There are so many flatland fantasies and drives here that it's hard to sort them all out.

More than that, they are blaming environmentalists, suggesting that the opposition to nuclear power stands between all of us and a two-degree world.

Oddly, some of these voices include climate scientists , who insist that we must now turn to wholesale expansion of nuclear power. Just this past week, as negotiators were closing in on the Paris agreement, four climate scientists held an off-site session insisting that the only way we can solve the coupled climate/energy problem is with a massive and immediate expansion of nuclear power .

But not so fast. There is also a new, strange form of denial that has appeared on the landscape of late, one that says that renewable sources can’t meet our energy needs.

After the signing of an historic climate pact in Paris , we might now hope that the merchants of doubt – who for two decades have denied the science and dismissed the threat – are officially irrelevant.

Harvard professor Naomo Oreskes wrote an opinion piece at The Guardian called There is a new form of climate denialism to look out for – so don't celebrate yet (hat tip, reader Alex). Check this out.

First, it is important to see that this is a fight among environmentalists, who have now done the usual thing by splitting into competing subgroups, in this case the pro-nuclear crowd and the anti-nuclear crowd. As my every god-damned day post demonstrates, there is no way in hell humans are going to replace fossil fuels with renewables or nuclear, or both, in any time frame which matters.

Oreskes cites The Usual Suspect (Mark Jacobson) to support her position

Numerous high quality studies, including one recently published by Mark Jacobson of Stanford University, show that this isn’t so. We can transition to a decarbonized economy without expanded nuclear power, by focusing on wind, water and solar, coupled with grid integration, energy efficiency and demand management. In fact, our best studies show that we can do it faster, and more cheaply.

In the second Flatland essay, I partly based my conclusion that renewables won't cut the mustard on the work of Mark Jacobson! If you look at what is required to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar, it becomes obvious that the task is impossible practically speaking, especially in light of growing human economies.

But forget about that. The disturbing (albeit normal) thing here is that those advocating an immediate turn to nuclear are equated with actual climate deniers, tarred with the same brush. Climate scientists Jim Hansen, Tom Wigley and Ken Caldeira think nuclear is the way to go. Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, like so many other Republican politicians, is a climate denier.

In Naomi's flatland mind, Jim Hansen = James Inhofe.

Really. I'm not kidding. She says so in the opening quote. This is the environmentalist version of Orwell's Thought Police.

Is it any wonder humans will actually achieve next to nothing in addressing the climate problem? They're totally immersed in their own political bullshit, which need not be in sync with reality and usually isn't. That's just how humans work. There's nothing to be done about it.

Innate socialty ("groupiness") makes humans prone to blaming, splintering and competing (intra-group conflict, politics). They were "designed" by nature to behave this way. There's nothing new under the sun. Humans fuck up in predictable ways.

Pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear, none of these bickering environmentalists are merchants of doubt. Both sides believe the impossible can be achieved. They simply differ on the means to that impossible end. They were also designed by nature to cling to optimistic bullshit.

I am totally out of this discussion of course because I shun unconscious group affiliations and, partly as a result, I am a real of merchant of doubt. I am not a climate denier. I am not a flatland fantasist. I am a realist, or at least I try to be. It's depressing and becomes more so with each passing year as I contemplate the Naomi Oreskeses of this world.

Reality doesn't care about human political conflict, but Naomi does because she is a puppet and her unconscious programming is pulling the strings.