In response to a pair of posts from late last week:

To the fellow who thinks me an “inappropriately named” “neocon trotskyite,” I can only say that:

a) I know who my father was, and was named appropriately;b) My environmental values are in fact quite high, I simply prefer to have both a classical liberal government and environmental protection;c) I’m actually a libertarian: socially liberal, fiscally conservative;d) You misread my post: my point about European automakers was simply that forcing them to supply flex-fuel vehicles to the U.S. market would not force them to supply said vehicles in Europe. In theory, demand for such vehicles in Europe would have to do so. But then, the European market is so heavily regulated, who knows?e) As for the jew-baiting effort to tie support to Israel to the world’s energy situation, I’ll only say this: the Middle East has always been a cauldron of tribal warfare, and likely always will be. If Israel were not there, the Arabs would still be slaughtering each other, as they always have, but the Jew-haters wouldn’t care because a) they’re generally bigots anyway, and b) it wouldn’t fit in with their pre-conceived notion that Jews are behind all the evils in the world.

To the fellow who took offense at my slagging engineers for elevating engineering efficiency over morality, well, you’re right. I should have said that “this is the problem with many engineers who wade into public-policy debates.” I know a lot of engineers are pragmatists and straight-thinkers. But I’ve found that the ones drawn to public policy (and I also include scientists in this) tend to ignore (or are unaware of) the fundamentals of good public-policy design. So for the activist climate scientist, only a linear response to climate change is acceptable: if putting emissions up causes change, you must stop putting emissions up. You can’t think about accepting some change, and mitigating other change, or some downstream sequestration, or geo-engineering. If these people were physicians, and a patient complained of stomach pain from eating, they’d insist the only answer was to give up eating. And, a disclaimer: my doctorate is in environmental science and engineering. I’m doubly damned.