Answers to questions about "depletion," nuclear, industry communication failure, and more
Select Q&A from some of my recent speeches
I often travel to give speeches about my work to energy companies, university students, non-profit organizations, and a variety of other audiences.
Since these speeches often include a Q&A, I thought it would be fun to compile some of the most interesting questions I’ve been asked recently—along with my answers.
What follows are transcripts of audience members’ questions from a handful of different speeches (paraphrased for clarity and anonymity) along with my answers (edited only for clarity).
This Q&A covers:
My vision for nuclear energy,
Why I’m not worried about fossil fuels running out,
The history of how pro-capitalists failed to own the issue of a good environment,
The fossil fuel industry’s failed foray into hiring communications experts,
How I think about our dependency on Saudi Arabia for fossil fuels versus our dependency on China for solar and wind.
(To inquire about having me speak at your event, email speaking@alexepstein.com with your desired date(s), location, and topic(s).)
Q: It seems like you are confusing the world’s need for energy for the world’s need for fossil fuel energy. Why do you focus on promoting fossil fuels rather than promoting, say, nuclear energy?
A: I am doing a huge amount to liberate nuclear energy. I’m not advocating that people should use more fossil fuels, as such. I’m advocating for the freedom to use fossil fuels.
And my point is that what you need is enough energy that’s affordable, reliable, and versatile for billions of people in thousands of places. What we have right now with nuclear is a state of stagnation where it has become incredibly expensive due to the green movement. It is not scaling well and right now it’s just providing electricity.
I want a world where nuclear is providing cheap electricity and cheap industrial heat and cheap kinds of transportation, and I’m fighting for that world—but we are nowhere near that world.
What I’m in favor of is the freedom to use fossil fuels so we can have as much energy now and the freedom from nuclear to reach its full potential. If you talk about eliminating fossil fuels and trying to replace it with nuclear in the near term, that is just killing billions of people.
Q: How do you address depletion, i.e., the worry that fossil fuel resources are limited and we are running out?
A: Well, in a sense, everything depletes. Everything in the world is finite, including the sun. And life. I mean, the beautiful thing about capitalism—or I should say, one of the beautiful things—is that it always allows us to maximize our resource potential by doing whatever is most cost-effective at a given time and progressively discovering new ways of what’s most cost-effective.
If you look at the oil that we used to power America in the 1800s, all of that is gone and the methods used then couldn’t get us very much oil today, probably. But we find new oil that’s accessible and we develop different methods and now we can produce way more oil than we did back then. And there’s 10 times more oil in the ground than we’ve used in the entire history of civilization, so if we can develop better methods, we can get that. Or we can find better methods of turning coal and getting liquid hydrocarbon, which is basically oil, out of that.
And then at the same time, we can look into uranium. And how do we get better at nuclear, and how do we get rid of the irrational regulations on that? So the whole thing is people are worried about running out of resources or depleting resources, and the actual fear should be running out of freedom, because when you run out of freedom, then what happens is you run out of resources.
Some people are a little overly optimistic and they think like, “Well, I read Julian Simon, the human mind is the ‘ultimate resource’ (energy he called the master resource) and so all these catastrophists are wrong.” And they’re wrong if there’s freedom. But if you take away freedom, you deplete available supply and you don’t replenish it. This is what we’re starting to see with fossil fuel. So I think, again, the real fear is running out of freedom and that causes you to run out of everything.
Q: Why have so many people been so successful advocating against fossil fuels, despite all the evidence that fossil fuels have enormous benefits, and despite all the money in the fossil fuel industry?
A: It’s a really interesting question. I think one thing I’ll say though is it’s pretty shocking how effective it is just to make it explicit that you should carefully weigh benefits and side effects. That to me is the most effective thing. That’s why I always start with it, because just generically, it’s easy for people to fall into bad thinking habits and not know that they’re thinking about something badly.
And when that happens, often people are not using what they would consider common sense in their thinking. There’s an expression, “common sense is not always common practice.” So it’s notable that if, just by bringing this up—so this doesn’t answer your question, but I’ll answer it in a second—it’s really notable just by knowing that people aren’t carefully weighing the benefits and side effects, and are just looking at side effects and exaggerating them and ignoring benefits, if you know that you can frame your communications a lot more effectively. Because you can get everyone to agree, “Hey, shouldn’t we look at both benefits and side effects?” And they’ll agree, and they’ll actually follow it much more in practice than they otherwise would.
I think there’s a bunch of reasons. I talk about this in Chapter Three of Fossil Future. I think one thing that’s been particularly effective is—this is a broader thing—the anti-capitalist movement has been good at owning the issue of a good environment. And that I think this is a real problem, because a good environment… that issue should belong to pro-capitalism people, because pro-capitalism people are for property rights, which is the whole basis of actually having an environment that’s good for human beings. It’s the basis of saying, “Hey, look, you can’t emit X in the air and water beyond certain limits because that’s violating people’s property rights, including to their air and their land and their water.”
And it’s the basis of people making their environments good. When it’s your property, you’ll actually make it good. And it allows us to develop our environments into abundant and safe places—instead of the “natural” world where everyone suffered, or almost everyone suffered for endless thousands of years.
But the anti-capitalist movement in the ’60s and ’70s, it did a really good job of owning the issue of a good environment. And the real goal of it, I believe, was not a good environment for humans, but was to just protect the rest of nature from humans.
I think it’s a very anti-human view, which I talk about in the book, but I don’t think the pro-capitalist side did a good job of saying, “Hey, look, we want an amazing world. We want a world where it’s beautiful and we have clean air and clean water,” and so the other side got associated with a good environment. And if you get associated with a bad environment, people are legitimately afraid of that because your environment is where you live.
If you have a fundamentally bad environment, you really can’t live. So I think this other movement did a really good job of saying, “Hey, we’re for a good environment and the other side is against it. And if you listen to them, the world is going to end.” And the more you think about “It’s going to destroy our environment, the world is going to end,” the less you can even think about the benefits of fossil fuels.
This is the AOC thing of “Hey, the world is going to end in 12 years, and you’re talking about the price.” It’s like, you make these unlimited side-effects. So there’s a lot going on, but that’s part of it.
Q: In terms of just the kilowatt-hour cost of energy, greener sources like solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, as well as natural gas, are cheaper, while most fossil fuel sources are more expensive. So how do you justify your claim that fossil fuel energy is cheaper? You mention something about repair costs?
A: Oh, yeah. So this is fortunately a thing that is changing in terms of how people think about it. So you’ll see a statistic that says solar and wind cheaper, and it’ll have usually the acronym LCOE, which stands for levelized cost of energy or levelized cost of electricity. Explicitly—you can see this on my Substack—levelized cost of energy does not factor in reliability.
The issue is: with electricity, the cost of electricity is the cost of reliable electricity. So what we need is reliable electricity.
When you’re dealing with an unreliable input like the sun and the wind, you need to look at the full cost. And when you look at the full cost, it goes up. So this is why, for example, Germany has some of the most expensive electricity in the world. They use some of the most solar and wind in the world, but what they have to do to ensure reliability is they have to build two grids. They have to build a solar and wind grid, and then they have to build a very duplicative coal and gas grid.
And Germany has had skyrocketing prices, but they’ve had good reliability. Now what other places try to do is they play what I call reliability chicken. So they don’t want these really high costs like Germany has, so they try to cut down on reliable power plants. They also try to cut down on resiliency measures, which is what happened in Texas, not weatherizing their plants enough versus, say, Alberta the same week had weatherization; they used fossil fuels and they did very well.
With reliability chicken, you’re basically hoping the sun shines enough, the wind blows enough, it doesn’t get too hot, it doesn’t get too cold—otherwise you’re going to get screwed by your lack of fossil fuel or other reliable power plants. That’s what happens in California. That’s what’s happening around the country. That’s why you have all the shortages. So you need to look at the full cost.
It’s not repair cost—it’s just the full cost for reliability. [LCOE] is fortunately starting to be less widely used. But for years, unfortunately, people have been deluded into thinking that solar and wind are cheaper when they’re not. They’re not cheaper for electricity when you factor in the full cost plus they can’t do the other things fossil fuels can do. I highly recommend to go to my Substack. I have the ultimate refutation of the argument that solar and wind are cheaper than fossil fuels. I have 70 very well referenced points on this.
Q: It’s my understanding that Western reliance on fossil fuels for the past few decades has made us dependent on—and enriching of—repressive regimes with a lot of fossil fuels such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar. What do you think of this as an argument for using solar and wind, which is everywhere, rather than fossil fuels?
A: Yeah, really important question. So I think one thing is if you’re looking in this realm, it’s a much more plausible argument for nuclear-based technologies than for solar and wind. As I mentioned, solar and wind are totally dominated by China for the foreseeable future.
You can say the sun is everywhere—but even that is a little bit misleading. It’s like America has very good sun in certain places and very good wind. If you look at South America, they don’t have really good of either. There are large portions of the world that don’t have really good solar and wind resources, and even if you do, the unreliability prohibits it from being a real substitute. So with solar and wind and batteries, those are hugely China-based. I do think that for sure we should be for all forms of energy increasing our domestic capacity.
So I’m a big fan of rare earth mining and the US doing all these things. We have more potential to do those in a more secure way. Nuclear, I think there’s more of an idea that you could do it domestically, but the real solution there is what I’m advocating, which is more energy freedom.
Take something like geothermal, which involves drilling into the ground. There are a lot of restrictions on drilling that are impeding that from happening. So the solution is to liberate anything to become cost-effective. The only way that China, India, and others are going to use things is if they’re actually cheaper. So subsidizing industries doesn’t help. We could talk about subsidizing research. What you need is liberating industries, so they’re actually competitive. So you don’t solve the problem by being dependent on China.
Now, in terms of the problem with these other nations, it’s a big subject and it’s not my current expertise, but I have done a lot of studying of it. The way in which we interacted with Mideast dictatorships was not at all inevitable. We made certain decisions to put people in power and in particular to allow them to violate agreements and give huge amounts of wealth to dictators that we didn’t need to do. So if you read a really good book on this—it doesn’t make a judgment on it so much, but I have a negative judgment—it’s a book The Prize by Daniel Yergin. But what you can see is… For instance, Saudi Arabia, when we first went there—the US and to some extent parts of Europe, but I think mainly the US—they were having trouble finding water. That was the main thing. Nobody thought there was any potential. The government made deals with the West saying, “Hey, we’re going to pay you this if you do this.” This was a deal.
When Saudi Arabia—they were one of the last to violate it—but all these governments violated it, and dictatorships were empowered. I don’t think we should have let that happen. And certainly because you put all these dictators in power and then you make a lot of bad deals. So I don’t want to minimize the problems with this, but the solution isn’t forcibly getting off fossil fuels. It’s liberating domestic fossil fuels and other alternatives and having a better foreign policy, which is not my expertise, but we definitely need a better one. So thank you.
Q: When I was in elementary school in the ’60s, we’d watch films about how Dow Chemical and others were improving the world. Why aren’t today’s energy companies far more proactive about publicizing the true and wide-reaching benefits of energy?
A: Yeah, it’s a great question. So let’s see where to start with this.
One thing to observe about the [cultural] environment when Dow Chemical and others were doing that was that it was a fundamentally pro-industry environment, which is very different. If you look at the trajectory of how people view industry, starting in the late sixties, you start to have a very downward trajectory.
It used to be, politically, that both the left and the right were very pro-industry. The classical communists and socialists, they had smokestacks in their imagery. They had factories. Everyone wanted to be the party of industry, in a certain way—in some ways, the left more than the right actually.
And then what happened for various interesting reasons, which is the whole discussion, is the political left—let’s just say anti-capitalists—they realized that they couldn’t win on an industry and prosperity grounds. And so they started attacking capitalism as environmentally bad, which I address in Fossil Future.
But just to give the story, they portrayed capitalism as environmentally bad, which is a form of being morally bad. And so what happened is the favorable environment in which PR people and companies could comfortably educate people—that environment no longer existed. You were in a much more controversial environment, where saying pro-industry things would require quite a bit more courage and quite a bit more addressing of concerns.
So what you have happen is the industry is already doing well. The energy industry tends to think—or tended to think—“Look, everyone needs our product. Whatever these yammering people say, they’re going to need our product. So let’s just lay low, not talk about it. We’re not going to go on TV anymore; let’s not talk about it. And then these guys won’t have that much of an effect.”
And it would be really hard for them, it would be hard for them to do well because it’s not their expertise. So they had a hard job, because of the culture. They decided not to do it. They thought they could get away with not doing it.
At a certain point, they started doing it by conceding all of their opponents’ arguments. So by saying, “Hey, we’re going to go beyond petroleum.” “Hey, look, we’ve got a wind turbine at the front of our prospectus. What makes us good is we’re not fossil fuels.” They started doing that, so they start making it worse. Or some of them would do a climate denier—I don’t like that term, but—“There’s no issue here. We don’t have any impact on climate. Let’s just not talk about it.” So they didn’t have the ammunition and it was a lot harder to do.
So I think the way to change it is... I mean, one thing is you can try to change the culture, which I do somewhat, but that’s hard to do. What I do more directly for them and for politicians is I try to make it a lot easier to make the arguments by breaking down all the arguments and referencing them all—and these what I call energy talking points.
I used to actually do consulting for energy companies where they would pay us to, say, help them with an ESG report or PR campaign. And I stopped doing that a few years ago because I just wanted to do public stuff that was available to everyone, focusing on politicians. But now what’s available free to energy companies is 10 times better than what we were ever paid for.
So I think if you check out EnergyTalkingPoints.com and our stuff, you’ll see for every issue, we have, “Here’s how to explain it, here are the facts,” etc. And that has started to embolden people, because if they have confidence we have good arguments, I have the answers to their questions, and you can give them more confidence.
And then what you’re also seeing is the more people speak up and it goes well, the better. When [an energy CEO] says something like, “Net zero by 2050 is a fantasy,” and doesn’t disappear from the face of the Earth, that’s a good example. There’s a guy named Chris Wright at Liberty Energy who’s done great work. They did an ESG report that basically said, “Hey, you want to look at our impact? Okay, we’re going to show you. Our impact is amazingly positive,” which is not what the ESG people wanted, but he’s been reframing that and he’s encouraging people to use his stuff.
So my strategy is to make it as easy as possible to tell the truth in a situation where it’s difficult.
Q: Tech companies are among the biggest consumers of energy on our planet, and they seem to get little backlash. It seems they are able to mask the amount of energy consumption that AI and data storage require. How do they get away with this, and why doesn’t the industry fight back?
A: Yeah. Well, to compound what you’re talking about, they also have the gall to claim… So you go to Google and they say, “We’ve been carbon neutral since 2007.” And we have some talking points about this, by the way, so you could check it out there.
But it’s very important that the fossil fuel industry stress its superior cost-effectiveness and scalability. This has been a fight that I’ve had for a long time, and I’m finally starting to win a little bit with the industry, because the view before was, “We don’t want to be anti-renewables.” And that’s true in one sense: you don’t want to be anti-freedom for renewables. You want to be pro-freedom for everyone. You want to be pro-competition. But you absolutely want to be anti your competition in the sense of if you are actually superior, you need to point it out.
I mean, would Steve Jobs have refused to run those Mac versus PC commercials? Would he refuse to say the iPhone is better than all these other crappy phones? Obviously, he wouldn’t do that. But think about what it says to the world. If you don’t say our product is better, that there are unique benefits of our product that you won’t get anywhere else, what that does is it undercuts the whole case because then people don’t think there are any benefits to what you do. They think you’re easily replaceable. And then any old claim about negative side effects, they’ll buy, because it seems totally safe to get rid of you.
So it’s been this unbelievably self-defeating thing to act like solar and wind are anywhere near replacements for fossil fuels. And yet it’s been part of the industry practice for a long time. And part of it is the whole communications apparatus often—
So you asked about why the industry didn’t fight back. I mentioned it has a difficult job. It’s difficult to persuade people of these issues. The culture is difficult. One of the things though that you very understandably do when you’re a specialist in something—and companies are specialists in energy production, basically—is you delegate it to experts in another field. And so what companies often do, and I’ve seen this is, they go, “Well, let’s find a communications expert. Let’s go to Edelman. That’s the leading PR firm in the world.” So, “Let’s have Edelman figure out how to advocate for fossil fuels.” Well, does Edelman know how to advocate for fossil fuels? Is Edelman even pro-fossil fuels? These guys can’t even convince themselves that fossil fuels are good. How are they going to convince anyone else?
There’s been this delegation to a certain—it’s improved—but to a certain kind of PR class and “communications expert” class, where they don’t actually believe in it. They don’t actually know how to argue for it. And so what they say is, “Hey, let’s just make people like you. Let’s throw some wind turbines up there. Let’s not criticize renewables. People don’t like that.” They’re all running their own psychological issues through you. Versus what’s actually necessary, obviously, is to persuade the world that you have a uniquely valuable product without which we cannot live and flourish. That should be very straightforward to do and obvious that it’s necessary—and it’s starting to happen.
So I think a lot of this stuff is getting better. I’m really happy to have a role in making it better, and I really am happy to have, in the last few years, I think we have discovered with Energy Talking Points—which now we now have eight people working on it—is that the biggest solution is we just do everyone’s work for them. So we just give you all the answers. You don’t have to do almost any work. Just ask AlexAI, go to the website. It’s just done. We just work out everything. And we do this for politicians. This is why you see presidential candidates, the RNC, everyone is starting to use our points and that’s great.
I want everyone to copy it. Or someone else can come up with a better thing, and then I will happily copy them and do something else.
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.
“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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