It's an opinion piece, not a news article. I looked up the author and according to Wikipedia he has a degree in Philosophy and "cites Ayn Rand as his greatest influence, having been especially impressed by her novel Atlas Shrugged". You might want to take what he writes with a grain of salt.

Rather then attempting to discredit the author because you think he doesn't have the qualifications to have an opinion on the subject why don't you show me where you think he's wrong?

I'm well aware of who the author is. He's been speaking on the subject of energy for close to a decade, debating the leaders in the environmentalist movement and wrote a NYT best selling book on the subject.

You just posted a link without any comment. Then expect others to go in depth on the matter. That's a cute tactic.

There isn't really much the author does say. The amount of wind and sun isn't constant. No ****, Sherlock. He complains about a misleading term but calls some forms of energy "reliables" and others "unreliables". He underlines his point that solar is unreliable in the US by using statistics from Germany. The climate in Germany is quite different than let's say in Arizona.
From all that he concludes that availability is somehow zero. It's almost impossible to be more of a shill. Is information available who is paying his think tank?

Not sure why being a best-selling author is any form of qualification. Sarah Palin topped the best-seller list and I am still not going to take any advice from her.

Using the terms reliable's and unreliable's isn't misleading because that is what they are. Wind and Solar always have to be backed up by a reliable energy. I believe he refers to Germany because its claimed to be the bench mark for the green movement. Pretty sure people have mentioned it earlier in this thread.

He's open that his think tank is for-profit. He gets money from speaking, consulting and book sales.

Being a best seller from a political memoir is a lot different then a being one from a book about a specific subject matter.

Fossil fuel plants have to be taken offline for maintenance. Shall we be consistent and call their reliable output zero?

Also linking higher German electricity prices to renewables is laughable.

Just got final inspection signed off on adding 200kw of unreliable solar power. My biggest project to date.

They take the plants offline when they are least needed.

I contributed to keeping a 100K bpd of reliables SAGD plant operating today.

+1, scheduled maintenance

And then you get these great headlines how "n country is currently producing over 50 % of its energy by renewable sources".

Great but typically sensationalized as hell.

Germany is a disaster when it comes to energy policy though and should be used as a warning, not example or something to compare with.

What is so wrong with the energy policies in Germany that you call it a disaster.

This doesn't sound good: http://news.yale.edu/2016/04/07/clim...es-study-finds

LOL, more like our predictions have never been close to being correct so we might as well double down.

You have no problem believing a blog post by a philosophy major that is indistinguishable from a fossil fuel marketing campaign. Yet a study done by Yale scientists that will be published in a peer-reviewed journal makes you laugh.

Want to show me some peer reviewed studies that predict catastrophic climate change or run away temperature increase that have ever been close to being correct?

It's actually increasing the CO emissions by forcing industry to emigrate and buying polluting energy sources outside, rising energy prices on everyone, putting strains on transfer network, increasing dependency on Russia.

It's based on feels and driving their nuclear down has caused a lot of it which has lead to increase of use in fossil fuels.

So they managed to make their energy production less reliable, more expensive and more polluting. It's a disaster.

Shifty, if it could irrefutably be proven tomorrow that climate change was a total hoax, environmentally at least, what would that change about the correct path forward?

It would hopefully stop the insane amount of resources put into inferior technologies.

You only need to look at the symptoms of the patient to see something is direly wrong. I hope you open your eyes.

If global cooling, global warming or climate change are all happening at catastrophic levels what is the correct path going forward?

The same one as if they are not.

We are choosing now what planet we live on for the next 200-300 years. Before we were not capable of really large scale destruction more so than any other species effect on an area (think elk or elephants which both royally **** **** up), but humans today have literally already caused the latest great extinction. Much of the work of this extinction has been completed as of the 1700s with mass transportation via ship allowing invasive species to overtake established locals. What scientists have underestimated is, the rate at which new species fill ecosystem roles and adapting, why the species adapt so fast. Invasives with short reproductive spans like insects are bound to produce innumerable poor consequences for their main threat and host, humans. In short, there is going to be some really nasty stuff coming up soon, and we will not be equiped to deal with it.

This is wholly ignoring issues like ocean pollution which wtf their are islands of trash, maybe you think that is natural? Or maybe if there is no global warming, then the islands of trash will melt??? I don't get it. Our current ecological preservation strategy is put all our **** in a pile and bury it. What could go wrong?

For example, do you know how much money plastic packaging saves??? Literally f $0. It saves the person who packaged something in plastic approx ~$0.02 a container in storage, paper proofing or w/e that would need to be done to simulate a plastic package properties in something biodegradable, but some politician somewhere has a plastic factory in his district and gets a $2k kickback, err speech or whatever they are calling it today. The entire $0.02 saved is then **** into our environmental externalities that are really obvious but noone does anything about it. Do you think the trash company gives a **** if we turn the whole planet into a landfill? That in fact should be their endgame if they are good business people.

IMO, the way forward is not complicated or hard to understand.

Trash, waste energy, getting energy from trash are really all the lowest hanging fruit, but even among competing green policies it doesn't get the attention it deserves because there isn't a much of a lobby for it.

Loss of biodiversity is of course incredibly tragic just by itself, but also one of the biggest possible sources of uncertainty in the future that can end up being catastrophic for humans.



And people talk about how this pollution or that will have an effect for decades or centuries, but the extinctions are permanent effects.

Yeah, I think something like 40% of US methane emissions come from decomposing food. I assume basically all that could be captured and used for energy.