Those funded by dirty energy will stoop pretty low to defend the source of their income. In the case of Steve Everley, this not only includes making misleading claims about a new clean energy pathways report, written by Stanford's Mark Jacobson, but also manufacturing a conspiracy about the report.
The saga began with Everley claiming that Jacobson's report shows a switch to renewables would lead to job losses. In response, Jacobson explained to Everley on Twitter that his evidence of job losses was based on test data. This exchange brought attention to Jacobson's data, prompting him to tidy up his enormous dataset by deleting the “dead test columns not used for anything."
Realizing that he could no longer point to Jacobson’s dataset to justify patently false job loss smear, Everley doubled down and wrote another column that claimed, "[Jacobson deleted] data showing job loss from renewables transition.” According to Jacobson, the figures cited by Everley were “random test numbers” that were “extraneous and irrelevant to the study.” If you’re curious, the data used in the report is available in the massive 68-sheet excel document that Jacobson included in the report's supplementary material. If you look, you’ll see as Jacobson told us that, “The numbers Everley used appear nowhere in our paper.”
The only person gullible enough to believe Everley is the Daily Caller’s Michael Bastach, who parrots Everley in a recent post. However, Bastach—in what seems to be a brief moment of something approaching journalistic integrity—does say that, “The data Everley found was not from the study itself” but “from supplementary materials posted online that are associated with his research.”
What “associated” numbers will Everley glom on to next? Maybe since the URL for the supplementary info contains “-50-USState” he’ll claim that Jacobson’s plan is for negative 50 US states? Stay tuned next week to find out.
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