The New York Times |

If you haven’t yet heard about the small but significant scandal concerning Neil Degrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist and host of the TV series “Cosmos,” who frequently speaks to audiences about cosmology, climate-change (as they’re calling it this week), and the shocking state of science literacy in America, you will be excused.

The scandal has not been covered by any mainstream media outlets — or, at any rate, not until recently, when the New York Times ran a weak-sauce Op-Ed about it, in which the writers, professors Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, managed to miss the point entirely.

Chabris and Simons seem to think the thrust of the scandal — which they do not regard as a scandal but rather a minor memory slip — was Tyson’s repeated fabrications of a George W. Bush quote.

The New York Times also, incidentally, forgot to credit the person and the publication who broke this scandal: one Sean Davis, whom I’ve referenced here once before.

In fact, however, the fabricated George W. Bush quote was the very least of Tyson’s mendacity.

Neil Degrasse Tyson was also caught fabricating a headline that was never actually a headline.

Neil Degrasse Tyson was also caught fabricating a quote by a member of congress who, in Tyson’s phony words, had changed his mind on a certain issue.

Neil Degrasse Tyson has been repeatedly caught changing his bizarre jury-duty story.

And then, of course, there’s all the pseudo-apologies, which make no sense to me and which indict him every bit as much as his prevarications.

So. If you don’t like to see science being corrupted by partisan politics and the Religion of the Left, do yourself a favor and familiarize yourself with every bit of this scandal.

Peak oil (so-called) is, as we’ve discussed here before, a fairytale of gigantic proportions, and this latest Texas oilfield discovery illustrates precisely why:

We begin to know about a resource only when we begin to use the resource. Knowing about that resource includes a cursory calculation of its quantity. The more we use of it, therefore, the more adept we become at finding it and calculating its quantity, extracting it and refining it. Thus, the more of it we use, the more of it we’re able to find.

No matter how closely it is defined, the physical quantity of a resource in the earth is not fully known at any time, because resources are sought and found only as they are needed. Even if the quantities of a particular resource were exactly known, such measurements would not be meaningful, because humans have a near-limitless capacity for developing additional ways to meet our needs: developing fiber optics, for instance, instead of copper wire … (Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2).

Quoting now from The Old Gray Lady:

The Texas field, known as the Eagle Ford, is just one of about 20 new onshore oil fields that advocates say could collectively increase the nation’s oil output by 25 percent within a decade — without the dangers of drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico or the delicate coastal areas off Alaska.

There’s a catch, of course: as you would suspect, the Religion of Environmentalism — of which church the socialist Barack Obama and his clownish administration are great devotees — fight tooth-and-nail to prevent such extraction. Why? Because extracting oil from rock requires hydraulic fracturing — a process known as fracking — and this in turn means that we must actually use our environment. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.

Such is the nature of environmentalism.

In related news, check out this gorgeous photo of some real alternative energy: turning natural gas into diesel.

Tag: The New York Times

Neil Degrasse Tyson: Not Off the Hook Yet

Huge New Oilfields Discovered In Texas