Joe Romm at ThinkProgress pokes holes in Bill Gates’ energy take in Bill Gates And Exxon Now Share The Same Climate Policy. They’re Wrong:
There was some bad news for billionaire Bill Gates at Exxon’s shareholder meeting Wednesday. Exxon chairman, president, and CEO Rex Tillerson said of Gates, “there’s no space between he and I” on what the world needs to do about climate change. “We’ve gotta have some technology breakthroughs but until we achieve those, just saying turn the taps off is not acceptable to humanity.”
Memo to Gates: It just might be time to rethink your position when the biggest corporate climate villain on planet Earth embraces your climate policy. And it might be time to rethink your message when the head of the company that has funded disinformation about climate science and solutions longer than any other says he has “had this conversation” with you and you are in total agreement.
Of course, Tillerson is not telling the truth when he says people who want strong climate action now are “just saying turn the taps off.” They are saying we need to turn the taps down in an orderly fashion over the next several decades — or risk multiple catastrophic climate impacts from Dust-Bowlification to sea level rise lasting centuries.
But Tillerson’s framing is just the illogical extension of Gates’ own argument that “the focus on ramping up deployment of [today’s] technologies diverts attention from the critical need to greatly intensify spending on basic research and large-scale development of new energy technologies.”
Both Gates and Tillerson are engaging in dangerous straw men. We don’t have to choose between clean energy R&D and deployment, between ramping up research funding and ramping down fossil fuel use. We can do both, and indeed we must.
But deployment just happens to be vastly more important. As climate expert Ken Caldeiraexplained four years ago, “Globally, deployment costs will be in the trillions of dollars, while R&D costs might be in the tens of billions.” Caldeira, who helps run Gates’ Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research argued in 2012:
If we had to choose one or the other, drivers to deployment or publicly funded R&D, I would pick drivers to deployment. However, we don’t need to make this either or, and we can do both.
Gates’ pro-miracle, anti-deployment argument was debunked at length by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) Chairman Michael Liebreich in his keynote address at BNEF’s annual conference in April — pointedly titled “In Search of the Miraculous” (which I discussed here). I also directly debunked Gates back in February.
Liebreich’s point was that what sustained long-term deployment programs have done for key clean technologies like solar and wind and batteries was already a “miracle.” He summed up the solar miracle in one chart, noting, “We’ve seen the costs come down by a factor of 150 since 1975. We’ve seen volume up by 115,000.” [...]
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2008—Senator, VA Secretary Disrespect Troops on Memorial Day:
On Memorial Day weekend, Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) and VA Secretary James Peake stood side-by-side in Fairbanks, Alaska to showcase their opposition to--and lack of respect for--today’s newest veterans.
Speaking at the Disabled American Veterans’ 19th Annual Department Convention, Senator Stevens told the majority of America’s most recent war veterans that they had not yet sacrificed enough to have earned a GI Bill that would cover the full cost of their educations.
Sen. Ted Stevens warned of a "mass exodus" from the military Saturday if the so-called 21st Century GI Bill goes into law without major changes. "There are worries that people who are already in for two years will serve one more and leave, and there’s really no incentive to stay," Stevens said.
What Stevens is really saying is that today's troops are unpatriotic--that they're only in it for the money and the college. And while Stevens’ "mass exodus" theory has been thoroughly discredited by the Congressional Budget Office, the true irony of the situation lies in the fact that Stevens earned his own college degree after World War Two by using the same GI Bill he’s aiming to prevent today’s veterans from receiving.
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On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: It’s all Armando, all the time. Well, not literally. But it’s an extended discussion with him of the Dem convention platform committee developments, and what can (and cannot) come of them. Plus, your daily roundup of the Hairspray von Clownstick follies.
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