How I would debate energy and climate if I were running for President
How I would debate energy and climate if I were running for President
In last night’s debate, some candidates made good points about energy. But there’s a lot of room for improvement.
During and after last night’s Republican Primary debate I got a bunch of messages praising the candidates for using some of my Energy Talking Points.1
One top Senate staffer wrote me: “I think your talking points were the biggest winner tonight.”
While I am glad to have had a positive influence on what politicians are saying about energy, my main reaction to last night’s debate was that no candidate is close to taking full advantage of the best energy messaging and policy ideas.
So here are the top 5 points I’d make to put forward a positive vision of energy and energy freedom, followed by how I’d answer the question about young people’s fear of climate change that no candidate answered directly.
(Just to be clear, I am never going to run for President or any other political office. But I will continue to do whatever I can to help elected officials and candidates to have the best possible policies, messaging, and facts when it comes to energy, environment, and climate.)
1. The most important thing I can do to make your life better—something that will lead to a better economy, a lower cost of living, more well-paying job opportunities, a smaller deficit, and greater national security—is unleashing American energy.
2. Because energy is the industry that powers every other industry, the price of energy affects the price of everything: the lower cost energy is, the lower cost everything is—the higher cost energy is, the higher cost everything is.
3: If we unleash American energy with energy freedom policies—allowing every form of energy to achieve its potential—we will become the world's energy superpower by far, whether it's oil, gas, nuclear, geothermal, whatever.
Remember when the world thought American oil was dead? Thanks to American energy freedom we had the shale revolution, and now we're the world's leading producer.2
4: Instead of unleashing American energy with energy freedom, Joe Biden has strangled American energy with green energy fascism—using dictatorial power to stop crucial mining and drilling projects, shut down reliable power plants, and prevent vital new pipelines.3
The results of Biden's green energy fascism are higher energy prices, an increasingly unreliable grid, and a deadly dependence on China, which controls the whole solar/wind/battery supply chain, produced of course using coal; China is actively building over 100 new coal plants.4
5: If elected President, I will from Day 1 unleash American energy with energy freedom policies, including: liberate domestic mining and drilling for all forms of energy, end preferences for unreliable electricity, and decriminalize nuclear energy.
With my energy freedom policies, we'll see a jump-started economy, lower fuel prices and food prices, new job opportunities for workers of all skill levels, a lower deficit, and a weakened China that can no longer control our energy and therefore us.
To unleash American energy through energy freedom is going to require not just rhetoric but radical, enduring policy changes against huge deep state and corporate opposition. I am 100% committed to making this kind of change.
How I would have responded to last night’s climate question from a student, which was: “Polls consistently show that young people’s number one issue is climate change. How will you as both President of the United States and leader of the Republican Party calm their fears that the Republican Party doesn’t care about climate change?”
Many Americans, especially young Americans, are very concerned about climate given what they hear from the media and other institutions. The solution is neither to evade their concern nor to appease it. We need a candidate who can alleviate their concerns with science, logic, and good policy ideas.
We need to make clear to young people the difference between climate impact, which is real, and climate catastrophe, which is not.
The world has warmed ~1° C in the last 170 years. Humans have some influence. But because we are so good at mastering climate, climate disaster deaths fell 98% over the last century.5To address any long-term concerns about CO2 emissions we need to advocate the policies that have the best chance of actually leading to cost-effective alternatives that everyone, including China and India, will actually use. And those policies are energy freedom policies.6
Energy freedom means: liberate development, including mining, from all the irrational restrictions (including NEPA, which strangles anything that somehow connects to the Federal government, which is most large projects) and to decriminalize nuclear energy.
PS As a bonus, here’s how my new chatbot AlexGPT advised Republicans to answer the question. AlexGPT will officially launch in a few weeks but Premium subscribers to this newsletter can already access it.
PPS For much more on how candidates can and should talk about energy policy, see:
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.
As of July 2023, China is constructing 128 new coal-fired power stations.
Global Energy Monitor - Coal Plant Tracker, Coal Plants by Country (Power Stations)
For every million people on earth, annual deaths from climate-related causes (extreme temperature, drought, flood, storms, wildfires) declined 98%--from an average of 247 per year during the 1920s to 2.5 per year during the 2010s.
Data on disaster deaths come from EM-DAT, CRED / UCLouvain, Brussels, Belgium – www.emdat.be (D. Guha-Sapir).
Population estimates for the 1920s from the Maddison Database 2010, the Groningen Growth and Development Centre, Faculty of Economics and Business at University of Groningen. For years not shown, population is assumed to have grown at a steady rate.
Population estimates for the 2010s come from World Bank Data.