Realism with energy and climate change has lifted its battered head in, of all places, the administration of US President Barack Obama.
At an annual conference of the Energy Information Administration this month, Obama's go-to intellectual on climate change rebuked "keep-it-in-the-ground" activists.
White House science adviser John Holdren called that approach "unrealistic" in his keynote speech.
Fire-breathers at groups like Greenpeace and 350.org cannot have welcomed the message, especially given its source.
Holdren, a Harvard professor trained in fluid dynamics and plasma physics, has spent his career advocating for aggressive precaution against climate change.
Indeed, he's credited with instigating the rebranding of the issue from unmarketable "global warming" and is reported to want to tweak the phrase to "climate disruption."
What would Americans do, after all, without academic elites in positions of influence telling them how to talk?
Holdren has had his White House job since the beginning of the Obama administration and also worked in the administration of Bill Clinton.
So he knows how to influence policy. He can claim credit for an Environmental Protection Agency gone rogue and a torrent of initiatives from EPA and elsewhere consistently aimed at discouraging development of fossil-energy resources.
But even Holdren thinks extremists go too far.
Asked to explain his remarks at the EIA meeting, a White House spokeswoman told the Washington Post that Holdren had pointed out the US and world depend on fossil fuels for more than 80% of their primary energy.
"It's not practical or affordable to replace the huge, fossil-fuel infrastructure with nuclear and renewables overnight, no matter how badly we may want to," she said, according to the newspaper. "As a result, the US will be using fossil fuels for decades to come, albeit, one hopes, with the share of nonfossil supplies increasing over time."
One also hopes that this morsel of practical reality will influence the formulation of energy policy more heavily than it has so far in this administration's final months.
(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted July 29, 2016; author's e-mail: [email protected])
