That review goes into detail. The big picture for me is that he misses the systemic effects in favor of low-level, often misdirected, points.
For example, he suggests "As a result of cleaner-burning coal, the transition to natural gas, cleaner vehicles, and other technological changes, the U.S. and other developed nations have seen major improvements in air quality."
Those factors may have contributed, but we exported our manufacturing to places with lower standards. The world's air quality degraded, but he found places it improved and claimed causes he liked without presenting others that contradict his views.
A lot of it reads like what Richard Feynman criticized of the shuttle explosion:
> it was asserted, there was "a safety factor of three." This is a strange use of the engineer's term ,"safety factor." If a bridge is built to withstand a certain load without the beams permanently deforming, cracking, or breaking, it may be designed for the materials used to actually stand up under three times the load. This "safety factor" is to allow for uncertain excesses of load, or unknown extra loads, or weaknesses in the material that might have unexpected flaws, etc. If now the expected load comes on to the new bridge and a crack appears in a beam, this is a failure of the design. There was no safety factor at all; even though the bridge did not actually collapse because the crack went only one-third of the way through the beam. The O-rings of the Solid Rocket Boosters were not designed to erode. Erosion was a clue that something was wrong. Erosion was not something from which safety can be inferred.
Shellenberger sharply disagrees with other environmentalists over the impacts of environmental threats and policies for addressing them. Shellenberger's positions have been called "bad science" and "inaccurate" by environmental scientists and academics.
Very sad, rather than addressing the contents you have to resort to trying to reinforce defamation. This attitude is what destroyed all reasonable conversation in recent years.
Of course not, but let's not play pretend, "this is the guy who back's this stuff" is a typical way to try and discredit a message by discrediting its author.
That review goes into detail. The big picture for me is that he misses the systemic effects in favor of low-level, often misdirected, points.
For example, he suggests "As a result of cleaner-burning coal, the transition to natural gas, cleaner vehicles, and other technological changes, the U.S. and other developed nations have seen major improvements in air quality."
Those factors may have contributed, but we exported our manufacturing to places with lower standards. The world's air quality degraded, but he found places it improved and claimed causes he liked without presenting others that contradict his views.
A lot of it reads like what Richard Feynman criticized of the shuttle explosion:
> it was asserted, there was "a safety factor of three." This is a strange use of the engineer's term ,"safety factor." If a bridge is built to withstand a certain load without the beams permanently deforming, cracking, or breaking, it may be designed for the materials used to actually stand up under three times the load. This "safety factor" is to allow for uncertain excesses of load, or unknown extra loads, or weaknesses in the material that might have unexpected flaws, etc. If now the expected load comes on to the new bridge and a crack appears in a beam, this is a failure of the design. There was no safety factor at all; even though the bridge did not actually collapse because the crack went only one-third of the way through the beam. The O-rings of the Solid Rocket Boosters were not designed to erode. Erosion was a clue that something was wrong. Erosion was not something from which safety can be inferred.
If you want rigor, I recommend Tom Murphy's textbook for his course at UCSD on energy for non-scientists, freely downloadable: https://escholarship.org/uc/energy_ambitions
Here's my review of it: https://joshuaspodek.com/the-science-book-of-the-decade-ener...