Sweetwilliam’s Reviews > The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels > Status Update

A poison or pollutant is always a combination of substance and dose. If someone mentions just a substance to scare you, independent of the context or the dose, he has given you meaningless, misleading information. He is assuming or expecting you to believe if something is dangerous in some dosage, it is dangerous in all dosages.

Actually, it is the top environmentalist intellectuals who lack climate wisdom. Because they are unwilling to think in an unbiased way about the benefits and risks of fossil fuels according to a human standard of value, they are blinded by the fact that the fossil fuel industry is the reason that they are alive and not "helpless at the mercy of the wind in the middle of some such plain."

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method...we'd like to see the world a better place...To do that we need to get some broad-based support to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts that we might have.