I’m of the opinion that a technology should be evaluated on it’s own merits, otherwise people start to point out that the field of modern engineering as a whole is the product of the military industrial complex and it gets all reddit-comment-thread-y. I’m not about to argue that there’s no astroturfing or outright propaganda in the energy industry (because I don’t like looking like a fool or losing arguments because I’m clearly wrong…) though. I wholly agree that it’s a hugely manipulated issue, and the mountains of evidence supporting that idea are so large that they threaten to bury you and I and the rest of this comment thread in an avalanche of carefully documented conspiracy and related rat bastardry.

However, I do take issue with painting all proponents of a particular thing as being some kind of fake ‘smoke screen’. While I’m sure some percentage of commenters are serving any number of nefarious agendas, they can take their attempt to de-legitimize an entire opposing perspective by painting them all as “shills” and kindly fuck right off. That’s trump-supporter shit, and furthers absolutely nothing except to divide voters on an incredibly important topic. That style of wedge-driving is the kind of thing you find in The Foundations of Geopolitics and is what the ‘smokescreen’ people actually do use to drive potential allies to infighting instead of coordinating an effective campaign for energy reform.

(Not that I think the above poster actually is some nefarious shill, but it’s a somewhat amusing juxtaposition)