Renewable Energy, Fossil Fuels, and the Climate Debate | Alex Epstein | EP 514

There's much more practical things that we can do to keep people safe from climate change, let's say, than making everybody poor by making fossil fuels impossible to access. You know, we have this clear demand that fossil fuels are needed for, and then we restrict fossil fuels some, and we start getting these big problems when we were told we would get big wealth. Well, why would we take off the table any potential source of innovation that would make energy more plentiful and more reliable? We haven't even reduced the supply of fossil fuels in the world; we've just slowed the growth, and we're having all these problems. There's no single town on the planet that runs entirely on renewables.

Well, right. Well, yeah, even if it creates something like a, you know, an air pollution challenge, it can also create the technology that can filter the air, and if anyone happens to get sick, it can also create the whole medical industry.

Yeah, so I've been at this 17 years now, and it's definitely at a peak in terms of enthusiasm and opportunity in this sphere. And I think it's interesting to break down. So maybe I'll do my own part last, and the part of sort of people who think like me, but there are a few other developments that are notable, and they're all sort of intertwined. But one that's one of the interesting ones that I take no credit for, but is very fortuitous intellectually, is the dramatic increase in electricity demand that is occurring right now in the world.

Right, exactly. So specifically, data centers, and within that, AI, and in particular, where you see it is with the very large digital tech companies and what their role has been in the energy debate so far, and then how it has drastically changed in the last year or two. So if you look at even in 2022, what's the posture of the big tech companies for the past years before that? It's overwhelmingly a posture of 'we are 100% renewable and you should be too,' and then politically advocating the net-zero-by-2050 kind of goal, which basically means rapidly eliminate fossil fuels.

Yeah, and so you have them, and you have to think of them as they're just an incredible center of gravity in the culture, and where they are is hard to move the culture away from, because just so much wealth and so much influence, and people in many ways want to be like them. And I think their posture was part of the Larry Fink era.

He goes to the World Economic Forum and says, 'Hey, we have data centers, we have AI, there's going to be massive new demand for what he'll call dispatchable or reliable electricity.'

Right, exactly, exactly.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. What we used to just call electricity. And he said, 'And we cannot power this with solar and wind, and we need dispatchable electricity like natural gas.' I'm like, whoa, where has this guy been? Like, this was the leader of net zero, 100% renewable. And you're seeing it with the tech companies too, right? Facebook with Microsoft trying to resurrect Three Mile Island. Everyone is admitting it.

So what we've had is just the economic reality. Once you need a lot more electricity, you have to run into the reality that you need more, specifically natural gas. Unfortunately, with nuclear, our policy is so bad—we'll discuss in a minute how to fix that—but it's so bad we cannot rapidly scale up nuclear. Solar and wind have limited scaling ability in terms of actually contributing to reliable electricity, because the storage...

Yes, exactly. The storage is just so prohibitively expensive.

I mean, Europe has been a precursor in all of these dimensions. I mean, Germany was—they used to tell us it's the model—and now it's a joke. Right now, they disavow Germany. So you have everyone going, and it's because when you really need a lot more electricity, you have to face economic reality. What was the case before is we had stagnant electricity demand, and we could accommodate a certain amount of intermittent electricity on the grid, and we could get away with shutting down a little bit of reliable capacity, although we were sort of bursting at the seams in terms of, you know, have a polar vortex, the grid almost crashes. We see a crash in California, we see a crash in Texas, we see warnings across the country. But now we have massive new demand, and what the tech companies had to do is they had to go from what they did before, is they just relabeled the fossil fuel electricity. So they would use the fossil fuel electricity and pay the utilities to label it as green. This is called renewable electricity credits, and unfortunately this is legally allowed, which is one of my recommendations to the new administration: is they need to disallow this.

You are allowed to claim that you are 100% renewable, which everyone takes to mean you are using 100% renewable electricity, if you buy credit from somebody else to relabel your fossil fuel electricity as renewable.

It's a similar kind of thing, but it's a different version of it. It's specifically labeling yourself renewable. So you take like Apple in North Carolina, right? So Apple is drawing from the grid in North Carolina. When you draw from the grid, you draw an equal percentage of every source in the grid, right? They all become like this homogeneous thing. So whatever, I don't know the exact state of the grid right now, but it has historically had a bunch of coal, a bunch of gas, a bunch of nuclear. But Apple wants to label themselves 100% renewable. So how do they possibly do that? Well, they pay the utility to say, 'Hey, you know, the coal and gas that Apple is using, that's the responsibility of the home consumers. They're actually using that, and Apple has the special electricity.' Yeah, yeah, they just take the portion of the electricity, like it's just a total figment, right? And you can do different versions of this, like called power purchase agreements, which Google does a lot of, where like you'll buy a certain portion of the wind in Iowa, even if you're not in Iowa, but you claim that you're using it. So it's all a fraudulent relabeling scheme, but you can get away with that as long as you don't need much new electricity, right? But once you need new electricity, you're running out of reliable electricity to relabel as green. And so that's what's happened. And a friend of mine who's a CEO of a major company was telling me he was at a conference and he was telling me about the shift in attitude on electricity, and he said before these tech companies said to us, 'If it's not 100% renewable, like different districts and stuff, don't even talk to us.' And now they said like they'll burn anything from bunnies to puppies to get electricity. That's the shift.

Well, I mean, the best person to talk to is an expert in large language models, but let's just—I'll give it to you in the macro. And especially, I'm very proud that I forecast this in Fossil Future. So Fossil Future was completed in 2021, came out in 2022, and the basic mechanism I talked about is there's really an unlimited human need for energy. And you know what energy is? It's machine food or machine calories. And historically, the major use of energy has been to expand and amplify human physical labor. So by expand, I mean via machines, so we can do things that we couldn't do. Like we can power an incubator with energy; we can't get five humans together and make an incubator, right? We can't get a thousand humans and make a plane. So one thing energy and machines do is they expand our productive abilities, and then they also amplify. So the example of, well, a modern combine harvester will make an agricultural worker able to reap and thresh 1,000 times more wheat than he could on his own, right? So that's the kind of classic thing. So it expands and amplifies the abilities. Historically, it's been primarily our physical abilities, and what the AI does—and it's really better thought of as augmenting our intelligence—is it's figuring out new ways to dramatically expand and amplify our mental ability. So as we're recording this, it's been about a week since ChatGPT Pro came out. So ChatGPT Pro is a $200-a-month product of OpenAI, which for certain businesses I think is going to just be wildly cheap, including mine. So any kind of... like, I'm in the business, including of creating energy policy and arguments and this kind of thing, and this is something modern AI, and specifically these large language models, has become incredibly good at. And with the Pro version, it's just unbelievable in terms of just helping you make decisions, helping you solve problems. So I had a very complex accounting and legal question that I needed, because you know I'm in the world of politics, and there's always a question of what's lobbying and what's not lobbying, and do you want a nonprofit structure, a for-profit structure. And I can just lay this out, and it can give me, you know, the equivalent of 10 hours of a lawyer, and then I can just run it by an actual lawyer for one hour to vet it, and I save whatever it is, right, $5,000 or something like that. And it's of course much quicker. The thing is on demand; it doesn't get sick, it doesn't make spelling errors, right? It's the thing.

So our brains are remarkable not only for the fact that they're intelligent, but for the fact that they're insanely energy efficient, right? And so we don't have, like, you know, there's a lot of stuff in biology that's just insanely efficient that we have not been able to replicate with non-biology. And this is the thing. But of course, the great thing about energy is we don't need to be as efficient as nature at any given point, because, you know, for a human in the United States, you know, we have 75 times more energy used by our machine servants than we do by our own bodies, right? So that's that. And we're going to... but with the AI and with the need for knowledge, what we're finding is there's no real end point to our desire to augment our intelligence, and in particular in the realm of medicine and then more broadly longevity.

And I think that's a great thing, and that's going to benefit all of us tremendously. But that's the kind of... I mean, there's also just the whole phenomenon of creating... not just right now, AI is primarily advisers, right? That's sort of giving us advice on what to do. But as it becomes more of an agent model, then you can do more and more. And of course, nobody knows exactly how successful these will be, how much they'll proliferate, what their limits will be, what new capabilities they'll have. But obviously, the world is very excited about it, particularly the digital tech world.

So for all these reasons, there is huge urgency, I think proper urgency, in the digital tech world, even to keep ahead of the Chinese.

And you're seeing that. And I think somebody like, you know, Vivek in the new administration, like this is a big focus of his in particular. It's like he's very sensitive to the national security implications of AI.

Yeah, it's really something to see. And that's not—I'm not even so cynical about that. I mean, this is, I think, part of why sometimes populations will have better conclusions than the experts at a given time, although I'm a big fan of consulting experts in a proper way. But you'll often have something like people will just sort of know, you know, it's not like with the whole fossil fuel thing. So even just in terms of common sense. So another development—so I mentioned one development is the urgent need for more electricity and the recognition that fossil fuel expansion is necessary for that. But number two, and this is what you were alluding to with Norway, is the very conspicuous failure of the net-zero agenda, even when only barely implemented.

Yeah, right. So one of the scandalous elements of that is that there's no single town on the planet that runs entirely on renewables, right? There's no micro-project of...

Well, right. Well, yeah, but they don't really run well. That's the problem.

The thing that's so bloody peculiar about that is that because these renewable sources are sporadic and unreliable, you have to have a backup system that has the same capacity as the renewable system when it falls to zero. And so what you have is a new system built on top of the old system, being particularly catastrophic in Germany, right, where they shut off their nuclear plants and now use lignite-fired coal plants to augment their unreliable renewable... I mean, it's complete insanity, right? And so this is a case where I think the general public was much smarter than, say, The New York Times, where the general public was like, 'Wait a second, we were told to shut down these reliable fossil fuel plants and they could be easily replaced, and now we have all these electricity shortages and our electricity prices are higher. Maybe these two are related.' And then The New York Times, like, 'No, no, no, no, no, there's nothing to see here. Renewables are actually cheaper, right? They're actually cheaper, even though we added a lot of them and our electricity got more expensive and less reliable. They're really cheaper, and we'll make up a number called levelized cost of electricity that tries to calculate the cost of electricity if it doesn't have to be reliable, and so we'll tell you it's so.' So there's all this like mumbo jumbo, which I sort of debunk in Fossil Future, like chapter six type stuff. But this is another thing where the net-zero agenda promised us we would be richer, even just a very marginal implementation. And I want to stress this because we haven't even reduced the supply of fossil fuels in the world; we've just slowed the growth, right? And we're having all these problems. So even just a very bare marginal attempt to slow the growth in the name of net zero has been a disaster. So that's number two, and they're related because, you know, we have this clear demand that fossil fuels are needed for, and then we restrict fossil fuels some, and we start getting these big problems when we were told we would get big wealth.

Yeah, well, of course. So I mean, the obvious things are where they're already used in a free market, so with their off-grid kind of applications and that kind of thing. I think what we need—and this relates to some policy ideas—is insofar as we're going to have electricity markets, what you really need is some form of tech-neutral reliability or dispatchability standard, where you allow the intermittent sources the chance to provide reliable electricity, but you require them to. So just to give you an example, like let's just say, let's say like in five years Elon thinks, 'Hey, you know what, I can get solar and batteries to the point where I can provide dispatchable electricity,' or maybe it's 'I can get solar and batteries and maybe I'll have a few gas peaker plants as like a backup, and I think I have this system to do it.' I want to encourage that kind of thinking because you could imagine it could be possible, but you don't want to burden the grid with somebody's incorrect idea, and most people's initial ideas are incorrect. So the basic way you do this conceptually—that the details become difficult—but you basically say everyone on the grid has to meet a certain standard of dispatchability or reliability. We don't care how you do it; you can do it with whatever you want. You're a black box, and we just demand certain standards of performance of the black box. I think that kind of model will allow you to have market discovery if any of these ideas are true. But unfortunately, what's happened is people have made these crackpot claims that we can just power it with solar and a little batteries, and they've used all these false models that, you know, people like me spend a lot of time debunking. But then they just ruin the grid because what they're really getting is they have the right to sell unreliable electricity with no reliability guarantee, right, at the same price, and in fact with subsidies, a far greater price than reliables. And so this would be the equivalent of the government passes a law and says, you know, dental car companies have to charge the same for a car that works all the time and a car that works a third of the time, and you don't know when. Like, and actually you have to pay—actually we're going to subsidize the car that works a third of the time and you don't know when, which then actually is going to take money away from the reliables, which has happened on our grid. Is we give, you know, whatever pool of utility payments and stuff we have on the grid, more and more of that goes to solar and wind, in part because of subsidies, because they can always bid if they want a negative price, because they can basically say, 'I'm going to pay you to take our electricity,' because we're giving them so much as taxpayers. So even if they pay the grid, we pay them way more than that. So it's just this totally screwed up system. But I'm not one of these people who says we should just not consider solar. We shouldn't consider solar and wind, but we need real...

We wouldn't. But with the grid, what we have is we have a monopoly situation, so you have to think of it in that context. Now, I think long-term we could argue that we don't even need to have a monopoly with the electricity grid, but in anything resembling the near future, when you have government monopolies and you have, insofar as you have these electricity markets—which are not exactly markets, they're more like government pricing schemes—you need to orient those so that they reward reliability and they really value reliability, and right now they don't. So you want to... so people talk about like 'all of the above,' which I think is a pretty bad term because you don't, in no thing do you just want everything because it happens to exist. Like we don't want animal dung, right? We don't want wood; those are part of the above. You really want best of the above, and that's what you get in a real market. So with electricity, we need to create the closest approximation we can with a monopoly system of a real market where the lowest-cost, most reliable solution is allowed to emerge and rewarded.

Well, that's going to be one of them. One... let me lead into this actually by saying kind of the way in which I think I'm part of this change in the culture, because it sort of relates to the relationship between my work in the past and my work right now. Yes. So I think of, if you think of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Future, they're really, you know, it was really designed to sort of create the ultimate guide to evaluating energy sources. That's really like fossil fuels just happen to be the conclusion that this needs to be our dominant form of energy because there's nothing close in terms of cost, reliability, versatility, and scalability for the foreseeable future. But it's really about how do you evaluate our energy situation and potential side effects of energy, including climate side effects, which is the main thing people are concerned about, in a pro-human way. And the basic idea is that you need to be very even-handed. So you need to very carefully weigh both benefits and side effects of fossil fuels, particularly with climate. And within side effects, you need to be even-handed, so you can't just look at negative climate effects; you also have to look at positive effects. And part of being even-handed is you need to be precise, like more...

Exactly, way more plants as a matter of fact. We talked a lot about that last time. But then also, of course, open to things like heat, more heat waves, and, you know, expansion of water and sea level rise. And the idea is you need to be very even-handed. And so that's one of the core methodological things that I think I've encouraged people to use, and that I think you're seeing more and more of, and people like Bjorn and Schellenberger, I think, have also done this. And then the other thing, which is a little bit deeper, is that we have to evaluate them in a pro-human way and be aware that most people are either deliberately—I think in most cases inadvertently—evaluating fossil fuels from an anti-human perspective. And then within that, again, we talked about this last time, but just the sort of key ideas are: one is when we're thinking about the Earth and what our goal for it is, our goal—we need to be clear—our goal could either be to advance human flourishing on Earth or to eliminate human impact on Earth. And that the dominant goal guiding our policy is this goal of eliminating human impact, as evidenced by the fact that the number one cultural political goal in the world right now is eliminating our impact on climate. That's what net zero means. So like our whole focus with the Earth is how do we eliminate our impact on it in general, and particularly with climate. And my argument is that's an anti-human perspective, in the same way that if our goal were to eliminate bear impact, you'd think that's an anti-bear perspective.

Exactly, that's what... that's the...

Exactly, that's obviously what this is trending toward, although they don't say that, right? They used to say it, but they don't say it as much anymore. They used to say we're against population growth and we're against technology, but that didn't go over. So then they said we're just against climate change, we're against climate impact, and then you sort of fill in the blanks: oh wait, the way to get rid of that is regress technologically and have no people.

So there's this moral perspective of what I call your standard of evaluation. So is your standard advancing human flourishing on Earth or eliminating human impact on Earth? And of course, I'm on team human here. And then I think the part you were most interested in, which is your basic premise about the nature of humans and our environment, and what I call the delicate nurturer view, which is the main view that the Earth, basically the unimpacted Earth, is this nurturing utopia.

Yeah, and it's sufficient, it gives us enough resources as long as we're not too greedy, right? And then human beings are what I call parasite polluters, so we just take from the Earth and we ruin the Earth. And my view is, well, reality, this is all just nonsense, like it's total pseudoscience, even though many scientists believe it. And in fact, human beings are producer improvers.

Well, no, I think even many real scientists do, unfortunately, because many specialized intellectuals are in the thrall of bad philosophy because they don't think about philosophy. So I think we're producer improvers, so we add value to the world. That's why we have this amazing world now that's abundant and safe, even though the caveman had nothing. Like if the world were abundant absent us, the caveman would be rich and we'd be poor because there's so many of us, but it's the opposite. So we produce and we improve our environment in many ways, like we've rid it of all kinds of disease and disgustingness, and then of course we give ourselves access to natural beauty. We can decide to cultivate whatever species we want, you know, if we love a species we can make it plentiful. And then the Earth is not this delicate nurturer, it's actually, I call it wild potential. So it's not stable, it's dynamic, it's not safe, it's dangerous, and it's not sufficient, it's deficient, and we need to impact it a lot intelligently to make it abundant and a safe place. And so when you think of fossil fuels in this even-handed way from a pro-human value perspective, and you get rid of this anti-human view of humans and our environment, it's very obvious that, well, this thing we've cultivated called fossil fuel is just this incredible net benefit because it just allows us to harness energy and therefore machine labor, you know, all these machine servants like never before. And one of the things about energy is it can solve any problem, including the problems it creates. So if energy creates a drought challenge, well, it can also create irrigation and it can also create crop transport. Even if it creates something like a, you know, an air pollution challenge, it can also create the technology that can filter the air, and if anyone happens to get sick, it can also create the whole medical industry.

So it's again, it's energy solving its own problem. So I feel like I got, particularly with Fossil Future, I sort of got to a level where I felt like I had fully fleshed out how to think about this in a pro-human way. And then to amplify that, we created this thing called Energy Talking Points, which people can see at energytalkingpoints.com. And the idea there was let's make this accessible, let's make it easy for anyone to make and understand these arguments. And I basically just broke every issue up into tweet-length points, and our target was politicians, so we wanted to make it easy for politicians to talk about this. And what we saw is once we made it easy, like once you make it easy for people to say the right thing, they'll say it a lot more. And so we saw even in this Republican presidential primary, you know, candidates like Ron DeSantis and Vivek making points like we've had a 98% decline in climate-related disaster deaths over the last century.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Right. This is, I feel, and this is going to relate to what I'm doing now, but even in the realm of energy evaluation messaging, I found it was a huge breakthrough to make it easy to be my ally, right? That was the sort of... that was a breakthrough. And there's obviously tons more work to do here, but I felt like I kind of think of myself as either a practical philosopher, an intellectual engineer. Like, I like engineering intellectual products that help people flourish. And I sort of felt like my core work that I wanted to do here, like the... there was less innovation forward than there was behind me in terms of energy evaluation. And of course, I built a team and there's a lot to do, but I feel like I had really, to my satisfaction, answered all the arguments on the other side, taught people how to think about this, and I was trying to think of, okay, like what else? And it's going to take a long time for this all to flesh out and stuff, and I'm going to keep working on it, but sort of what's the next frontier that I'm interested in? And I do think that those of us—I call us energy humanists—I do think we've made a big difference. So like Bjorn Lomborg, Michael Shellenberger, and you know, I think, you know, you've really taken up this mantle as well, and it's really helped a lot. And I don't want to be complacent because we need massively to spread it, but just in terms of what I personally wanted to do, I felt like there was a much bigger gap now to fill in a potentially very time-limited window, which...

Well, yes, I think, you know, when I talk about advancing human flourishing on Earth, I think of—I don't draw a distinction really between our economy and our environment. I mean, I think it's actually all our environment, and I think of environment in a very humanistic way. So if you take a bird, right, like is a bird's nest a part of its environment?

Right, so I think a factory is our environment and the beach is our environment. I think we're just uniquely good at reshaping our environment to be particularly conducive to us. So when you talk about ecological thinking, I really think of that as humanistic thinking about our environment, as in how do we make sure...

around you and you burn them, and like, what else are you going to do? Versus you don't think as holistically about your environment — not because you wouldn't care about those things, it's just you have a sense of urgency. Once you're wealthy, you can think about things like, hey, what would the ideal climate be? I mean, let's leave aside are we negatively impacting — like, how can we maybe make more places like California, right? Or how can we, like, oh, how can we optimize the species on this particular island for some particular goal? Or even, we really like, you know, at home we have a dog and it's like, how can we make this dog really survive? Or how can we get rid of these mosquitoes — like, we don't like these aerial mosquitoes. The polar bears, they're beautiful, but we want them cordoned off so they don't eat us. Like, we're really engineering the Earth. So when you talk about ecological stuff, I think about it as this very sort of long-term and broad thinking engineering of the Earth to advance human flourishing, whereas the anti-impact crowd, that's not how they think of it. So if you made that argument to them, they're like, no, we don't want to impact it at all. We don't want like eight billion prosperous people who have nice gardens and clean air — like, that's way too humanized an Earth. We need, you know, back to the Pleistocene, as, you know, Earth First! I think used to say. So that's just to say, like, I don't like this idea of, like, oh, if from an environmental perspective — because is it a pro-human environmental perspective or anti-human? If it's anti-human, they just won't accept anything that involves human... gratefully accepted. So, so thank you.

So let's go on the — let's go on in terms of what I think the big opportunity is. And so when I'm — no, I'm very like, I wouldn't exactly say hedonistic, but like, I'm very much an enjoying life and work person, and like, I like doing things that are very beneficial to others that I really like doing. I'm not like, okay, I'm going to be miserable for 20 years and everyone else is going to be happy — like, it doesn't appeal to me much. So I think I do as much as anyone for energy, but like, I like to enjoy it. And part of that is I like to, you know, for me what's interesting is like an unsolved problem that I think would be fun to solve that I'm not convinced anyone else is going to solve unless I work on it, which again people can say like that's megalomania or whatever. But in this case I think it was pretty clear there was an unsolved problem, which is there was no real pro-freedom energy policy fully worked out in the event of a pro-freedom administration and Congress. And so, you know, like you look back a couple years ago, and I learned this particularly, and maybe we could start there on the issue of nuclear energy, because I'm just a huge — like, I've been interested in nuclear and enthusiastic about nuclear far longer than I've been enthusiastic about fossil fuels, because, you know, I grew up in a liberal environment, I'm like, I was afraid of climate change and this kind of thing, whereas nuclear, I was never really afraid of the nuclear kinds of fears. I know you have your own background in terms of like nuclear war, but I didn't grow up in that era, right? I mean, I was born in 1980, by 1989 we have the fall of the Soviet Union. I didn't really buy this idea that we're all going to be, you know, three-eyed fish and whatever. So, and that's also a concern that is in many ways importantly separate from the issue of nuclear power. It's totally right because the nuclear power plants can't explode. That's a very fundamental distinction. It's the physics make it impossible to explode. So, but with when I — it's in nuclear, my focus: why is nuclear so stagnant, right? We had this ideal of too cheap to meter, what, back in the '40s, right? It's going to be the electricity is going to be so cheap you don't even need an electricity meter at your house because like, who cares? It's going to be free. Even like data on hard drives — like, think about how much that's gone down in price, you know, the last 30 years, and yet nuclear just — it had this boom in the '60s and then starting in the '70s, you know, and then the early '80s, just totally start stagnating, where to the point where from the beginning of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1975, we went 48 years until 2023 until we had one plant go from conception to completion, and these were these Vogtle plants in Georgia, and they were just, you know, seven, eight, nine times over cost. They were just catastrophically expensive. So there was everyone who knows anything about nuclear knows the policy is a disaster. Like, you need to fix the policy. And yet I would ask nuclear advocates, okay, what do we do? Like, if you were the president, what would you do? And they'd always say, it's — nuclear policy is so bad, it's terrible. I'm like, okay, but what would — pretty low resolution — what would you do? And then I started realizing like, this is the problem, is that I don't really know what to do. And so even if I help people evaluate energy in a better way — of course there are some things I can know how to do in terms of stop blocking these pipelines and stuff like that. But even at the resolution of like, okay, what exactly should the air quality standards be and how do you determine them? You can say, oh, this recent thing on ozone is ridiculous because it's, you know, it sets the level of ozone below the background level in some parts of the US. So how are you going to possibly meet that, right? If background ozone is greater than your — but like, you could see these irrationalities, but there's a question of, well, how do you actually come to this solution? And I just kept seeing this with every issue, and I just thought like, I don't know the answers. And it's not that nobody knows the answers, but that the people who know the best answers — there's in no way has this been put together in a usable, coherent way. And at the same time, through Energy Talking Points, I had really proven to myself that, hey, if you can make it easy for politicians to do something, they're going to be a lot more likely to do it. Like, a lot of these politicians want to do well. Someone might just come along and capitalize politically on your ideas — that's certainly a possibility, but they need to be developed, right? You need to have something to hand them. And I noticed when I would talk to them, it would be too much vaporware, it'd be too abstract. And so then I became really interested: okay, let's say we have a new pro-energy president and a pro-energy Congress, how can we be prepared for that situation? Because if you think about, you know, at a certain point it became clear it would be Trump, but even if you take some of the others like DeSantis and Vivek, and that field was incredibly pro-energy compared to previous years, and I hope this is...

Something that I and the energy humanists have contributed to, certainly in terms of the arguments available. I'm certain I've helped contribute to it, but we had definitely broken the ice for those arguments at minimum, right, at bare minimum. So, and then you see, like, case in point, I know people are using the exact argument and that kind of thing. But that was this situation where, you know, even compared to, like, Romney, who, by the way, in many ways I admire, so I'm not trying to criticize Mitt Romney, but I'm just saying, like, if you look at the 2012 situation, where Republicans were in 2012, there was much less positive enthusiasm for energy, certainly fossil fuels, and much more friction in terms of let's hold back fossil fuels for climate reasons with the crop that we had. And certainly ending up with President Trump, like, that was not the case. And with Trump, we saw in the end, his, like, a central campaign thing was let's unleash American energy, which, that is, you know, to my energy ears, that's music. Like, oh, you want to actually do that? Because that hadn't been... But then I feel this obligation of, well, we as a country, we need to be ready for this situation, and I don't think we are. I mean, we are in the sense that they did a lot of good things the first administration, so it's not like they'll do nothing good. But if you have an opportunity like that, you want to do as much good as possible, right? And as a citizen, I felt like, okay, what I can do is try to create, like, a very specific platform and accompanying messaging so that they at least have the option of the policies. Because I was never—I've always said I'm never going into politics, which I'm not. Like, I'm not—I'm never going to have any control, but at least I can be the ultimate resource if somebody wants to take advantage of the resource. And so this last year and a half has been developing what I call, like, the Energy Freedom Platform, and this is, like, a very step-by-step detailed guide. So I thought we'd walk through the high level, but then we'll go into just some specifics because people can get a flavor. Because what I don't want to do is say, well, you have to be specific, but then just be high level. But of course, like, I sent you one of the internal documents I've shared with people the other day, it's like 125 specific policies, so we're not going to get into that. But I just want to—I'll give a few indications of some of the kinds of specific things.

But I'd say at a high level, number one is liberating responsible domestic development, so that includes, like, all the pipelines, all energy production, all sorts of stuff.

Yes, exactly. So, you know, you have a sort of slightly different set of obstacles, but in many ways the same kinds of obstacles in Canada.

So policies... I know, that's the thing. Worse philosophy. So, but we focus on the US first. So it's like liberating responsible development from anti-development policy. So that's sort of one bucket. Number two is ending preferences for unreliable electricity, which we talked about a little bit, but fundamentally our grid, our policy is just totally punishing reliability and rewarding unreliability in the name of so-called renewability. So there's that. Number three is setting environmental—this is a really important one that there's not been enough work on to date, which is setting environmental quality standards based on cost-benefit analysis, on real cost-benefit analysis, including objective health science, not health speculation. That might be an interesting one to go into in terms of how that's done. Number four is addressing climate danger through resilience and energy innovation, not punishing America. So the way our idea is, we're going to keep ourselves safe from climate by destroying fossil fuels, which, by the way, have made us way safer from climate, and then suddenly the climate's going to be nice to us, even though the rest of the world's not going to follow. Like, we have this insane thing: if we punish ourselves by destroying our fossil fuel industry and we set an example for the rest of the world, the climate will be nice to us, right? So...

So that's a major... yeah, but I would say, to the point about—so the key is really the combination of resilience. So the way you make yourself safe from climate is by becoming incredibly resilient. That's what we've already...

Yes, right, right. And then the other thing, though, I mentioned energy innovation. Countries can set an example insofar as they want superior forms of energy if they can actually innovate a globally cost-competitive alternative, which is really the only thing you can—the only way you can actually address a global issue that's caused by the cheapest form of energy emitting CO2 in the atmosphere, right? The only way you can really address it in a remotely humane and practical way is to come up with a cheaper form of energy that doesn't emit. Yeah, that's all you can do. And you need to be a wealthy and prosperous and free society to do that. You're not going to run your economy into the ground and then innovate the new nuclear.

And the fifth one is unleashing nuclear energy from the many pseudoscientific restrictions. So yeah, let's—which one do you want to...

Talk about... oh, I think we might as well just go through them in order. I think they're all extremely interesting, and you can go into them in as much detail as you see fit. And yes, I'll just highlight some sort of priorities for all of them and where I think the... And of course, by the way, if any politicians are watching this or anything like that, email me, Alex at alexepstein.com, and happy to help with the details.

This... I should say one thing about, by the way, because I think you're always good at drawing lessons from things, things about how to compile this, because this is certainly not just me thinking in a room, although I do think a lot in a room. I mean, part of it has been trying to find the absolute smartest people who had already figured out as much of this as possible. So some of what I'm going to say has been me, or often my team. So I have a very, very brilliant team who works for me full-time. They're sort of all around the world. I found them in these very... it's almost like the X-Men, you just find them in these very obscure places.

They are, but I think it's going to be particularly... they're good at the messaging part of it. Like, so I was doing something last night, actually, playing around with explaining why I'm very suspicious of these CO2 capture schemes, and I was getting it to do the math on how much... I wanted like a set of talking points on how much we pay. Might as well tell you, like, how much you pay for the coal and how much we are subsidized to sequester the CO2, right? And people have no idea.

But it's basically the math is: one ton of coal generates between two and three tons of CO2, so like it's more than its mass. And it's similar with gas, but gas has twice the energy density per mass. So with coal, that means if you have a $50 ton of coal, you get paid $85 a ton to sequester the CO2. So that means you're on the order of $200 to store the air. So for $50 of coal, you pay $1 to put the air underground. Is China going to do that? Is India going to do that? And so for gas, it's about half. So gas, you basically pay about half that. So it's preposterous economically.

Yeah, because the CO2 on its own, leaving aside the energy that's coupled with it, because if just CO2...

Plus, it's really, really expensive to sequester it. Like, you already made the economic case that's devastating. It's by any reasonable standard... this is actually a really important issue right now because I think one of the big challenges to what I call Energy Freedom policies is now, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, which is the thing that really set these carbon capture prices incredibly high, we have a huge portion of the oil and gas industry now lobbying to keep these very large subsidies. And so the oil and gas industry was more consistently pro-Energy Freedom before, but now when it comes to Congress talking about, you know, do we repeal the whole IRA or part of it, there's a lot of very influential people saying, no, no, of course we have to keep the carbon capture stuff. And I think that's a wrong view.

But also, people very much underestimate how valuable it is to be known as a truth-teller and to have intellectual integrity across a lifetime. And I found this out, just as a sort of digression, when I was... you know, many people sort of interacted with the transition team, and I'm never officially on any kind of team, and you know, and I definitely wasn't there. But I remember I was making some recommendations, and one person on the team told me, like, you know, to make really good picks... So by the way, I'm not taking responsibility for any given pick, I'm just saying I was one of the people consulted. And he said, you know, to make really good picks, we need outside experts that we can totally 100% trust, and that's the way this person said, like, I feel about you. And I thought, that's interesting, because I didn't even know this person, met him once a while ago, but like, he's seeing me think consistently for 17 years in a way that's logical and not partisan or tribal, and not like pro-fossil-fuel-industry when the fossil fuel industry is doing something badly.

And when the fossil fuel industry tries to convince people, oh well, it's good to subsidize the hell out of CO2 reductions for carbon capture, but it's bad for solar and wind, how are people supposed to take that? So I think short-term it feels like, oh well, maybe we can keep these subsidies, and like we were planning on getting these subsidies, but in the long term you establish these anti-freedom things and you diminish your credibility.

Yeah, yeah, and that's it. It's like, it's kind of like quality is the best business model, like in the long term. But it's one of these things where it's a lot easier for the missionary to figure that out. Like sometimes people talk about missionaries and mercenaries in business, and like often the missionary... it's just like you can't even do anything else. It's for me, whatever, because I'm kind of an entrepreneur, but I'm really just... I like thinking about what I think is... I like trying to figure out what I think is right and then convincing other people of it. So just psychologically, there's no appeal to me of, oh, I'm going to say something someone else thinks is right and that I think is wrong, and I'm going to make money. Right? I mean, that's just throwing my life away, and it's going to be miserable.

So it's sort of like I didn't do it with the idea of, oh, in 17 years I'm going to be a trusted political adviser, but maybe people... if it takes that to convince other people, like these trade groups, because what I do, Energy Talking Points, now we advise on policy, and I just find people just roll out the red carpet for us. They're so interested, and we do no lobbying, no public support, I have no affiliation, I give no money to anybody, I don't endorse...

Yes, right, right. And that was the focus, and not the consequences of that.

Right, it took a long time, like it's a long-term investment strategy. But yeah, I found exactly the same thing, it's exactly the same. So it's just this thing where... but I noticed these trade groups, like I was in a meeting recently, and the other, you know, another person in the meeting might be way more famous and way richer than I am, but I feel like everyone in the room trusts me more because they know I'm saying what I think is right, which doesn't mean they'll agree with me, but they know that...

In this case, I am right.