Behind the argument is simple human arithmetic. Scott W. Tinker, an emeritus professor who has spent four decades on energy and the environment, wants to move the public conversation off its favorite seesaw: “fossil fuels” versus “renewables”, growth versus stewardship, “dirty” versus “clean”. Those labels, he argues, promise choices that do not actually exist, and the people who pay for the illusion are households. His column ran originally at RealClearEnergy and reached a wider audience through RealClearWire, and he reports that the public is waking to it, and even some politicians.
The human side of the case comes first. Energy, Tinker writes, is a means rather than an end; it runs hospitals and schools, food production, transport and communications. Where it is affordable and dependable it lifts people out of poverty, lengthens lives and widens opportunity. More than eight billion of us share the planet, and billions still cook and heat with wood and dung, or lack dependable power altogether. Demand, he argues, will keep climbing, and scenarios that show it falling, like the IEA’s 2021 net-zero work, are “aren’t aspirational, they’re disingenuous.”
What this means for families is the test he keeps applying. Wind and solar, he grants, have grown fast and gotten cheaper and will matter; but they are intermittent, and making them dependable means transmission lines, storage and backup generation, all of it showing up on the bill. Meanwhile coal, oil and natural gas still carry more than 80% of world energy demand. A system assembled over a century cannot be swapped overnight, and policies that pretend otherwise have, in his telling, already delivered expensive, largely self-imposed electricity and gasoline in Germany, Britain and California.
His alternative is what he calls energy realism: everything on the table. Solar and wind where they fit, nuclear advanced, grids and storage built out, geothermal and hydrogen supported, fusion and satellite solar further off, and the footprint of the existing fuels kept shrinking. Climate goals are not the opponent, he insists; realism strengthens climate action by strengthening economies. History’s transitions, wood to coal, coal to oil and gas, hydro to nuclear, each left people better off, and the next chapter, he writes, “must be written through innovation, investment, and pragmatism, not ideology.”
The line families may remember is shorter: “It’s tough to negotiate with physics.” Tinker is due to speak on these themes at London’s Alliance for Responsible Citizenship forum on June 26. He frames his position as ambition with receipts, more energy, not less, with a smaller footprint, judged by whether it works in practice for the households, businesses and developing nations who depend on it.
Sources
- The real foundation and future of human progress * WorldNetDaily * by Scott W. Tinker, Real Clear Wire
- There Is No Such Thing as Renewable Energy, Says Scott Tinker
