Leslie Evans

Climate Denier Believes the World Is Cooling

Revisado: 07-08-15

What would have made Twilight of Abundance better?

His fundamental thesis that earth's temperature is controlled by sun activity is rejected by virtually all scientists. He rejects anthropogenic global warming.

Would you ever listen to anything by David Archibald again?

No

Which scene was your favorite?

The cold coming down from Canada and destroying American agriculture.

What character would you cut from Twilight of Abundance?

It is nonfiction and doesn't have characters.

Any additional comments?

He is generally correct about the ecological disaster that we are facing, and I would agree with him on peak oil, but he wrote when prices were rising. The world recession killed demand and, paired with U.S. unconventional shale oil output, drove prices down, so at least for a time his comments on this issue were dated, though I expect the price spiral will return at some point and he will be correct on it at some not far distant future date. But the thesis of a cooling world is so far off as to spoil the book entirely as a work of environmental science. Archibald is regarded as a crank by actual scientists. He holds only a BA, does not publish in peer reviewed journals, holds no academic position, and works mainly in the oil industry, which may explain his bias against the idea that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels is heating the planet.

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Prediction of the 2008 crash two years early

Revisado: 09-25-12

Kevin Phillips, once a Nixon advisor and the principal architect of the Southern strategy that switched the solid South from the Democratic to the Republican Party, he has since come to deeply regret that action. Here in his 2006 book he predicts the crash that came in 2007-2008 in great detail. He forsees a radical decline in U.S. fortunes from three convergent factors: the peaking of world oil supplies, sharply and permanently raising energy costs, the capture of the Amnerican economy by debt promoting financial companies at the expense of those that actually make something, and the transformation of the Republican Party into a theocratic formation that has renounced policy based on evaluation of facts and replaced it with one based on biblical prophecy, particular as bowdlerized in the Left Behind novels by Christian fundamentalist Tim La Haye. On biblical rather than factual grounds the Republicans reject our European allies and the United Nations because of La Haye's claim that they are controlled by the Anti-Christ bent on using them to create a world Satanic government. Global warming and peak oil are denied either because fundamentalists believe that God would never allow his people to suffer from an environmental disaster or because they believe we are in the end times and Jesus will be here soon to beam the true Christians to heaven in the Rapture and they don't have to worry about what happens to this place. Some dull spots, and lots and lots of statistics, but still an important summary of the symptoms of U.S. decline. Phillips also takes some time to chart a similar confluence of energy decline, financialization, and rise of theocracy in the eclipse of previous empires, notably Rome, the Dutch, the Spanish, and the British.

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