The Wall Street Journal and Steve Koonin: The New Face of Climate Change Inaction.
Fresh from the company that gave us the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Steve Koonin is the answer to a troublesome question facing the Journal’s opinion page editors: What you do if you want to continue obstructing progress on global warming pollution, but your usual stable of tame skeptics is starting to die off (Fred Seitz), retire from active research (Dick Lindzen), or discredit itself through serial scientific errors (John Christy) or by taking fanatical and manifestly untenable positions (Heartland Institute)? That puts the editors in quite a pickle. The Wall Street Journal evidently has high hopes for promoting Koonin as a prominent new voice for inaction, having lavished on him 2,000 words and front-page Saturday exposure outside the Journal’s paywall.
Who is Steve Koonin and why should we care?
Koonin has constructed a narrative that is calculated to make people take notice even if they wouldn’t ordinarily trust anything the Wall Street Journal published on global warming: I’m a physicist bringing my brilliance and outside perspective to the backwater of climate science! (He was a professor of physics, and later provost, at Caltech.) I’m green! (He was chief scientist for BP, the oil firm that likes to tout itself as the “beyond petroleum” company, and he was involved with renewables there, among other things.) I’ve got true-blue Democratic credentials! (He was undersecretary for science in the Department of Energy during Obama’s first term.)
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