How ironic! A post spawned by a banned trolling commenter who called your host a “Trump-supporting fascist” generated excellent commentary and two outstanding Comments of the Day. Thus a disruptive and unethical visitor here actually helped to enrich the discussion and enlighten participants. I know I learned some things from Sarah B.’s excellent Comment of the Day on the post, the first of the two earning the honor.
Here it is, on “Ethics Quote of the Month: Banned EA Commenter ‘David’”…
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While I cannot answer for lawyers, there are plenty of Trump deranged engineers, and we sure get trained in logic, critical-thinking, and evaluation of consequences of our thought processes. This training does not inoculate us from our own biases. Indeed, biases manage to short circuit the training.
Jack is fond of saying biases make us stupid, and certainly today’s society proves it. I cannot tell you how frustrated I get when a trained engineer tells me that electric cars will solve all our problems. No one with the training I went through should say that electric cars are a universal solution. They should be able to calculate life cycle pollution, understand vehicle weight issues with roadways, realize the limitations of battery technology, mineral scarcity, and electrical grid load. However, by the time we get our intensive training in logic, critical thinking, and more, we have also been inundated in “global climate change” mass hysteria. The biases I saw my fellows come out with was amazing, even as I was standing there with the damn numbers.
For another example, many left leaning engineers and accountants believe the bunk that oil companies shouldn’t get tax breaks for depreciation of assets because ‘no one else’ does. Yeah, that whole section in all the required Econ classes on depreciation and tax law must have been purged from their brains to believe that. On the other hand, when much your training includes “cultural context” courses, you get a full EVIL OIL COMPANIES treatment, which rather lessens the value of learning to think critically when biases are intended to be ingrained in you.
Higher education has become a joke. It is now more about indoctrinating you in progressive bias than teaching you how to think logically and applying that to life. When I was in college, in a conservative establishment (comparatively at least), there was still intense indoctrination against critical thinking on certain topics. My professor and his group of grad students (including me) got shut down from our research because it was focused on items against the prevailing winds. We had some good data on a way to have made the US independent in the electricity, transportation, and chemical sectors for about 200 years and with the then-current electricity prices, chemical prices and oil at $90-110 a barrel equivalent, after adjusting each for inflation. We needed to pilot our ideas out further and do some triple checks of our assumptions, but the initial passes checked out. We even limited ourselves to old technology that had been in use, at that point for no less than 80 years, to keep confidence high and speculation low. However, the indoctrination centers disliked our project due to it not following the political winds, shut our work down, and chased us out. That was over a decade ago. Look at where we are now.
Bias not only makes you stupid, but it keeps your training from being engaged. Now, higher education truly sees itself as an indoctrination facility, no longer teaching how to think, but what to think. I doubt that lawyers are any more immune to this than engineers are.
Ethics Alarms 
Wonderful comment, but it’s also intriguing. Would that concept of your team still likely be valid? Is it something that a company could investigate and implement?
Yes, it is perfectly valid, but to get there would require fossil fuels and multiple $1B plants to be newly constructed. We only got through the very initial stages of the design, so there are still significant amounts of engineering and designing to be worked through. Even if companies were willing to pay out for those new plants (and oil companies were interested for a while) the permitting process is several decades long and requires essentially no Democrats to be in power for that time, as they traditionally have shut down any of these type of projects. This is not to say that many Republicans aren’t just as bad for allowing new fossil fuel based technology to be built.
We were partnered with Idaho National Labs for this, and they were happy with our initial results. The scientific understanding is still there and will always be, but the political will to allow companies to do this is not.
Thanks again for the response. That doesn’t really surprise me, although it is one more step on our journey from being a ‘can do’ society to a ‘can’t allow that’ one.
It makes me wonder if some other country that didn’t shackle itself in these ways might be able to achieve that sort of breakthrough. Perhaps a developing country desperate to create a good energy infrastructure. Ahh, but that’s probably my irrational optimism speaking.
Our work was based off of Germany during the War and South Africa during apartheid, specifically coal gasification and Fischer-Tropsch. We then mixed that with some other technologies to get our process.
So yes, you are correct. Other, less regulated countries could do a lot. It would also be cheaper if they didn’t worry about all the different pollutants at high removal levels alongside extensive carbon sequestration like we did.
Interesting. I have heard of Germany’s coal liquification efforts during WWII, but all I’ve read indicated that the results were fairly marginal for the effort and cost required. I hadn’t heard about South Africa using this process, but it makes sense if they have coal but little oil.
I’d assume that the process has been improved in the past 80 years, and reading Wikipedia, it seems there are a couple moderately sized plants in Qatar and South Africa.
It is not hard to imagine these processes becoming quite valuable as one tool of the energy industry.
I can see why your higher ups wouldn’t like to research this process — it does use coal after all, which is automatically filthy by all their definitions (even if more modern processes can alleviate that).
Aside from helping out with the energy situation, I’d think this would be valuable for other reasons. There is, after all, a finite amount of oil and gas in the world and we need petroleum products for so much more than fuel — as I believe you’ve mentioned, our world would grind to a halt without petroleum products.
I can envision a world someday where people are aghast that their ancestors actually burned oil instead of reserving it for all the useful things in life. 🙂
Around ten years ago I gave a talk that covered various fall back, “Plan B”, options, both bridging measures and long term ones. Researching for that I found some things out:-
None of these pay on their own, under current circumstances – but, come an emergency, they might justify distress price increases.
Thank you Jack.
Sarah,
WRT your last sentence: We aren’t.
I’ve rediscovered my slide….thank you .