The full video and transcript are below. As a preview, here’s what I view as the top 5 energy policy priorities:

1. Liberate responsible energy development

2. End preferences for intermittent electricity

3. Set environmental standards based on cost-benefit analysis

4. Unleash nuclear energy from unscientific restrictions

5. Address climate danger through resilience and innovation, not punishing America

Kimberly Guilfoyle:

Joining me now, author of Fossil Future and founder of Energy Talking Points, Alex Epstein. Thank you so much for being on the program.

Alex Epstein:

My pleasure.

Kimberly Guilfoyle:

All right, that was a nice little clip that we played. I want to get your reaction to the cabinet pick for energy and your broader take of where we’re headed with respect to major policy shifts.

Alex Epstein:

I, like probably a lot of people, had opinions on who should take different kinds of personnel positions. When people asked me, I shared them. My number one pick for Secretary of Energy by far was Chris Wright. I was very, very happy about that. My number one for Interior was also Doug Burgum, so I had a good week energy wise—

Kimberly Guilfoyle:

Yes, you did.

Alex Epstein:

—last week. I would say with Chris in particular, if you see that clip, you can imagine, if people know my work, I’m very aligned with him. He and I came to very similar conclusions, actually mostly independently. I’ve known him for about 10 years. We once participated in a debate together against some climate catastrophist and did really well. One thing I particularly admire about Chris, in addition to just his vast energy knowledge and incredible leadership ability, is just his integrity.

This is a guy who runs a multi-billion dollar public company and is willing to say stuff like that. I think when you’re thinking about appointees and this kind of thing, you really want somebody whose character you can trust. Chris has shown that whatever anyone else is doing or saying, he’s going to do what he thinks is right. And I usually think what he thinks is right is right so I’m very happy.

Kimberly Guilfoyle:

Okay, so Biden officials had a primary goal of looking at America’s fossil fuel resources. Contrast that if you can with what you expect from both the Trump Energy and Interior departments.

Alex Epstein:

Well, I think both of them align around this idea that’s become popular of unleashing American energy and what I would call energy freedom policies. There the idea is that we want as much energy as we can get, as long as it’s cost-effective. If it’s expensive and unreliable, that’s not useful at all. That’s a waste. We need it to be low cost, reliable, and on a huge scale. Ideally would provide more than enough for ourselves and then can actually empower our allies around the world.

I think both Governor Burgum and Chris Wright are very into this idea. I think a way to capture their idea, don’t attribute this to them, but this is how I would characterize it as “best of the above.” Often people say “all of the above” like, “Hey, let’s just use everything whether it’s good or bad.” But that’s not what a free market does. We don’t want to use animal dung for energy even though we could. We want to use the best forms of energy, and that’s what a free market does. Chris is talking about liberty. It unleashes the best form of energy.

I know he’s really interested in: how do we unleash nuclear? If there’s more potential in solar and wind and batteries, then let’s unleash that. But let’s not give them any special preferences. If you unleash all of American energy, we just have huge potential, not just with oil, but also coal, natural gas, maybe geothermal, certainly nuclear. These guys are very focused on what I think are the right things versus being biased in favor of some industry. You don’t want to just go from an anti-fossil fuel bias to a pro-fossil fuel bias. You want to go to an energy bias to want the best energy for everyone.

Kimberly Guilfoyle:

Excellent, excellent answer. Just how vast is the bureaucracy inside these departments? Some of it’s quite daunting when you think about the numbers. What can be done on Day One? What are some of the longer term energy policy goals?

Alex Epstein:

The size of the bureaucracy is important, but it’s really a reflection of the real problem, which is the coercive restrictiveness of the bureaucracy. If you just had 10,000 people there twiddling their thumbs, that would suck because we have to pay them taxes—but the problem is they can stop us from drilling for oil. They’re stopping us from building new natural gas infrastructure, which we desperately need. We could almost double our natural gas production pretty quickly if we could build enough pipelines and export infrastructure.

But we’re prohibited. It’s not the number of bureaucrats that’s the main thing, it’s their incredible restrictive power. What you need to do—I’ve mapped this out in any politician or any who asked, just email me. Those guys know how to reach me. I’m happy to tell anyone. But basically you need to do five core things. Then there are a lot of specifics on each.

One is you need to liberate domestic energy production and infrastructure. Oil, coal, natural gas and all this infrastructure. You need to do that responsibly, but get rid of all these anti-human, anti-development forces that just think you have no right to impact nature.

Number two is you need to end preferences for unreliable electricity. We need to unleash affordable, reliable electricity, which means we need to stop preferring unreliable electricity.

Number three, setting environmental standards based on real cost-benefit analysis. Right now we have this idea that any amount of emissions you stop is a good thing. But if you stop all emissions, you just kill everybody. You need to have actual cost-benefit analysis so that we have really clean environment and really good industry—which is the ultimate thing we need to have to have a good standard of living.

Number four is we need to unleash nuclear energy. There’s all these ridiculous restrictions getting in the way of nuclear, which is the cleanest and safest form of energy. It eventually could be the cheapest form of energy, but we need to do all kinds of things with what’s called the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Then number five is we need to address CO2 emissions in a different way instead of punishing America, which makes no sense, in the name of a fake climate catastrophe. There’s climate change but not a climate catastrophe. We need to unleash climate resilience. Make ourselves so we can face any climate—and we need to unleash energy innovation. Because the only way you’ll actually get lower emissions ever is if we make lower emission energy so cheap that China and India choose to buy it. Right now China’s building 300 new coal plants because that’s the cheapest thing to do. If you want to change that, don’t prostrate America, liberate America.

Kimberly Guilfoyle:

I like that a lot. We hear a lot about cutting red tapes and really exciting things with DOGE and government efficiency. Elon says he is going to cut $2 trillion. What is that red tape as it relates to energy or anything else that you have focused on?

Alex Epstein:

I’ll give you a few examples. There’s a lot of these. But one is in the realm of liberating domestic production and infrastructure. There’s something called NEPA, which is the National Environmental Policy Act, which is a very flawed piece of legislation. That is the number one delayer of projects. Projects can be delayed by 10 years or more, totally unnecessarily, based on this thing called NEPA.

What you need to do is you need to do certain things to NEPA. There’s technical terms like committing NEPA to agency discretion. But basically you need to make environmental review a very efficient process and not one that activists can just keep initiating over and over and over. That’s probably the number one thing.

In the realm of electricity, you need to get rid of all the preferences for unreliable electricity at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Instead of focusing on reliability and cost, they’ve started focusing on climate. You need to get rid of that. Your job is not to protect the climate. They can’t do that, they shouldn’t do that. They should focus on affordability and reliability and there’s a lot of specific things they could do there.

Then I’ll give you one more. In nuclear, what’s called the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, they measure nuclear danger in a way that overstates the danger of nuclear by a factor of 50. It’s technically called the “linear no threshold” model of danger, and it’s just a disaster.

One thing I try to stress to people is, you need to understand at the high level we need to unleash this, but then you need to understand all the details. This is the thing that I’ve been working on for the past year and a half in case we had such an administration—working out the details in every little respect. I don’t really work with a lot of people, but if anyone is working on this and they want to know the exact game plan to do in every area, just email alex@alexepstein.com and I’ll help you out.

Kimberly Guilfoyle:

Well, there you go. I love it. One stop shop here as well. Some of the media have attacked Chris Wright for not having the government experience. We’re seeing some of these attacks on some President Trump’s picks. Is that actually a weakness here? How do you see it?

Alex Epstein:

Wait, sorry, I don’t understand. What’s the specific thing?

Kimberly Guilfoyle:

Some people have attacked Chris Wright saying that he doesn’t have government experience. That he wasn’t “a good pick.” Is that actually even a weakness here?

Alex Epstein:

I think it depends. In general, I want to say to people, both sides I would say, should not be so partisan about things. I wish that we were in a world where people would just look at the picks on the merits, and if you dislike certain picks, then you should say so. If you like certain picks, you should say so. But it’s suspicious when everyone says, oh, “all the picks are amazing,” or “all the picks are the end of the world.”

I can say for Chris, Chris is not the end of the world. Chris is the beginning of the world, if anything. That is an amazing pick.

“No government experience.” Well, that would be a problem if there were no one else in the Department of Energy and he was literally the only person there. But in fact, knowing an amazing amount about the breadth of the energy industry—Chris has a background in fusion from MIT, has worked in geothermal, is on the board of one of the leading nuclear innovators in the world, Oklo, is a legend in oil and gas for his work in the Shell Revolution and in oil field services. This guy knows a crazy amount. That’s rare.

Not to be immodest, but I know a lot about energy. It’s rare that I go to dinner with somebody and learn a lot about energy. Chris is one of the people that that’s the case for. He knows a ton about energy, he’s very pro-liberty, so he understands how free market policies work. He’s an incredible leader and as part of being an incredible leader, he knows how to pick the right team so that they can handle all the logistics.

Of course he needs help navigating the bureaucracy, learning about the White House. I know for a fact that a lot of smart people are already helping him and will help him. You should be really excited about this pick if you want energy in America to be better.

Kimberly Guilfoyle:

All right, well we certainly do. I’m very excited about the pick because you’re excited about the pick and you’ve explained it very well and all the research and your expertise in this area. I’m sure that he will also rely and consult with you, which will be a fabulous thing. I’m really happy about Doug Burgum, if you want to take a moment to talk about him and that pick for the Interior.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, so again, the reason he was my number one pick for Interior is—this is true with both Chris and Doug—that it’s a very rare thing that you get somebody who’s an exceptional entrepreneur and who knows a lot about a field and is willing to serve in government. Just most people aren’t and I get it. Look, for various reasons I’m not ever serving in government. I admire these guys who are willing to do it.

Kimberly Guilfoyle:

I do too.

Alex Epstein:

Governor Burgum is somebody who was incredibly effective in North Dakota. I’ve talked to him quite a bit. He knows a shocking amount about energy, period. But particularly for somebody who has a background in the computer industry, was a star at Microsoft and sold a software company for over a billion dollars. This guy is like a proven leader in business and in government. His government in particular has dealt extensively with some of the most crucial issues at EPA, but also Interior. He and his team already are very familiar with those issues.

Kimberly Guilfoyle:

Love it.

Alex Epstein:

If you have somebody who understands industry and all the roadblocks and has great leadership ability—and DOI (Department of Interior) is a massive, massive thing. Leadership is really good. I’m not claiming that I influenced this by the way. I’m just saying when people asked me, I said, “This is my number one pick,” because it’s a very rare set of attributes together.

We should take advantage when people like this are willing to serve. Because a lot of people, I won’t name any names, but a lot of people want these positions because they think it’s cool to be Secretary of Energy or Secretary of the Interior. I hate that motivation. You should only want it if you are plausibly the best in the world. These two are both plausibly the best in the world. It’s very exciting that they’re in those positions.

Kimberly Guilfoyle:

Excellent. I’m excited about it too. Alex Epstein, thanks so much for being on the program. Everyone, please go check out EnergyTalkingPoints.com and Fossil Future, great book. Thank you so much.

Alex Epstein:

Thank you.

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So I was thrilled when Chris was nominated last Saturday for Secretary of Energy. Here’s an in-depth interview I did with a reporter shortly after the announcement. (The reporter said I could publish the whole discussion so long as he could remain anonymous. I have also paraphrased his comments to further protect anonymity.)

Enjoy!

Reporter:

When I was looking into Chris Wright’s views of oil and gas being a great thing for the world, I thought, “this is exactly the kind of stuff that Alex Epstein talks about.” So I was wondering if you could say a little bit about: to what extent are Chris Wright’s views about energy in line with yours?

Alex Epstein:

Chris and I are extremely aligned, almost uncannily so. I say uncannily so because unlike many executives who I think have primarily come to this kind of view through my work, Chris, in my understanding, mostly came to similar conclusions on his own.

We first met in late 2015 or so, something like that. I was in Colorado and we happened to do a debate together. A guy named Aaron Harber, who’s a really interesting politically neutral host, wanted me to come in and do a debate. And then he teamed me with this guy, Chris Wright, whom I hadn’t heard of.

I was quite impressed that this is a CEO who’s A) willing to say these kinds of things, and B) unusually knowledgeable about multiple aspects of the issue. So not just the energy part of it, but the climate part of it. I thought he had a much more nuanced view of the climate part of it than other CEOs I’ve encountered.

Sometimes with CEOs—there’s no universal thing, but sometimes what you’ll see—is people will publicly just say something vague like, “Climate change is a serious problem” and you get that level of superficiality. Or sometimes people will say, “Do fossil fuels cause global warming at all?” It often goes between those two things.

And Chris, like me, had much more of the idea of, no, there is a greenhouse effect and we need to think carefully about: what’s the magnitude of that, what are the negatives of that, what are the positives of that? And then, in the case of the negatives, what are the offsetting positives that we get from fuels that we wouldn’t have if we didn’t have fossil fuels?

So I found him to just be very aligned with me then. And I think having gotten to know him subsequently, knowing his history, we don’t have the exact same intellectual influences, but both of us have very pro-liberty backgrounds as you can see with his “Liberty Energy.” And we both have a strong interest in how liberty makes human life better.

I would say although I certainly have an interest in how liberty particularly makes life better for the world’s poorest people, that’s probably Chris’s focus. That’s been his focus for many decades. And he definitely sees energy as part of the picture that more broadly includes liberty.

And he also—I think this is another place we align—he also definitely thinks of supporting primarily not fossil fuels or oil and gas, but rather abundant, cost-effective energy. And he, like I, believes that fossil fuels will remain uniquely cost-effective and scalable for the foreseeable future. And the world needs far more energy, if you recognize the world is mostly poor. So we both come at it from that perspective, not from the perspective of having a favoritism.

Reporter:

Right, it’s like, energy is great, and fossil fuels work great for energy.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah. We would love if something better came along—and the sooner, the better. But we try to be objective about the competitive advantage fossil fuels have. I think of it on the level of silicon in semiconductors. It’s like, you’ve got these physical properties that are very hard to replicate, and then you have generations of smart people building an industry around those specific physical properties. That’s something very, very hard for something to rapidly replace and you could do a lot of damage.

Reporter:

There are good reasons to get away from silicon, but yes.

Alex Epstein:

I don’t know specifically there, but you could think about this with other things as well. If you think about the technology of—again, just my view—but the technologies involved in antibiotics and vaccination, people could say I think with more plausibility with antibiotics, but they could say, “Well, there’s certain things I don’t like about antibiotics.” They have resistance, et cetera. But then you think about, well, we don’t have a better way of dealing with all kinds of different infections, so we should seek out a better way.

We should always seek out better ways of everything, but we should still champion antibiotics as long as they’re the best solution for all these different use cases.

Reporter:

What would it be like to have that view in leading the Department of Energy, not just in contrast with the Biden administration, but even, say, in contrast with Dan Brouillette and Rick Perry? What do you think are the kind of policies that could stem from those sorts of views?

Alex Epstein:

So I think there are a few things, and one thing I’ll say about the Department of Energy position that is known to anyone who knows about energy (but worth highlighting) is the Department of Energy does not deal primarily with the vast majority of energy, and it deals a lot with things like nuclear materials. And so it’s actually not at all automatic that even when a good person is head of the Department of Energy that they will have all that much effect on energy—although I do believe that they can, and I think Chris almost certainly will.

And so the opportunities to affect it, let’s just say few of the biggest opportunities are, one is DOE has oversight of FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which has oversight of electricity, at least most of electricity, let’s say—it doesn’t have full oversight over generation, although it has some. And then we have the natural gas pipeline system.

These are likely the two most crucial parts of our energy system for the next several years because the grid is obviously the basis of electricity and has enormous supply and reliability problems currently and on the horizon as demand increases. And then with the natural gas pipeline system, that is really the choke point for US natural gas reaching its potential. US natural gas is by far the fastest scaling way we have of increasing energy production in general and electricity production in particular, but it’s bottlenecked by pipelines.

So in both of those cases, FERC has oversight. Now, FERC is one of these quasi-independent agencies, but DOE can exercise a lot of positive leadership over it, including directly and also in consultation with the President of the United States. And now also Doug Burgum, whom I also think is excellent, is going to be in charge of this National Energy Council, which hasn’t been fully, at least to me, hasn’t been fully fleshed out.

But I think somebody like Chris who understands the problems and also the fundamental solutions with FERC can do an enormous amount of good improving the electricity system as head of DOE. But it takes a very special person with a bunch of different skills and knowledge, including very good communication skills, knowledge of policy, knowledge of technical stuff, putting together the right team. It takes a very specific person, which is why when people asked me—like many people, I get asked who I would recommend—Chris was my number one recommendation by far. My number one recommendation for any energy position, period. And then also Doug Burgum was actually my number one for Interior.

So in terms of the energy picks, those two in particular have gone well. And I suspect that because Chris is in charge of DOE, that increases the probability of having good picks for the Chairman of FERC and the Chairman of the NRC. And that’s one of the other crucial things that the Secretary of Energy can influence is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, both by selecting the right Chairman and Commissioners for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but also having a vision of what needs to change there.

And Chris has a benefit in terms of he’s long been interested in nuclear energy. He started out in fusion at MIT, but he’s quite knowledgeable about fission and very interested in what can be done to really unleash the potential of nuclear energy by really having, I would say, proper scientific policies, which I do not think the NRC does.

They have a lot of pseudoscience that makes them treat nuclear, which is actually the safest form of energy, as the most dangerous form of energy and their mission as an agency is essentially to eliminate all nuclear risk at essentially all costs. And that just makes us have more expensive and more dangerous energy, because if you try to eliminate all risk from the safest thing, then you end up with more dangerous things.

And then actually the third thing I would say in general is the Secretary of Energy, because of the title, also has a significant, at least potential, bully pulpit to exercise leadership in energy, to express opinions about this.

So for example, Governor then Secretary Perry, I think one of the things he did that was very valuable that was perhaps underrated, is he made quite a big focus of the power of American energy and energy in general to alleviate poverty in the developing and undeveloped world. In fact, he and I met—we subsequently became quite close and have a great relationship now—but we actually met when I was speaking in South Africa in 2017, and we really bonded over this issue. So that’s an example of, it’s not just the policy, but you can prioritize this as a thing in government. Obviously, Chris, given his interests, I would guess this will definitely be a focus of his insofar as he’s talking publicly about energy, how the world needs more energy.

Reporter:

Could you elaborate a bit more on the importance of Chris being a strong communicator on energy?

Alex Epstein:

I think in any cabinet position, it’s a big asset to be a very good communicator. With energy in particular, it’s incredibly important because there’s such intense emotion that people have about these issues and so many common over-simplified ways of characterizing and mischaracterizing people that it’s really a benefit to be an exceptional communicator with a very nuanced mastery of the subject.

So the climate issue, for example, the public debate just goes between, “We have no impact on climate and therefore fossil fuels are okay, climate change is a hoax,” that kind of view versus, “Fossil fuels impact climate, it’s the end of the world, and therefore we should rapidly get rid of fossil fuels.” It’s like a very un-nuanced thing.

You need somebody who has—well, I think Chris has the right views on these—but in any case, you need somebody who can express views on this with a lot of clarity and precision because whatever the new administration does on energy is certainly going to create a lot of controversy, and it’s much, much better if you have a communicator who can explain why that is.

So for example, I certainly don’t control what the administration does, and I don’t know what they’ll do, but let’s say they withdraw from the Paris Agreement—which of course I would advocate—but I think it’s important to have a very clear explanation of why you’re doing that, what the considerations are, et cetera, not just do it because you happen to be in power. So I think Chris is really important there, and that’s one of the reasons why I was such a big supporter and will continue to be a big supporter. It’s his nuanced understanding. The main thing is the internal clarity, but then his ability to communicate it is important.

And then I would also say that he has a very unusual track record of being courageous in that he has had the same views expressed, whether he’s been a private company or public company. It’s very unusual for the CEO of a public company—particularly in the modern ESG era, which is fading a little bit, but Chris was doing this the whole time—to say, “Hey, I think fossil fuels are good for humanity, and I believe that we impact climate, but I don’t think that it’s catastrophic, and I don’t think we should use that as an excuse to deprive people of energy.” He’s willing to say these controversial things. I don’t think they should be controversial, but he’s willing to say them when very few are.

There was an event—I won’t say what the event is because it was one of these Chatham House Rules things—but we were at an event once, and this was almost during peak Larry Fink net-zero. Even Larry Fink now is retreating from net-zero and saying we need natural gas for data centers and stuff. But this was at the peak of that. And I remember I was the annoying one at the conference because I was the one saying, “I don’t think net-zero targets are good and here’s why, et cetera.”

And it’s one thing for me to say it. I’m a public commentator. Controversy doesn’t really hurt me in the same way. A lot of people buy my books and hire me to speak and stuff, even if I’m controversial. Whereas Chris, he basically said all the same things near the end of the conference and was just lighting into everyone, but he had a public company—and these are people who could finance his things.

So he and I really bond over, maybe above anything else, I think we bond over the idea that it’s your job, if you’re going to be speaking, to say what you think is the truth. And so that’s heartening to me, that he believes this that strongly.

Reporter:

One quote from Chris that’s getting a lot of attention is, “There’s no climate crisis.” Usually it’s taken out of context and doesn’t include that he also says climate change is real—but do you agree with that statement? And then, can you tell me a bit about what it does or doesn’t mean?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, so he often makes these two statements, and I agree with them. Or the way, I’ll put it in my own terms, which I agree with and which I think are consistent with what he says, is: the two leading terms that we use to discuss climate and energy refer to things that do not exist. And they are “climate crisis” and “energy transition.”

The energy transition one’s a little easier to explain. So people say we’re in an “energy transition” as if we’re rapidly transitioning away from fossil fuels. But fossil fuels, we still have an addition, we even have an addition of fossil fuels. And then the other technologies that are being added are energy additions. So this has changed a little bit, but when people are describing the energy transition and they act as if we’re rapidly getting away from fossil fuels, and then when they use that as the primary noun to describe what’s happening in energy, that’s biasing the thinking.

So I’ll use terms like “energy evolution,” which I think is probably the clearest way of thinking about it because then you could just look at the facts: hey, how is energy evolving? And so with “energy transition,” I don’t use that term and I think that’s why he said that about energy transition.

And then in terms of “climate crisis,” it’s again unfortunate. I think it’s really bad when your primary noun to describe an area of reality has a controversial evaluation attached to it. So you can say, even if you believe that we have a climate crisis, I think you should talk about, well, we have the state of climate or state of climate livability, and I think it’s in a crisis state. But when you just look outside and say, “Hey, this is the climate crisis,” I don’t think that’s really honest because to argue that climate is a crisis requires a complex chain of reasoning.

I’m looking outside right now. It doesn’t look like a climate crisis to me. Most people don’t experience a climate crisis in the way that they would an energy crisis, right, when they’re having shortages and in line and stuff like that. So A) I think it’s a leading thing, that that term has become this untouchable noun, but then B) for me, a crisis is something that is in a very bad state and getting worse. And I think from the perspective of human life in relation to climate—so what I focus on in my work, and this isn’t Chris’s term, but I think it’s compatible—is climate livability.

So, how much are we threatened by climate and how much do we benefit from climate? At the moment, I believe that has never been better.

And one of the things Chris, like I, cites is the very nonpartisan statistics about climate-related disaster deaths being at all time lows: they’ve rapidly declined over the last 100 years and even the last 40 years. And it’s because our ability to master climate has far outpaced any new climate challenges.

So climate livability is a function of what’s your ability to master climate danger and also what’s the climate benefit. So with snow, right, snow used to be a menace, and now it’s something we pay to go to in Utah and Colorado.

It’s like, your climate mastery ability and the state of the climate system, you can’t look at those separately any more than you can look at your livability with disease without looking at, well, all the things you have to counter it. Even if there’s a bunch of polio floating around, well, if we have polio vaccines, then we don’t have a polio crisis.

And so with climate, you can believe that we’ve added some new challenges to the global climate system, but our level of mastery has far outpaced that, and that’s given us a level of resilience that makes our climate situation much better.

So when you say it’s not a climate crisis—and this isn’t Chris’s term, but I’ll say it to be provocative, but I think it’s also accurate—we’re actually in a climate renaissance. As in, human beings have never had a safer and more enjoyable relationship with their surroundings.

I think ultimately the view of climate crisis from people who know that we’re safer than ever from climate is actually a difference in morality, where they evaluate good and bad by how little or how much we’ve impacted the Earth. So they think the fact that we’ve impacted climate somewhat significantly—not as significantly as some people think, but somewhat significantly, so if we’ve led to most of a one degree Celsius, two degrees Fahrenheit temperature rise—they think that’s immoral. And that’s why it’s a crisis, that we had no right to do it, that we shouldn’t impact climate.

But it’s about evaluating the world and the climate by the standard of less or no human impact is good and more human impact is bad, and it’s a crisis because we impacted it, not because it’s bad for us.

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• Speaking and media inquiries

“Energy Talking Points by Alex Epstein” is my free Substack newsletter designed to give as many people as possible access to concise, powerful, well-referenced talking points on the latest energy, environmental, and climate issues from a pro-human, pro-energy perspective.

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COP 29 is calling for over $1 trillion in annual climate reparations

• A major theme of COP 29 is that the world should set a “New Collective Quantified Goal” wherein successful nations pay poor nations over $1 trillion a year to 1) make up for climate-related harm and 2) build them new “green energy” economies. In other words, climate reparations.1

  

• What would $1 trillion a year in climate reparations mean for you and your family?
  
  Assuming the money was paid equally by households considered high income (>$50 per day), your household would have to pay more than $5,000 a year in climate reparations taxes!2

• Climate reparations are based on two false assumptions:
  
  1. Free, wealthy countries, through their fossil fuel use, have made the world worse for poor countries.
  
  2. The poor world’s main problem is dealing with climate change, which wealth transfers will help them with.

But free, fossil-fueled countries have made life better for poor countries

• Free, wealthy countries, through their fossil fuel use, have not made the world worse for poor countries—they have made it far, far better.
  
  Observe what has happened to global life expectancies and income as fossil fuel use has risen. Life has gotten much better for everyone.3

  

• The wealthy world’s fossil fuel use has improved life worldwide because by using fossil fuel energy to be incredibly productive, we have 1) made all kinds of goods cheaper and 2) been able to engage in life-saving aid, particularly in the realms of food, medicine, and sanitation.

• Without the historic use of fossil fuels by the wealthy world, there would be no super-productive agriculture to feed 8 billion humans, no satellite-based weather warning systems, etc. Most of the individuals in poor countries would not even be alive today.

Free, fossil-fueled countries have made the poor safer from climate

• The wealthy world’s fossil fuel use has been particularly beneficial in the realm of climate.
  
  Over the last 100 years, the death rate from climate-related disasters plummeted by 98% globally.
  
  A big reason is millions of lives saved from drought via fossil-fueled crop transport.4

  

• The “climate reparations” movement ignores the fact that the wealthy world’s fossil fuel use has made life better, including safer from climate, in the poor world.
  
  This allows it to pretend that the poor world’s main problem is dealing with rising CO2 levels.

The poor world’s problem is poverty, not rising CO2 levels

• The poor world’s main problem is not rising CO2 levels, it is poverty—which is caused by lack of freedom, including the crucial freedom to use fossil fuels.
  
  Poverty makes everything worse, including the world’s massive natural climate danger and any danger from more CO2.

• While it’s not true that the wealthy world has increased climate danger in the poor world—we have reduced it—it is true that the poor world is more endangered by climate than the wealthy world is.
  
  The solution is for the poor to get rich. Which requires freedom and fossil fuels.5

  

Escaping poverty requires freedom and fossil fuels

• Every nation that has risen out of poverty has done so via pro-freedom policies—specifically, economic freedom.
  
  That’s how resource-poor places like Singapore and Taiwan became prosperous. Resource-rich places like Congo have struggled due to lack of economic freedom.

• Even China, which is unfree in many ways (including insufficient protections against pollution) dramatically increased its standard of living via economic freedom—particularly in the realm of industrial development where it is now in many ways much freer than the US and Europe.

• A crucial freedom involved in rising prosperity has been the freedom to use fossil fuels.
  
  Fossil fuels are a uniquely cost-effective source of energy, providing energy that’s low-cost, reliable, versatile, and scalable to billions of people in thousands of places.6

  

• Time and again nations have increased their prosperity, including their safety from climate, via economic freedom and fossil fuels.
  
  Observe the 7X increase in fossil fuel use in China and India over the past 4 decades, which enabled them to industrialize and prosper.7

  

• For the world’s poorest people to be more prosperous and safer from climate, they need more freedom and more fossil fuels.
  
  The “climate reparations” movement seeks to deny them both.

• The wealthy world should communicate to the poor world that economic freedom is the path to prosperity, and encourage the poor world to reform its cultural and political institutions to embrace economic freedom—including fossil fuel freedom.
  
  Our leaders are doing the opposite.

Climate reparations pay off dictators to take away fossil fuel freedom

• Instead of promoting economic freedom, including fossil fuel freedom, wealthy climate reparations advocates like Antonio Guterres are offering to entrench anti-freedom regimes by paying off their dictators and bureaucrats to eliminate fossil fuel freedom.
  
  This is disgusting.8

  

• The biggest victim of “climate reparations” will be the world’s poorest countries, whose dictators will be paid off to prevent the fossil fuel freedom that has allowed not just the US and Europe but also China and India to dramatically increase their prosperity.

• The biggest beneficiary of “climate reparations” will be China, which is already emitting more CO2 than the US and Europe combined. (Though less per capita.)
  
  While we flagellate and cripple ourselves, China will use fossil fuels in its quest to become the world’s superpower.9

  

• The second biggest beneficiary of “climate reparations” will be corrupt do-gooders who get to add anti-fossil-fuel strings to “reparations” dollars and dictate how it's spent—which will surely include lots of dollars for unreliable solar panels and wind turbines made in China.

Leaders must reject reparations and champion fossil fuel freedom

• We need leaders in the US and Europe who proudly:
  
  1. Champion the free world’s use of fossil fuels as an enormous good for the world, including its climate safety.
  

  2. Encourage the poor world to embrace economic freedom and fossil fuels.
  
  Tell your Representative to do both.

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• Climate debates often focus on exactly how much rising CO2 levels will impact the global climate.
  
  The truth is, there is a lot of uncertainty here.
  
  What is certain is that we need energy freedom to achieve climate resilience and energy innovation.
  
  Here are the reasons why.👇

1. We need abundant energy to be resilient to climate danger.

• Discussions of climate safety often treat reaching a given level of CO2 as the key to climate safety. But the last 100+ years show us that by far the most important factor for climate safety is energy abundance, because it makes possible incredible climate resilience.

• It’s an irrefutable but little-known fact that as the world has warmed 1° C, humans have become safer than ever from climate danger. The rate of climate-related disaster deaths—from storms, floods, temperature extremes, wildfires, and drought—has fallen 98% in the last century.1

  

• Why has climate safety dramatically increased as climate has become warmer? Because any challenges of warming, including any other climate changes caused by warming, have been overwhelmed by our accelerating ability to master climate. E.g., neutralizing drought via irrigation.

• Why has humanity’s ability to master climate so far outpaced climate challenges? A fundamental cause is the proliferation of cheap, reliable energy, which powers the machines that enable us to master climate.

• Machines powered by abundant energy have allowed us to:

  • master drought danger via irrigation and crop transport,

  • master temperature danger via heating and A/C,

  • master storm danger via building resilient infrastructure plus storm warning and evacuation systems2

    

• We have primarily fossil fuels to thank for abundant energy, given that fossil fuels provide 80%+ of the world’s energy despite 100+ years of aggressive competition. And they are still growing—especially in the countries most concerned with cost-effective energy. E.g, China.3

  

• If we consider the incredible climate resilience that abundant fossil fuel energy has given and can continue to give us, we will be much less worried about rising CO2 and much more worried about the massive climate vulnerability that would come from restricting fossil fuels.

2. The only practical and humane way to lower CO2 emissions is through energy innovation.

• Even though increasing energy abundance, not decreasing CO2 emissions, is the overwhelming driver of climate safety, climate discussions often obsess about reducing emissions.
  
  But the fact is wealthy countries desiring lower CO2 emissions is not enough to make it happen.

• So long as fossil fuels are the most cost-effective option for people, especially in developing nations, they will (rightly) choose to emit CO2.
  
  The only practical and humane way to reduce emissions is energy innovation that leads to truly globally cost-competitive alternatives.

• Consider that the US emits < 1/7 of global CO2—and falling. The main reason global CO2 emissions are rising is because billions of people in the developing world are bringing themselves out of poverty by using fossil fuels to power factories, farms, vehicles, and appliances.4

  

• The developing world overwhelmingly uses fossil fuels because that is by far the lowest-cost way for them to get reliable energy. Intermittent solar and wind can’t come close. That’s why China has 300 new coal plants in the pipeline.5

  

• The only way to lower CO2 emissions and benefit America is to promote innovation that makes low-carbon energy truly reliable and low-cost. Are China and India going to stop using fossil fuels so long as they are the lowest-cost option? They won’t and they shouldn’t.

3. To achieve energy abundance and energy innovation we need energy freedom.

• Both in order to have the abundant energy that climate resilience requires and the energy innovation that long-term lower emissions require, we need to be free to produce and use all forms of energy, including today’s most cost-effective and scalable option: fossil fuels.

• Fact: The 2 biggest instances of CO2 reduction have come from the freedom to innovate:
  
  Nuclear: Freedom led to cost-effective and scalable nuclear power until the “green” movement virtually criminalized it.
  
  Gas: Freedom led to significant substitution of gas vs. coal.

• What promising low-carbon energy technologies need above all to become cost-competitive is freedom to innovate. Entrepreneurs need to be free to rapidly test, implement, and evolve their ideas—whether for a promising nuclear power plant design or for a new type of deep geothermal well.

• Instead of low-carbon energy evolving to become more cost-effective than fossil fuels, we are seeing huge government preferences for solar and wind “solutions” that make electricity more expensive and less reliable, while nuclear is stagnant or declining in much of the world.6

  

• America’s and other governments’ promotion of non-cost-effective low-carbon energy and impeding of promising low-carbon nuclear energy has led to a situation where there is no globally cost-competitive low-carbon energy on the horizon.

• The standard climate conference approach of trying to rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use will destroy energy abundance, destroy prosperity, and make us too poor for genuine energy innovation. It should be replaced by an energy freedom approach.

• Whether you think more CO2 will lead to 1 or 2 or 3° of warming this century the fact is restricting fossil fuels will make energy expensive and scarce, which will make us both endangered from climate and too poor to afford to invest in energy innovation.
  
  We need energy freedom.

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In reality, net-zero would radically increase climate danger and ruin billions of lives.

Good people should condemn COP and embrace energy freedom.

• The COP 29 climate conference has a consistent theme: previous COPs have done an okay job of restricting fossil fuels in the name of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but this one needs to eliminate fossil fuel use far faster so as to reach net-zero by 2050.
  
  This is 180° wrong.

• COP 29’s goal of rapidly eliminating fossil fuels to reach net-zero is deadly because:
  
  1. Fossil fuels are making us far safer from climate along with improving every other aspect of life
  2. Even barely implementing COP’s net-zero agenda has been disastrous.

Fossil fuels are making us far safer from climate.

• The justification of COP 29’s net-zero agenda is that fossil fuel use is causing an escalating “climate crisis.”
  
  But if we look at the full effects of fossil fuels on climate danger, we find that overall fossil fuels have dramatically reduced climate danger.

• Myth: Climate danger is higher than ever because of fossil fuels' CO2 emissions.
  
  Truth: We have a 98% decline in climate disaster deaths due to our enormous fossil-fueled climate mastery abilities: heating and cooling, infrastructure-building, irrigation, crop transport.1

  

• Myth: Mainstream science shows that rising CO2 is an “existential threat” that will soon cause global catastrophe and then apocalypse.
  
  Truth: Mainstream science shows that rising CO2 levels will lead to levels of warming and other changes that we can master and flourish with.

• For the full story on how fossil fuels overall make us far safer from climate and will continue to do so, read this:
  
  

Even barely implementing COP 29’s net-zero agenda has been disastrous.

• While COP 29 leaders bemoan how slow their restriction of fossil fuels in pursuit of net-zero has been, even “slow” restriction has caused a global energy crisis.

• Myth: Net-zero policies are new and exciting.
  
  Truth: Net-zero policies have caused catastrophic energy shortages even with minuscule implementation. Just by slowing the growth of fossil fuel use, not even reducing it, they have caused global energy shortages advocates didn’t warn us of.

• Minuscule net-zero policies causing huge problems:
  
  US: frequent power shortages after shutting down fossil fuel power plants.

  EU: deadly fossil fuel dependence after restricting their domestic fossil fuel industry.

  Poor nations: can't afford fuel due to global restrictions.2

  

• If just restricting the growth of fossil fuels in a world that needs far more energy is catastrophic, what would it mean to reduce CO2 emissions by the 50% many “climate emergency” advocates want by 2030 and the 100% they want by 2050?
  
  Global misery and premature death.
  
  

COP 29’s net-zero agenda harms poor nations most of all.

• The net-zero movement led by COP is particularly dangerous to Africa and other poor regions.
  
  Consider: 1/3 of the world uses wood and animal dung for heating and cooking. 3 billion use less electricity than a typical American refrigerator.
  
  Only fossil fuels can provide the energy they need to develop.3

  

• Every prosperous country has developed using fossil fuels.
  
  No poor country has been able to develop to the point of prosperity without massive fossil fuel use.
  
  Development requires energy, and fossil fuels are a uniquely cost-effective and scalable source of energy.4

• Fossil fuels are so uniquely good at providing low-cost, reliable energy for developing nations that even nations with little or no fossil fuel resources have used fossil fuels to develop and prosper. E.g. South Korea (83% fossil fuels), Japan (85% fossil fuels), Singapore (99% fossil fuels).5

  

• The obvious path for African development and prosperity is to use fossil fuel whenever it’s the most cost-effective option, which is most of the time, and certainly to responsibly produce the significant fossil fuel resources that exist in Africa.
  
  Yet COP tells Africa to forgo fossil fuels.

• COP 29 is fundamentally immoral because its goal of “net zero by 2050” would deprive billions of the energy they need to prosper.

  
  Good people who care about energy and human flourishing should condemn COP and net-zero can champion energy freedom instead.

The path forward: reject net-zero and embrace energy freedom.

• The path to global prosperity and increasing climate safety is energy freedom: allowing us to use all forms of energy so we are prosperous, resilient to climate danger, and in the long-term innovate new, truly cost-effective alternatives to fossil fuels.

• Rejecting net-zero and embracing energy freedom means scrapping the Paris Agreement, whose pursuit of net-zero is committing virtually all nations, including the world’s poorest, to rejecting the fossil fuels they need to prosper.

• While many at COP are saying that a US withdrawal from Paris by the next administration would be irresponsible, it is the only responsible action to take given that Paris commits us to banning most of the fossil fuels that we and our allies need.

• Rejecting net-zero, including the Paris Agreement, and embracing energy freedom requires collaboration among pro-freedom countries like the US, developing nations such as African nations, and any reasonable energy companies.

• Developing nations, above all African nations, need to reject net-zero and embrace energy freedom: the freedom to produce and use all cost-effective sources of energy—including, essentially, fossil fuels—which means rejecting all net-zero targets. Here’s a blueprint for doing it.
  
  

• The energy industry and obviously the fossil fuel industry should condemn COP and its net-zero goal. Appalling, ExxonMobil and others are actually calling for the US to stay in the net-zero Paris Agreement!

  
  Here’s why this is both immoral and impractical.
  
  

• Any attendee of COP 29 should thoroughly reject the conference’s “net zero by 2050” goal and instead proudly advocate for energy freedom and climate safety through climate mastery.
  
  If they do that, they have a real chance at stopping the conference from ruining the world.

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Here’s the full transcript and Q&A. (Audience member questions are paraphrased to protect anonymity.) I’m hoping the video will be available soon.

Alex Epstein:

All right, so I’m going to start out by taking a poll of where the audience is. Here’s the question: What is the current state of our relationship with climate?

I’m going to give you four options. Are we experiencing: a climate catastrophe, climate problem, climate non-problem, or climate renaissance? Raise your hand when you hear the one that you think best reflects the current state of our relationship with climate.

• Climate catastrophe — in most audiences, this would be much less of a minority view.

• Climate problem — probably about half the room.

• Climate non-problem — a bunch of people.

• Climate renaissance — okay, that’s the record.

So here’s what’s interesting about this issue, what I would call the “designated expert” view. The view of the people we’re told to give us guidance on these issues is that we’re obviously in a climate catastrophe that’s becoming an apocalypse; maybe some will say a climate problem on the verge of catastrophe.

And yet empirically, if you look at how livable our climate is from a human-flourishing perspective, it’s undeniable that it’s never been better.

This is a chart of what’s happened in the atmosphere. We’ve put in more CO2, and that indeed has caused some warming and has other climate effects. But at the same time, the death rate from climate disasters—so storms and floods, extreme temperatures, et cetera—has gone way down. It’s gone down actually 98% in the last century.

This means that a typical person has 1/50 the chance of dying from a climate disaster compared to what somebody used to have. And if you look at things like damages, we’re not actually more threatened by climate. If you adjust for GDP, we’re safer from climate still.

The reason I raise this is: we have this situation where the supposed experts on something say that we have a catastrophe, and yet in reality, it’s never been better from a human-flourishing perspective. And this is independent of the future. So you could say, “Well, I think it’s going to get worse in the future.” But their view is about the present; they describe us as in a climate crisis or climate emergency now.

So what’s going on here? What’s going on here is very important because it shows that the mainstream “expert” view of fossil fuels and climate is not just based on facts and science, it’s based on a certain moral perspective on facts and science—because from a human flourishing perspective, we’re in a climate renaissance. What’s going on is what I call their moral standard or standard of evaluation.

The way they evaluate the world in a particular climate is not in terms of advancing human flourishing on Earth, but of eliminating human impact on Earth. And this is the dominant idea, this is the way we’re taught to think about climate: that a better climate, a better world, is one that we impact less and a worse one is one that we impact more.

I think this is the most evil idea. I think human beings survive and flourish by impacting nature. This idea that we should aspire to eliminate our impact is an anti-human idea. And I think that if we look at this issue from a pro-human perspective—from the perspective that a better world is one with more flourishing, not less human impact—that totally changes how you think about fossil fuels.

I’m going to give you a bunch of facts—but these are not right-wing facts or something. These are all either primary source facts or they are just mainstream climate science. What I’m doing differently is I’m looking at the facts and science from a consistently human flourishing perspective, and that’s something that unfortunately almost nobody else does.

But what’s good is I think if most people realize that they’re not thinking about it in a pro-human way, they’ll want to think about it in a pro-human way, and then we can really change energy thinking for the better.

If we’re going to apply this idea of advancing human flourishing as our standard, if we’re going to do it consistently, there’s basically one rule we need to follow, which is we need to be even-handed. By even-handed, I mean we need to carefully weigh the benefits and side effects of our alternatives, just as you would do if you were deciding to take an antibiotic: what are the benefits and side effects of this? How does that compare to the alternatives?

When it comes to fossil fuels and climate—and I want to focus on climate because there are other side effects of fossil fuels like air pollution and water pollution, but those aren’t really the reason people hate fossil fuels. Those have gone way down in the past few decades, and hatred for fossil fuels has gone way up. So it’s really about the climate issue.

When we’re thinking about fossil fuels and climate, there are four things we need to look at to be even-handed. And feel free to challenge this in the question period, but literally nobody has ever been able to challenge this, and I’ve debated every single person that was willing to debate.

So one is you need to look at what I call the general benefits of fossil fuels. Then you need to look at what I call the climate mastery benefits of fossil fuels. You need to look at the positive climate side effects of fossil fuels. And then of course, you need to look at the negative climate side effects of fossil fuels.

My contention is when you do this from a human flourishing perspective, it’s just completely obvious that we need to use more fossil fuels, and that this idea of getting rid of fossil fuels by 2050 is the most destructive idea, even though it’s literally the most popular political idea in the world today. Getting rid of fossil fuels is advocated by leading financial institutions, leading corporations, almost every government in the world has agreed to it. So it’s literally the most heretical thing you could say to say that we should use more fossil fuels, and yet I’m going to argue that it’s obvious and the mainstream view is just insane.

Let’s look at the general benefits of fossil fuels. What are the benefits we’re going to get if we’re free to use fossil fuels going forward that we’ll lose to the extent that we are not? And the mainstream view, epitomized by this guy Michael Mann, who’s one of our leading designated experts, is there really no benefits. He has a whole book on fossil fuels and climate, pictured here, and he says essentially nothing about the benefits of fossil fuels—and this is pretty conventional.

Now, I’m going to argue that the benefit of fossil fuels is literally that 8 billion people have enough energy to survive and flourish. And they are basically three points I think we need to get to get this. One is that fossil fuels are uniquely cost-effective. What somebody like Michael Mann and others have been saying for years, though it’s going out of favor, is that fossil fuels don’t really have any benefits because we can rapidly replace them with intermittent solar and wind.

And again, fortunately this is going out of favor now, but it never really made any sense. What we see if we look at the facts is fossil fuels have had 100 plus years of aggressive competition. They have had enormous political hostility for the last 20 years, and yet they’re still growing despite this. So there’s something special about them.

And then to further confirm this, the places that care most about cost-effective energy are committed to using more fossil fuels. So China has 300 plus new coal plants in the pipeline. And then of course, the AI data center world is doubling and tripling down on natural gas because that’s the most cost-effective thing.

By cost-effective, I mean four things. Affordability—how much can a typical person afford? Reliability—is it available when needed in the exact quantity needed? Versatility—can it power every type of machine, including things like airplanes and cargo ships that are hard to do with anything besides oil until we get a really good nuclear solution? And then scalability—is this available to billions of people in thousands of places?

I think the evidence is really clear, there’s nothing that can compare to fossil fuels in terms of making energy available to billions of people that’s affordable, reliable, and scalable.

And so what that means is to the extent we restrict fossil fuels, people have less energy, which brings me the second point about the benefits of fossil fuels, which is that it is the worst thing imaginable to deprive people of energy because energy determines how much we can flourish on Earth. By flourish, I mean live to our highest potential, so with lives that are long, healthy, and filled with opportunity. You can see, for example, in the cases of China and India, there’s a very strong correlation between energy use, which has dramatically gone up largely thanks to fossil fuels, and GDP and life expectancy.

And the basic reason is simple but profound. The more cost-effective energy is, the more we can use machines to be productive and prosperous. With machines, this naturally impoverished and dangerous world becomes an abundant and safe world. Without machines, life is terrible. Only fossil fuels can provide this for the vast majority of people.

So this is really an existential issue—and it becomes even stronger when you realize one final fact about the general benefits of fossil fuels, which is that the vast majority of the world is energy poor.

We have 6 billion people who use an amount of energy that we would all here consider totally unacceptable, and we have 3 billion people who use less electricity than a typical American refrigerator does.

So think about what this means—and maybe the most powerful area for me is to think about having a child.

My wife and I had our first child a little over four months ago. And if you’ve had a child, I’m sure you’ve had this exact experience where this tiny little fragile thing is born and you just think, “This is the greatest thing ever.” And then maybe soon after you have the thought, “The worst thing ever would be if something happened to him.”

And then you think about energy. Around the world, there are so many babies—particularly premature babies or any babies with any kind of challenges—where because they lack reliable electricity, they don’t have things like incubators, and millions of babies die. Millions of parents suffer the worst possible tragedy because they don’t have enough energy.

And yet we have a global movement saying, “You should not use the most cost-effective form of energy, which is fossil fuels.”

So this is really just the most important issue, and I think it’s supremely immoral that we’re trying to restrict the thing that billions of people need to survive and flourish.

Those are the general benefits of fossil fuels, which are just enormous, but that’s not even the only thing that our establishment ignores. There’s also very strong climate-related benefits, so what I call climate mastery benefits. How significantly does fossil fuel use, which is, again, a source of uniquely cost-effective energy, how much does that increase our ability to neutralize climate danger?

And this is really important because the more mastery you have over climate, the less any climate change, even a negative one, can be a problem. So for example, even for something like a drought—a drought can wipe out millions of people, but if you can do irrigation and crop transport, you can neutralize the drought.

And in fact, the more climate mastery you have, the more negatives don’t even become negatives. A thunderstorm that could wipe out a bunch of houses a few hundred years ago, that can become a romantic setting for a date now.

Mastery is that important. And yet our designated experts tell us there’s nothing to see here. The IPCC, which is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading authority on how to think about this issue has thousands of pages of reports, and yet not once do they mention climate mastery benefits of fossil fuels.

And yet, as I pointed out, we’ve had a 98% decline in climate-related disaster deaths as we’ve used more fossil fuels. And this is not just a coincidental correlation. There’s a very strong causal relationship because fossil fuels have powered heating and air conditioning, storm warning systems, building sturdy buildings. And then as I mentioned, drought: we’ve reduced the drought-related death through irrigation and crop transport by over 99%.

So fossil fuels haven’t taken a safe climate and made it dangerous; they’ve taken a dangerous climate and made it safe. And if we have such enormous climate mastery abilities, that should make us a lot less afraid of any kind of future. Now, we need to look at another category to be even-handed.

People wonder about the negative climate side effects—we’ll talk about those—but also what about the positive climate side effects?

People have this idea—I think because they have this idea that our impact is just this bad thing—that there’s no such thing as a good climate side-effect. And we have this idea of, “Oh, us impacting the climate just means a world on fire.”

But actually one of the major effects of putting a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere is you have a much greener world. There are very strong arguments that we have trillions of dollars in benefits in terms of increased crop growth that we need to take account of in our calculation.

And then warming. People think of warming as, “Oh, warming is terrible, it means the Earth is on fire.” But the fact is that far more people die of cold than of heat. And warming for the foreseeable future is expected to save more lives than it takes, particularly because—most people don’t know this, but it’s a mainstream climate science—warming occurs more in colder regions and less in hot regions. It’s not like the whole world’s going to become scorching if the world becomes more tropical at a fairly slow pace.

So then what about these negative side-effects? Well, if you factor in the climate mastery benefits, there’s really nothing that should scare us.

There are certainly negative side-effects, for example, increase of heat waves. That for sure will happen and continue to happen, and faster sea level rise than we would otherwise have. But there’s nothing that should remotely scare us.

If you look at mainstream climate science, which has a lot of biases, if you factor in our climate mastery abilities, there are no overwhelming impacts that they project.

For example, sea level rise is the most plausible problem, and yet extreme projections by the UN, the most remotely plausible extreme projections are 3 feet in 100 years. That’s something we can deal with pretty readily. We already have 100 million people living below high tide sea level.

So I return to my basic point. If we’re pro-human, including even-handed—and we really look at this issue of fossil fuels from a pro-human perspective—the world is going to be a much better place if we use more fossil fuels, and it’s going to be a horrifically bad place if we rapidly eliminate fossil fuels. And I say a corollary of this is that policy-wise, the obvious policy is energy freedom.

We need the freedom to produce and use all forms of energy, including nuclear and including solar and wind, if and when they can really provide reliable electricity. We need as much cost-effective energy as we can get, and that’s going to make the world a much better place.

So hopefully I’ve persuaded some of you of this in this direction. But I think the next logical question, particularly this room, is, “Well, what do we actually do about this?” Because it’s one thing to talk about this, but I’m really not interested in just talking about this and selling books and whatever. I’m interested in: how do we actually change energy policy for the better, which is going to require changing energy thinking for the better?

And I want to share with you my approach because it is an approach that’s working really well. And my motivation for coming here is mainly I want to get a bunch of talented people excited about this approach.

Some of you can maybe be hired by us, some of you can join us in different ways. So let me give you my basic approach—and it’s simple: make it really easy to be an ally of the truth.

Often when people have a view that’s controversial but true, they kind of like being controversial. I mean, look, we’re at Hereticon, we’re sort of celebrating being heretical. But I personally don’t really like being heretical. If I think I’m right and the world depends on it, I want the world to become conventional with the truth. And so what I’ve done for the last 17 years on this issue is I’ve thought as much as I can about, “How do I create resources that make it as easy as possible for people to understand the truth and communicate the truth to others?”

And there are basically four things that we’ve been working on for the past few years that I want make you aware of.

So what is this book, Fossil Future? This is designed to be a completely systematic guide to how to think about energy and climate from a pro-human perspective that gives you totally how to think about it and addresses every single factual issue you could ever want to address. So if you want to, you can just become totally bulletproof and clear by reading this book

Get Fossil Future on Amazon

The second thing is called Energy Talking Points. This has really been my biggest breakthrough in persuasion, because the idea here is let’s make it super easy. We break down every single issue imaginable into tweet-length talking points. So if you want to know anything about energy, environment, or climate from a pro-human, pro-freedom perspective, you can just go to energytalkingpoints.com.

Browse hundreds of Energy Talking Points

And now we have Alex AI. So if you go to alexepstein.ai, you can ask that thing anything, and it is really, really good at answering questions as me.

Try AlexAI for free

So this has really become a phenomenon in politics. We have over 200 offices that use Energy Talking Points.

And the other thing is we offer them also for them is “Energy Talking Points on Demand.” So we offer a totally free consulting service for any White House, Senate House, or Governor’s office. And again, hundreds of them take advantage of it.

Get ETP on Demand (political offices)

Our goal is: let’s just make it easy for them to do the right thing. Let’s give them all the messaging they need. We write policies, executive orders, legislation for them, personnel recommendations, everything. Because again, I want to make it easy for people to understand the truth and spread the truth.

And then finally, the thing I’m working on most right now as part of Energy Talking Points is called the Energy Freedom Platform. The goal here is to make it easy for politicians and citizens to unleash American energy.

There’s a lot of excitement right now about unleashing American energy, but it’s actually really hard to figure out: what are the policies that will unleash nuclear? What’ll unleash permitting? What’ll fix electricity? What should the government do about climate?

We spend a lot of time and a lot of money talking to the smartest people in the world, including a lot of really expensive lawyers, and working out a very detailed blueprint so that any administration or any Congress that wants to do the right thing, it’s basically for them on a silver platter.

I don’t want to get into a lot of details about how well it’s going, but it’s going really, really well. I hope the approach makes sense to you. I’m telling you about these things because I want more talented people involved in this. At minimum, please take advantage of all the free resources that we have. Another thing is if any of you have any ideas that you think could help or you want to collaborate on things, just find me or email me at alex@alexepstein.com.

Send us an idea

If any of you are interested in financially supporting what we do, we make amazing use of money, so feel free to talk to me about that.

Inquire about a financial contribution

And then most importantly, whether this applies to you or somebody else, we are hiring. So we are looking for more talent. We’re looking for design talent, product management talent, growth talent, operations talent. We’re doing a ton and we’re raising more and more money, and we want really smart people.

So if any of you are potentially looking for a job or you know of somebody else that we should meet, please come up to me and talk to me or send me an email at alex@alexepstein.com.

Inquire about a job

I believe that if we make it really easy for people to adopt pro-human thinking and to understand why fossil fuels and other cost-effective energy are here and adopt energy freedom policies, we can just make an absolutely amazing impact on the world.

Thank you very much. Questions?

Audience member 1:

Thank you very much. I’m entirely persuaded by your argument, but when I leave this environment and I go back out into the world, I’ll be inundated with media and relationships and messaging. They’re going to pull on me emotionally and have me questioning your argument.

What do you do about the emotional component of the argument, which is where most people make their decisions from?

Alex Epstein:

So I think that there’s this often this false dichotomy between being logical and emotional, and actually that’s not really how it works.

I told this story of just thinking about my son. If I think about a parent who has lack of electricity and I put myself in their position, it gets very hard not to break into tears. So that’s an emotional thing that’s also factual.

I think the key is to be able to explain the truth in a way that’s really connected to people’s values. And then where people think their values are threatened, you need to be able to explain the truth as well. For example, if you go to EnergyTalkingPoints.com and you look up extreme weather, you can see very specific points about how we’re safer than ever from extreme weather and how opposing false appeals means endangering more people.

I love the question—but it’s really a matter of having the facts and logic and then having the examples and explanations that make it emotional for people or that neutralize the negative emotion.

Audience member 2:

Things for a very interesting talk. In your argument you focus on more fossil fuels rather than more of other energy sources, say solar and wind. My question is: Are you advocating for more fossil fuels instead of other energy sources or in addition to other energy sources?

And also, on an individual by individual basis or household by household basis, do you think there’s diminishing returns from using energy, or is more always better for everyone?

Alex Epstein:

I think with both of these with these issues—to what extent do I want more fossil fuels to exclude other things and what extent do I advocate more energy—I think you really need to think of it in the context of freedom.

We’re in a situation today where if people are left free, they will use way more fossil fuels than they’re using today, particularly the developing world.

So what we have right now is the use of fossil fuels, as big as it is, it’s being currently strangled, and also actually other forms of energy are being strangled. Nuclear is being strangled, and certain aspects of solar and wind on the development side, for example, are being strangled.

What I’m ultimately for is energy freedom, which is going to lead to way more energy. And so it’s not that I want less of other forms of energy—unless they’re just subsidized and mandated, in which case they’re making us poor.

But I want a lot more energy in the world—and in terms of how much people use, they’re going to want to use a lot more to make their lives good, but ultimately that’s decided by their free choices. They have to decide how much energy you want to use versus other things. But what you see is that that’s going up, and even in the developed world it’s going up.

I actually talked about this in Fossil Future, which I wrote in 2021, but it’s now really come true. The whole data center AI world shows that we have a limitless need for beneficial knowledge, and so energy is crucial to doing that.

Basically, we need just way more energy, but I’m advocating the freedom for all forms of energy with no special preferences.

Audience member 3:

Do you think that externalities, both positive and negative, need to be incorporated into the market price for energy?

Alex Epstein:

Yes, well, I wouldn’t put it this way. And by the way, I highly encourage people to check out Fossil Future, particularly Chapter Four, which addresses this externalities thing. My argument is really a refutation of the idea that fossil fuels have huge negative climate externalities because in fact, their overall externalities on climate are to make us far safer from climate.

So if you mean we really should think systematically about the positives and negatives, yes, but unfortunately, many people who use technical terms like externalities are just being super biased, but they dress it up. So they’ll be like, “Oh yeah, externalities,” and that intimidates people. But actually you’re still making this basic error of just focusing on negatives and ignoring positives, and I elaborate on that a lot in the chapter before.

Audience member 4:

So I’m largely persuaded by your case, but there is one thing that still gives me pause, which is the danger that the “experts” are right about the amount of methane clathrate frozen in the Arctic. I worry that we could cross a threshold that would kick us into a unmitigated positive feedback for temperature, which we could not linearly extrapolate from the current warming. Can you comment on the methane clathrate issue?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, so this is a specific issue. I keep mentioning Energy Talking Points; there’s a pretty detailed examination of this there. But basically, if you actually look at the science on methane, it adds to warming, but it does not add to warming in the way that this is suggested.

Just as one final perspective that I think is useful. We’ve run the experiment of having this planet have more than 10 times more CO2 in the atmosphere than it does today, and the planet did not burn up. It was a more tropical place.

So the “danger” that we face is a more tropical planet versus a less tropical planet at a faster speed. I don’t think there’s any plausibility that we face anything dangerous, but if we do, the key is going to be abundant energy and direct climate mastery.

Maybe this is a preview of some of the other talks. If we need to, we can directly control the temperature of the planet. We know how to make it hotter. We know how to make it cooler. I don’t think we need to do that right now. We need to do that responsibly, but that’s the path to it.

There’s no path of safety of withdrawing fossil fuels given today’s economics and facts. So the solution is always better technology used better, not the withdrawal from the technology that we all need to live and flourish.

I know we’re out of time, so thank you very much. Feel free to email me at alex@alexepstein.com.

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• EnergyTalkingPoints.com: Hundreds of concise, powerful, well-referenced talking points on energy, environmental, and climate issues.

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• Speaking and media inquiries

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• Kamala Harris’s true position on fracking

• The destructive consequences to Canada and the free world of the Biden-Harris administration cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline

• The myth that fossil fuels are making us more endangered from extreme weather like hurricanes Helene and Milton

• The myth that solar and wind cheaper than fossil fuels

The full video and transcript are below.

Rita Pahahi:

Joining me now is bestselling author of Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less, energy expert, Alex Epstein.

Alex, is she or isn’t she? This is the question we’re facing. We know where Donald Trump’s energy policy lies. He’s crystal clear about what he wants to do. But with Kamala Harris’s position, well, it remains murkier. She’s long said that she wants to ban fracking. She promised to do that when she was a Democratic presidential nominee back in 2019. She said she’d ban fracking on day one. Now, she says she doesn’t want to do that. It would certainly end her chances in a state like Pennsylvania if she had that policy these days. But really, where does she sit on this crucial issue?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, I think it’s actually just really clear. Her position is “net zero by 2050,” which basically means “ban fossil fuel use by 2050,” and she supports steps to get there. And whether you ban fracking outright or just destroy fracking through a series of irrational regulations, doesn’t really matter. The goal is to destroy fossil fuels.

So one way to think of it is you can destroy fracking without banning fracking, just as Obama pledged to destroy the coal industry and largely succeeded without banning coal. You just pass other regulations that make it impossible.

Rita Pahahi:

Now, the Biden-Harris administration did straight away block their Keystone pipeline. What’s been the impact of that decision?

Alex Epstein:

This is one of the most damaging things, because if you think about the situation with Canada, Canada just has enormous, enormous, what’s called proven oil reserves. They have way more than we have in the United States. They have huge amounts of untapped production that could be a great source of oil for us in the US, very well suited to our refineries, as well as oil that could supply the free world, which we need now more than ever because we have a lot of hostile people with a lot of oil.

And instead of taking a step toward more energy trade with Canada—and we should be doing a lot more—they just destroyed it, and they destroyed it on a whim. They basically just got the State Department to destroy it after over 10 years of investment in planning. And so this not only just totally sabotaged a lot of our potential with Canada, it told everyone in industry, “you could be on the chopping block at any moment.” And so that disincentivizes investment, it creates fear. And so we haven’t even started to experience the full consequences of stopping Keystone.

Rita Pahahi:

Alex, let’s have a look at this alarmist piece published by Monash University right here in Melbourne Australia. They claim that Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene serve as a stark example of how climate change is influencing storm dynamics. They also say it demonstrates how “warmer ocean temperatures and shifting weather patterns can lead to severe in both coastal and inland communities.”

And they also wrote, “Recent extreme weather events including devastating tropical cyclones underscore the critical need for global cooperation and decisive action,” and that it highlights a disturbing trend: storms are becoming more impactful, closer to the coast. Alex, care to respond to what you’ve just heard?

Alex Epstein:

This is really damaging because the overall message here is, “Let’s get rid of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are making the climate more dangerous. If we get rid of fossil fuels, then we’re going to be safer from climate.” But if you just think for a second, have fossil fuels made us more endangered by climate or safer from climate?

You just think what was a hurricane like 100 years ago, 50 years ago, even 25 years ago compared to today, and it’s obvious—and the data bear this out—that we’re much, much safer from hurricanes and other forms of extreme weather, and fossil fuels are a huge reason why. They keep us incredibly resilient through things like heating and air conditioning, storm warning systems, evacuation systems, building sturdy buildings, etc, etc.

So we’ve become incredibly resilient to climate thanks to fossil fuels. And whatever climate affects fossil fuels have had are very hard to detect, particularly with storms.

This is why there’s no strong trend with hurricane frequency or intensity. And so they’re really just trying to make stuff up, saying like, “Oh, it develops faster here and there.”

The big picture is fossil fuels are making us safer than ever from extreme weather. And so if you’re manipulating science to tell us to get rid of fossil fuels, you’re going to make us far more endangered from extreme weather. And if you did it literally, you just destroyed the whole country because the grid can’t work without fossil fuels.

Imagine Australia without coal. That’s over half your grid. So you get rid of coal really quickly, a huge percentage of the population dies, the grid doesn’t function, you have civil war. These guys are not at all thinking through what they’re advocating—or they are and they just really hate humans.

Rita Pahahi:

Well, I think that’s at the heart of a lot of the activism we see in this area. And one of the claims we hear over and over again in this country, and I’m sure elsewhere, is that renewables are cheaper, that they actually lower energy costs, but the reality seems to be fairly different to that.

Take me through this graph you recently shared. It seems to show that places with the highest percentage of renewable use seem to be paying more for energy.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah. That’s a good description of what that shows—and we see this around the world. And Rita, I think it should be pretty obvious to somebody. Imagine I said, “Hey, Rita, I’ve got something that’s better and cheaper than the iPhone, but I’m not just going to make it and compete with the iPhone. I need you to ban the iPhone, and then give me a couple trillion dollars in subsidies, and then I promise it’ll be cheaper than the iPhone.”

Well, if it were cheaper, then you wouldn’t need to ban the competition and you wouldn’t need subsidies—so obviously it’s an inferior thing, and they’re just issuing press releases with lies.

If you’re actually better, then compete with fossil fuels on providing reliable electricity and other forms of energy—and they’re not willing to do that because the technology and economics aren’t there. And really this whole “renewable is cheaper” thing, it’s just a cover to pretend that we’re not going to experience extreme suffering from banning fossil fuels.

And what we’ve seen in Europe is just even with a little bit of restriction of fossil fuels, it creates a total energy crisis. So they should learn their lesson. And if renewables (so-called) are actually cheaper or can become cheaper, then let them compete on a real market to provide reliable energy. Otherwise, it’s obviously just a lie.

Rita Pahahi:

Now, you’ve highlighted more catastrophizing by the climate activists. It’s something that we hear daily, and it’s not new. Let’s go back 20 years to this from The Guardian in 2004 where they claimed that “climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters.” Once again, Alex, that claim has not aged too well?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah. If we actually had news, it would just constantly be telling us, “Guess what? Life is better than ever. We’re safer than ever from climate. Thank you fossil fuels. Let’s give the fossil fuel industry a medal.” That’s all we would be talking about—because we’re obviously safer from hurricanes, we’re much safer from drought, we’re safer from temperature extremes.

We should be celebrating. We’ve become incredibly resilient to climate. And whatever climate change has occurred, it hasn’t mattered that much, and we shouldn’t expect it to matter that much. Why would one or two degrees change on the Earth overwhelm the most adaptable species in the history of the planet that’s increasingly getting better at being resilient from climate?

So people are just—they’re thinking about climate like it’s the year 1300 and drought is going to be a problem versus no, we’re in the 21st century. We’re really good at dealing with climate. We’re safer than ever from climate. We’re in a climate renaissance. Let’s keep getting better at dealing with climate, and let’s keep being freer and energizing the whole world and deal with real things like 3 billion people using less electricity than a typical US refrigerator. That’s a real problem, not the weather.

Rita Pahahi:

Alex Epstein, said beautifully. Thank you so much for your time this evening.

Alex Epstein:

Thank you.

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Popular links

• EnergyTalkingPoints.com: Hundreds of concise, powerful, well-referenced talking points on energy, environmental, and climate issues.

• My new book Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less.

• Speaking and media inquiries

“Energy Talking Points by Alex Epstein” is my free Substack newsletter designed to give as many people as possible access to concise, powerful, well-referenced talking points on the latest energy, environmental, and climate issues from a pro-human, pro-energy perspective.

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Truth: Fossil fuels have made us much safer from extreme weather—and the recent hurricanes would’ve been far worse without them.

Truth: We’re experiencing unprecedented safety from extreme weather.

• Media reports would lead us to believe that hurricanes like Helene and Milton are proof that fossil-fueled “climate change” is making extreme weather much more dangerous by virtue of being more intense and/or frequent. Mainstream data and climate science show otherwise.

• Myth: We’re experiencing unprecedented danger from extreme weather.
  
  Truth: We’re experiencing unprecedented safety from extreme weather, including a huge drop in extreme weather deaths in recent decades. All media reports on extreme weather should acknowledge this, yet none do.

• You wouldn’t know it from typical media coverage, but we are far safer from extreme weather like Milton in today’s fossil-fueled world compared to the past. Climate-related disaster deaths, i.e. extreme weather deaths, are down 98% over the last century!1

  

• Myth: Extreme weather deaths may have decreased, but damages have increased.
  
  Truth: Despite many incentives for global climate-related damages to go up—preferences for riskier areas, government bailouts—GDP-adjusted climate-related damages are flat.2

  

• 3 keys to understanding climate damage statistics:
  1. Damage should be measured as percentage of GDP not compared dollar-for-dollar to a poorer past with less wealth at risk. (E.g., Miami Beach)
  2. More people today choose to live in damage-prone areas.
  3. Government bailout policies increase damage.

  

  Michael Shellenberger @ShellenbergerMD

  The increasing cost of hurricane damage can be explained entirely by more people and more property in harm’s way. Consider how much more developed Miami Beach is today compared to a century ago. Once you adjust for rising wealth, there is no trend of increasing damage.

  

  3:38 PM ∙ Oct 4, 2022

  ---

  685Likes170Retweets

• Myth: The damage of Milton shows how destructive today’s climate has become.
  
  Truth: The damage of Milton shows how wealthy and populated Florida has become.3

  

Fossil fuels have driven our record safety from extreme weather.

• Myth: Fossil fuels shouldn’t get credit for our incredible resilience to extreme weather, only blame for making weather worse.
  
  Truth: There’s definitive proof that fossil fuels drive our resilience to extreme weather, while there’s little evidence they’re making weather worse.

• Myth: Storms are a bigger danger than ever thanks to fossil fuels.
  
  Truth: Storms are a smaller danger than ever thanks to the fossil-fueled machines that build sturdy buildings, as well as fossil-fueled weather warning systems and fossil-fueled disaster relief efforts.4

  

• Myth: Floods are a bigger danger than ever thanks to fossil fuels.
  
  Truth: Floods are a smaller danger than ever thanks to fossil-fueled flood control infrastructure and disaster relief.5

  

• Myth: Fossil fuels don’t deserve much credit for plummeting climate disaster deaths; it’s “resilience.”
  
  Truth: Fossil fuel energy makes us resilient through plentiful infrastructure-building, heating and cooling, irrigation, transportation, etc.

• Myth: We don’t need fossil fuels to protect ourselves from extreme weather—we can just use alternatives.
  
  Truth: There is no near-term replacement for fossil fuels for the 1/4 of the world that uses abundant energy—let alone the 3/4 of the world that doesn’t.

• Fossil fuels will for decades remain uniquely able to provide low-cost, reliable energy to billions. That’s why fossil fuels are 80% of world energy and still growing.6

  

• An example of fossil fuels’ unique ability to power climate resilience:
  
  During the cold week that overwhelmed Texas’s solar-&-wind-favoring grid, causing blackouts, the weatherized coal-and-gas infrastructure in Alberta, Canada kept the power on in far colder temperatures.7

  

• Myth: The rich, fossil-fueled world has ruined the poor world by making it vulnerable to extreme weather.
  
  Truth: Fossil fuels have made everyone more prosperous and less vulnerable to extreme weather.
  
  To be even better off the poor world needs more fossil fuels!8

  

Truth: Fossil fuels have not had a significant impact on extreme weather.

• While there’s overwhelming evidence that fossil fuels have made billions of people much safer from the impacts of extreme weather, mainstream climate science provides little evidence that fossil fuels have made extreme weather significantly worse.

• Myth: Fossil fueled “climate change” has made storms much worse.
  
  Truth: Mainstream climate science does not indicate any alarming trends in the frequency or total energy of hurricanes and tropical cyclones, which are the typical metrics used to assess their potential danger.9

  

  

• Myth: Media claims about increasing hurricane frequency are accurate.
  
  Truth: Leading media outlets have deliberately misrepresented the flat long-term hurricane trend. E.g., the New York Times cherry-picking a starting point—the low point of 1980—to make a flat trend seem upward.10

  

  

• Leading media outlets have also deliberately ignored statements by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change about how any increases in hurricane frequency in records are likely due to increasing reporting, not actual frequency.11

  

• Here are recent data on global hurricane frequency and intensity from a 2022 paper (Klotzbach et al). Does this remotely resemble what trusted media sources tell you?12

  

  

  

• Here’s recent US data for landfalling hurricanes, both overall and major. Again, consuming the New York Times and other trusted sources would you have any idea that the data looked like this?13

  

• Myth: Fossil fuels made Hurricane Milton worse for Florida.
  
  Truth: While we can’t know exactly how Milton was different due to human climate impacts, we know that without fossil fuels Florida would be a 3rd-world place that Milton or even a weaker storm would have devastated.

• While we can’t know exactly how Milton was different because of human climate impacts, we know that without fossil fuels Florida would be a third-world place that Milton would have utterly devastated.

Truth: Fossil fuels will continue to make us far safer from storms and other extreme weather.

• Even though we’re clearly safer than ever from extreme weather and have fossil fuels to thank for it, the media pretend that any current safety will change soon because fossil fuels will make storms far worse in the future.
  
  But mainstream climate science shows nothing of the sort.

• Myth: Fossil fuels are projected to have a significant impact on storms.
  
  Truth: Even the anti-fossil-fuel IPCC estimated in its latest assessment report that a signal of human impact on tropical cyclones will not be detectable this century amid a high natural variability.14

  

• Myth: Hurricanes are expected to get more frequent as temperatures rise.
  
  Truth: Mainstream science expects that hurricanes will become less frequent as temperatures rise.15

  

• Myth: Hurricane intensity is expected to get catastrophically higher as temperatures rise.
  
  Truth: Mainstream estimates say hurricanes will be less frequent and between 1-10% more intense. This is not at all catastrophic if we continue our fossil-fueled climate mastery.16

  

Most public climate communicators fail to think about fossil fuels and extreme weather in a balanced way.

• Anyone who talks about fossil fuels or “climate change” making extreme weather worse without talking about how fossil fuels make it better does not know how to think about climate safety. Unfortunately this includes most of the media, many climate researchers, and commentators on both sides of the political aisle.

  

• Myth: Media-cited research on extreme weather is unbiased.
  
  Truth: Extreme weather research is riddled with biases. In addition to ignoring fossil-fueled climate mastery, many researchers have overtly political motives and ignore positive impacts of fossil fuels on weather.17

• Myth: Climate researchers have no political bias.
  
  Truth: Certain climate attribution “scientists” admit that they are motivated by political goals and shape their “science” accordingly. E.g., media favorite Friederike Otto wants climate research “on the offensive.”18

  

• Even though there’s no signal of significant fossil fuel impact on hurricanes, the climate catastrophist media and researchers try to still somehow blame fossil fuels for large percentages of hurricane death tolls and damages. Attempts to do so are thoroughly dishonest.

• Myth: Attributions of X% of an extreme weather event to humans are credible.
  
  Truth: Not only are many attributors clearly biased, but no precise estimate of this kind is possible given today’s climate modeling limits, where mainstream models hugely diverge from one another.19

  

• Myth: Extreme weather “attribution” researchers are simply trying to understand extreme weather and have found fossil fuels guilty.
  
  Truth: Extreme weather “attribution” only looks for negative impacts of fossil fuels on extreme weather, brazenly ignoring any avoided negative impacts.

• Note that we don’t know how many hurricanes the US East Coast and other vulnerable spots dodged or will avoid thanks to global warming. Models cannot give us this information and since it’s not a negative, no mainstream and public researcher in the field is looking for ways to find out.

• Commentators love to claim a scientific connection between hurricanes and climate change because these storms are so impactful and could help their political agenda. But hurricanes are a particularly bad example because empirical science doesn’t show a danger increase so far.20

  

• One of the few climate researchers who is openly looking at the full impact of fossil fuels on climate, including potential avoided damage, is meteorologist and hurricane expert Dr. Ryan Maue. What are the chances we see his point about avoided hurricanes in the mainstream news?

  

  Ryan Maue @RyanMaue

  Hurricane Dorian 3-years ago stalled just off the Florida coast in Bahamas & tracked north, paralleling the coast. New analysis of the event strongly suggests that climate change stopped Dorian's advance. Researchers have directly linked slowing of hurricanes to climate change.

  2:20 AM ∙ Aug 31, 2022

  ---

  81Likes25Retweets

• Myth: We can expect fossil fuels to make extreme weather far more dangerous in the future.
  
  Truth: Fossil fuels’ climate mastery benefits have far overwhelmed any negative side-effects on extreme weather for 100+ years and there’s every reason to expect this to continue.

• Myth: Rapidly eliminating fossil fuels will make us safer from extreme weather.
  
  Truth: Fossil fuels provide uniquely cost-effective energy in a world that needs far more energy. Rapidly eliminating them means far less energy, which means climate impotence—and mass death.21

• While leading scientists say that future hurricanes can become slightly stronger and less frequent, there is little evidence today of strong influence from warming so far. In any case, what we face is a level of danger that we can readily master—if we can use fossil fuels.

• Myth: When a major storm hits, politicians like Governor Ron DeSantis should commit to anti-fossil-fuel policies.
  
  Truth: That would be pseudoscientific symbolism, and make their constituents poorer and more vulnerable going forward. Like Europe, which now forces deindustrialization.

• It is absolutely shameful that Governor DeSantis's political opponents are trying to blame him for the damage of Hurricane Milton given that 1) the pro-freedom, pro-energy policies he supports lessened the damage and 2) his focus now is where it should be: hastening recovery.22

  

• Thankfully Governor DeSantis has demonstrated very good climate thinking on hurricane Milton, acknowledging that extreme weather has always been incredibly dangerous, and focusing on the increased safety Floridians are experiencing due to fossil fueled resilience measures.

• Myth: The next extreme weather event you hear about would have been much better if we had rapidly eliminated fossil fuels.
  
  Truth: We will be far safer from that event thanks to fossil fuels. And we are also alive with our current life expectancy thanks to fossil fuels.

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Michelle Hung and Steffen Henne contributed to this piece.

Popular links

• EnergyTalkingPoints.com: Hundreds of concise, powerful, well-referenced talking points on energy, environmental, and climate issues.

• My new book Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less.

• Speaking and media inquiries

“Energy Talking Points by Alex Epstein” is my free Substack newsletter designed to give as many people as possible access to concise, powerful, well-referenced talking points on the latest energy, environmental, and climate issues from a pro-human, pro-energy perspective.

Subscribe now

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Here are videos and transcripts from my segments, followed by some comments on where my perspective differs from Red Power’s.

Highlights

1. Introducing Alex Epstein

Interviewer (Michael Quinn Sullivan):

No one’s done more to explore and celebrate the rise of human prosperity and flourishing than philosopher Alex Epstein. Alex founded the Center for Industrial Progress based in Laguna Beach, California where I caught up with him recently. He’s an avowed critic of the push for so-called “net-zero carbon” policies that are used to justify attacks on reliable energy production and therefore used to push for wind and solar.

Alex Epstein:

You’re either evaluating the Earth on a pro-human standard, like human flourishing, or an anti-human standard.

Interviewer (Michael Quinn Sullivan):

In some ways it feels like the opponents of fossil fuels—it’s not so much that they hate fossil fuels, but they hate the independence and the prosperity that fossil fuels bring.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, let’s put it in the context of a term that the anti-fossil fuel people like to use, which is the “livable planet,” which is to say the reason we’re opposing fossil fuels is because we want a livable planet for our children and grandchildren, et cetera.

Now, what is a livable planet? Well, a livable planet is a planet in which the organisms you care about can flourish, which means live long lives, healthy lives.

And if you look at the planet from the perspective of livability, what you see historically is it was not a very livable place. So even as recently as 200 years ago, but going back thousands and thousands and thousands of years, life expectancy was sub 30 years.

So people were just poor and the population was very small. We had an Earth that could support a very small population, very short lives, very low standard of living, including very low opportunity. And then suddenly 200 years ago, it went from this flat stagnation to just jumping up to this incredible level of flourishing. It’s the same planet, same rock, same atmosphere.

We’ve changed the atmosphere a little bit and they said, “Well, we changed the atmosphere. It must’ve made it unlivable.” But whatever’s happened in the atmosphere, the planet has become incredibly livable. Because now we have 8 billion people who live to around 70 on average and have stratospherically high income compared to the past. And everyone should be interested in what caused this.

Interviewer (Michael Quinn Sullivan):

For Epstein, the answer is found in harnessing reliable energy to power machines that have allowed humanity to flourish. The experts promoting so-called “green energy” don’t like that.

Alex Epstein:

In particular, they have this idea that human impact can only ruin the Earth. When in fact, human impact can actually make the Earth much better. But then also it points to if they don’t acknowledge the positive impact so far, maybe they have a different definition of positive and negative than I do.

I think of positive and negative in terms of the Earth as the Earth is more conducive to human flourishing. I think their view of positive with regard to the Earth is that it has less human impact on it. So their view of the ideal Earth is the Earth that has little or no human impact. You’re either evaluating the Earth on a pro-human standard like human flourishing or an anti-human standard.

What you see really is this general incredibly negative attitude toward human impact on Earth. And what you notice is we were talking about the increase in human flourishing on Earth—from one perspective, what that means is human impact on Earth has been overwhelmingly positive. We’ve taken a planet that’s very impoverished and dangerous and made it unnaturally abundant and safe.

2. Alex Epstein on the myth that solar and wind are cheap and abundant

Interviewer (Michael Quinn Sullivan):

The myth is that wind and solar are cheap and abundant.

Alex Epstein:

Well, abundant is a very ambiguous term because there’s a question of the physical abundance of something and is it abundant or scalable as an actual usable resource? If something is expensive, it’s not abundant in terms of a resource.

If we just focus on the issue of cost, the myth is that they’re cheap, and this is done using a lot of really shameful accounting tricks. But the fundamental one is not factoring in the cost of reliability.

That’s like saying I have a car and I’m not factoring the cost of reliability, and the car only works a third of the time and you don’t know when it’s going to work. That’s not the same thing. So you’re comparing apples to rotten oranges.

3. Rep. Chip Roy and Alex Epstein on energy freedom

Rep. Chip Roy:

You know what I’d like to have in terms of solar and wind? Independence. I don’t want to be on the grid if I don’t have to be. If you don’t have full energy freedom, okay, you don’t have the engine of economic prosperity and growth. You just don’t.

Abundant reliable energy is the life for the engine of commerce that allows human beings to profit and prosper.

Alex Epstein:

They’re not offering a superior technology for customers to voluntarily choose. They’re offering a wildly inferior technology to force customers to use and prevent us from using what works.

4. Alex Epstein on energy subsidies and shackles

Alex Epstein:

Take California where we are right now. It’s not simply that they forced us to pay a bunch of money for solar and wind, particularly solar. It’s that they actually shut down major nuclear power plant near here, San Onofre. They actually shut down natural gas plants. They’re actually starting to shut down our ability to import reliable fossil fuel electricity from other places.

So the subsidies and the shackles are just incredibly... It’s just an incredibly dangerous combination because you end up not only paying more, but you have way less of it.

5. Alex Epstein on inferior energy and dependence on China

Alex Epstein:

There are many problems with China and energy. I mean, the fundamental one is that we are choosing inferior energy. That’s the number one thing because if you have inferior energy, you have an inferior economy, which ultimately means an inferior military, which means a jeopardized country.

Now on top of that, we’re choosing inferior energy that is sourced from arguably our greatest geopolitical threat, which is China. One of the justifications is we don’t want to be so dependent on the Middle East, but our dependence on the Middle East is trivial for oil compared to our dependence on China for the whole solar and wind supply chain.

So even if they were actually reliable and cost-effective, there would be concerns about where they’re coming from, but to make yourself dependent on something inferior is insane.

7. Alex Epstein on lack of energy freedom, not energy

Interviewer (Michael Quinn Sullivan):

It seems that scarcity is a feature rather than a bug for the proponents of wind and solar.

Alex Epstein:

Yes, I agree with this entirely, and I’ve always agreed with this and I’ve argued it since the beginning of my career, but it’s now becoming very apparent, because what they said at the beginning was “use our energy and you’ll be rich and we’re going to have way more energy.” And then what happens is, well, the “way more energy” doesn’t happen; it’s the opposite. Energy becomes more scarce, more expensive, less reliable.

They say, “Well, maybe you can deal with a little bit less energy.” And then you start to see they do these trial balloons like, “Well, maybe you don’t need to eat meat and maybe you can eat bugs and maybe you can live in a really small space.” And it’s trending toward “Maybe you can die.”

Interviewer (Michael Quinn Sullivan):

We’re creating our own dystopian future.

Alex Epstein:

Yes, and it’s all preventable. It’s all bad ideas. Again, we didn’t run out of energy. They used to be afraid of running out of energy. We’re just running out of freedom.

8. Alex Epstein on uninventing the reliable electric grid

Alex Epstein:

One thing I would say for Texans in particular—this applies to all Americans, but Texans in particular—is don’t lose your outrage over how abominable the energy and in particular the electricity situation is.

It is outrageous that so long after Thomas Edison gave us the modern electric grid, we can’t produce enough electricity. We basically uninvented the reliable electric grid. That is an embarrassment.

9. Alex Epstein on Texans being told to use less electricity

Alex Epstein:

We have Newsom saying, “Hey, no more internal combustion engines.” And then six days later saying, “Don’t charge your EV. We don’t have enough electricity.”

And look at Texas, I mean California, but look at Texas. How often are Texans being told use less electricity? That’s not the job of the electricity provider, to tell you to use less. It’s the job of them to give you as much as you want and need and can pay for.

My (different) take on some issues covered by “Red Power”

1. What is China’s role in our growing grid problems?

The documentary presents the perspective that China’s mendacity is a primary source of our growing grid problems.

“China helped us get hooked on expensive, inefficient energy sources that they produce so that we’ll give them money that they can use to buy food and control our power grid.”

China has “manipulated the deceitful politicians and played into the schemes of the handout-seeking corporate cronies.”

My view is that the fundamental responsibility for America’s grid problems lies with the bad ideas we’ve accepted, such as climate catastrophism, that have caused us to massively subsidize unreliable solar and wind and to, even more harmfully, shackle reliable fossil fuels and nuclear.

China has certainly capitalized on that situation by selling us what we’ve asked for. And China, to its credit, has also avoided many energy ideas. So I agree that our policies create a dangerous dependence on China and an energy disadvantage in relation to China, but this is primarily due to our acceptance of bad ideas versus China’s mendacity.

2. What is the role of “corporate greed”?

The documentary presents the perspective that “corporate greed” is a primary driver of our dependence with China for solar and wind supply chains.

“If you think American politicians have yielded too much to China’s agenda, American businesses are even worse.”

“we’ve been deceived by… corporations that put short-term profits over long-term prosperity for our citizenry.”

“corporate greed has given a global superpower unprecedented access into the very heart of our economy.”

My view is that what’s being called “greed” is substantially people responding to incentives that have been created by the aforementioned bad ideas. More broadly, businesses are trying to respond to the ever-changing incentives of our incredibly incoherent overall foreign policy toward China—where our government has no definite position if China is a friend, enemy, or somewhere in between.

3. How should we think about the “environmental impacts” of solar and wind?

The documentary points out that solar and wind, while often touted as “green” and “low-impact,” actually are significantly environmentally impactful.

“Environmental concerns and economic concerns abound about the impact of intermittent energy sources, these so-called ‘renewables.’”

“We are told that we’re supposed to fall for green energy because it’s so clean and so good for the environment. But here I am standing on a pile of windmill waste that goes on and on and on and on.”

“wind and solar… is obliterating the landscape of America.”

The validity here is that we should look at the full process of every energy source, and weigh positives and negatives. However, we should avoid just focusing on negatives of solar and wind. Above all we should certainly avoid the idea that challenges of solar and wind like land use, mining, or waste are insurmountable.

The main problem with solar and wind is that currently they’re not actually good substitutes—or in most cases even good supplements—for low-cost, reliable fossil fuel energy.

However if solar and wind actually became economically superior, then we could and should find responsible ways of doing them; we shouldn’t demonize them.

4. The role of energy subsidies and shackles

The documentary presents the perspective that subsidies for solar and wind are the worst threat to our grid.

“The issue of subsidies is at the heart of the problem facing Texas.”

“those subsidies are absolutely killing our ability to prosper by driving prices up, by making it difficult to go get oil and gas exploration”

In my view, the biggest source of our grid problems is not the promotion of solar and wind, it’s the shackling of fossil fuels.

As I explained in my recent testimony to Congress, our administration has shown us that it will do anything it can get away with politically to rapidly eliminate fossil fuels: pipeline blocking, federal leasing bans, LNG prohibitions, power plant shutdowns, EV mandates, SEC rules, etc.

In particular EPA’s recent power plant rule is literally the single greatest threat to our grid in the history of electricity, since it would ban up to 1/6 of our reliable power and prevent replacements amid an electricity crisis.

While subsidies for solar and wind are destructive, the number 1 threat to our grid is our government’s all-out war on fossil fuels.

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What follows are transcripts of questions (paraphrased for clarity and anonymity) along with my answers (edited only for clarity).

This Q&A covers:

• How “the social cost of carbon” is an inherently biased concept,

• My response to claims that the relationship between CO2 and temperature is unknowable,

• California and Germany as cautionary tales for anti-fossil-fuel policies,

• My response to claims that climate change harms polar bears,

• “Failure-worship” in the Green movement,

• My analysis of methane emissions.

(To inquire about having me speak at your event, email speaking@alexepstein.com with your desired date(s), location, and topic(s).)

Q: The “social cost of carbon” was $50/ton a few decades ago. Now they’re even saying it’s over $100/ton. But if you look at the benefits of fossil fuels, the social cost of carbon is actually negative. Could we quantify how many people would be dead right now without fossil fuels, and call it the social cost of not having carbon?

A: I work a lot in policy these days, and someone is suggesting a taskforce on the “social cost of decarbonization,” which is what you’re getting at here. The thing I want to highlight here—we can talk about how to quantify it—but one of the things that happens in this general anti-fossil fuel movement is they use very technical terminology to obscure very crude thinking errors.

For example, they use a term called “Levelized Cost of Energy.” If you’re just a lay person and you hear that Lazard has something called “Levelized Cost of Energy,” and a newspaper is reporting that it says solar and wind are cheaper, you think, “That sounds pretty intimidating to me. I can’t challenge that.”

Then if you look at it, it says that “Levelized Cost of Energy” is the cost excluding “reliability-related considerations.” It’s just a total trash metric that allows you to favorably compare unreliable energy to reliable energy because you don’t have to actually factor in the cost of making solar and wind reliable.

This is a similar issue where they are ignoring the benefits of fossil fuels, including the climate benefits. What happens is, then, if you ignore the benefits of fossil fuels, including the climate benefits, what you can then do is take climate side-effects—and even if you don’t exaggerate them, though they do exaggerate them a lot—they pretend that, “Hey, we’re going to have all these climate side-effects and we’re not going to be able to do anything about them.” Whereas in fact, any climate side-effects of fossil fuels we’ve seen so far are trivial compared to the benefits, because fossil fuels have this unique ability to cure their own side-effects, especially in climate.

Anything we do to create climate challenges, we can do far more to neutralize climate. That’s why we’re safer from climate. First of all, you would never call it the “social cost of carbon.” Notice that the whole idea of a “social cost of carbon” is just isolating a negative side-effect from a benefit—but you cannot isolate the side-effect of fossil fuels from the benefit of fossil fuels. What they’re building in there is they want you to do that, and they want to pretend that fossil fuels don’t have unique benefits.

What you actually need to do is you need to do an analysis of the relative benefits and side-effects of fossil fuels versus alternatives, and if you did that, you’d see that getting rid of fossil fuels kills everyone and using fossil fuels makes everyone’s life better.

I just want to highlight how all this technical terminology is obscuring terrible thinking. So you need to be very careful when you use it. Even saying “we should recalculate the social cost of carbon”—we shouldn’t be thinking in those terms.

It’s the same thing when people say, “Hey, let’s talk about climate change,” I never talk about “climate change,” because what people mean by “climate change” is the climate side-effects of fossil fuels. Well, I’m never just going to have a conversation about the side-effects of antibiotics. You can’t have conversations about side-effects apart from benefits, unless you’re just isolating them temporarily to study them. The whole device is to get you to deny the benefits of fossil fuels over and over.

Most of the resources we have, by the way, you can get for free on EnergyTalkingPoints.com. But one issue I have more in my book, which unfortunately you have to pay 20 bucks for, but in Chapter 4 I talk about this and other things. There’s what’s called externalities. They’re like, “Oh, negative externalities.” They have all this terminology, which is all just very crudely just looking at negative side-effects and not looking at benefits, which never makes sense, but it makes even less sense when the benefits of something cure its own side-effects.

Q: David Collum of Cornell University says that the relationship between CO2 increase and global temperature changes is too complex and unknowable. What’s your take on that?

A: He’s an interesting guy. I’ve interacted with him a little bit. Let me say one thing about this. I won’t address his exact version of the argument because I haven’t seen it, but there is a kind of argument that I don’t like, which is the idea of, “Science is always unsettled.” It’s often put this way.

People will say, “Well, climate change is settled science,” and then somebody will say, “Well, science is always unsettled.” What does it mean, science is always unsettled? In the sense of, you’re open to new ideas—but we have to make decisions, including policy decisions, based on our understanding of how the world works. We make it based on gravity, we make it based on the science of guns killing people and stuff like that, and if you have a nuclear weapon in your backyard, you’re not really allowed to do that, and that’s based on the current understanding of nuclear weapons. “The science is unsettled”—maybe the nuclear weapon, if it goes off, will make you really healthy or something.

You have to go on what the best evidence we have at a given time is. When people say, “Oh, the science is unsettled, etc, etc,” it gives way too much credit to the other side, because it makes it seem like the best evidence we have is that fossil fuels are making the climate unlivable, whereas all the evidence we have is that they’re making it livable.

In terms of Collum’s point, the complexity we have is that the cause is going both ways, as far as we can tell historically. So historically, temperature increases CO2, and CO2 can increase temperature to a certain degree, and there are all sorts of other things going on. If you look historically, Al Gore will show you this thing of “Look, the CO2 went up and the temperature went up,” but historically, it’s actually the CO2 went up after the temperature went up. It’s actually that the temperature went up and warmed the oceans and then the CO2 evaporated.

More recently, despite what people say, the warming has trailed the CO2. There are physical reasons for both of these, and there are lots of other things. So in the sense of: is it too complex for us to really predict exactly? Yes. But I don’t think that means somebody can’t say at least a plausible range of, “We think it’ll warm this much.” And we should think about it.

And my view is that the range of plausible things people can think about, none of them really create problems, so we shouldn’t be very alarmed. But if somebody, given the current state of science, said, “You know what? There’s a possibility hurricanes are going to be 10 times more intense,”I would listen to that. I wouldn’t say, “Well, we can’t really know exactly.”

So, he’s definitely right technically, but sometimes even when you have an imperfect understanding, you need to make decisions.

Q: What do you think the future of Colorado’s oil and gas industry will look like if Colorado keeps following in the footsteps of California?

A: At this point, I know a lot of people in oil and gas, and it’s funny, when you talk to the CEOs, there’s a sympathy continuum and it’s highest in California, and then Colorado, and then maybe New Mexico. In Texas it’s like, “Oh, great, you just got a permit in three days. There’s no problem.”

What happens is at first they try to be careful about when they’re restricting development. They try to do this “perfect” amount where they can still have the golden goose, but also symbolically be against it. But then either the same person is compelled to move in a certain direction or a new person comes in who doesn’t know. What gets scary is as long as you have the same intellectual trends, you don’t really ratchet back. Once you have one person who starts ruining it, it doesn’t really go back and improve, it just keeps getting worse, and you have to worry about the next person who’s going to make it worse.

Polis is really bad, but I’m sure there’s somebody worse. He’s not an idiot. He’s actually smart in ways, I think—but he’s really bad.

Is he as bad as Newsom? Even Newsom is not insane in ways that some of the council people in California are. What you see in California is Southern California is the most geologically explored place in human history. I believe it’s Los Angeles County, I think it’s Los Angeles County, they just said, “We’re getting rid of the rest of our oil development.” They have this whole history, most people don’t even know that they have buildings and they have oil derricks and buildings to hide them from people and stuff. And now they’re just saying, “Let’s just get rid of all of them.” That’s just a long way of saying that the fact that the state depends on it is not nearly as effective as you would like in leading them not to destroy it.

New Mexico will be the most interesting because it is so dependent—the most dependent—on oil and gas, and they have so much hostility. At the moment, as far as I can tell, the governor’s view is, as far as I’ve heard her say is, “I hate oil and gas, but we really need you guys right now.” That’s not a very stable position to be in, but that seems to be the position.

That’s a case where either you need to elect people who are friendly, or you really need to do more cultural/political advocacy. That’s a case where you really need to change the cultural environment. It’s not like you say, “Hey, Jared Polis, go talk to Alex Epstein. Here’s his phone number. He’ll help you liberate oil and gas.” He doesn’t want to do that. And I don’t know how to fix that, except through getting the people very upset.

I would say use California as a cautionary tale. I would also focus on the electricity side of it. You’re also seeing this in Colorado where the mistakes there lead to the most obviously catastrophic consequences in terms of having statewide blackouts in 2020 and that kind of thing. That’s definitely where a lot of these states are headed. The problem with it is that with electricity, it’s not like you just lose X percent of revenue, it’s that you lose the entire functioning of the system.

We’re really in this interesting period where nationally we’re having this crazy situation of we have an organic increase in demand for electricity through AI and data centers, we have artificial increase in electric demand from EV mandates, and then we have an artificial decrease in reliable supply thanks to the administration and then thanks to governors like Newsom and Polis.

It’s just this absolute train wreck, worse than a train wreck, ready to happen. And that I think is the easiest thing to warn people about, because you can show them. That’s where California I think is the best example. Gavin Newsom says, “No more internal combustion engines. You have to use EVs.” Literally six days later says, “Don’t charge your EVs. We don’t have enough electricity.”

I always focus on electricity as my first example because it’s the one that’s most stark to people. In California, there is a great failure case, unfortunately.

Q: Why don’t fossil fuel advocates use Germany more as an example of solar and wind failing to replace fossil fuels?

A: It’s being more and more used. What is interesting is when I started debating people on these issues, Germany used to be their success case, even when it was failing at the beginning. By the way, we should take maximal advantage of all the stupid policy decisions and bad outcomes that have already happened to preempt future ones.

Germany is a great example. Germany, California, all of these different examples, they should be used all the time. I’m totally in favor of using them. Sometimes people have this attitude that, “You know what? We just have to let things get really bad, and then people will wake up.” Unfortunately when things get really bad, A) they got really bad and that’s bad, since this means people suffered and died. And B) the people who caused it don’t usually admit it was their fault.

Even in Germany—I was talking to some people in Congress who went over in a delegation there. They went over to Germany and they just thought Germany was just going to be apologizing and saying, “You know what? You Americans were right.” But Germany was like, “No, we’ve been right all along. We should be doing more of this.” The people with the correct interpretation need to be sounding a warning at every increment of destruction and drawing on these examples.

We already have plenty of grid problems to show that the green agenda is bad. We don’t need more grid problems to show this, we need more awareness of what’s happening. By the way, one way to take advantage of this is to not just consider things bad—we should consider things bad and treat them as bad, not just if thousands of people die—we should consider them bad if we regress at all.

One thing I’ve convinced some politicians to say, particularly in Texas, is that you guys should be embarrassed that you’ll have 30 days in a row where your electric utilities tell you, “Use less electricity.” Thomas Edison would be so ashamed of the industry. We uninvented the reliable electric grid.

We need to be ashamed that we are having problems with reliable electricity in this day and age. In the fifties, they thought we were going to be having flying cars, not that we would have insufficient electricity. We should already be alarmed going backwards. It’s like the iPhone 16 is like the Motorola Razr. That’s what’s happening, and we should be outraged about it. All the bad stuff is plenty for us to be upset about and change people’s opinions.

Q: I think many of us have seen videotapes of polar bears, the ice floe breaking up and they don’t have any place to go. How do you respond to that kind of imaging?

A: Well, it’s an interesting thing. I’ll say how I’d respond to it in a second—but it captures my point that people aren’t really thinking of the world from a human perspective when there’s a lot more focus on, “This polar bear lost his piece of ice,” than three billion people have almost no electricity. It’s an interesting focus that that’s the thing. Most people have no intention of ever seeing a polar bear, don’t know anything about polar bears. In other languages they’re called water bears; they don’t just need ice, they’re in water all the time.

The whole thing with polar bears, one is valuing human beings above polar bears is morally problematic. The second thing is, insofar as human beings value polar bears, having a high-energy world that is slowly warming is way better for polar bear populations than having a slightly colder world with no resources. The more resources we have, the more we can preserve and protect any species that we care about.

There’s this meme—I don’t know if you’ve seen this meme, but it’s a good meme that flows around, and I forget the exact numbers—but it’s Al Gore. it’s a polar bear and Al Gore. He says, “When Al Gore was born, there were 5,000 of us. Only 25,000 remain.”

They’re a dramatically increasing population. This is the thing, of course they don’t give you that context. So the easy thing is, yes, we’ve had more polar bears, but the more important thing is when you have energy, fossil fuels enable you to do virtually anything you want to make the world better, including if you care about polar bears, to increase polar bear populations.

Again, I don’t think most of the people opposing fossil fuels really care about polar bears. It’s a symbol of “evil human beings had an impact on nature.”

Sometimes there is a man-made change that on its own is adverse, but we could counteract it. Other times, at least in my understanding with for example the caribou, and it certainly often happens with marine life, is often other life likes us.

One of the fallacies of “human impact is bad” is that human impact is always bad for the rest of nature. That’s a ridiculous bias. Why would you assume that? In general, human activities, what do we do? One of the conspicuous things they do is they create warmth. The world is too cold for almost everything. When things are warm, organisms go to them. By the way, we create warmth and we create a lot of new raw material, and often raw materials are in short supply. You’ll see birds will use our material and other things use our material. Even things like waste, what we consider waste, many forms of life thrive on it.

If you’re thinking about parts of non-human nature that we value, which I think all of us do in various ways, you need to think about 1) energy allows us to pursue all of those things much more than we otherwise could, and 2) you cannot assume that our impacts, even our inadvertent impacts, are bad. You have to look at it clinically.

Again, with polar bears, people just assume, “Oh, we made it warmer. Obviously all the polar bears died. I don’t even need to look into the numbers,” versus, “No, actually there are more of them than in a long time, and actually people are having a lot of problems with them.” And guess what? The people who claim to care about them are not remotely concerned about the problems they’re causing.

Q: Could it be that the thinking within the Green movement, which seems so detrimental to their own well-being, reflects a form of self-loathing?

A: It is, but I think the key to it psychologically is a lot of people are willing to accept a certain amount of self-loathing if they get to engage in greater amounts of other loathing.

You could watch these videos of me at these climate protests, and these are very unpleasant human beings to deal with in most cases. It’s not very happy and friendly. They would never say, “I’m so virtuous.” It’s much more like, “I’m less bad.”

Their focus is on you guys or me—they’re associating me with a fossil fuel industry. They’re like, “You guys, you fat cats”—sometimes they’ll do it about the 1%, but it’s always people who are successful—they’re like, “You guys are evil. And yes, I’m evil, I’m bad, but you guys are really evil.”

There’s a lot of things that can be challenging and insecurities and stuff like this. One way people deal with that is they find ways to feel better than others. And one way is you can try to have a positive view of the other and an even more positive view of yourself, but sometimes that’s very implausible. So maybe what you can do instead is you can have a negative view of yourself, but an even more negative view of another person. The green movement is the perfect vehicle for this kind of thing because anyone who is successful has an impact, and if impact is evil, then the person who does nothing has less impact than the person who does a lot. It’s a perfect morality for failures to feel superior. So yes, the self-loathing and other-loathing is very important.

Q: What is your stance on the newer topic of methane emissions?

A: When you burn fossil fuels, it creates these greenhouse gases, and the main one is CO2, then the second most significant one is called methane. It’s a CH4—one carbon, four hydrogens—and that’s basically what natural gas is. But instead of the natural gas burning and generating CO2, it’s basically a natural gas in the atmosphere.

What people like to say is, “It’s 40 times more powerful than CO2” and things like this. But the same basic analysis applies, that the warming effect of methane is not that significant relative to how much is emitted. My basic analysis is the same. I don’t really say anything different about methane because it’s basically if you look at all the greenhouse gases and the amount of warming they cause and are expected to cause, that’s not that big a deal, so you should not be restricting energy based on that.

Just some facts about methane that are important though is people say it’s more powerful, but we emit much less of it and it disappears from the atmosphere much more quickly. Actually the real challenge of CO2, insofar as there’s a challenge, is that it sticks in the atmosphere for a long time. Most things we emit just enter in and out really quickly. Most particulate pollution doesn’t last that long, but CO2 aggregates. Methane gets cleared a lot more quickly.

So in a sense, if you’re concerned about warming long-term, methane is less concerning. You get rid of the “problem” more easily. The main thing is it’s not that much warming, and energy is what matters, not small changes in the climate.

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• EnergyTalkingPoints.com: Hundreds of concise, powerful, well-referenced talking points on energy, environmental, and climate issues.

• My new book Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less.

• Speaking and media inquiries

“Energy Talking Points by Alex Epstein” is my free Substack newsletter designed to give as many people as possible access to concise, powerful, well-referenced talking points on the latest energy, environmental, and climate issues from a pro-human, pro-energy perspective.

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Share Energy Talking Points by Alex Epstein

Watch my testimony and Q&A here, or read the transcript below.

Alex Epstein:

Thank you. My name is Alex Epstein. I’m a nonpartisan philosopher and energy expert. I’m very grateful today to share with members of both parties my analysis of what I call government-dictated green energy, which is the essential energy policy of the Biden-Harris administration and of much of today's world.

The basic idea of government-dictated green energy is that the government should force us to rapidly reduce our use of fossil fuel energy and replace it with so-called “green energy,” mostly solar and wind, such that we reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 at the latest. 

There are three basic truths you need to know about the costs of government-dictated green energy. And I think these are really under-appreciated even by critics.

One is they have been enormous so far.

Two is they would have been catastrophic had it not been for the resistance of their opponents. This is very important when you hear the Biden administration has record production. That’s in spite of them, not because of them.

And three, they will be apocalyptic if not stopped in the future.

So let’s talk about the cost so far of government-dictated green energy. All the energy related problems we have experienced in recent years, which have been a lot: high gasoline prices, higher heating bills, higher electricity bills, and unreliable electricity, which is a huge problem we need to talk much more about, are the result of government-dictated green energy.

And its very simple. When you shackle the most cost effective and scalable source of energy, fossil fuels, and you subsidize unreliable solar and wind, that wouldn’t otherwise be competitive, energy necessarily becomes more expensive, less reliable and less secure. So again, it’s very simple.

Unfortunately the current administration and many others are engaged in a denial campaign blaming our energy problems on everything but their own policies.

And then their main targets for blame are Putin, which is a factor, but a derivative factor, and then industry greed, which is a lie. High fossil fuel prices are not a Putin price hike. They’re caused fundamentally by government-dictated green energy.

What happened is they made fossil fuel prices artificially high before Putin’s war, and they made our capacity much less than it should have been. They prevented the free world from quickly increasing production like it could have if we had actually had what I call energy freedom.

And high fossil fuel prices have certainly not been determined by greed, including so-called price gouging, which is a big focus right now.

Prices are determined by supply and demand. If oil and gas companies could control energy prices in their favor, why didn't they do this from 2015 to 2020 when they were losing money? The truth is that government-dictated green energy policies are fundamentally responsible for all the energy related costs we experience today compared to a decade ago.

And in fact, it’s worse than that. There’s an opportunity cost. Because were it not for these policies, energy would have gotten considerably cheaper and more reliable, especially with lower natural gas prices, which should have lowered electricity prices. Instead, they’ve gone up because we’ve added a bunch of wasteful energy and unreliable stuff. And it gets worse, since energy is the industry that powers every other industry. By making energy more expensive and less reliable, we make everything more expensive and less reliable, which means government-dictated green energy drives price inflation. Very important point.

But even blaming Biden-Harris’s government-dictated green energy policies and those of other countries for all the energy-related costs we experienced today, including inflation, is not enough, because we have to recognize that these policies would have done far more damage had they not been vigorously opposed.

In action after action, unfortunately, the Biden administration has shown us that it will do anything it can get away with politically to rapidly eliminate fossil fuels. So pipeline blocking, federal leasing bans, LNG prohibitions, power plant shutdowns, EV mandates, SEC rules.

Now, most of what this administration has tried to do to rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use has thankfully been slowed by opposition. So Congressional battles, lawsuits over power plant shutdowns, courts reversing illegal leasing bans, etcetera.

But without this opposition, they would have already caused energy ruin. Consider our failing grid. We desperately need more reliable power plants, given huge demand from AI and EVs, which, that’s artificial demand mostly from the administration, but our EPA has tried to shut down all coal, which is one sixth of reliable capacity.

Were it not for the opponents of this administration’s government-dictated green energy policies, we’d already have a third-world grid. So, you have to think about the real cost.

I hope you can understand why I’m so concerned about our energy future. The costs of government-dictated green energy have been enormous and would have been truly catastrophic had this administration done everything it wanted to. 

Here’s what scares me most. Our administration and others promised to rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use to reach net-zero by 2050.  But so far, they’ve only managed to slow fossil fuels’ growth. They haven't reduced it, they’ve just slowed its growth. And just that has caused an energy crisis. What happens if we really start going net-zero, which is the promise ahead of us?

Just think about agriculture. Our ability to feed 8 billion people is dependent on natural gas for fertilizer and diesel for farm equipment, neither of which has a near-term scalable substitute that's not fossil fuel.

Government-dictated green energy unopposed would starve much of the world. And I’ll just say as I conclude, there is an alternative to government-dictated green energy: energy freedom, which means the freedom to produce and use all sources of energy so long as they are subject to reasonable protections against pollution and other forms of endangerment.

And that’s really going to be the key to having energy abundance and resilience to climate in the near future and energy innovation, including among alternatives, long term.

Whatever party you’re from—again, I don’t affiliate with either party—I want to help you fight for energy freedom and I welcome your questions.

Representative Jodey Arrington (R, TX-19):

Let me, let me move to Mr. Epstein because this is a sincere, issue that I’ve mulled over ever since I read the Green New Deal plan and what I believe is a very extreme response to a very modest change in the climate in terms of temperature. The premise it seems like for my colleagues is as follows: climate change is significant, the consequences are catastrophic and in the near term, and we need massive government intervention or we’re going to destroy the planet. Therefore, it is the greatest existential crisis.

Never once in my entire career at a town hall anywhere has anybody raised the issue of the threat of climate. They’ve raised a lot of threats, a lot of them that Ms. Jackson mentioned, like this inflation tax that is regressive and hurting working people more than any single issue. They can’t even think beyond that because they’re trying to survive, which is why we have the highest consumer debt in history, the highest credit card debt in history.

It's real. The facts support that. Is this the right way to, I mean, is that premise accurate? Is that the right way to frame this? Because they may argue, yes, it’s painful. Yes, prices are going up, but we’re saving the planet, and we’re saving America from this existential threat. What do you, what do you say, Mr. Epstein?

Alex Epstein:

So I hope we get asked more about this, because I only have a little bit of time. I think the key to thinking about this is, the premise is that fossil-fueled climate change has been catastrophic so far and will be apocalyptic going forward. And to evaluate predictions about the future, I always look at their track record.

It is false that climate change is catastrophic so far, and we can measure this very clearly because we can measure how many people die from climate-related disasters, and that number not only hasn’t increased, it has decreased by a factor of 50, so a 98 percent decrease over the last century.

The basic mechanism is very simple. Any new climate challenges that have been caused by rising GHG emissions, and I think there are some particularly heat-related, they have been overwhelmed by our increased resilience, or what I call climate mastery. So the challenges, whatever they have been, are trivial compared to the increase in mastery.

If you try to think about the future of climate and you don’t recognize that we’re getting better and better at dealing with all kinds of climate disasters and climate challenges, then you can’t think about this issue intelligently.

So people say “climate change is real.” Yes, we do have an impact on climate, but equating that with climate catastrophe is wrong.

And then saying that the US, which is one seventh of the world’s emissions and has no control over global emissions, except for legitimate innovation, not government-dictated nonsense, but legitimate innovation like nuclear, to say that we’re going to save the planet.

A, the planet doesn’t need saving.

And B, it’s a farce that you're going to do it by forcing people to use a bunch of junk and then restricting our ability.

So I consider the whole IRA just ridiculously dishonest. I think that if they were honest, they would say, hey, we, everyone needs to be poor to avoid climate catastrophe. If they said that, I would take it seriously.

Representative Tom McClintock (R, CA-5):

Mr. Epstein, the ranking member boasts that American production is up. But doesn't production take years to bring online? And the production today was made possible by the regulatory relief under Trump.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, so I mean, it’s really simple.

Joe Biden ran on, “I guarantee you we're going to end fossil fuel,” and as I said, has done everything he could get away with to restrict production.

The fact that it’s gone up is obviously in spite of him, not because of him. He didn’t promise record oil production; it’s just something he wants to take credit for, much like President Obama.

Representative Tom McClintock (R, CA-5):

They keep telling us oil production is evil.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah. So it’s opportunistic. I don’t know if I can comment on California, but I’m a Californian.  Is that okay? 

Representative Tom McClintock (R, CA-5):

Yes.

Alex Epstein:

Oh, okay. I want to give people a resource, by the way, because there have been many false claims made today. And I looked at Mr. Higgins’ testimony last week. If people just go to alexepstein.substack.com, I refuted 12 of the myths that he said, I think, last week, which he also said today. And if you also go there, look up “every myth about net-zero refuted,” and you'll basically cover everything that's been said.

California, that report he mentioned by energy innovation, that is a total trash report. They excluded California and they blame California energy prices on climate change. You know that’s not true. And also our wildfire problems are because of green policies that prevent us from doing proper forest management to reduce the fuel load. It’s very easy to manage forests well. We don’t do it because of green policies. So California, which is a pretty self-contained grid, although we depend on a bunch of others, that’s a model of “green energy.”

Representative Ron Estes (R-KS 4):

Mr. Epstein, how is energy freedom, which encompasses an all-of-the-above, more beneficial to the US consumers?

Alex Epstein:

Well, I would think of energy freedom as a best-of-the-above approach, not an all-of-the-above approach. I don’t really like the idea of all-of-the-above.

We don’t want to use anything that happens to exist. We don’t want to use wood and animal dung for electricity, right? So I think it’s important.

With energy freedom, all the sources would be allowed to compete, but they would have to compete in a fair way. And so, for example, with wind and solar, it’s really important that they be required in some way to provide reliable electricity.

Right now, they’re allowed to provide unreliable electricity and get the same amount or more than reliables. That's like a car rental company that rents you cars that work a third of the time and you don't know when. And you pay the same as for a reliable car; that would never work in rental cars.

So energy freedom allows you to have maximum energy abundance now and maximum energy innovation going forward. And I think both parties want energy innovation. You need to get the government out of the way with things like NEPA just ruining development of all kinds. You need to get the EPA to stop attacking things. You need to reform the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

If we want innovation, we need to focus on freedom not on subsidizing things and robbing Americans.

And as you noted before that, even having solar and wind, you also have to provide a base percentage to compensate for the time when they're not producing.

Yeah. So you better make sure they’re cost-effective. We need grid reform so that people are actually incentivized to provide reliable electricity.

Representative Ron Estes (R-KS 4):

Great. And I appreciate y’all being here. We’re talking about, it’s so important to be able to talk about energy because that drives the economy. It drives, it drives our civilized life that we live today. So thank you all for today and I'll yield back Mr. Chairman.

Representative Scott Peters (D-CA 50):

I agree with Mr. Epstein on a couple things he just said.

And in fact, we’re going to face higher prices, in large part because of the demand pull, from the first increase in demand for energy we’ve seen in decades. We have been growing, but we've been efficient, so we haven’t needed big production increases.

Now we’re going to see a greater demand for energy because of manufacturing returning to the United States, somewhat because of the IRA, because of electrification, and because of the demand from AI for huge amounts of electricity. In fact, I heard the Microsoft facility for AI might require itself 5 gigawatts, which is bigger than the whole complex of nuclear power we just built in Georgia.

So this is a challenge for all of us, but let’s just recognize that we’ve never produced more oil and gas than we are today, despite the rhetoric either from the Biden administration or about the Biden administration.

Also, I couldn’t agree more we've done work on increasing the production of nuclear power, that’s been bipartisan. I'm working really hard to get NEPA out of the way. I agree with you, I think it's been a huge delaying effect with, with not the kind of environmental quality results we need.

And we need to reform the grid. I would just say, too, the problem I’ve had with the grid here is I can’t get Republicans interested in talking about transmission, interregional transmission. We couldn’t even have a hearing in the Energy and Commerce Committee. I’d love to have to do that bipartisan way. We’ve seen the Republicans in the way of transmission reform, but we all need to be in this together.

The other thing I’d just point out is that we are going to see the cost of climate change also affect consumers and recent studies found that the global cost of climate change stemming from extreme weather, natural disasters, the effects of a warming planet could reach 3.1 trillion a year by 2050.

So that includes costs of damage to infrastructure, property and public health, and these costs will only increase over time as the destruction from climate change becomes more severe. We’ve got to respond to that. I think the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act do try to do some of that and try to increase new technologies through subsidies in clean energy. I think that’s appropriate as these technologies are getting off the ground, because we do want, not all-of-the-above as you said, but we want many-of-the-above, and some of them won't get started on their own.

I would also point out wildfires have already burned over 6 million acres this year and as wildfire season continues, it's clear that the time for action is now.

That’s continuing to raise the cost of living, the cost of healthcare, lower the quality of life for my constituents. Earlier this year, insurance rates for California homeowners increased by an average of 34%. Utility wildlife prevention and mitigation costs are nearing 5 billion a year.

So I would point out that solutions exist. Our bipartisan Fix Our Forests Act will restore forest health, increase resilience to catastrophic wildfires and protect communities by enabling landscape scale work to increase the pace and effectiveness of forest management and restoration projects.

Representative Glenn Grothman (R-WI 6):

I’d like to talk a little bit, whichever one of you feels most appropriate to speak on the cost of electric cars and the effect it’s going to have on the middle class. One of you feels like a champion of that? Okay, good. I think there are three things that go into the cost of a car. What is the effect of this demand that we buy these electric cars as far as the initial price of a car?

Am I going to have to pay more for a new car than I did my last car if I buy it in 2023?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, I mean, it’s pretty obvious the reason they need to force it on us is because we wouldn’t buy it voluntarily. So that means it’s not the most cost-effective option. So, yeah, it increases the cost and it decreases the effectiveness. So for many families, it's not nearly as versatile as a gasoline car.

Representative Glenn Grothman (R-WI 6):

Well, you’ve got the cost up front, and I, as I understand it, talking to my auto dealers, 20, 25,000 more for my next car than the car I just got if I got to buy electric.

Alex Epstein:

Well, there’s that, but then there’s many hidden costs. Texas Public Policy Foundation did a good study which shows 10,000 to 20,000 dollars of us subsidizing per car. So these are incredibly subsidized through all sorts of things like zero-emissions credits. And yeah, so we’re just paying a fortune for these things directly and indirectly.

Representative Glenn Grothman (R-WI 6):

I really don’t like the way they’re trying to squeeze the middle class.

Representative Bob Good (R, VA-5):

Thank you particularly, Mr. Epstein, for your incredible leadership and expertise on this issue…

Mr. Epstein, you often talk about the concept of energy poverty or the difficulty of some people, and Ms. Jackson has spoken to this as well, to afford the most basic of their energy needs, whether it’s domestically or internationally and how much that hurts people.

Well, can you just speak a little bit more to that, Mr. Epstein, and then I’d like Ms. Jackson to speak to it as well?

Alex Epstein:

This is a problem globally and in the US. Energy poverty basically means you can’t afford to use a lot of energy. And you need to use a lot of energy to have a modern life, to have abundant food, clothing, shelter, medical care, et cetera.

Every single thing we do to restrict the availability of energy—and as I mentioned, by, restricting fossil fuels and by forcing us to pay money for uneconomic alternatives, both of those restrict the availability of energy—we make every single person poorer in the world, really, but particularly the poorest people feel it the most.

And I just want to give a mention of, we have three billion people in the world using less electricity than a typical American refrigerator. We have 6 billion people who use an amount of energy, people in this room would consider totally unacceptable. The world is desperately poor, and what they want to do is rise out of poverty, and that requires energy.

And for the foreseeable future, that means we need more fossil fuels. That’s why I said to one of the representatives, we need more fossil fuels, not less. That’s what I talk about in Fossil Future. So, it’s just crazy to think we’re sacrificing billions of people's opportunities in the name of preventing a degree or two of warming, when we’ve already shown we're incredibly good at dealing with a warmer planet.

And by the way, far more people still die of cold than of heat. There’s nothing to say even a warmer planet is worse, objectively. But, a warmer planet with abundant energy is a great planet. A colder planet, or the same planet with no energy is a terrible planet.

Representative Bob Good (R, VA-5):

It’s my understanding that burning wood actually is producing more energy on the planet still than solar and wind does. 

Alex Epstein:

They juice up renewable numbers using that. They want to say X percent renewable. They like to add hydro even though the green movement is anti-hydro, anti-large-hydro. And yet in Europe often they juice up the renewable numbers by, they often buy wood pellets from America, take them across the  sea with oil, and then they burn them there and they call that renewable.

Representative Bob Good (R, VA-5):

So oil tankers going across the ocean to…

Alex Epstein:

With wood made using diesel equipment in the United States. So this just points to a lot of this is a scam. If you think CO2 emissions are a grave threat, then you have to recognize the only way to deal with that is to make people poorer.

But we have to have an honest conversation. You can’t say we’re going to restrict fossil fuels, we’re going to force you to use uneconomic things, and you’re going to become rich. Let alone do it randomly to various cronies, which is what the IRA did. So it’s a very dishonest conversation right now.

Representative Bob Good (R, VA-5):

And nothing has brought more prosperity and industry to the world than fossil fuels.

In a wealthy country like the United States, which is harmed by these ridiculous unrealistic policies, far worse for third-world countries, poorer nations, who we pretend we want to help as we try to force upon them our woke policies.

Representative Chip Roy (R, TX-21):

Mr. Epstein, you know, a lot of things are being said and we can go through a refute of, you wisely noted, you went through some refutations.

I can’t go through it all. But I think it’s important for people to understand the context that we’re operating under. We have China where, to the best of my rough knowledge, they have something like 1100 coal fired plants, and they’re building maybe a plant, plant and a half, or two plants a week, depending on the time of year. Is that roughly correct?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, they have something like 300 new plants in the pipeline, which is way more than the US’s total capacity.

Representative Chip Roy (R, TX-21):

Correct. And we have basically zero coal-fired plants in the pipeline.

Alex Epstein:

We have negative coal plants in the pipeline, which is an existential threat to the grid.

Representative Chip Roy (R, TX-21):

Correct. And we have limited natural gas plants in the pipeline because, and this is important, the subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, those subsidies, among other policies, are making it economically less feasible for people to invest in the production of natural gas in the market. Is that correct?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, so we have systematic preferences for unreliable electricity and the IRA made that considerably worse. 

Representative Chip Roy (R, TX-21):

And so even in Texas, which sits on a sea of available natural gas to be able to produce natural gas fired energy, Texas, putting aside the barriers to nuclear, which we ought to be talking more about, by the way, as well, and you speak about it regularly in Texas, we have to have the government of Texas already under strain, having spent 13 billion to make up for a federal government that refuses to secure the border.

The government of Texas is having to itself create natural gas production wisely or not. That’s a debate through its government action without relying on the market because the market has been constrained by these subsidies. Is that correct?

Alex Epstein:

Mostly, I mean, Texas has some responsibility itself because it has its own kind of isolated market with ERCOT, yeah, but if you look at the effect, just to elaborate a little bit on what you said like when you when you basically rob American taxpayers and require them to pay for solar and wind, what happens is people just always use solar and wind whenever it’s available and that depletes the funds available to natural gas plants. So then you need to do another artificial intervention. So the key is get rid of all the preferences for unreliable electricity, and then real electricity will win. 

Representative Chip Roy (R, TX-21):

Moving really quickly to the vehicles. The tailpipe rule. The tailpipe rule has been put in effect, and that will have, in effect, the requirement that we be producing, effectively, two thirds of the vehicles in this country be EV by 2032. Correct?

Alex Epstein:

Yes.

Representative Chip Roy (R, TX-21):

Roughly, the impact on the average American family of that rule, what would that do in terms of cost of vehicles, cost of existing internal combustion engine vehicles, used market or new, availability of vehicles, particularly with the lack of infrastructure and materials in the States, which I'll get to in a minute, what would be the impact of that?

Alex Epstein:

So just, just really quickly, it forces people to pay for more expensive vehicles.

People don’t realize how much they’re paying with the subsidies, in part because the internal combustion engine vehicles end up subsidizing the EVs. So there’s that whole thing. I think the biggest cost that we haven’t covered yet is the cost to the grid, because we’re artificially restricting the supply of reliable electricity, as I mentioned, with shutting down coal plants and new EPA rules would just destroy the grid.

So we really need to prevent those because they prevent new natural gas plants from being built to replace coal. But we’re talking about a grid that’s already in crisis, thanks to government-dictated green energy. We’re talking about forcing EVs, so you artificially restrict supply, you dramatically artificially increase demand.

That is just a guaranteed death sentence for the grid. We need to stop that immediately.

Representative Lloyd Smucker (R, PA-11):

And Mr. Goode is a good friend, but he said something to the effect, Mr. Epstein, that well, if folks here are saying that there’s nothing like climate change, we shouldn't even have this conversation. And it’s what I've heard so often, sort of the arrogance of individuals who believe that you really can’t even question any of the dogma around climate change.

I didn’t hear you say that climate change doesn’t exist. What I heard you say was that it's about the impact of climate change, how much that will impact us, and then how much resilience we will have to do that. So you know, just simply shutting down the conversation when someone doesn’t agree. It just seems pretty bizarre to me.

And I guess I’d like you to address that. We’ve heard a lot of claims here about how by 2050, you know, we’re going to see the food supply impact that we already talked about, wildfires, I know that hurricanes have been attributed to climate change, but that’s been debunked. So I guess I’d like to get your perspective on that statement that was made earlier and on the kind of feedback you get on your positions.

Alex Epstein:

Sure. So, yeah, I think it’s valuable here, I’m a philosopher and energy expert. So part of this is just the terminology and the arguments are very bad. So we want to be very precise. So, when people say climate change, what they mean is man-made climate impact. That's really what they’re focused on. And that's fine, and that’s a legitimate thing to focus on, but what that is, is that is primarily a side-effect of fossil fuel use, right.

So we burn fossil fuels, we add more CO2 to the atmosphere, and it has some effect on climate. We can’t quantify it perfectly, but it has some, and it’s generally a warming effect. And it’s important, if you think about it as a side effect of fossil fuel use, then you need to think both about the benefits of fossil fuels and about the side-effect. And with the side-effect itself, you need to be precise. So you mentioned you need to be clear about the magnitude. And you need to be even-handed. You can’t just look at negative side effects. You have to look at positive. For example, more warmth in a world where far more people die of cold than of heat.

The problem with the discussion is it's so biased. It only looks at negative side-effects of fossil fuels. It ignores the climate benefits directly. It ignores what I call the climate mastery or resilience benefits, so the fact that we’re far more resilient. And as I mentioned, this shows up very clearly in the fact that we’re far safer from climate than ever.

You can believe in climate impact and not believe in climate catastrophe. And in fact, believe in a climate renaissance. Like we’re really safer than ever from climate. It’s just total BS to say, oh, do you believe in climate change? Do you believe fossil fuels have side effects? Therefore, you should get rid of them.

That’s like saying, do you believe antibiotics have side-effects? Oh, if so, no more antibiotics. It’s just like third grade thinking that unfortunately is practiced by many smart people, including scientists. I'm glad to have the chance to address it.

Representative Lloyd Smucker (R, PA-11):

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Representative Rudy Yakym (R, IN-2):

The EPA’s power plant rule is a de facto ban on coal-fired power plants and prohibits more natural gas power plants from being built.

Mr. Epstein, what sort of impact will this rule have on our ability to meet the nation's future energy demands and what are the economic consequences of failing to meet this demand?

Alex Epstein:

I just want to make clear that everyone needs to do everything possible not to let these rules go into effect. They are just a complete death sentence to the grid.

I mean, I’m not shocked often, but I'm shocked by this. Again, the fundamentals are: we already have a grid in crisis thanks to bad policy, shutting down reliable power plants, and then promoting more electrification. We have artificial more demand from EVs that the administration is forcing. And as you mentioned, we have a lot of organic, healthy demand from new uses of electricity.

And yet, we’re shutting down our reliable coal plants, which are one sixth of capacity. And we're passing restrictions that are going to prevent most new natural gas plants from being built. I don’t know what it’s saying. It’s like, “let’s just become Lebanon” or something like that. It’s just unbelievable that we’re not thinking about this.

These rules are so far beyond the pale. What does it mean to just have blackouts all the time? It just means a huge portion of people die. Look what happened to Texas just a few years ago with a tiny version of these policies. So, if you want to talk about existential threat, that’s life without a grid.

Representative Rudy Yakym (R, IN-2):

Thank you.

Representative Chuck Edwards (R, NC-11):

And Mr. Epstein, I’ll begin with you. I represent a district in the western part of North Carolina. It’s a mountainous region. And with all the calls for us to do away with fossil fuels—we have one major power plant in my district, by the way, in the mountains. Keep in mind, it's in the mountains.

But with all these calls to convert from fossil fuel to solar and wind, I’ve done some calculating on what it would take to for us to convert the one 566 megawatt power plant that we have to all solar, how many acres it would take for solar panels to generate that same amount of energy. It’s in the tens of thousands of acres. That’s just simply not available unless we were to carve up all of our agricultural land.

When I look at windmills, which by the way, appear to be 30 stories tall, and mind you, we’re in the mountains, it would be very difficult to put a 30 story tall windmill in a mountain region let alone, I think it was 2,400 acres that I calculated it would take of windmills to generate that same megawatt of power out of the one station that we have.

Have you calculated into the cost anywhere, the loss of residential land, farmland, and what it would take to convert into?

Alex Epstein:

I would say this is the least of the problems of solar and wind. So what you see is that in certain locations, it’s just totally not doable and in many countries, it’s totally not doable.

The United States is vast, so you can imagine, like Elon Musk will say—and it’s valid as far as it goes, but it’s not doesn't go very far—that oh, if you put a certain amount of solar panels in Utah, that could, “power the whole country.” One problem is, how do you get everything to the rest of the country?

The main problem is the reliability problem. So you mentioned what it would cost to replace fossil fuels with solar and wind. We don’t know because nobody’s ever even attempted it. Nobody’s attempted a self-sufficient solar and wind plant or set of plants in any sophisticated area around the world.

And the reason is it would be cost-prohibitive just to give you one number. Elon, I like him in a lot of ways, but he said he said publicly, all we need is just a bunch of my mega packs and solar panels, we can power the world. I ran the numbers. To back up the world for one day would be 100 to 200 trillion worth of megapacks. So 100 trillion dollars is global GDP. These last 10 years, you know, much like an EV. So it's just there is no such thing as replacing fossil fuels with unreliable solar and wind. The only way you can do it partially is because you have fossil fuels as a backup. So it's really important for people to know this is not a real thing.

I’m not against solar and wind, but they should provide their own reliability. And that’ll force them to actually make a contribution or get off the grid either way. 

Representative Chuck Edwards (R, NC-11):

Well, thank you for that.

Representative Chuck Edwards (R, NC-11):

Mr. Epstein. I'm running out of time, but real quick I’d like to ask, because I believe the cleanest energy is the most readily available and convenient form, whether that’s solar, nuclear, wind, geothermal, or fossil.

But not everybody agrees, as you’re well aware. This administration seems to be obsessed with eliminating fossil fuels in the name of climate change. In your opinion, what do you think’s the most dangerous and potentially longest lasting impact of the Harris-Biden administration's attack on fossil fuels?

Alex Epstein:

Right, so it’s them and it's the global movement. I mean, it’s very simple. They're pushing for the rapid elimination of fossil fuels. I mentioned if they had remotely gotten their way so far, we’d already have a catastrophe. Net-zero by 2050 is the single most destructive idea human beings have ever come up with.

And I mean that literally, and I’m very familiar with all the other acts, but taking a world of 8 billion people with no cost effective replacement for fossil fuels and starving them of energy, there would never be anything like it. So we’re not going to do it in practice, but we're going to do something really, really bad along the way.

And with Biden-Harris in particular, it’s the U.S. will do it and others won't. So that means we cede our economic and security position. And in a dangerous world, I do not want that. 

Representative Chuck Edwards (R, NC-11):

Thank you.

Representative Tom Suozzi (D, NY-3):

So if I’m somebody who's concerned about high costs and I’m concerned about climate, what do you think we need to be doing right now to try and reduce the impacts of  greenhouse gases on climate change while also trying to keep the cost down. So, Mr Epstein, you seem most anxious to talk.

Alex Epstein:

I'm very anxious. Thank you for the great question. So I would say, I'll just make this a sidebar, but I wouldn’t be as concerned as you are because—

Representative Tom Suozzi (D, NY-3):

About what?

Alex Epstein:

About climate. I’m not saying to have no concern, but our ability to deal with it is— well, I might someday, I’ll give you a copy of Fossil Future.

But okay, on this issue, if you are concerned, you have to recognize one fundamental truth, which is the US has very limited control over global emissions and emissions are a global issue. So we have—

Representative Tom Suozzi (D, NY-3):

No, no, I listen, I recognize that we, in the 80s and 70s, 80s, 90s, we chased a lot of industry out of America and it goes to other countries and they’re polluting way worse than we ever did.

And they’re building coal plants and, you know, they’re—

Alex Epstein:

So that’s our leverage point. Our only leverage point, on your terms, is to liberate truly globally cost-competitive alternatives. I think the most promising is nuclear. It’s hypothetical you might be able to do it with solar and wind if you can figure out reliability.

Nobody’s figured that out yet. Geothermal has some potential. But you need to move all the roadblocks out of the way for alternative forms of energy, and that requires radical NEPA reform, requires radical reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, something I’m working on. So I’d love to talk to you sometime or anyone else about how to do this, because what we’ve done to nuclear is a crime, and what New York has done to nuclear is a crime.

Representative Tom Suozzi (D, NY-3):

Yeah, awful. I really think that we should be building more nuclear power in America. I’m concerned, however, you know, when they try to do it in dense areas, that's a problem. I’m concerned about getting rid of nuclear waste. Where are we going to put the nuclear waste?

Alex Epstein:

Right, so nuclear waste is the leading—

Representative Tom Suozzi (D, NY-3):

And I’m concerned about transmission lines, when you build these facilities, whether it be wind or solar or nuclear, in these very far off locations, transmitting it to where you need the power.

Alex Epstein:

I think nuclear is a lot safer than you’ve been led to believe. Certainly what’s called the “waste,” the used fuel, that’s the safest form of waste we have.

It’s very small, it’s very manageable, it hasn’t damaged anyone, we can store it indefinitely. So nuclear unfortunately has been demonized even more than fossil fuels. It has the advantage of, it’s very dense, it’s stored energy. There’s a lot we can do with it, but we need to get the government out of the way.

We can’t—subsidizing specific American boutique energy does nothing globally.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth:

If I could add that New York State, you all have the Marcellus Shale, but you’re not using it, and there’s a lot of clean natural gas that could come out of that, which Pennsylvania is using right now, and you all are not.

And New York State has a 70 percent renewable portfolio standard goal, and that's also driving up the price of energy in New York State.

Representative Tom Suozzi (D, NY-3):

Yeah, I think that you know, I just take the end of my, we have to figure out how to balance our two systems, okay? Capitalism is the best system in the history of the world.

It’s created more wealth. It’s created more innovation. It’s lifted more people out of poverty. It’s the best system, but it’s based upon competition, and the better competitor you are, the better you’re going to do. If you're a bad competitor, you’re not going to do well. But we don’t want people who are bad competitors to be relegated to a life of misery.

So we have another system called democracy, which says all men and women are created equal. So we got to put some protections in place. So the question, the challenge for us, is how to find a balance between these two systems on a knife's edge. Because if we go too far, too many protections, we kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

We do no protections, we end up with people with a bunch of miserable lives. The challenge of our current environment in America is nobody finds balance. Everybody’s saying, you're one of those, no, you’re one of those, and we don’t find that balance anymore. So we’ve got to work together and find some balance.

To balance in this question, in this issue, there's a lot of us concerned about climate change, and there's a lot of us concerned about cost, but we've got to find a balance between the two.

Representative Michael Burgess (R, TX-26):

In December of 2019, front page of the Dent Record Chronicle, front page story, dismantling, not just we're not going to use a coal plant anymore in South Texas, they actually physically dismantled it.

They bulldozed it. It’s never going to be used again.  And then in February of 2021, we had that cold snap where hundreds of people died because there was no energy from that coal plant to put on the grid when they really needed it. So that is the existential threat. You flip the switch and nothing happens. 

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, I’d love to comment on that. I mean, I was one of the people on the record before Winter Storm Uri and that disaster happened, saying Texas’s reserve margin is dangerously low. The problem is people equate the so-called “capacity” of unreliable electricity with the capacity of reliable electricity.

But reliable electricity or dispatchable electricity, that means you can have it when you need it in the quantity you need it. Unreliable electricity you don’t know when, and what happened during winter storm Uri was solar and wind when needed most went out to lunch at one percent they were at one point they were less than one percent of theoretical capacity, which is why it should be called fantasy not capacity, and relying on that is very dangerous.

Representative Michael Burgess (R, TX-26):

And it was dangerous.

Representative Ralph Norman (R, SC-5):

Mr. Epstein I see your book, I’ve heard great things about, I need to get one before I leave.

Alex Epstein:

I have one for any representative who's interested.

Representative Ralph Norman (R, SC-5):

Well you have mentioned that the administration’s pause on liquefied LNG exports is deadly. Can you explain why it is deadly?

Alex Epstein:

Natural gas is, like all forms of energy, is life-giving, but natural gas in particular is crucial to food.

We use natural gas as the basis for modern fertilizer. We have no near-term replacement for natural gas, just for fertilizer. And so you’re talking about making everyone’s food more expensive, and you’re talking about depriving people of a clean, reliable source of energy around the world. Natural gas, we should have talked about more today.

This is the huge opportunity cost of the current administration and past administrations. We could be radically increasing our natural gas capacity if not for some domestic bans like in New York, but mainly pipeline capacity. We can’t build pipelines, so all of our gas is locked away in certain places.

If we could build pipelines, we could have it more around the country, and we could have it more around the world. And this is, I mentioned this in my testimony, the opportunity cost of not having energy freedom, and instead replacing it with government-dictated green energy. People have no idea how prosperous we could be, and they have no idea how poor we will be if we keep going in this direction.

Representative Ralph Norman (R, SC-5):

I wish all of you could have heard the testimony of the governor of Alaska talking about the damage that they are doing to Alaska. That’s their source of income. They’re putting them out of business. And the look on his face during the testimony, it’s unconscionable that they’re continuing to do this.

So it’s not just here in America. You mentioned that the, the Biden, and I call it the border czar’s, EPA power plant rule, destroy our US electrical grid. Given that we’ve already done, already in the midst of an electricity reliability crisis, what else can we do in these last two months of hopefully the end of this? 

Alex Epstein:

What can Congress do?

Representative Ralph Norman (R, SC-5):

What would you urge us to do specifically?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, I would urge, so, the most immediate thing is do whatever you can to pause the shutdown of reliable power plants, not just the EPA rule, which is just mass destruction, but all the other rules too. So we could document all the different things, but basically we should not be shutting down any reliable power plants right now because it is a threat to the health and safety of Americans.

EPA is supposed to protect our health, you cannot have health with a reliable grid, so they’re doing the exact opposite. I’ve talked to some people about legislation to do that, but I think we should put a pause on these shutdowns.

Representative Ralph Norman (R, SC-5):

Well, the regulations that they’ve imposed on companies and not just gas and oil, it’s, I’m in the real estate business. And as I’ve told, people realize that so goes the real estate market, mainly housing, so goes the economy. There are no battery operated dump trucks that deliver concrete. There are no battery operated dump truck trucks that deliver our food. It’s gas. Gas and oil. So I just want to thank you.

I’m out of time, but we’re going to do what we can to remain to this term to hopefully reverse some regulations and the next administration we’ll make a change.

Alex Epstein:

I'm happy to help any way I can.

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In preparation for the hearing, I wanted to see what the witness in favor of the Biden-Harris energy policy, Trevor Higgins of Center for American Progress, would say in its defense economically. I saw that he testified recently on this very topic.

I found his claims in favor of government-dictated green energy to be appallingly inaccurate and misleading, so I wanted to make sure that the elected officials at today’s hearing and anyone else hearing these claims had access to refutations of them.

• Myth: “Clean electricity has become the most affordable source of energy there is.”
  
  Truth: If this were true “clean electricity” wouldn’t need enormous preferences in the form of subsidies, mandates, and no price penalty for unreliability—and “clean energy” proponents wouldn’t feel compelled to cripple fossil fuels by punishing investment, production, refining, transportation, and use.1

  
  In reality, since “clean electricity” from unreliable solar and wind can go to near zero at any given time, it depends on reliable electricity. It doesn't replace the cost of reliable electricity, it adds to the cost of reliable electricity. That's why the more solar and wind we've used as a nation the higher our prices have gotten.

• Myth: Inflation has slowed since the passage of the IRA, so the IRA worked.
  
  (Higgins: “Since the enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act, overall inflation has slowed by two-thirds, grocery price inflation in particular has slowed by nine-tenths, and energy price inflation has not only slowed but fully reversed and dropped 7 percent. Meanwhile, wages have risen 8.5 percent, far outpacing inflation. Since enactment, total employment has grown nearly 4 percent and economic output is up 10 percent. This is an exceptionally strong record.”)
  
  Truth: This is a blatantly dishonest example of the “post hoc” fallacy—the first thing happened before the second thing, therefore the first thing caused the second thing.

  
  The IRA couldn’t have possibly lowered inflation because its significant effects are not in force yet.
  
  And when the IRA’s effects are in force, they will obviously be inflationary due to its huge subsidies, which will increase our debt burden and therefore inflation.2

• Myth: “investments in clean energy specifically are a primary strategy in the fight against inflation”
  
  Truth: Subsidizing energy sources that can't compete on a free market is by definition inflationary. It makes us pay more for energy that we otherwise would. And when coupled with restrictions on the most cost-effective form of energy, fossil fuels, it makes us pay far more for energy.

• Myth: “Federal grants, loans, and tax incentives are unlocking record-breaking levels of private investment in building the clean energy economy.”
  
  Truth: The “record-breaking levels of private investment” consist of investors chasing free money from the government instead of investing in truly cost-effective energy projects.

• Myth: Thanks to the IRA we are “restructuring global supply chains and unlocking a domestic manufacturing renaissance.”
  
  Truth: Thanks to the IRA Americans will pay a fortune in taxes and inflation to prop up industries that have no prospect of being internationally competitive.
  
  If we want to be internationally competitive we need to liberate domestic development from the “green energy” movement’s hostility to human impact on nature and therefore human development. Given that under the current administration we cannot even open a promising domestic mining project in Minnesota, there is no chance we can wrestle critical mineral dominance from China this decade or in the next 3 decades.

• Myth: “Fossil fuel dependence renders the daily costs of operating our energy systems vulnerable to supply shocks after extreme weather.”
  
  Truth: The naturally-stored energy in fossil fuels is available in any weather, which is why they are the centerpiece of reliable, resilient grids in every climate. Meanwhile solar and wind can’t survive the “supply shock” of a calm, cloudy day.

• Myth: “Fossil fuels push electricity prices higher...through the price volatility of the natural gas market”
  
  Truth: Even when natural gas prices are high unreliable solar and wind can’t compete without special preferences.
  

  That’s why forcing solar and wind on us has led to much higher electricity prices than we had when natural gas prices were high.
  
  If it weren’t for government-dictated green energy, including restrictions on gas production and pipelines, and subsidies for unreliable solar and wind, plummeting natural gas prices would have led us to pay far less for energy than we are today.3
  
  It is particularly disingenuous for people who are for strangling the natural gas industry to complain about high natural gas prices. This would have been like Tonya Harding criticizing Nancy Kerrigan’s difficulty skating after Harding’s team physically assaulted Kerrigan.

• Myth: “Fossil fuels push electricity prices higher, including through... uneconomic utility investments in coal plants.”
  
  Truth: Utility investments in coal plants were extremely economic until government-dictated energy shut them down.

  
  Coal plants are a much, much cheaper way to provide reliable electricity than solar, wind, and batteries are. The only way to make coal a terrible investment relative to solar and wind is to subsidize solar and wind and make the coal investment worthless by shutting the plant down.

• Myth: “Fossil fuels push electricity prices higher, including through...the surge in wildfires exacerbated by climate change.”
  
  Truth: The main cause of wildfire damage is “green” policies that allow forest “fuel load” to build up in the name of leaving forests untouched.
  
  No credible projection says the IRA will have any meaningful effect on the conditions of wildfires so to claim that it’s saving us these costs is a lie.4

• Myth: “In Texas, for example, wind and solar saved $11 billion in wholesale electricity costs in 2022 alone.”
  
  Truth: To know the cost of solar and wind one has to look at the full system cost, not the “wholesale electricity costs.” The full system cost of solar and wind has been disastrous for Texas, as evidenced by their total failure to provide meaningful electricity during Winter Storm Uri, which Texans are still paying a fortune for.5

• Myth: “The prospect of swiftly declining domestic demand for oil and gas is provoking the industry to build new export facilities, hoping to find overseas markets for liquefied natural gas (LNG).”
  
  Truth: Industry is not “hoping” to find markets, US natural gas is desperately needed across the world! This includes European countries that desperately need more natural gas to support their unreliable solar and wind capacity on their expensive power grids.6

• Myth: “As a report from Energy Innovation has documented, states that are investing in clean electricity, such as Iowa, New Mexico, and Kansas, have seen less increase in electricity prices than states who have remained most dependent on natural gas.”
  
  This “report” is pure propaganda. Looking honestly at the cost of adding unreliable solar and wind would mean looking at relatively self-sufficient grids that add a lot of solar and wind, such as California’s—which has experienced huge price increases and reliability problems. But the report evades California’s higher electricity prices by absurdly blaming them on wildfires. (“Wildfire costs and risks have significantly increased electricity rates in California.”)
  
  The “report” instead focuses on states like Iowa, New Mexico, Kansas, and Oklahoma, which are embedded within much larger grids and socialize the costs of unreliability to others. Another example of ignoring socialized costs: the report acknowledges that transmission and distribution costs are rising nearly twice as fast as inflation but misattributes this to things like “grid hardening.” In reality, the high demand for more transmission and storage is driven by the need to enable more solar and wind capacity.
  
  In addition, recent high natural gas prices are largely a product of government-dictated green energy.
  
  Natural gas in general has kept electricity prices low, and had we not added so much unreliable solar and wind, the long-term fall in natural gas prices would have made our electricity cheaper.

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Truth: Kamala Harris is still for banning fracking—because she is still for the net-zero agenda that requires banning fracking along with all other fossil fuel activities.

• Kamala Harris, who in 2019 said, “There is no question I am in favor of banning fracking,” now tells voters in fracking-dependent states like Pennsylvania that she is no longer wants to ban fracking.
  
  They shouldn’t believe her, since Harris’s net-zero agenda requires banning fracking.1

• To know what to make of Harris’s reversal on a fracking ban, we need to first recognize that banning fracking would have been one of the most harmful policies in US history. It would have destroyed 60% of our oil production and 75% of our natural gas production.2

• Fracking is very likely the single most beneficial technological development of the last 25 years. By extracting cheap, abundant oil and natural gas from once useless rock, it has made energy far cheaper than it would otherwise be.

• Fracking and agriculture: The availability of food is highly determined by the cost of oil, which powers crucial machinery, and gas, which is the basis of the fertilizer that allows us to feed 8 billion people. Thanks to fracking, the world is far better fed than it would otherwise be.

• Given how life-giving fracking is to humanity and how essential it is to the prosperity and security of the US, any politician who has ever suggested banning fracking should be considered an energy menace until and unless they issue a deeply reflective apology.

• Harris and others who have advocated banning fracking should apologize along the following lines: “I called for banning something crucial because I listened only to exaggerated claims about its negatives and ignored its huge benefits. I am deeply sorry, and pledge to do better.”

• Someone who comes to understand why it’s wrong to ban fracking—because the benefits you would destroy are far greater than the harms you would avoid—should also understand that the same problem exists with the broader anti-fossil-fuel, “net zero” agenda.

• Harris has not apologized whatsoever for her support of a murderous fracking ban.
  
  And far from questioning the anti-fossil-fuel, “net zero” agenda, she has remained 100% committed to it.
  
  Which means she’s an enemy of not just fracking but all fossil fuel use.

• The guiding energy goal of Biden/Harris is “net zero by 2050”—rapidly banning activities that add CO2 to the atmosphere.
  
  Since there’s no scalable way to capture CO2, burning fossil fuels necessarily means more CO2.
  
  “Net zero” = “ban most fossil fuel use”—including fracking.3

• Given that “net zero by 2050” requires banning virtually all fossil fuel activity, the whole conversation about whether Kamala Harris wants to ban fracking is absurd.
  
  You can’t be for fracking and for net-zero anymore than you can be for penicillin and for banning all antibiotics.

• For “net zero by 2050” advocates there’s no question of if they want to ban particular fossil fuel activities such as fracking in the next 25 years, just when and in what order.
  
  If Harris doesn’t try to ban fracking soon she’ll just try to ban other vital fossil fuel activities.

• The Biden-Harris administration has already shown us that they will try to do everything they can to ban fossil fuels in pursuit of net-zero—and that they will only be limited by pro-fossil-fuel political opponents’ opposition and the resistance of voters.

• Both Biden and Harris made it clear when campaigning that their guiding energy goal was “net zero by 2050” and that meant rapidly banning fossil fuels.
  
  Biden: “I guarantee you, we’re going to end fossil fuel.” Harris’s cosponsored Green New Deal called for banning fossil fuels.4

  

• When they entered office, Biden and Harris continued to make “net zero by 2050” their guiding goal by rejoining the Paris Agreement that committed us to it and by announcing a “whole of government” focus on “climate”—code for: rapidly getting rid of fossil fuels.5

  

• In action after action, the Biden-Harris administration has shown us that it will do anything it can get away with politically to rapidly eliminate fossil fuels: pipeline blocking, Federal leasing bans, LNG prohibitions, power plant shutdowns, EV mandates, SEC rules, etc, etc.
  
  

• Americans have already paid a high price for the Biden-Harris administration’s net-zero agenda—high energy bills, power shortages, and inflation.
  
  But we’d be paying a far higher price had pro-fossil-fuel politicians and voters not opposed and dramatically slowed the agenda.6

• Most of what Biden-Harris have tried to do to rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use has been, thankfully, slowed by opposition: lawsuits over power plant shutdowns, courts reversing illegal leasing bans, etc.
  
  Without this opposition they would have already caused energy ruin.7

• Consider: America desperately needs more reliable power plants given huge demand from AI and (Biden-mandated) EVs.
  
  But the Biden-Harris EPA has tried to shut down all coal—1/6 of reliable capacity!
  
  Were it not for Biden-Harris opponents we’d already have a 3rd-world grid.8
  
  

• Harris tries to act reassure us that she’s “moderate” because Biden-Harris hasn’t destroyed oil and gas—e.g., fracking is allowed and oil production has actually increased.
  
  But that’s because opposition has moderated her insanely destructive net-zero ambitions.

• The only way Kamala Harris can validly convince the public that she’s not an energy threat is to renounce not only her support of a fracking ban but of the “net zero” agenda—and to correct the anti-fossil-fuel bias that leads to both of these murderous policy ideas.

• Whenever you hear a politician claim to be a friend of oil and gas, fracking, or any other aspect of fossil fuels, ask one simple question: Do you renounce the “net zero” agenda?
  
  If not, they will work to destroy fossil fuels—and with them our energy, prosperity, and security.

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Truth: Fossil fuels have made Texas far safer than ever from climate, both from heat and the (far more dangerous) cold—but anti-fossil-fuel policies are stalling that progress.

• A recent Wall Street Journal article portrays Texas as threatened by fossil-fueled climate warming. But as evidence, they point to just 200 additional heat deaths, while ignoring the overall decline in climate deaths that fossil fuels helped cause.1

• An objective account of climate danger and fossil fuels would look at what the general trend of climate danger is and what fossil fuels’ role is in that trend. Globally and in Texas, the answer is clear: climate danger is lower than ever, and we have fossil fuels to thank for it.

• The global rate of climate-related disaster deaths has fallen 98% over the last century because of cost-effective energy from fossil fuels, which powers A/C to master heat, heating to master cold, irrigation to master drought, and storm warning systems to master storms.2

  

• Instead of recognizing the reality that fossil fuels are making people safer from climate globally and in Texas, the WSJ cherry picks one data point to falsely portray fossil fuels as increasing climate danger: an increase of 200 in heat-related deaths since 2021.3

  

• Obsessing about 200 additional heat deaths in Texas is dishonest given that cold kills far more than heat and fossil fuels have made us safer from both. So few people die from heat today that it is possible to make 200 extra deaths noticeable on a graph for a state with 30 million people!4

  

• All else equal, we would expect heat deaths to increase, given that

  
  (1) as populations grow, absolute deaths grow

  
  (2) city sprawling creates concentrated heat islands that raise local temperatures
  

  Yet, despite a growing population, we see little change in US heat deaths long-term.5

  

• Even more dishonest than obsessing about a tiny amount of additional heat deaths in Texas is blaming it on fossil-fueled “climate change,” even though “climate change” is a slow trend on the scale of 30+ years and can’t be shown to cause an increase in deaths over 3 years.6

  

• By blaming small numbers of climate deaths on the fossil fuels that have made the number of climate deaths small in the first place, the anti-fossil-fuel media justify a catastrophist agenda that will make us less safe from climate and far less prosperous overall.

• Across America, the power grid is in decline due to policies that reward unreliable electricity, prematurely shut down coal plants, criminalize nuclear, and force EV use. And it’s about to get worse, as EPA’s power plant rules decrease electricity supply and AI increases demand.
  
  

• In Texas, grid-gutting policies are causing deadly blackouts and shortages. E.g., the February 2021 disaster was caused by inadequate investment in reliable power plants and their weatherization, which came to a head when unreliable solar/wind inevitably disappeared.

• Anti-fossil-fuel policies increase climate danger by making it expensive or illegal for us to run the fossil fueled climate mastery machines that keep us safe from climate. Thus these policies are effectively anti-climate-safety—or pro-climate-danger—policies.

• Texas is not in danger from fossil fuels, which have made climate far safer. The real danger facing Texas is anti-fossil-fuel policies—politically viable only thanks to false media reports of a dangerously hot world—which threaten to neuter their climate mastery capabilities.

Michelle Hung contributed to this piece.

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High electricity bills are the result of government-dictated green energy schemes.

• Electricity rates have risen 47% faster than the CPI the last 12 months, and nearly 24% overall since the Biden-Harris administration began.1

  

• As Americans struggle with rising summer electricity bills, it’s important to know that this struggle was 100% unnecessary and 100% preventable.

• High electricity bills are the result of government-dictated schemes—such as the recent IRA—to build massive, wasteful, unreliable solar and wind infrastructure.2

• As bad as higher electricity prices seem, they are actually far worse, since we are also paying huge IRA subsidies through taxes and inflation that don’t appear on our utility bills.
  
  

• Because solar and wind can go near zero at any given time, they don’t replace reliable power plants—they add to the cost of reliable power plants.
  
  That’s why electricity prices have gone up even as the cost of natural gas, our leading source of electricity, has gone way down.3

• The solution to high electricity bills is to end all preferences for unreliable electricity.
  
  

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Warmer temperatures are less of a threat than cold ones, and fossil fuels make us safer from both.

• Anti-fossil fuel politicians love summer because hot temperatures give them the opportunity to portray the world as “on fire”—and offering anti-fossil-fuel policies as a solution.
  
  In reality, cold is a bigger problem than heat—and anti-fossil-fuel policies make both worse.1

  

• Anyone commentating responsibly on summer temperatures must acknowledge 3 facts:
  
  1. Heat-related deaths are far less prevalent than cold-related deaths
  2. Earth is warming slowly—especially in warm places
  3. Fossil fuels make us safer from both cold and heat

• 1. Heat-related deaths < cold-related deaths
  
  When our leaders discuss the warming of the planet, they treat warming as obviously bad. But while they portray the planet as already “too hot,” the fact is that far more human beings die of cold than of heat.2

  

• Study after study has found that deaths from cold outnumber deaths from heat by 5-15 times. On every continent cold is more dangerous than heat. Even in many countries we think of as especially hot, such as India, cold-related deaths significantly exceed heat-related deaths.3

  

• 2. Earth is warming slowly—especially in warm places
  
  So far we’ve had ~1°C of warming from a cold starting point in Earth's history 150 years ago. Future warming will be limited by the diminishing nature of “the greenhouse effect”—as well as being concentrated in colder places.4

• Warming so far has been slow and benign. But will future warming make the world unlivably hot? No, given 2 facts almost universally acknowledged by climate scientists: 1) the diminishing warming impact of CO2 and 2) the concentration of warming in colder places.

• The warming impact of CO2 diminishes (“logarithmically”) as it increases in concentration.
  
  Every new molecule of CO2 we add to the atmosphere has less of a warming effect than the previous one. Warming will diminish as emissions increase—the only question is at what rate.5

  

• Climate warming is concentrated in colder areas of the world (such as the Arctic), during colder times of day, and during colder seasons.
  
  This means that future warming will occur more in cold situations where it saves lives than in hot situations where it causes problems.6

  

• All reporting on the warming of the Earth should specify not only that humans are far more endangered by cold than by heat, but also that Earth is warming slowly—and less in warm places. That virtually no reporting acknowledges this shows that much “reporting” is propaganda.

• 3. Fossil fuels make us safer from dangerous temperatures
  
  Not only is the warming from fossil fuels’ CO2 emissions slow and in many ways beneficial, the uniquely cost-effective energy we get from fossil fuels makes us both safer from cold and heat.

• The key to being protected from dangerous temperatures is to master them by producing different forms of temperature protection, such as: insulated buildings, heating, and air-conditioning. All of these things require energy—which means for most people they require fossil fuels.

• Fossil fuels are the only source of low-cost, reliable energy that for the foreseeable future can provide energy to billions—in a world where 3 billion people still use less electricity than a typical American refrigerator.7

• On a planet where people die much more from cold than from heat, but both are major threats, the key to safety is to have energy be as affordable and plentiful as possible so as many as possible can afford heating and air conditioning. For now this means more fossil fuels.

• People who blaming pro-fossil-fuel politicians for hot temperatures evade that:
  
  1. Cold is more dangerous than heat
  2. Warming is slow, especially in warm places
  3. We need fossil fuels to protect us from cold and heat

• Reducing CO2 emissions in a humane and practical way means focusing on liberating alternatives—especially the most potent, nuclear—to try to truly outcompete fossil fuels in the future. Depriving us off fossil fuels now and pretending China will follow is immoral and impractical.

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Don’t blame the climate for unreliable power, blame climate policies that shut down reliable power.

• In recent summers it’s become commonplace for Americans to experience electricity shortages, with calls to use less electricity and the frequent threat of brownouts or blackouts.
  
  This is an embarrassment, and it was totally preventable.1

• Anti-fossil-fuel politicians will blame our grid’s reliability problems on “climate change,” which is supposedly making it too hot for a grid to operate.
  
  This is absurd; countries with much hotter temperatures than ours, like Singapore, are easily able to have a reliable grid.2

• The real cause of reliable problems is the obvious: government-dictated “green energy” policies that punish reliable fossil fuels and nuclear, while privileging unreliable solar and wind.

• Since at any given time solar and wind can go near zero, using them to replace reliable power doesn’t work. E.g., during February 2021’s winter storm, TX solar and wind were totally out to lunch—but they’d taken tens of $billions that could have gone to reliable, resilient power.3

• The Biden-Harris EPA has been at war with reliable power plants, above all the coal plants that our grid depends on for 1/6th of its reliable power.
  
  And they’re doing this while demand for power is increasing from data centers and EVs.
  
  

• The Biden-Harris EPA’s recent power plant rules will not only shut down vital coal power plants more quickly, they will also prevent new natural gas plants from replacing them.
  
  

  
  

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Any politician who supports the “net zero” agenda is working to make gasoline prices much higher.

• Every politician will claim this summer that they’re working to make gasoline prices lower, because they know that’s what voters want to hear.
  
  But the many politicians that support “net zero by 2050” are working to make gasoline prices higher.

• For the US to become anywhere near “net zero by 2050,” gasoline use needs to be virtually eliminated.1

• Since Americans left to their own free will choose to use a lot of gasoline, the only way for “net zero” politicians to eliminate gasoline is to make it unaffordable or illegal.
  
  Low gasoline prices are totally incompatible with “net zero.”

• The Biden-Harris administration knows that all fossil fuels, including gasoline, need to be far more expensive for them to pursue “net zero.” That’s why the EPA set a rising “social cost of carbon” starting at $190/ton—the equivalent of adding $1.50 a gallon to gasoline prices!2

• From Day 1, President Biden has openly supported the destruction of the fossil fuel industry, from his 2019 campaign promise of “I guarantee you, we’re going to end fossil fuel” to his 2021 executive order declaring that America will be “net zero emissions economy-wide” by 2050.3

  

• Kamala Harris has, unfortunately, been even more supportive of the “net zero” agenda and therefore higher gasoline prices. In 2020 she supported a fracking ban, which would have destroyed 60% of US oil production. And she cosponsored the fossil fuel-destroying Green New Deal.4

  

• Of course, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, like all politicians, claim to be for lower gasoline prices. But because their real priority is the “net zero” agenda, in practice they are doing everything they can to raise prices.
  
  Here are 8 specific actions they’ve taken.

• Biden Gas Gouging Policy #1
  
  Biden has worked to increase gasoline prices by taking a “whole-of-government” approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This entails reducing oil investment, production, refining, and transport, all of which serves to increase gas prices.5

• Biden Gas Gouging Policy #2
  
  Biden has worked to increase gasoline prices by expanding the anti-fossil-fuel ESG divestment movement. ESG contributed to a 50% decline in oil and gas exploration investments from 2011-2021, resulting in artificially higher prices. Biden is making it worse.
  
  

• Biden Gas Gouging Policy #3
  
  Biden has worked to increase gasoline prices via “climate disclosure rules,” an oil and gas investment-slashing measure that coerces companies into spouting anti-fossil-fuel propaganda and committing to anti-fossil-fuel plans—plans that will raise gas prices.
  
  

• Biden Gas Gouging Policy #4
  
  Biden has worked to increase gasoline prices by issuing a moratorium on oil and gas leases on federal lands, stunting oil and gas production and investment. When it’s harder to produce and invest in oil, gasoline gets more expensive.6

• Biden Gas Gouging Policy #5
  
  Biden has worked to increase gasoline prices by hiking the royalty rate for new oil leases by 50%. This is money the government gets from the industry on top of taxes. And it discourages oil investments, meaning less production meaning higher gas prices.7

  

• Biden Gas Gouging Policy #6
  
  Biden has worked to increase gasoline prices by restricting oil and gas leasing on nearly 50% of Alaska's vast petroleum reserve. This is a crippling blow to Alaska's oil and gas industry. Less Alaskan oil means higher gas prices.8

  

• Biden Gas Gouging Policy #7
  
  Biden has worked to increase gasoline prices by threatening to stop oil and gas mergers. Mergers, which increase efficiency, benefit domestic production and lower prices. Blocking mergers raises oil prices long-term, which means higher gas prices.
  
  

• Biden Gas Gouging Policy #8
  
  Biden has worked to increase gasoline prices by cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline. This prevented Canada from using its vast oil deposits to their full potential—meaning lower global supply and higher prices for oil and gasoline.9

  

• Joe Biden should level with the American people and make clear that his agenda is to increase gasoline prices—much like Obama’s infamous admission that “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” under his energy plan.
  
  Or he should apologize and embrace energy freedom.10

  

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1. We must think about fossil fuels in a balanced way.

2. Only by using fossil fuels can 8 billion people have the energy they need to survive and flourish.

Today, I’ll share Energy Sound Bites to support the third core truth: The climate positives of fossil fuels far outweigh the climate negatives.

As a reminder, the goal of Energy Sound Bites is to distill key facts and insights about energy, environmental, and climate issues into a form—100 characters or less—that’s short enough to remember and repeat whenever you need them.

The climate positives of fossil fuels far outweigh the climate negatives

• When looking at the climate effects of fossil fuels, we must look at both negatives and positives.

  • We can’t just look at how warming increases heat waves, we also must look at lives saved from cold.

• Fossil fuels’ biggest climate positive is the ability to master climate danger.

  • Fossil fueled cooling allows us to dramatically reduce danger from heat.

  • Fossil fueled heating allows us to dramatically reduce danger from cold.

  • Fossil fueled irrigation allows us to dramatically reduce danger from drought.

  • Fossil fueled evacuation systems allow us to dramatically reduce danger from storms.

• By powering climate mastery fossil fuels can actually neutralize many of their climate challenges.

  • If fossil fuels increased drought 10% they could overwhelm that via irrigation and crop transport.

• Fossil fueled climate mastery has easily overwhelmed any climate challenges so far.

  • Fossil fueled climate mastery has helped us become safer than ever from climate.

  • The climate death rate is 98% less than it was 100 years ago.1

    

  • The drought death rate is 99% less than it was 100 years ago.2

    

  • Climate has warmed about 1° C, a mild and manageable amount, over the last 170 years.3

    

  • Other climate effects are hard to discern, but in any case they are overwhelmed by mastery.

    • At 2°C warming, hurricanes are expected to be less frequent and between 1-10% more intense.4

      

    • Fire danger, which depends mainly on mastery, is down from 20 years ago and far down than 100 years ago.5

    • GDP-adjusted climate-related damages are flat despite many incentives for them to go up.6

      

• Nothing in mainstream climate science suggests climate challenges we can’t master

  • Even though Earth has gotten ~1°C warmer, more people still die from cold than heat (even in India)!

    • While we’re taught to fear heat-related death, cold-related death is a far bigger problem.

    • More people die of cold than of heat on every continent.

    • Near-term warming is expected to decrease temperature-related mortality.7

      

  • Warming from CO2 is concentrated in the coldest parts of the world during the coldest times.

    • While we’re taught to think of warming as “global,” in fact it is concentrated in colder places.

    • Mainstream climate science says warming will be concentrated in colder places (Northern latitudes).

    • Mainstream climate science says warming will be concentrated at colder times (nighttime).

    • Mainstream climate science says warming will be concentrated during colder seasons (winter).8

      

• Rising CO2 leads to diminishing warming.

  • While we’re taught warming will accelerate as CO2 levels rise, this contradicts mainstream science.

  • The “greenhouse effect” of CO2 is a diminishing effect, with additional CO2 leading to less warming.

  • Even the UN’s most extreme scenarios show warming leveling off as CO2 levels rise.9

• The IPCC projects impacts from warming that would be masterable with fossil fuels.

  • The UN IPCC is a catastrophizing organization—but even it projects masterable warming impacts.

  • The most plausible danger is rising sea levels, but extreme UN projections are just 3 ft / 100 yrs.10

    

  • We already have 100 million people living below high-tide sea level.11

• If we destroy the freedom to use fossil fuels, climate danger will get worse along with everything else.

  • With “net zero,” climate danger of all types will dramatically increase.

  • With “net zero,” CO2 levels will rise more slowly, but billions of lives will be ruined.

• If we protect all energy freedom everything will get better, including climate mastery, and we’ll innovate alternatives faster.

  • With energy freedom, we’ll get better at mastering climate danger, natural or manmade.

  • With energy freedom, CO2 levels will rise but life will continue to get better and better.

  • With energy freedom, the rate at which alternatives are cost-competitive will accelerate.

  • Thus, energy freedom is the only moral and practical way to reduce CO2 emissions long term.

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Michelle Hung contributed to this piece.

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• Speaking and media inquiries

“Energy Talking Points by Alex Epstein” is my free Substack newsletter designed to give as many people as possible access to concise, powerful, well-referenced talking points on the latest energy, environmental, and climate issues from a pro-human, pro-energy perspective.

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Today, I’ll share Energy Sound Bites to support the second core truth: Only by using fossil fuels can 8 billion people have the energy they need to survive and flourish.

As a reminder, the goal of Energy Sound Bites is to distill key facts and insights about energy, environmental, and climate issues into a form—100 characters or less—that’s short enough to remember and repeat whenever you need them.

Only by using fossil fuels can 8 billion people have the energy they need to survive and flourish.

• Fossil fuels are a uniquely cost-effective and scalable source of energy.

  • Fossil fuels provide 80%+ of the world’s energy and are growing fast.

    • Fossil fuels are growing in spite of 100+ years of competition and 20+ years of political hostility.1

      

• Countries that care most about cheap energy are pro-fossil fuels.

  • China, which uses mostly coal to produce “green” technology, has 300+ coal plants in the pipeline.2

    

• Fossil fuels’ success comes from a combination of natural attributes and generations of innovation.

  • Fossil fuels are uniquely cost-effective due to being naturally stored, concentrated, and abundant.

  • Fossil fuels are uniquely cost-effective due to 100+ years of innovation.

  • Only nuclear rivals fossil fuels’ natural attributes—but it has been crippled by irrational policy.

• Unreliable solar and wind are nowhere near able to replace fossil fuels.

  • For most energy needs, solar/wind either can't do what fossil fuels can or are far more expensive.

    • Solar/wind only provide <6% of world energy—and only electricity, which is 1/5 of energy.3

    • Electricity from solar and wind depends on huge subsidies and 24/7 life support from reliable power.

  • Solar and wind’s basic problem is unreliability: they can go near-zero at any time.

    • Solar and wind provide exactly the amount of electricity that’s needed 0% of the time.4

      

    • Since solar and wind are unreliable they don’t replace reliable power, they parasite on it.

    • No grid is near 50% solar and wind without huge parasitism on reliable neighbors.

  • Current battery technology can’t make up for solar and wind’s unreliability.

    • Just 3 days of global solar/wind backup with Elon Musk’s Megapacks would cost ~$320T, >3X global GDP.5

• Reliable nuclear and geothermal are nowhere near able to replace fossil fuels.

  • In its current state, nuclear is generations away from being cost-effective on a global scale.

    • Producing as much nuclear energy as fossil fuel by 2050 would require adding four 1GW nuclear plants every day.6

    • A huge obstacle to scaling nuclear is its crippling by unscientific restrictions.

    • US policy in particular is so anti-nuclear that no one can build a plant cheaply anymore.

  • Geothermal as we know it is nothing resembling a scalable, near-term replacement for fossil fuels.

    • Current geothermal is not scalable as it requires rare geological heat reservoirs, e.g., like Iceland’s.

    • “Deep geothermal” has long-term promise, but is in an experimental state and not at all scalable.

• Cost-effective and scalable energy is essential for humans to flourish on Earth.

  • Earth, including Earth’s climate, is a naturally very inhospitable place.

    • Many people operate under the false assumption that Earth is a “delicate nurturer.”

    • On the “delicate nurturer” assumption, unimpacted nature exists in a stable, safe, sufficient balance.

    • On the “delicate nurturer” assumption, humans are “parasite-polluters” whose impact inevitably leads to disaster.

    • In truth, Earth is not a “delicate nurturer” but “wild potential”: dynamic, deficient, and dangerous.

    • In truth, humans are “producer-improvers” who can impact Earth for the better.

  • Humans can only flourish on Earth if we use energy to transform it into an abundant and safe place.

    • Since Earth is naturally deficient and dangerous, we must use energy to make it abundant and safe.

    • Energy powers machines and frees up time to radically amplify and expand humanity’s productive ability.

  • Fossil fuels make possible an unprecedented quality of life.

    • Thanks to cost-effective and scalable fossil fuel energy, the world has never been a better place to live.

    • Energy from fossil fuels is fundamental to modern life, from agriculture to sanitation to medical care.

    • Thanks to energy from fossil fuels, life expectancy and income have skyrocketed.7

      

      • As China’s fossil fuel use increased over 600% since 1980, its life expectancy increased by 15 years.8

      • As India’s fossil fuel use increased by over 700% since 1980s, its life expectancy increased by 14 years.9

        

  • Fossil fuels have brought billions out of poverty with the opportunity for prosperity.

    • Thanks to cost-effective energy (mostly fossil fuel), extreme poverty has plummeted to <10% from 42% in 1980.10

• Most of the world’s 8 billion people lack the energy they need to flourish.

  • The vast majority of the world needs much more energy to get out of poverty.

    • 3 billion people use less electricity than an American refrigerator.

    • 1/3 of the world uses wood and animal dung for heating and cooking.11

      

  • Even in America, millions cannot afford enough energy.

    • Almost 1 in 3 American households say they’ve gone without food or medicine to pay for energy.

    • 1 in 5 of American households say they’ve kept their home at an unsafe temperature due to energy costs.12

  • The massive need for energy can only be satisfied if massive fossil fuel use continues and expands.

    • Without fossil fuels, billions of energy-starved people plunge into poverty and early death.

    • With fossil fuels, billions more people can have the opportunity to flourish.

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Michelle Hung contributed to this piece.

Popular links

• EnergyTalkingPoints.com: Hundreds of concise, powerful, well-referenced talking points on energy, environmental, and climate issues.

• My new book Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less.

• Speaking and media inquiries

“Energy Talking Points by Alex Epstein” is my free Substack newsletter designed to give as many people as possible access to concise, powerful, well-referenced talking points on the latest energy, environmental, and climate issues from a pro-human, pro-energy perspective.

Subscribe now

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