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‘Drill, baby, drill’ is a dead-end for most states
In contrast, Minnesota has economic opportunities in renewable energy if the political climate will allow them.
By Patrick Hamilton
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One of my first memories as a child is of clambering up the back of the sofa in our home in Detroit Lakes, Minn., to watch enthralled as a thunderstorm thrashed the world beyond the living room window. After my parents later moved me and my three older brothers to Moorhead, I would carefully scan summer afternoon skies for the telltale wisps of cirrus, foretelling the later arrival of thunderstorms. In high school, I discovered Bruce Watson’s “Minnesota Weather Almanac” and repeatedly reread his accounts of remarkable historical meteorological events in Minnesota. In college, I eagerly took every meteorology and climatology course available.
I ended up not pursuing a career in atmospheric sciences, but during my 40-year career with the Science Museum of Minnesota I had the privilege of working with many private- and public-sector meteorologists and climatologists. They were of course all unique individuals, but many of them shared similar origin stories of childhood encounters with memorable weather events that instilled in them lifelong fascinations with our atmosphere. All were grateful that their childhood interests, through much dedication and study, evolved into lifelong careers.
I’m going to oversimplify climatology to the annoyance of my climatology colleagues but to make a point. There are two main fields within climatology. There are those who employ the laws of physics to develop highly sophisticated computational models of how our atmosphere works. And there are those who carefully analyze historical meteorological records to help us all understand whether atmospheric conditions at any point in time are normal or unusual.
For many years, the climate modelers had been saying that if humans continued to release large amounts of heat-trapping gases, then the atmosphere eventually would increasingly exhibit extreme behaviors. And in response, historical climatologists noted that unusual behaviors had not yet become visible above the natural, noisy variability of the atmosphere. That is no longer the case. There is overwhelming agreement among climatologists that what the computational models predicted in a greenhouse-gas-charged world now is evident in an atmosphere increasingly behaving in ways unlike anything observed in meteorological records.
None of the atmospheric scientists I have had the honor of working with considered themselves political. They were happy to have careers that supported their scientific curiosities while providing all of us with invaluable insights into how our atmosphere works. But science inevitably becomes politicized when scientific findings disturb strongly held beliefs and have implications for how people organize their societies and economies.
Implicit in climate change denialism is that accepting the reality of human-caused climate change means that you should fear not its consequences but its solutions. President-elect Donald Trump wants to “drill, baby, drill,” but the U.S. already is by far the world’s largest oil producer. Just five states and federal offshore leases in the Gulf of Mexico account for 87% of all U.S. oil production, while 27 states produce little or no oil. Striving to raise already record-setting U.S. oil production will not lift many boats.
In contrast, in early November, DG Fuels — a synthetic fuel producer — announced plans to construct a $5 billion plant in Moorhead to produce sustainable aviation fuel from agricultural and forestry wastes. Every state in the union has an agricultural sector and thereby produces agricultural wastes that presently add no value to rural economies. And while the amount of solar energy varies greatly across the U.S., the stunning decline in the cost of solar panels over the past decade means that solar energy is now economical virtually everywhere in the country. However, Heliene Inc. — a solar panel manufacturer — recently announced a hold on building a $200 million plant in the Twin Cities because of Trump’s disdain for renewable energy.
Every state has the potential to participate in the rapidly advancing clean energy economy as opposed to the handful that presently benefit from U.S. dependence on coal, oil and natural gas. But realizing these broad and enormous economic and employment opportunities requires a clean energy future that all parts of the country can participate in creating. Tell your members of Congress that you support energy policies that don’t benefit only a few but instead all of us and in so doing, significantly address climate change.
After a 40-year career developing environmental projects for the Science Museum of Minnesota, Patrick Hamilton retired in October 2024 and now holds the honorary title of fellow.
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Patrick Hamilton
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