Bob Berwyn’s Climate Science Narrative Laundering

Climate hysteric “journalists” tend to go low, but not this low.

Ars Technica, formerly a great technology news site, regularly pushes partisan climate crisis propaganda, mostly reposted from a similar site, Inside Climate News. In an article posted today written by Bob Berwyn titled GOP budget bill poised to crush renewable energy in the U.S.

The “article” contains the usual shibboleths from energy-ignorant pro-renewables fools such as the claim renewable energy is cheaper than hydrocarbons or nuclear and that big bad evil fossil fuel companies receive subsidies while ignoring the subsidies renewables receive.

But what really struck out was something embedded in the following:

On the Department of Energy website, Wright wrote, “wind and solar brings us the worst of two worlds: less reliable energy delivery and higher electric bills …If sources are truly economically viable, let’s allow them to stand on their own,” he wrote, ignoring that the fossil fuel industry gets annual subsidies of about $20 billion annually, according to estimates by Oil Change International, a nonprofit watchdog group.

But hundreds of studies show that renewable energy is much less expensive and, in a well-planned grid, can make energy supplies more secure.

“The proposed GOP tax on wind and solar is a danger to the United States,” Mark Z. Jacobson, a Stanford University renewable energy researcher who has authored numerous studies on wind and solar power, wrote via email.

The new tax provisions “lock in death and illness to up to 100,000 Americans every year due to fossil-fuel and bioenergy-fuel air pollution that wind and solar help to eliminate,” he said.

A click to that hundreds of studies show points to none other than Mark Jacobson’s personal website on the Stanford domain, and it’s not “hundreds” of studies or even all studies for that matter but is 107 of them. Of those 107, Jacobson, who apparently put the document together is either the primary author to co-author on 15 of them and is cited in several of the others.

Jacobson is no stranger to criticism here.

Furthermore, these aren’t even the entire studies, they’re the first pages of said studies which contain the titles, authors, and most importantly, the abstracts.

Jacobson, to his credit, is at least honest with the document title:

Abstracts of 107 Peer-Reviewed

Published Journal Articles From 45

Independent Research Groups With Over

260 Different Authors Supporting the

Result That Energy for Electricity,

Transportation, Building

Heating/Cooling, and/or Industry can be

Supplied Reliably

with 100% or Near-100% Renewable

Energy at Different Locations Worldwide

Do Berwyn or Jacobson not understand that in order to properly read and understand a scientific study, one has to actually read the entire thing? Not just the authors and abstracts but the introductions, literature reviews, methods, results, and author-designated limitations if present?

For all the blabbering about scientific evidence, the PDF is not a peer-reviewed synthesis, not a cost-benefit analysis, not even a systematic literature review. It’s a self-curated list of abstracts—many theoretical, most modeling-based, and none grounded in real-world implementation data.

This is not “what the science says.” This is what Jacobson says The Science™ says.

As

Holly MathNerd

might say interpreting such “studies” using this methodology is akin to stepping on a rake.

How To Not Step On A Rake

Or in Jacobson’s likely case, it’s getting high off his own flatulence.

Berwyn has an interesting background of his own as supposedly an Austrian-based reporter with a “journalism” who worked or previously worked in one of Colorado’s “news” organizations, The Colorado Independent, which merged into the Colorado News Collaborative (COLab).

Cory Gaines

of Colorado Accountability Project has lots to say about these types of “non-profit” news organizations and their narrative laundering. COLab are briefly mentioned in one of his dives into the non-profit goons Rose Foundation as recipients of their dark money but little else seems to be understood about them.

Who is Rose Community Foundation? How much of your money do they get? Wolf depredation two ways. Diverging Diamond Interchanges.

But the more sinister dimension isn’t just Jacobson’s self-referential citation game—it’s how media organs launder this pseudo-consensus into public gospel. Outlets like Ars Technica and Inside Climate News no longer practice journalism in the traditional sense. They do not interrogate claims. They do not cross-examine sources. They serve instead as clerks of the climate cathedral, transcribing the proclamations of its priesthood and affixing the “science says” seal to whatever political narrative is in vogue.

What we are witnessing is not science. It is Scientism—a performative, moralized simulation of science designed to assert authority, silence dissent, and compel obedience. Its defining feature is certainty without falsifiability, and its institutional enablers are no longer “labs” or journals but “nonprofit” newsrooms funded by stolen money.

Their role is not to inform, but to enforce the current thing narrative and not to ask questions, but to manufacture consensus.