[A Response to Craig Considine]

There is a particular move in Western academic writing that I have come to recognize on sight.

It arrives whenever a pattern of violence associated with one civilization becomes inconvenient for a certain kind of argument.

The move goes like this: locate a comparable act of violence from a different civilization, describe it with maximum rhetorical force, and present the comparison as analysis. You are not explaining anything. You are manufacturing a tie. And a tie, in this context, is not a draw. It is an acquittal.

When two defendants are declared equally guilty, the one you came to prosecute walks out the side door while everyone is still looking at the other one.

Dr. Craig Considine makes this move in a 2015 piece titled “Why Celebrating Columbus Day is Like Celebrating ISIS Day.”

The core argument is that Christopher Columbus and the Spanish Catholic Monarchy carried out a holy war against indigenous peoples that is morally equivalent to what ISIS was doing in the Levant in 2015, and that critics who point to Islamic violence as a distinctive problem have either forgotten or chosen to ignore the West’s own record of atrocity.

Considine is a sociologist at Rice University with twenty years of published work on Christian-Muslim relations, so this is not a casual social media take. It is a considered academic argument by a credentialed scholar, and it deserves a considered response.

Let me say first that the history Considine describes is not fabricated.

In the late 1990s, before the term 'AI' meant anything to anyone, I built a network of data centers.

We lit up floors in New York and Los Angeles, in St. Louis and Chicago, in Dallas and Miami.

They hummed with the servers that carried the first great wave of the commercial internet. And not one of them consumed a single drop of water to keep those servers cool. Not a gallon.

We rejected heat the way a car rejects heat, with air and with glycol circulating in a sealed loop, the warmth carried out to the rooftop and handed off to the sky.

The water bill for cooling was zero, because there was no water in the cooling.

I tell you this not for nostalgia but because it settles an argument that has lately been dressed up as a crisis.

You have read the headlines. The data centers are coming, the story goes, and they will drink your rivers dry. The artificial intelligence boom will guzzle the reservoirs while families are told to let their lawns go brown.

It is a vivid picture.

It is also, in its central premise, false. And I can say so with confidence because I solved this supposed crisis a quarter century ago, on a budget, with technology that was not even new then.

According to the BBC, climate change has become more alarming during the 21st century.

What they once called global warming they now call global heating; what they once called climate change they now call the climate crisis.

If it is a crisis, then official estimates of the damage that climate change has done and will do if the models prove accurate should be easy to obtain.

They are not.

The technical term for this damage is “the social cost of carbon,” meaning the net value in dollars of harm done today and in the future by each tonne of extra carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere.

This includes damage to people’s living standards, to infrastructure, to peace of mind, to the natural environment, to everything.

Yet here is a strange thing. The British Government, though obsessed with carbon, no longer estimates or considers the social cost of carbon — at all.

Its official position is that “carbon valuation for policy appraisal no longer uses the social cost of carbon.” It gave up estimating this measure of the net harm from future climate change in 2008.

Why? That’s easy: because scientists and economists just could not get the number up high enough to surpass the cost of reducing emissions.

With the 30th anniversary approaching of the destruction of TWA Flight 800, a look at the application of justice in the Sandy Berger caper might prove useful.

Two-tiered justice is nothing new.

My late partner James Sanders and his wife Elizabeth were arrested and convicted in a federal court of allegedly “stealing airplane parts.”  

By contrast, the late former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger admittedly stole and destroyed classified documents from the National Archives and never went to trial.

An investigative reporter, Sanders tested a pinch of foam rubber sent by an insider to expose the truth about TWA 800. Berger stole the documents to prevent the truth from being exposed. His escape from justice was breathtaking.

Berger was Bill Clinton’s fixer. Like Pulp Fiction’s Winston Wolf, his job was to “solve problems.”

Joseph Raymond McCarthy was a United States Senator from Wisconsin who rose to national prominence in the early 1950s because he dared to confront a reality that much of the American establishment preferred to ignore.

He believed communism was not merely a foreign threat but an internal one.

McCarthy understood that America’s adversaries did not always arrive in military uniforms or foreign armies. Sometimes they arrived through institutions, ideas, influence networks, and political movements that slowly reshaped public opinion and government policy from within.

His fight took place during one of the most dangerous periods in modern history.

Joseph Stalin controlled Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain.

Mao Zedong had consolidated communist rule over China.

The Soviet Union had successfully penetrated American institutions through espionage networks that reached into the highest levels of government.

Communist parties, front organizations, propagandists, and fellow travelers operated throughout the Western world.

[TTP:  This is the first of a three-part series we’ll cover this week. The original article was too long to post all at once, but too good to merely summarize.]

It’s important to understand that fossil fuels are today, and will continue to be for many decades to come, the essential foundation for civilization as we know it in the world today.

We should first note how the fossil fuels we get from the ground were made. As Brian Villmoare writes in The Evolution of Everything: The Patterns and Causes of Big History:

[P]lants use the stored chemical energy [which they get from the sun through photosynthesis] to grow. But when animals eat those plants, they are acquiring that same stored energy, which they then convert to growth, or store as fat.

If a predator eats an animal, that same energy is passed down to the predator. So, in effect, when a lion eats an impala it is eating an animal that is stored solar energy, only in chemical form.

Humans access this same solar energy when they eat plants or animals, or burn logs for warmth. But what about other forms of energy?

When we burn gasoline in our cars, we are using that exact same solar energy.

Hundreds of millions to billions of years ago, giant mats of cyanobacteria and other organisms covered the Earth’s oceans. When they died and were buried beneath the ocean floor, over time that plant material decayed and slowly converted into what we call crude oil.

A similar process occurs during coal formation, when plant matter is buried and decays over millions of years. In both cases, the product we burn is a stored accumulation of millions of years of solar energy, converted into a chemical form via photosynthesis.

The only form of chemical energy on Earth that is not the result of photosynthesis is nuclear energy.