Environment & Energy

ignorant of wind power in Iowa, for example, would make such a false claim of "only a useful life of 25 years". I have been involved in these facilities throughout the Plains and Midwest for longer than your claim and I can tell you that other than routine maintenance on gearboxes or upgrades they go along quite well. Your vaunted nuclear plants are not maintenance free so just stop with the nonsense.

Nobody cares how long you've been in the health industry. You can still be short-sighted in your proposals and as I have noted you have no solutions put forth for transportation. Your writings always attack and belittle those who express concerns and from an engineering standpoint that approach holds little of value.

I've worked with such people in the past and they were always a net negative to any working group because of their inability to conduct themselves in a collegial manner rather than picking fights, ridiculing other team members and never missing an opportunity to express to all of the group that only they are right about anything and everything. These kinds of people take any critique of their views or cautions about additional considerations to be a personal attack and they respond with more of their useless and counterproductive putdowns etc.

Some very intelligent people in science and engineering are also some of the least productive because of these problems in their approach and manner. The more extreme examples are the ones I knew who were brilliant but despite that you could not let them into a meeting with colleagues or people from outside because they would invariably start yelling, belittling and swearing at people. So they were useful for limited purposes because they never understood that an engineering meeting and review is not there for the purpose of bowing to them but rather for the purpose of professional assessment across disciplines so that projects and proposals are vetted across those disciplines with input given and considered about all manner of items and aspects of the project/proposal.

Working with and managing people who behave in their profession in the ways I've described is misery for colleagues and managers and ends up being counter-productive and bad for morale, collegiality and cohesiveness of working groups. Eventually it can get so bad that the person has to be let go because they are an overall net negative and refuse to improve their approach. Sadly I've seen this before and I recognize it when I see it. You couldn't get me to want to work with such people again for all the money in the world. In technical fields the approach of "I'm always right and the rest of you aren't" is always a negative. It can often be the result of an education that focused on "numbers and science" without giving an education about the process and how to work with people.

A nationally highly regarded Engineering school in my area produced several engineers who came my way who were great on "the numbers, materials knowledge etc." and had high grades but their ability to write a memo or report was atrocious with grammar, spelling and construction that would have failed 8th grade. In other words they may have been very good about something but they couldn't communicate it effectively because their "higher education" didn't consider training their students to communicate effectively to be important. It is not dissimilar to schools not understanding the need to educate about the professional process and things like the engineering review process, it's purpose and how to effectively and constructively take part. Been there done that.

On the subject of "attributable" or "attributable risk factors" it is faulty to imply to people that this is the same thing as "verified cause of death". Estimations of effects or potential effects based on risk factors are precisely and only estimations based on formulas. As the Lancet article I linked points out there are issues with all of it that need to be recognized rather than flailed at and denied. Recognizing them and working on them is the proper process.

But this dialogue has gone as far as is useful and anything further would just be circular etc. Have a nice Sunday and keep trying to always work better.