Greenhouse Gasses and Fossil Fuels

Donn, scientists have established a lot of things about climate change. Unfortunately, scientists are often conflicted - they're incentivized to hold opinions that benefit them personally.

So when I read of someone challenging scientific status quo - that greenhouse gases are indeed a threat to global climate change, species diversity, human welfare, etc. - there are two possibilities: 1) Either the person is a qualified researcher who has happened upon some profound truth that has escaped the attention of hundreds of leading climatologists, or 2) The person, whether scientist or not, has a conflict of interest - he or she stands to benefit from advancing a theory with little or no scientific basis.

The first thing we can do is try to learn more about that person, a task sufficiently easy for anyone in this Internet Age. If we learn more about Donn Dears, sometimes we can learn why he's adopted a position which would be widely considered contrarian. Here's what I found:

"Mr. Dears worked at General Electric testing large steam turbines and generators used by utilities to generate electricity; followed, by manufacturing and marketing assignments at the Transformer Division. Later he led an organization servicing these and other GE products in the United States and established facilities around the world to service power generation, transmission and other electric equipment.

...Mr. Dears has inspected oil producing and shipping facilities in Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries in the Mideast and Northern Europe, as well as examining iron-ore mining locations and major shipping centers in Europe and Asia to assess their need for U.S. technologies and equipment."

Certainly you can understand why someone might recognize a significant conflict of interest in someone who has both personally profited from an industry threatened by scientific status quo, and also spent their career working among others with the same conflict?

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

Scientists have established that the five most abundant greenhouse gasses will not significantly increase temperatures if they double from current levels.

I'll leave that one alone, now, since a vast majority of people listen to the near-consensus of trained scientists to know that emissions and climate change are in fact connected and are a threat. 

Even if greenhouse gasses were threats, it’s impossible to eliminate fossil fuels using any currently available technology.

To this one, though, I'm not sure this is a reasonable take. What if it's not about eliminating fossil fuels, but greatly reducing reliance on them? What if it's not about available technology but developing the technology that can? What if it's not about just throwing our hands up in the air and proclaiming "well, there's nothing we can do about it-- so drill, drill, drill!"?