JR:  Cyberbullying of climate scientists is on the rise, thanks to the hard-core deniers (see “UK Guardian slams Morano for cyber-bullying and for urging violence against climate scientists“).  MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel, whose family is the target of the latest attacks, writes me, “I had heard about the hate mail and threats received by others, but am surprised at how little it takes these days to trigger hysterical and hateful responses from the ideologues out there.”

UPDATE:  You can read below the comments of climate ethicist Donald Brown, who has been the focus of Morano’s “reprehensible” tactics four times.  He calls it “sheer intimidation.”

By James West at The Climate Desk via Grist

Prominent MIT researcher Kerry Emanuel has been receiving an unprecedented “frenzy of hate” after a video featuring an interview with him was published recently by Climate Desk.

Emails contained “veiled threats against my wife,” and other “tangible threats,” Emanuel, a highly-regarded atmospheric scientist and director of MIT’s Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate program, said in an interview. “They were vile, these emails. They were the kind of emails nobody would like to receive.”

“What was a little bit new about it was dragging family members into it and feeling that my family might be under threat, so naturally I didn’t feel very good about that at all,” Emanuel said. “I thought it was low to drag somebody’s spouse into arguments like this.”

Climate Desk has seen a sample of the emails and can confirm they are laced with menacing language and expletives, and contain personal threats of violence.

Emanuel began receiving emails “almost immediately” after the video was posted on Jan. 5, and the volume peaked at four or five emails a day. The threats have now petered off.

Threats are nothing new in the world of climate science.

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James Bond villains blamed for nuclear’s bad image

The evil villains in James Bond movies are being blamed for casting a long-lasting shadow over the image of nuclear power, says the president of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Prof David Phillips says that Dr No, with his personal nuclear reactor, helped to create a “remorselessly grim” reputation for atomic energy.

Prof Phillips was speaking ahead of the 50th anniversary of the movie.

The chemistry organisation says it wants a “renaissance” in nuclear power.

Prof Phillips says the popularity of the Dr No movie from 1962 created an enduringly negative image of nuclear power – as something dangerous that could be wielded by megalomaniacs with aspirations to world domination.

The villain of the movie, planning mass destruction from his secret Caribbean hideout, eventually dies in the cooling pool of his nuclear reactor, having been foiled by James Bond, played by Sean Connery.

No, this isn’t a story in The Onion.  It’s actually from the BBC.  You can listen to the interview here.

Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima — these aren’t to blame for nuclear’s bad image.  It’s Ian Fleming and Hollywood.  Well, actually not Ian Fleming, since the original book didn’t have the nuclear power stuff.  In the book, Dr. No is buried under a chute of guano.  Darn you, anti-nuke screenwriters!

To paraphrase the other interviewee, Prof. Tom Burke, blaming Bond villains for creating a bad image for nuclear power is like blaming the enduringly negative image of the Mafia on the Godfather movies and the Sopranos.  And no, I’m not comparing power of the atom to the power of the mob, although they do have one thing in common — they  charge more and more over time (see “Does nuclear power have a negative learning curve?“):

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This week marked the two-year anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti that killed 300,000 people, displaced 1.5 million people, and crippled already-crumbling infrastructure.

In the effort to rebuild, the Haitian government has a unique opportunity to transform its electricity grid to favor distributed generation and help increase energy access in the most energy-impoverished country in the western hemisphere. Today, only 12% of Haitians have access to the electricity grid.

However, expanding access means thinking differently about infrastructure than before the tragedy.

“After the earthquake, everyone wanted to focus on rebuilding the grid. But it’s important to remember that even if the grid were fully constructed, it’s still serving a small amount of the population and still hemorrhaging money,” explained Allison Archambault, president of EarthSpark International, an organization working to bring distributed energy technologies to Haiti.

“It’s the smaller solutions that have a bigger and faster impact,” she told Climate Progress.

EarthSpark’s mission is to bring distributed energy technologies to Haitians in order to help them spend less time and money on securing energy. The organization helps set up stores for selling LED lanterns and solar technologies, while also providing education on distributed energy.

Rather than spend millions of dollars on an expensive, unreliable electricity system that may not benefit Haitians for many years (if at all), EarthSpark is working on building a small-scale, profitable alternative focused on individual solutions.

For example, the solar LED lantern it sells costs about $12. With the cost of operating a kerosene lantern at around $0.25 per night, the payback for a safe, renewable product only two months. And that’s not even factoring in the cost of the actual kerosene lantern itself.

“The big grid is sucking up almost all of the political attention. It’s complicated and can be very political, but these distributed technologies make such a huge difference, very quickly,” says Archambault.

This struggle between large, centralized energy infrastructure and nimble, distributed infrastructure is playing out throughout the developing world. As emerging countries rush to catch up with the developed world, they’re often focusing on building the same type of dirty, inefficient energy systems — with that vision pushed by organizations like the World Bank, which is helping fund massive coal plants.

This conflict is now a central piece of the conversation around sustainable international development.

“Eliminating kerosene is different than eliminating a coal plant. You’re dealing with some pretty deeply ingrained forces,” said Justin Guay of the Sierra Club’s international climate program, speaking to Climate Progress at the international climate talks in Durban, South Africa.

One of the big “wins” coming out of Durban was the creation of a framework for the Green Fund, an international pool of money that will help finance mitigation and adaptation projects in developing countries. The fund is designed to bring together $100 billion a year by 2020 for deploying clean energy and other infrastructure projects.

But environmental groups are also heavily criticizing World Bank involvement in the Green Fund, saying the organization’s bias toward dirty fossilized infrastructure makes it ill equipped to manage it:

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