MichaelLind off base on #globalwarning, #PeakOil too

Sometimes Michael Lind is great; sometimes he's thought provoking. Occasionally he's irritating. This time, he's all three and worse He may be right on the abundance of natural gas, but he's "out there" on an age of future oil abundance. Plus, although not a global warming denier, or even a skeptic of its reality, he appears to be a "minimalist" on its effects.

In sounding like Daniel Yergin, and in making claims for both crude oil and natural gas that even Exxon won't, he's sounding like a utopian, or Kurzweil, or Michael Shermer, with a dash of Bjorn Lomborg thrown in on the global warming side.

It's clear that he's overstating the case for future oil reserves. He should know that King Hubbert made allowances for new technology when he first proposed his ideas on Peak Oil.

He also, while perhaps quite right on natural gas reserves, overlooks the difficulty of converting an entire infrastructure, and not just an occasional filling station, to natural gas pumping. Finally, he ignores the costs of that, and how much more quickly running cars on natural gas would draw down those reserves.

That said, he is right that hyper-abundant natural gas will put the use of renewables for electricity in doubt. But, gas is no panacea on global warming issues. More on that below.

As for coal? Its use for electricity is simply not allowable if we're going to have any reasonable chance of controlling (no, not stopping) global warming. Using coal to produce diesel? It's environmentally dirty and requires massive amounts of water, among other problems.

Finally, he ignores global warming almost entirely in this whole long piece. When not ignoring it, he poo-poos it with a comment like this:

The scenarios with the most catastrophic outcomes of global warming are low probability outcomes -- a fact that explains why the world’s governments in practice treat reducing CO2 emissions as a low priority, despite paying lip service to it.

Big fail. Big fail. Big fail.

I don't know whether or not Lind has read the news from across the pond that there's good research indicating we have a 50-50 chance of a 4C, not a 2C, rise in temperatures by 2100. I suspect, thought, in light of this column, that he'd pooh-pooh that, too, though, even though it means we have a 50-50 chance of a 3F/1.5C rise by 2050, when Lind is likely to be alive.

As for his claim on why politicians are treating CO2 emissions as a low priority? It's not because they think scientifically-backed worst-case scenarios are alarmist; it's because they're craven.

Lind has written enough about politics to know how craven politicians can be, which makes his refusal to take that into account all the worse.

Lind was someone I enjoyed reading. I'll be looking at him with much more skeptical eyes now, assuming he's a semi-neoliberal cornucopian.

Andrew Leonard, his Salon colleague, has the right reaction today; WTF? That said, until/unless Lind admits he bloew it, he's on skeptical probation.


Lind now weakly claims he's "not a global warming denialist." No, just a pooh-pooher of how bad it's going to get.

Right here:

If there were really a clear and present danger of catastrophic overheating ...

Now, "present" isn't in the next 5 years, perhaps. But, a 3F rise by 2050, in the lifetimes of many of us here right now? I'd call that "present" enough. And, catastrophic enough.

Michael Lind, put down the shovel.

Oh, and STOP LYING. Andrew Leonard never called you a global warming denialist, despite your claim in your second column.