A Renewable-Energy Champion Is Suing His Scientific Critics
Stanford professor Mark Jacobson has sued a prominent energy researcher and the National Academy of Sciences for defamation over a sharply-worded rebuttal of his work, shifting a heated scientific debate over renewable energy out of the journals and into the courts, according to the MIT Technology Review.
The suit demands a retraction of a June paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Jacobson seeks more than $10 million in damages from both the paper’s publisher and its lead author, Christopher Clack, who is chief executive of Vibrant Clean Energy and a former NOAA researcher,” according to the article.
Clack and 20 other researchers responded in a publication that Jacobson’s paper “contained modeling errors and implausible assumptions that could distort public policy and spending decisions.”