me on the subject of the meme here, which is captioned, “From Iceland to Taiwan and from Germany to New Zealand, women are stepping up to show the world how to manage a messy patch for our human family.” (more…)

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In response to the meme here, reader Sara notes, “Follow the law, no worries.”

It’s strange to hear an American say this.  Our right to due process under the law, as guaranteed by our 5th and 14th Amendments, is so central to our way of thinking, and the concept of extra-judicial killings is so abhorrent, it’s rare to find someone advocating this level of lawless barbarity on our shores.

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Here’s a cool video of people, many of whom are in quarantine, calling upon NY State lawmakers to divest all pension holdings of fossil fuels.  Some cite environmental issues, but others point to something even more immediate: they don’t like losing money.

Shown above is the five-year chart of ExxonMobil common stock.  Latest trade: $40.48, far less than half of what it was on this date in 2015.

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