There I am, reviewing the daily Google News headlines, and there’s one titled “How Bill McKibben Lost the Plot,” and I guess this is Google News headline worthy because McKibben’s new book, Here Comes the Sun, is coming out soon and Sun Day events nationwide are happening on September 21, and McKibben has been in the news more than usual, and that’s saying something.

I wanted to see what this intriguingly titled article in New Atlantis had to say.

I quickly ascertained that the critiques leveled against Bill McKibben’s pro-solar views had a familiar ring, with those bells rang for the fossil fuel industry in well-worn anti-solar talking points. After going through a veritable checklist of the fossil fuel industry’s tried-and-false arguments I became curious. What is New Atlantis?

I asked Gemini, in Deep Research mode, the following prompt:

Investigate the following names on the masthead of New Atlantis for connections to the fossil fuel industry: EDITOR, Ari Schulman; MANAGING EDITOR, Samuel Matlack; Assistant Editor, Louise Liebeskind; Director of Development & Communications, Brady Lee; Senior Editors, Brendan Foht, Adam Keiper, Caitrin Keiper, Yuval Levin, Christine Rosen; Editor-at-Large, Eric Cohen; Contributing Editors, James C. Capretta, Matthew B. Crawford, Alan Jacobs, Wilfred M. McClay, Gilbert Meilaender, Charles T. Rubin, Diana Schaub, Stephen L. Talbott, Raymond Tallis, Algis Valiunas, Adam J. White, Robert Zubrin; In Memoriam, Peter Augustine Lawler (1951 2017), Roger Scruton (1944 2020); Researcher, Melynda Boyce

Include in this analysis any connections to 501 c 3, 501 c 4, think tanks, PACs, and foundations as funders to New Atlantis.

Wow.

I’ve made the full 14-page report, “A Web of Influence: An Investigative Analysis of The New Atlantis Masthead and its Connections to the Fossil Fuel-Linked Funding Network,” available, but here’s the not-so-shocker: New Atlantis has plenty of ties to fossil fuel supporter entities, as do many of the editors and contributors. In other words, the article on Bill McKibben—and by extension, on the renewable energy transition—is a hit piece that resonates with the best of bullshit fossil fuel arguments and thus adds nothing useful to the complex discourse on where America is today in terms of its energy future or how to deal with climate change. Rather, this article by Ted Nordhaus is simply another round of “forward into the past.”

One of the themes of the article in New Atlantis is that Bill McKibben is not a reliable journalist today, if ever one, and that all those articles by him in The New York Times and The New Yorker, and so many other significant national publications, and his books, too, of course, are simple boosterism that cherry-picks stats and studies and reports that support the solar boosterism. I must say that this claim by author Ted Nordhous is deliciously rich in hypocrisy.

AI turns out to be an effective tool for investigating connections between entities known for boosting fossil fuels and attacking renewable energy, or, more broadly, entities engaged in climate denialism and climate action delay, and those stories, articles, and “research” papers produced by such entities. In Dear Josephine, the second of my four-book series in The Steep Climes Quartet, there’s a plot line concerning a pro-climate action academic group using AI to help reveal fossil fuel’s dark money, and while the AI report mentioned in this post doesn’t have the identical reveal, I’m once again reminded as a fiction writer that the future I write about is already often here in the present. The Steep Climes Quartet is a literary climate fiction series, with the first book, Kill Well, taking place in 2026, and the aforementioned second book, Dear Josephine, taking place in 2029. On the matter of Big Oil corporate malfeasance, it looks like I’m not just blue-skying it, at least on this one point.

But let’s get back to the New Atlantis article, with a few examples of the fossil fuel talking points parroted in the piece:

Solar overproduction is a problem for electrical grids and can be addressed in one of three ways. You can curtail generation at times when there is excess. You can build long-distance transmission lines to ship it off to somewhere else. Or you can use batteries to store it. Each of these tactics is already being deployed in California and other places with relatively high shares of solar energy. But each is limited.

Ah yes, the ol’ “solar overproduction” argument. While it is true that solar overproduction would raise costs, solutions such as battery storage has dropped precipitously in costs and seems likely to continue its claim on robust affordability. And, yes, long-distance transmission lines are needed, but this is well-proven not only as established technologies such as HVDC, but the economic argument that we’ll need more transmission infrastructure is largely moot, too, since with the growth in electricity demands being forecast, we’ll need more transmission lines regardless of electrical power sources. One argument the article presents—“You can curtail [solar] generation at times when there is excess”—seems particularly troublesome to the author, but “excess” power is a reliability benefit, not deficit. Developments in digital data collection of power loads and supplies and the management thereof—whether shunting excess power to other areas or into storage—is a rich and active area of activity, including the concepts of virtual power plants (VPP) and distributed energy resources (DER). Add in actionable home appliance and EV power management and you have yet other elegant solutions to what Nordhaus suggests is an intractable barrier.

Intractable barriers are expensive to solve, and Nordhaus plays another fossil fuel industry canard—costs and subsidies:

This brings us to the real reason solar and wind continue to require subsidies, policy mandates, and political action for continued growth: wind and solar are not nearly as cheap as McKibben says they are. Yes, the wholesale cost of adding a kilowatt of solar or wind capacity is relatively cheap and continues to fall. But that is not a full reflection of the real cost of these sources to a utility, a grid manager, or an end user.

Well, thanks, buddy, for letting me know the “real reason solar and wind continue to require subsidies, policy mandates, and political action for continued growth.” I love hearing this argument, and mainly because it doesn’t bother to mention costs and subsidies for fossil fuels. The shills for fossil fuel love to bring out MBA-like acronyms and suggest that only they are serious about the laws of thermodynamics, such as when they’re referencing EROI or LCOE. Here’s a link to another AI Deep Research analysis I’ve undertaken on both Energy Return on Investment (EROI) and LCOE, or Levelized Cost of Energy (or Electricity), if you want to learn more. And wouldn’t you know it, but it turns out that when you’re not cherry-picking old cost data for solar from 2015 or when you look at fossil fuel’s actual point of use energy instead of the intrinsic amount of energy per unit at the well (before transport and refining and transport and huge amounts of energy loss through waste heat), EROI and LCOE look rather smart for solar and wind. But, hey, why let facts mar a perfectly good (sounding) argument?

And lets talk factually about subsidies. First, subsidies, policy mandates, and political action are tried-and-true means to develop industries and technologies for the public good. Second, it isn’t exactly like fossil fuels don’t enjoy plenty of subsidies—whether in the form of tax breaks or advantageous accounting or bargain lease pieces—and this for an industry that is well over two centuries old, unlike, if you want to know, solar, which goes back to its start in Bell Labs in the 1950s. The fossil fuel subsidies are actually much worse because the industry is allowed to pass on the costs of production of their products and the costs in the use of their products to everyone. Dumping pollution and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere has a real price and everyone gets to pay it, whether they use fossil fuels or not, and who doesn’t pay? The fossil fuel companies, that’s who, and that’s weird considering that fossil fuels exact a great public cost, whether through higher levels of illness or in increases in property insurance or, if global warming is left unchecked, the collapse of food production and ever larger swathes of uninhabitable land.

Ouch!

The International Monetary Fund, not known for its leftist proclivities, puts the U.S. annual fossil fuel industry cost total for direct and indirect subsidies (a.k.a. externalities) at ~$700 billion, with a “B,” every year. Add that to your kilowatt hour, mister. Are there other expenses to consider related to solar power? Of course. Are there additional costs related to fossil fuels? Definitely, and that price tag is a doozy.

And then there’s the “If we can’t do everything with electricity, why bother with the renewable energy transition” argument, which, put this way, already expresses the absurd straw man argument for what it is:

But there are also hugely important industrial processes where McKibben’s rule does not apply at all. Fossil fuels are used not only as a source of heat but also as a chemical input for many foundational industrial processes. Coal has been a central element of steelmaking for centuries because it not only melts iron ore but also contributes carbon molecules to the chemical process of converting iron to steel, which is an alloy of carbon and iron. Natural gas has similarly been the fuel of choice for making synthetic fertilizer, because it provides the hydrogen molecules needed to make ammonia in addition to the heat and pressure the reaction requires. Natural gas and petroleum are likewise chemical inputs to a huge range of refining processes, most notably plastics, as well as providing the high temperatures required to produce petrochemical products. Metallurgical coal is even used to make the kind of silicon used in photovoltaic solar panels.

The fact that we haven’t figured out every piece of the problem and may need to use fossil fuels for some things still, while chipping away at the last stubborn holdouts, doesn’t mean solar and wind and batteries aren’t big progress. Work is underway on such things as low-CO2 emissions concrete, for example, and arc furnaces for steel production are already being used. Plastics—a major use of petrochemicals—are increasingly recognized as dangerous (apparently, we all have microplastics in our livers and testicles and brains), and hopefully we’ll figure our way out of that, too.

It isn’t that fossil fuels have no value, because fossil fuels obviously do have applications beyond expanding the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere, but that doesn’t mean we need to keep using coal or oil or gas to boil water and spin turbines, or have transportation based on serial explosions in an internal combustion engine, a process, by the way, that loses several dozen percentages of the energy in gasoline and require extensive radiator cooling systems and catalytic converters and a whole bunch of other pricey stuff.

Nordhaus and all others who use the argument that renewables have not solved every problem as yet and thus is to be questioned is the real “lost plot.” These arguments are sillier than I-do Annie, who sings, in Richard Rodgers’s Oklahoma, “With me it’s all or nothing, it’s all or nothing with me.”

There are outright misrepresentations in this New Atlantis article, and here’s one of my favorites:

This gives a hint at Here Comes the Sun’s real purpose, which is to offer exhortation, not revelation. It is an encyclical of sorts to McKibben’s followers to keep the faith at a moment when the climate movement is under siege not only from the populist right but, increasingly, from the center-left.

Really? Is it untrue that vast majorities of the world’s people are concerned with global warming and want their governments to act? Yes, this is demonstrably a lie. Poll after poll show vast majorities—between 80-89%—want their governments to address climate change. The percentage in America is somewhere between 70-80%, and we might thank the likes of anti-climate action shill factories such as New Atlantis for the difference.

And is it true that “the climate movement is under siege… from the populist right?” Yes, or maybe only for some percentage, but keep in mind that the populist right is also under siege by the same fossil fuel industry’s self-interests that fund such bullshit as New Atlantis.

There’s a climate fiction novel by Nick Fuller Googins called The Great Transition that has people who had participated in or abetted fossil fuel and other corporations in delaying and blocking the renewable energy transition, now years later, in internment camps and undergoing trials.

Let’s ask AI what conditions would be required for these interment camps and trials to become a likely future. We might just discover we have already met those conditions and, as the great Pogo might say, they are us.