DeSmog

Your source for that article is a man named Alex Epstein, who is paid by coal industry figures to advocate for a "new industrial revolution".

> In a September 11, 2018 piece at the CIP website, Epstein disclosed “proudly” that one of his industry clients was Tyler White, president of the Kentucky Coal Association. [22]

Also interesting:

> Alexander Epstein planned to release his “Energy Liberation Plan” for consideration by 2016 political candidates. According to an article by Epstein in Forbes, the Energy Liberation Plan seeks to combat “backwards energy and environmental policies that are anti-development, not anti-pollution.” He contends that we are “squandering the opportunity of a generation, through blind opposition to our three most potent sources of power: hydrocarbon energy (coal, oil, and gas), nuclear energy, and hydroelectric energy.” [15]

I am reading, and I am neither weeping nor laughing, because this is exactly what I expected to see.

If this is someone you expect to accurately represent climate science, I think you are mistaken in holding them in that regard.

As a counterpoint, here's another take on the "97%" figure, a review of the several meta-studies that have been done on climate science:

http://skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-consensus.htm

Their conclusion is that between 90 and 100% of climate science papers agree that 1) climate change is occurring and 2) it is caused by human industrial sources.

Of course, the man paid by the…

First, let's set aside that this is a secretive climate change denial lobbying group that's been under multiple investigations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Warming_Policy_Foundation) and is headquartered at the same office as an industrial mining lobbying group and look at the actual claim.

They quote fired climate skeptic Peter Ridd (https://www.desmogblog.com/peter-ridd) who has been funded by numerous industrial groups and coincidentally made claims that their products are harmless.

This time he misreads AIMS data for which AIMS has openly criticized him before on (that's why he had to create his own chart and not use one of AIMS). AIMS of course, firmly and clearly states the opposite of his findings: https://www.aims.gov.au/docs/research/climate-change/declining-coral-growth.html . Coincidentally the GPWF is fairly well known for intentionally deceptive graphics https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Global_Warming_Policy_Foundation

Anyway, then the article says the author of the claim they are criticizing, Terry Hughes of James Cook University "refused to make public the raw data". This is linguistic acrobatics. His research team had already made public the data so he personally couldn't make it public a second time because that's not how language works. Here's the data:
https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.ncjsxksrq

So in summary they lied about the data not being public and cited someone who intentionally misrepresented data and…

> Paris has a pollution problem. Instead of the smoke from Gauloise cigarettes and the aroma of freshly baked bread, the air is packed with smog, an issue that got so bad one day last month, the city forcibly halved traffic by allowing only cars with odd-number plates to drive.

Of course this could have nothing do to with Germany phasing out its nuclear power plants and having to reopen coal power plants instead.

They massively increased the share of solar and wind in their energy production, but still need more traditional methods of power generation to cover when those 2 are not providing energy, hence more coal [1].

And coal is incredibly polluting. See [2] for example for CO2 emissions :

> In July 2014, a group of NGOs published a study on the EU’s 30 worst CO2-emitting thermal power plants. German power stations featured six times among the 10 dirtiest.

CO2 is not the problem for city pollution of course, it's the rest of the small particulate matter that is.

[1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/germanys-energy-transition-explained-in-6-charts

[2] http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/01/24/coal-casts-cloud-over-germany-s-energy-revolution

I wonder what parallels we can draw with oil. The US resumed being a major oil producer in the last decade thanks to the fracking boom. I feel like we got a lot of propaganda about energy independence and not supporting brutal Middle East dictators (that our CIA set up). We got into a price war with the Saudis and Russia [1] and lost. With Covid killing demand this year, the US shale oil industry is on the verge of imploding.

I can't see the US competing long-term with cheaper rivals in any natural resource production. We're hamstrung because the main tools for sustaining such industries (state ownership, tariffs, massive subsidies) are politically unpalatable/anticapitalist. "Energy independence" was just a cover for private industry to make a quick buck. Shale firms have not produced a profit [2], workers are being laid off left and right, but owners and investors benefitted massively from the grift [3].

1. https://www.ft.com/content/2d129e4a-860b-11ea-b872-8db45d5f6714
2. https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/the-dramatic-rise-and-fall-of-shale-oil/
3. https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/03/05/us-shale-fracking-boom-fraud-alta-mesa-enron

An article by Tyler Cowen of the Mercatus Center - "the most important think tank you've never heard of." [1]

If you're interested in the background of this interesting organization, there's some funding information at [2].

It's maybe not that surprising that a board member of an economics outreach effort heavily funded by Koch Industries would argue for the freedom of the very rich to "to minimize their tax burden through (mostly) legal shell corporations," especially considering that the Kochs were exposed doing just this by a previous round of ICIJ published leaks. [3]

But maybe it's worth asking why such a reasonable practice, totally within the law, would be so secret in the first place that it takes leaks like these to make it known.

1: http://web.archive.org/web/20070824203256/http://gazette.gmu.edu/articles/index.php?id=5895

2: http://www.desmogblog.com/mercatus-center

3: https://www.icij.org/project/luxembourg-leaks/new-leak-reveals-luxembourg-tax-deals-disney-koch-brothers-empire

Alex Epstein is the director of the Center for
Industrial Progress, an organization he founded
in 2011. Its mission is to "inspire Americans to
embrace industrial progress as a cultural ideal."
He is also a blogger at Master Resource, a "Free
Market Energy Blog," and a past fellow of the Ayn
Rand Institute, an organization that has received
funding from the Koch Foundations including at
least $50,000 between 2005 and 2010.

http://www.desmogblog.com/alex-epstein

Some of my favorite blog post titles of his:

* Coal is Clean: http://industrialprogress.com/2012/03/12/coal-is-clean/

* Keep Our "Addiction" to Oil, End Our Allergy to Self-Assertion: http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?JServSessionIdr005=zvtlch4c22.app14b&page=NewsArticle&id=12743&news_iv_ctrl=2090

* Why We Should Love the Oil Companies: http://www.masterresource.org/2012/06/love-oil-companies-educate/ (I think this might be my favorite for its shades of Dr. Strangelove's subtitle)