Power Hour with Alex Epstein

A couple months ago, a young researcher named Emily Harari reached out to me about my views about the scientific consensus on climate change. She raised some interesting questions I hadn’t commented publicly on, so I agreed to do the interview if we could share it with my listeners.

This week’s Power Hour features that interview.

Some of the topics we cover are:

– The legitimate and illegitimate view of consensus
– How to learn the actual state of consensus
– The National Climate Assessment
– How consensus statements often misrepresent the state of consensus
– The role of the media in distorting science
– How transparent should consensus discussions be
– The obligation of scientists to stand up to false consensus statements

On this week’s Power Hour Alex Epstein interviews Chuck DeVore, a Vice President at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and former California state assemblyman on the California wildfires. DeVore has extensively studied the history of fires in California, and gives a fascinating historical perspective that points the right path forward.

Questions covered include:
– What is California’s climate like historically in terms of being prone to fire?
– How were forests and fires dealt with by natives prior to the Gold Rush?
– How were forests and fires dealt with subsequent to the Gold Rush?
– What policies have been most responsible for making us Californians vulnerable to dangerous fires?
– How have logging policies affected vulnerability to dangerous fires?
– How have air quality policies affected vulnerability to dangerous fires?
– What are the most important policies to fix the situation?
– How can we as citizens get involved?

On a special bonus episode of Power Hour Alex Epstein interviews Patrick Moore, ecologist and cofounder of Greenpeace, on the realm causes of California’s wildfire disaster. Moore pins the blame squarely on “green” forest mismanagement.

Topics covered include:
– What are the top policy changes necessary to prevent dangerous, out of control wildfires (not the same as fires)?
– How does private vs. government ownership of land affect the likelihood of dangerous fires?
– What are the major drivers of dangerous, out of control wildfires?
– What places in the world have the best wildfire management?
– How have government policies changed for the worse in the US?
– How do you respond to claims that these fires are inevitable because of climate changes?
– Dr. Moore’s forthcoming book on invisible catastrophes.

On this week’s Power Hour, Alex Epstein interviews David McIntosh, President of the Club for Growth, one of the world’s most influential free-market organizations.

The Club for Growth recently shared Alex’s EnergyTalkingPoints.com website with its members and the candidates it works with.

In the interview Alex asked McIntosh a wide range of questions relating to promoting freedom and energy in 2020, including:

– What does the Club for Growth do?
– How does the Club for Growth select and help free-market candidates?
– What are the most important issues at stake this election?
– Why did the Club for Growth share Alex Epstein’s EnergyTalkingPoints.com?
– What has McIntosh learned about effectiveness in Washington that supporters of energy freedom can utilize to become more effective?

On this week’s Power Hour, Alex Epstein brings on Congressman Chip Roy to discuss the 2020 energy debate and how pro-freedom candidates and citizens can be successful in it.

Some topics they cover include:
– Why energy policy has not been a big topic of discussion so far, particularly among Republicans.
– Why we can expect energy policy, including climate policy, to be a big topic in the final two months of campaigning.
– What Congressman Roy thinks of EnergyTalkingPoints.com.
– The challenges candidates face in dealing with a wide variety of issues.
– Some of the most common energy and climate questions candidates need help responding to.
– How to promote EnergyTalkingPoints.com.

On this week’s Power Hour, Alex Epstein brings back Michael Shellenberger, our most popular guest of 2020, for an in-depth look at the California blackouts and the California wildfires.

On this week’s Power Hour Alex Epstein interviews economist Dr. Saifedean Ammous about economics and energy.

Dr. Ammous, in part due to his influence by The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, is working on a new economics textbook that makes energy a central focus in analyzing the causes of prosperity. Dr. Ammous is best known for his popular book The Bitcoin Standard, a fascinating look at the economics of Bitcoin.

Alex and Dr. Ammous discuss a wide range of topics, including:

– How Ammous got interested in energy economics.
– What Ammous learned studying the economics of biofuels.
– Why it’s crucial to think of time as the most important resource.
– How energy relates to time.
– How economists tend to undervalue energy–and what Ammous is doing to address this.

Additionally they discuss several foundational issues in economics, such as the nature of money, economic calculation, the nature of value, and opportunity cost. I hope you enjoy the wide-ranging discussion.

As a bonus, on this episode Alex gives his first ever public explanation of “the private jet problem,” a central idea in The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels 2.0.

On this week’s episode of Power Hour, Alex Epstein shares EnergyTalkingPoints.com–a growing library of short, powerful, and carefully-referenced talking points that any pro-freedom candidate or citizen can use.

He discusses the enthusiastic responses he’s gotten so far and asks listeners to spread the word by:
– Sharing them with campaigns you’re connected to and encourage those campaigns to talk to me.
– Sharing them on social media.
– Sharing them with coworkers and employees.
– Sharing them with programs you like and encourage the hosts to invite me on.

We want more campaigns to get them and use them like the one who sent this message did: “[Y]our talking points are so thorough…We’re going to work these into our messaging on energy and the environment. Much appreciated!”

On this week’s Power Hour Alex Epstein interviews Mark Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, on the future of energy in general and “renewable energy” in particular. In the last year and a half Mark has published two fascinating and widely circulated reports: “The ‘New Energy Economy’: An Exercise in Magical Thinking” and “Mines, Minerals, and ‘Green’ Energy: A Reality Check”.

Mark brings a great perspective to energy issues because he a) has a strong physics background and b) he is deeply knowledgeable about how different industries, above all the digital technology industry, use energy.

On the show Mark and Alex discuss:
– The three ways to use unreliable “renewable” energy and why none them work well
– The massive and rapidly increasing quantities of reliable electricity used by digital technology
– Why every hour of video uses as much energy as driving 1 mile
– How AI has a limitless need for energy
– Tech companies’ contradiction of supporting unreliable energy and demanding ultra-reliable energy
– The fallacy of equating energy and electricity
– The limits of battery density
– Why engineers can’t fulfill arbitrary political wishes

On this week’s Power Hour, Alex Epstein interviews Ron Stein, author of Energy Made Easy and Just Green Electricity, about the decline of California’s energy system.

On the show they discuss:
– How much oil California uses and where it comes from.
– The decline of California energy production and the rise of imports from the Middle East.
– Where California’s electricity comes from–hint: a lot of it isn’t from California.
– How California is shutting down 4 reliable power plants with no replacements on the horizon.
– How California’s regressive oil and electricity policies his poor and middle class Californians the hardest.
– How California can change its energy future.

On the podcast Alex also answers two listener questions: one about “energy privilege” and one about the role of reliable, low-cost energy in fighting oppression.

At the end of the second question Alex discusses how modern, high-powered communication systems are valuable for fighting many kinds of oppression, but how the current social media model is dangerously suppressive of open intellectual debate.

From Alex Epstein, host of Power Hour

On this week’s Power Hour I interview Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, author of False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.

As I discussed in my review of the book several weeks ago, I think this is an extremely valuable book, on two counts above all.

1. It documents in case after case how the media and political leaders wildly distort the conclusions of mainstream climate research.
2. It documents in case after case how human adaptation can neutralize climate danger.

The book was recently attacked in a New York Times “review” by the famous near-socialist economist Joseph Stiglitz. Bjorn systematically refuted the pseudo-review on this impressive LinkedIn article.

On the show we discuss:
* How trusted media sources manipulated a climate research paper to predict 187 million climate refugees when the number was actually around 300,000 (half the number of people who move out of California every year) * Why we always need to look for positive and negative impacts, not just one or the other
* How many seconds worth of electricity all of America’s batteries can store today
* The true state of solar and wind in the world today
* How people in developing countries around the world demand “real electricity,” not the meager, unreliable electricity provided by much-heralded solar installations
* The prospects for nuclear energy
* Some of the crude errors of the New York Times review of False Alarm
* How global capitalism will encourage energy progress even when specific technophobic countries reject it

On this week’s Power Hour Alex Epstein interviews Dr. Patrick Moore, ecologist and co-founder of Greenpeace, about climate catastrophism.

Moore eviscerates climate catastrophism by looking at rising CO2 levels from a scientific and pro-human perspective–not the pseudoscientific and anti-human perspective that dominates today.

Topics include:
-Why Moore left Greenpeace.
-The beginnings of the climate catastrophe movement.
-Why Moore believes human beings would not only survive but survive better at far higher average temperatures (which would be concentrated toward the poles).
-Why Moore believes that contrary to being in a Sixth Extinction, we are actually at an unprecedented time of biodiversity with no end in sight.
-Why Moore believes “ocean acidification” claims are totally meritless.
-The commonality among opposition to plastics, GMOs, nuclear energy, and fossil fuels.
-Moore’s unrefuted theory that human beings actually saved life on Earth from terminal decline in CO2 levels.

Alex Epstein interviews Caleb Rossiter , Chairman of the CO2 Coalition.

There is an active campaign, led by billionaire anti-fossil-fuel activist Tom Steyer, to convince Facebook to remove the CO2 Coalition from its platform.

Some highlights include:
* Rossiter’s decades-long work on African issues.
* Why fossil fuels, especially coal, are crucial to African prosperity.
* How Rossiter became suspicious of climate models.
* CO2 as a warming gas *and* a plant fertilizing gas.
* How challenging climate catastrophism hurt Rossiter’s career.
* How the “paid off by the fossil fuel industry” narrative is laughable.

Alex Epstein interviews Michael Shellenberger, author of Apocalypse Never, which hit #5 on Amazon. His recent article, ‘On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare,’ has been widely shared.

Some highlights:
* How Shellenberger went from being a renewables activists to championing nuclear.
* Why Shellenberger decided to stand up against climate catastrophism after years of silence.
* How modern environmentalism is a religion.
* The real motives of most of modern environmentalism.
* How environmental journalists misrepresent environmental science.

Alex Epstein discusses two soon-to-be released books: Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger and False Alarm by Bjorn Lomborg.

He explains why these are crucial books in the broader project of a pro-human environmental movement that rejects climate catastrophism.

On this episode of Power Hour Alex Epstein interviews Naomi Seibt, the 19-year-old German teenager who has been called “the anti-Greta” for her articulate and outspoken challenges to climate catastrophism.

The focus of the discussion is the outrageous attempt of the German government to take down her videos challenging climate catastrophism and advocating what she calls “climate realism.”

Instead of trying to resolve the issue quietly, Naomi says “I’m going to go big this time. And I’m going to involve the press. I’m going to make this very public….people will see what’s going on and how they try to silence us. And I think that will make them question the issue a lot more.”

On this episode of Power, Alex Epstein answers listener questions about “100% renewable,” why he publicly violated Gavin Newsom’s stay at home order, and the George Floyd saga.

Alex Epstein interviews Matt Ridley on the topic of “how energy innovation works.” Drawing from Ridley’s new book, “How Innovation Works,” they discuss:

-Why Ridley considers “the conversion of heat to work” to be perhaps the most important innovation.
-The true story of innovation in fracking and why the conventional narrative about it being a government-led innovation is false.
-Why there’s so little innovation in nuclear–and what to do about it.
-Why freedom is crucial to innovation.

On this episode of Power Hour, Alex Epstein and Steffen Henne discuss:

-Why no company is or can be 100% renewable for the foreseeable future.
-The three dishonest techniques companies use to claim that they are “100% renewable” or “carbon neutral.”
-How Google, Microsoft, and Amazon use these techniques to deceive the public.
-Why companies’ refusal to consider nuclear energy is cowardly.
-How 100% renewable propaganda pollutes the energy debate.

From Alex Epstein, host of Power Hour
On this week’s Power Hour I interview economist Ray Niles on how a freer market can help us protect ourselves from COVID-19.
We covered topics including:

– How price controls, in the form of anti-“price-gouging” laws, caused – shortages of vital medical supplies and other supplies.
– How we are in a critical moment for freedom in America.
– How “temporary” incursions on freedom rarely go away.
– How a freer market in hospitals would increase capacity.
– The long-term consequences of money-printing and “stimulus.”

On this week’s Power Hour I interview Wayne Christian, Chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission (the primary governing body over oil and gas in Texas), on why he decided against passing a government-controlled cap on oil production in Texas.

In a bonus episode of Power Hour I interview one of my favorite COVID commentators, economist Daniil Gorbatenko, about the overwhelming evidence that the lockdown mantra “safer inside” is wrong.

Being inside increases our risk of a dangerous infection from COVID-19 by a) exposing millions to higher doses of the virus and b) decreasing immunity.

Being outside by contrast, exposes us to lower doses of the virus and increases our immunity.

So not only are the lockdowns catastrophically destructive to every aspect of life besides COVID-19, they also make many and likely most Americans more vulnerable to harm from COVID-19 itself.

On this week’s Power Hour I discuss “The Five Things Planet of the Humans Gets Totally Wrong.”

1. It evades how bad the “natural” planet was for human life.
2. It evades how good today’s humanized planet is for human life.
3. It evades our ability to create new value and grow indefinitely.
4. It evades our ability to produce more value with fewer side effects (e.g., nuclear).
5. It evaluates the state of the planet by an anti-human standard (unchanged nature), not a pro-human standard (human flourishing).

From Alex Epstein, host of Power Hour. On this week’s Power Hour I discuss “The Five Things Planet of the Humans Gets (Mostly) Right.”

1. Green energy is a high-impact industrial process
2. Green energy has many undesirable environmental impacts
3. Green energy is hugely dependent on fossil fuels
4. “100% renewable” is energy accounting fraud
5. Leading green energy advocates are a terrifying combination of ignorant and dishonest

Next week I’ll cover “The Five Things Planet of the Human Gets Totally Wrong.”

From Alex Epstein, host of Power Hour. This week’s Power Hour features a 2 hour interview with philosopher Onkar Ghate, focusing on why lockdowns were never a necessary or proper response to COVID-19.
Dr. Ghate, a longtime colleague (and mentor) of mine, has been doing some great work on what a truly American, pro-freedom, approach to infectious diseases looks like.
Some topics we covered include: 

• We need objective, clearly defined laws specifying and limiting the power of government in regard to infectious diseases.
• Why Sweden has more American infectious disease laws than America does.
• How clearly defined laws lead to better preparedness by government, industry, and individuals.
• Why more profit-making in the health care system is key to scaling capacity.
• How governments have failed to do their proper job of identifying and isolating infectious individuals.
• How far greater transparency from government would empower a free people to make rational decisions.
• The right way to handle potential hospital capacity shortages.
• How the idea of “free” health care promotes irresponsible behavior.
• Why state-wide lockdowns were not the right policy with the evidence we had.
• Why lockdowns were a panic-based, not reason-based policy that should be removed as quickly as possible.
• How governments should make policy and communicate to citizens going forward.
• Why now is the time to write to government officials—and what you should write.

On this week’s Power Hour Alex Epstein covers 4 topics:
-A pro-freedom approach to COVID-19
-My favorite COVID-19 commentators
-The fallacy of COVID-19 and climate “denial”
-New climate talking points

With in-depth interviews of experts on controversies such as “green energy,” offshore drilling, “energy independence,” fossil fuels, etc, Power Hour seeks to help listeners get clear on these complex but vital issues. Every episode features a new guest, an extended interview/discussion, and a closing segment with my takeaways from the discussion.

With in-depth interviews of experts on controversies such as “green energy,” offshore drilling, “energy independence,” fossil fuels, etc, Power Hour seeks to help listeners get clear on these complex but vital issues.

On this week’s Power Hour I explain why I’ve jumped into the COVID-19 policy debate and why I believe bad thinking methods are driving leading predictions and policies. Then I offer a first draft of a path forward, which I call “Don’t Stop Living, Live Smarter.” The six key steps are:

Step 1: Acknowledge the difficult reality we are in.
Step 2: Recognize that an indefinite universal lockdown is both impractical and immoral.
Step 3: Massively increase testing and transparency
Step 4: Liberate American ingenuity to massively increase treatment ability
Step 5: Help the highly vulnerable minority protect themselves.
Step 6: Go back to work (and school) with virus-prevention best-practices.

On this week’s episode of Power Hour, Alex Epstein discusses four ideas you won’t hear anywhere else: 

-The increasingly prevalent COVID-19 policy of indefinite universal isolation is immoral and un-American
-Climate change fixation blinds us to real threats like COVID-19
-A Green New Deal would be fatal in the fight against COVID-19
-The Corona Recession is a mild preview of the Green New Deal

On this week’s Power Hour “best of” episode, I interview economist Richard Salsman. We get into an in-depth discussion on the issues of waste and pollution.

On this episode, Bradley and I discuss the apocalyptic predictions of “running out of resources” and why they are invariably wrong. Bradley explains why the more resource we consume the more resources we have. 

On this week’s Power Hour “best of” episode, I interviewed physicist Denis Rancourt, one of the most intelligent scientists I have ever spoken to, about the true physics of CO2.

On this week’s Power Hour “best of” episode, I talk to Dr. Amesh Adalja, infectious disease specialist and professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, about the nature of infectious diseases, epidemics, and how to master these natural threats both on an individual level and on a societal level.

On this week’s Power Hour “best of” episode, I talk with energy expert Jude Clemente about the extent of energy poverty around the world, including in the US. We also discuss how with the right energy policy we can make everyone around the world more prosperous.

On this week’s Power Hour “best of” episode, I talk to Steve Milloy, publisher of junkscience.com, about emissions, the EPA, and how junk science corrupts much of our government’s environmental policy.

On this week’s Power Hour “best of” episode, I talk to Robert Zubrin, author of Merchants of Despair and president of The Mars Society, about Aquaculture, Mariculture, Genetic Engineering and the role of anti-humanism in slowing down progress for human life.
This is one of my favorite episodes ever. Among other things, it totally changed my view of the ocean.

On this week’s Power Hour “best of” episode, I talk to one of the world’s leading experts on fracking, Dr. Mukul Sharma. Dr. Sharma has written numerous publications and conference proceedings, including pieces like “Hydraulic Fracturing: Facts and Myths”. Here are some of the questions that will be answered:

-What is fracking?
-What exactly is horizontal drilling?
-What chemicals are used in the process?
-How does fracking impact our environment?
-And much more

On this week’s Power Hour “best of” episode, I talk to Pierre Desrochers of the University of Toronto about the real, positive relationship between capitalism and our environment.

On this week’s Power Hour “best of” episode, I talk to the Kirk Sorensen, founder of Flibe Energy, on the subject of nuclear power from Thorium. Kirk is a leading advocate of Thorium, an incredibly potent source of energy. You can learn more about his work at www.energyfromthorium.com.

On this week’s Power Hour “best of” episode, I talk to Michael Lynch, President and Director of Global Petroleum Service at Strategic Energy & Economic Research Inc. (SEER), about the underlying economics of oil price changes.

On this week’s Power Hour “best of” episode, I talk to Robert Zubrin, author of Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism.

Dr. Zubrin’s is a fascinating history of the theory and practice of what Zubrin calls “anti-humanism”–the belief that “human beings are pathogens whose activities need to be suppressed in order to protect a fixed ecological order with interests that stand above those of humanity.” Zubrin traces anti-humanism from the doctrines of Thomas Malthus centuries ago, which led to murder and sterilization campaigns in the name of protecting ourselves and the planet from “overpopulation,” to the racist social mis-interpretations of the theory of evolution that led to mass-murder in the name of protecting ourselves and the planet from “degeneration of the gene pool,” to the modern “environmentalist” movement’s war against life-saving practical energy, pesticides, and genetically-modified organisms, in the name of saving ourselves and the planet from an “excessive” human “footprint.”

On this week’s Power Hour “best of” episode, I talk to Dr. Edward Calabrese, professor of toxicology at the Department of Environmental Health Sciences in the School of Public Health at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

We discuss the linear no-threshold dose-response model, which regulatory agencies use to set pollution standards, and his findings about a more realistic “hormetic” response model that could improve regulatory standards and human health if adapted.

On this week’s Power Hour “best of” episode, I talk to climate scientist Dr. John Christy about what climate scientists know, don’t know, and why. Dr. Christy is a Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and Alabama State Climatologist.

On this week’s Power Hour “best of” episode, I speak to Brendan O’Neill, editor of spiked-online.com and author of A Duty to Offend, to discuss the difference between the humanist view of nature and the anti-humanist view of nature.

On this week’s Power Hour “best of” episode, climate scientist Dr. Judith Curry, Professor and former Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, President of Climate Forecast Applications Network and proprietor of the blog Climate Etc., joins me to discuss how she went from being a mainstream climate scientist to one of the most controversial figures in the field–and what her experience tells us about the state of the climate science profession today. We also discuss the attempt to use anti-mafia laws to prosecute “climate deniers.”

On this “best of” episode of Power Hour, I talk with Rod Adams, publisher of Atomic Insights, about nuclear power and how the build time as well as the cost for new reactors have been increased by irrational fear of it.

On this week’s Power Hour, Don, Steffen, and I break down my debate with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and address some of Kennedy’s distorted claims that I didn’t have time to cover. Topics include:

-The myth that Kennedy supports a free market in energy
-Why “levelized cost of energy” calculations don’t prove that wind and solar are affordable
-The truth about climate-related deaths and climate-related damages

On this episode I talk to Patrick Moore, ecologist and a co-founder (and defector) of Greenpeace about how the science of ecology has been corrupted over the decades, and how it can be fixed.

On this episode I talk to Michael Shellenberger, President and co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute and prolific champion of nuclear power, about a rational approach to environmental issues.

On this week’s Power Hour, Don and Steffen discuss five topics:

-Greta Thunberg’s unscientific sermon
-Climate policy trends: Germany vs. China
-What climate protesters really want
-Why we shouldn’t “do something” about climate
-The shameful fossil fuel divestment campaign

On this week’s Power Hour, Don and Steffen discuss six topics:

-The Saudi oil attacks
-How Norway rigged its car market to promote EVs
-Greta Thunberg’s U.S. visit
-The state of Germany’s “energy transition”
-Rolling back the lightbulb ban
-Debunking the myth of “green jobs”

On this week’s Power Hour, Don and Steffen have a special episode:

Breaking down CNN’s Democratic presidential candidate climate change town hall.

On this week’s Power Hour, Don and Steffen discuss five topics:

-The EPA rolls back methane regulations
-The real lessons of Hurricane Dorian
-More welfare for corn ethanol farmers?
-Why quick charging EVs would be a disaster
-Democrats sue to stop Trump’s Affordable Clean Energy rule

On this week’s Power Hour, Don and Steffen discuss five topics:

-Bernie Sanders’ totalitarian climate plan
-David Koch’s legacy
-The CNN climate debate
-The flight shaming movement
-The truth about Amazon fires

In a special edition of Power Hour, I interview Power Hour listener Patrick McDonald on his idea for a more meaningful way to measure CO2 emissions. Instead of talking about how many tonnes of CO2 someone emits, we should talk about how their emissions compare to Al Gore’s annual emissions.

On this week’s Power Hour, Don, Steffen, and I discuss six topics:

-Eco-fascist mass murder
-Silencing climate skeptics
-The Texas energy crisis
-Germany’s onshore wind capacity stagnates
-Wind and solar can’t scale
-“Contaminating” the moon

On this week’s Power Hour, Don and Steffen discuss six topics:

-Trump reins in the Endangered Species Act
-Blocking the energy infrastructure blockers
-The war on meat
-“Green energy” utopianism
-Frameworks for persuading vs. frameworks for manipulating
-Solar roads = the worst roads + the worst solar

On this week’s Power Hour, Don and Steffen covered six topics:

-Prestigious economist says GND would help the economy
-India’s energy needs
-Why the left and right can’t agree on climate change
-Making sense of nuclear and coal bailouts in Ohio
-Should we preserve natural beauty?
-How the government ruined your dishwasher

On this week’s Power Hour, Don, Steffen, and I covered six topics:

-Carbon tax watch
-The fallacies behind “Earth Overshoot Day”
-Greta Thunberg’s revealing climate summit stunt
-Energy deprivation in Michigan
-Being green vs. human beings
-Ethiopia grows trees, not prosperity

On this week’s Power Hour, Steffen and Don covered six topics:

-The ubiquity of anti-human thinking
-Heat waves and blackouts
-Will climate change cause Tuvalu to drown?
-Berkeley bans natural gas
-Hiding the costs of climate restrictions
-A climate change moonshot?

On this week’s Power Hour, Steffen and I covered seven topics:

-Trump’s environmental offensive
-Green energy growth declines
-Do environmentalists want to stop climate change?
-Exposing NASA’s “97% of climate scientists agree” lie
-How much CO2 does your speech emit?
-The state of European nuclear power
-No impact means no renewables

On this week’s Power Hour, Don and Steffen covered six topics:

-Inslee’s climate indoctrination plan
-Bloomberg’s green energy fantasy
-New York climate law jeopardizes manufacturing
-The media pushes electrification hype
-Power plants could push emissions targets beyond reach
-LEGO decides plastic is a problem

On this week’s Power Hour, Steffen and I covered three topics:

• Presidential candidates fail to seriously address climate and energy
• Why we disagree with Peter Diamandis’s predictions about the future of battery electric vehicles.
• Wood Mackenzie optimistically tallies zero-CO2 US power at $4.5 trillion

On this week’s Power Hour, Don, Steffen, and I covered four topics:

Once again I was unable to record Power Hour, but my colleagues Don and Steffen stepped in to cover six topics:

-The lessons of Chernobyl
-The future of Germany’s nuclear industry
-Bloomberg uses his wealth to make us poor
-Another failed climate prediction
-China threatens to cut off US rare earth metal supply
-How regulations are making us waste natural gas

Once again I was unable to record Power Hour, but my colleagues Don and Steffen stepped in to cover six topics:

-Joe Biden’s climate plan
-The problem with “freedom gas”
-Are killer heat waves going to decimate the US?
-The latest front in anti-fossil fuel investor activism
-The green fight against flight
-Millennials blame climate change for their failure to save

On this week’s episode of Power Hour, Don and Steffen cover seven topics:

-The green movement’s “intelligent transformation” denialism
-Putting an end to the Chevron extortion racket…for now
-Texas stands up to pipeline sabotage
-BP aligns with Paris climate goals?
-California flirts with banning gas-powered cars
-The myth of a green wave in the EU elections
-Alberta might repeal carbon tax–and get a new one

On this week’s episode of Power Hour, Don, Steffen, and I cover eight topics:

-Australia votes for energy abundance
-Have we been overestimating methane emissions?
-The Guardian’s biased climate reporting
-Congressional bill seeks to limit ethanol blending
-Will the EPA reject air emissions junk science?
-90% of US not in drought for first time since 2000
-Mile-long gasoline lines paralyze oil-rich Venezuela
-Wind power still dependent on subsidies

On this week’s (abbreviated) episode of Power Hour, Don, Steffen, and I cover five topics:

-No, fossil fuels don’t get $5 trillion in subsidies
-Joe Biden’s climate conundrum
-Bernie Sanders wants Silicon Valley to stop supporting energy progress
-Why the media isn’t talking about cheap shale oil
-The Green New Deal isn’t so green

On this week’s episode of Power Hour, Don, Steffen, and I cover nine topics:

-The UN’s latest environmental scare
-Renewables growth stalls
-The hidden risks of rooftop solar
-The other natural gas blockade: the Jones Act
-American LNG fuels European energy security
-The first “solar powered town” isn’t
-The contradictions of France’s green energy policy
-Can wind and solar make the grid more resilient?
-Protectionism for uranium producers

On this week’s episode of Power Hour, Alex, Don, and Steffen, cover seven topics:

-PG&E decides only blackouts can prevent forest fires
-Offshore drilling remains off limits
-Beto O’Rourke’s Green New Deal-lite
-The risks of NOT using fossil fuels
-New York bans skyscrapers and hot dogs
-Nuclear “bailouts” in Ohio and Pennsylvania
-California blames high gas prices on oil industry conspiracy

On this week’s episode of Power Hour, Alex, Don, and Steffen, cover eight topics:

-Fact-checking the NYT on renewables
-An honest study on the true price of renewables
-Iran sanctions set off oil price hikes
-PA warns NY: stop blocking our natural gas or stop buying our natural gas
-Extinction Rebellion’s criminal climate protests
-Facebook pays a price for its “100% renewable” lies
-Will the pro-nuclear presidential candidates please stand up?
-Court victory for a climate heretic

On this week’s episode of Power Hour, Don, Steffen, and I cover six topics:

-The Green New Deal, not climate change, is an existential threat
-We wanted flying cars, instead we got climate catastrophism
-What Chevron’s purchase of Anadarko means for the future of oil and gas
-Elizabeth Warren vows to ban fracking on public lands
-The unethical Michael Mann gets an ethics award
-Pennsylvania’s underhanded push for cap-and-trade

On this week’s episode of Power Hour, Don, Steffen, and I cover seven topics:

-The true cost of solar
-Can Trump stop New York from depriving New England of affordable energy?
-Arctic drilling in jeopardy…again
-Keystone XL, 11 years and counting
-The surprising lesson of Venezuela’s blackouts
-Lights out for Texas?
-The wastefulness of household recycling

On this week’s episode of Power Hour, Alex, Don, and Steffen cover seven topics:

-The Senate’s Green New Deal vote
-The Republicans’ “Green Real Deal” train wreck
-Federal judge blocks oil and gas development in Wyoming
-Colorado’s continuing war on fossil fuels
-Bernie Sanders vows to outlaw fracking
-California (finally) decides to do something to prevent wildfires
-How to think about byproducts

In this week’s episode of Power Hour, Alex, Don, and Steffen cover seven topics:

-Robert Phalen’s great work on air pollution
-Students skip school to protest climate change
-Oregon says “no” to fracking prosperity
-2020: The climate change election
-The insane economic theory behind the Green New Deal
-Europe’s largest “renewable” energy source: biomass
-The Trump administration pushes corn ethanol

In this week’s episode of Power Hour, Alex, Don, and Steffen cover eight topics:

-A new way to frame energy conversations
-Venezuela goes dark
-After stinging defeat in 2018, Colorado’s anti-fracking activists are back
-Green New Deal: A Preview
-How the Fukushima nuclear incident is still being distorted 8 years later
-Youngstown’s fight for fracking freedom
-The false hype around Texas building “the world’s largest batter”
-The attack on industrial collaboration

In this week’s episode of Power Hour, Alex, Don, and Steffen cover seven topics:

-Improving the human environment
-Did Trump put a “climate denialist” on a White House climate panel?
-What’s the actual capacity of “the world’s biggest battery”?
-“Demand response” = power deprivation
-Amazon’s dishonest “Shipment Zero” program
-The latest “green” trend: plastic penance
-Why U.S. coal plants are outdated

• The Canadian Energy East pipeline is in the crosshairs of environmentalists.
• EPA head Gina McCarthy puts out a scare story about how climate change will give children asthma.
• A recent study in New York State to establish baseline water quality confirmed once more that methane contamination is mostly natural and unrelated to gas drilling.
• Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is giving out more leases for offshore oil & gas production in the Gulf of Mexico.
• Government Accountability Office says more needs to be done on “ocean acidification.”
• Nuclear Regulatory Commission says that Yucca Mountain nuclear waste facility meets its safety standards for a million years.

• Lockheed’s Skunk Works is working on a compact fusion reactor, promising a prototype in 5 years.
• A new study on fracking impacts reveals that drilling into the ground creates seismic activity but in the case of fracking this activity cannot be felt by humans.
• 350.org is pitting “climate warriors” in stone age canoes against coal ships to sabotage modern energy.
• Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann has a new presentation about the performance and state of climate science.
• California is close to finalizing SB4 with additional rules for in state fracking operations.
• Swedish energy giant Vattenfall, which runs major operations in Germany, seeks $6 billion in compensations for the post Fukushima shut down of nuclear power.
• Many environmentalists have embraced more natural gas and horizontal drilling as a viable alternative, but only for as long as it has not been cheap and abundant, which caused them to change their minds and take the exact opposite stance.
• The IEA says will Africa to experience a renewable boom.
• The President continues to deride political opponents via his official media outlets using the smear term “climate change deniers.”
• Whole Foods is implementing a new food labeling system which focuses on environmental buzz words.

Here are three things we know about man-made global warming. First, the consequences will be terrible if we don’t take quick action to limit carbon emissions. Second, in pure economic terms the required action shouldn’t be hard to take: emission controls, done right, would probably slow economic growth, but not by much. Third, the politics of action are nonetheless very difficult.

…

So why is the opposition to climate policy so intense?

Well, think about global warming from the point of view of someone who grew up taking Ayn Rand seriously, believing that the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest is always good and that government is always the problem, never the solution. Along come some scientists declaring that unrestricted pursuit of self-interest will destroy the world, and that government intervention is the only answer. It doesn’t matter how market-friendly you make the proposed intervention; this is a direct challenge to the libertarian worldview.

And the natural reaction is denial — angry denial.

As you’ll see, I have some things to say about Dr. Krugman’s analysis :-).