It's been a little while since we've talked about RealClearEnergy, but that doesn't mean they've slowed down with the disinformation.
For example, Jonathan Lesser continued his Manhattan Institute-backed anti-EV crusade on Monday with a piece calling Biden's clean car move "a new low." That trainwreck of an article followed another recent piece that made the obviously ridiculous argument that climate pollution (methane gas) is somehow a climate solution.
But what caught our eye was a column on Monday by Duggan Flanakin of CFACT, the right-wing lobby shop that employs the 'climate lockdown' conspiracist Marc Morano and is one of the dark money outfits pushing anti-offshore wind disinformation.
Oddly, instead of his usual disinformation attacking climate solutions, Flanakin is now apparently praising a "solution." Specifically, he lauds Tinia Group, a company which is apparently raising money to use AI and the blockchain to send data from individual solar panels to solar energy producers and consumers. Flanakin's column reads like a press release; in fact, it's clearly just a rewritten version of a press release the company put out, with key phrases barely changed.
One of the few changes Flanakin made is still obvious, with the strikethrough formatting left over where cuts should have been made: "The Tinia platform uses artificial intelligence ('A.I.') algorithms to predict energy production from each solar cell panel in real-time, while the blockchain technology provides a secure and transparent way to track energy transactions."
Interestingly, the other place where strikethroughs are still left is where Flanakin quotes what Tinia and its co-founder Radu Puchiu call its "solution:" the system of basically replacing grid-load-balancing utilities with the blockchain for users to buy and sell each other solar power directly. After the first use of the word, in which Flanakin is quoting Puchiu calling this system a "solution," subsequent references have the quotes visibly struck, like this: “solution”.
So maybe Duggan Flanakin wasn't just shilling for Tinia and was actually attempting to be sarcastic about Tinia's "solution," but the RealClear editors just didn't get the joke since they're so used to unquestioningly promoting energy company press releases.
Or maybe Duggan's just enjoying his easy job at CFACT a little too much. His first RealClear piece, for example, mixed the metaphors of the Hookah-smoking caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland with Puff, the Magic Dragon. An April column claimed "Europeans may be rejecting the EV kool-aid," but that metaphor was about a racist mass murder and not the LSD-laced electric kool-aid that we suspected Flanakin may have over-indulged in when he wrote his bizarre ChatGPT and EV take in February.
Either way, we'll hold off on endorsing any company claiming that blockchain and AI and other crypto buzzwords are a climate "solution" and not just the source of more pollution!
