That Moore Award

A reader writes:

The only problem, Andrew, is, whatever the metaphor, he is empirically right. It's straight up science.  And I say that as an oil geologist who makes his living producing fossil fuel.

The species collapse related to global climate change, and associated energy production, is absolutely frightening.

Coal is "stored" in the earth, and without man mining it, it would only slowly be released and more is stored. A mass balance. We are dumping tens of millions of years of that "stored" coal into the atmosphere every decade. Obliterating the coal budget through time, in no time. It is tremendously dirty stuff, full of sulfur, nitrogen, radioactive and so on compounds. The reason people shouldn't eat fish because of Hg, which is a global epidemic of "too high to eat", is almost solely due to coal burning, it comes FROM the coal. Hg is a incredible neuro-toxin during embryonic stages for almost all life. We're watching these Hg level reach levels where they are fundamentally changing the ability of young to grow.