Free Republic

I am a Carl Sagan fan from way back. His 1980 TV miniseries “Cosmos” hit me at just the right age and inflamed a lifelong love of science. But we’ve had nearly 40 years to assess the long-term effects and see how Sagan unwittingly contributed to a trend that muddled public understanding of science. This weekend’s so-called “March for Science” is a perfect example of what went wrong. All you really need to know about the “March for Science” is that it is scheduled for Earth Day. The organizers may say the march is nonpartisan and has a variety of...

Jake Pultorak chuckles at the mention of “range anxiety,” the fear among some electric vehicle owners that their car's battery will run out of juice before the driver can find a charger. “I had that as a gas-car driver, but the anxiety was over how much I had to pay to get where I was going,” said Pultorak, 44, of Franklin Park, who has owned an all-electric Tesla Model S for about two years. Worries at the gas pumps have diminished over the past nine months as the global crash in oil prices brought the cost of gasoline to its...

There's No Oil Shortage May 3, 2005 BEGIN TRANSCRIPT Let me dig out that story here and then go back to the phonecalls. It's in The Economist, which is a British publication, magazine, pretty high repute, and the title of the story, "A Bottomless Beer Mug: Why the World is not Running Out of Oil." Let me just read to you an excerpt. "Peter O'Dell of Rotterdam's Erasmus University points out that since 1971, over 1500 billion barrels of oil have been added to our worldwide reserves. Over the same 35-year period, under 800 billion barrels were consumed. One can...