Power Hour with Alex Epstein

By Alex EpsteinNews News Commentary

Power Hour with Alex Epstein episodes

September 16, 2020 Patrick Moore on How “Green” Forest Mismanagement Caused the California Wildfire Disaster
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.
1 hr 17 min
September 09, 2020 Promoting freedom and energy in 2020 — interview with the Club for Growth’s David McIntosh
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?
39 min
September 02, 2020 Congressman Chip Roy on The 2020 Energy Debate
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.
35 min
August 26, 2020 The Real Villains Behind CA Wildfires and Blackouts with Michael Shellenberger
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.
1 hr 7 min
August 19, 2020 Economics, Energy, and Bitcoin
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.
1 hr 24 min
August 17, 2020 EnergyTalkingPoints.com
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!”
25 min
August 06, 2020 Mark Mills on our energy future and why it isn’t “renewable”
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
1 hr 4 min
July 29, 2020 California’s Energy Nightmare, “energy privilege,” and resisting oppression
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.
1 hr 29 min
July 22, 2020 Alex Epstein’s most in-depth interview ever on the moral case for fossil fuels
From Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels

Last Thursday I was interviewed by former Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts as part of a project by him to educate Australian politicians and members of the general public on energy and climate.

We ended up going 2 hours and 15 minutes. I think it’s my best and most comprehensive interview to date.

Here’s the very long list of topics we covered.
- Should Senator Roberts be proud to be a human being, and be proud to have worked in the coal industry?
- The vast improvement in human life and the role of fossil fuel “machine food” in that improvement
- How much the human environment has improved in the last 200 years
- How fossil fuels make it much easier to preserve the most desirable parts of nature
- How fossil fuels helped end slavery and servitude
- The three ways in which fossil fuels are crucial to medical science
- How fossil fuels make possible today’s amazing division of labor
- What going back to nature would be like in a world of 8 billion people
- The question our society should be obsessed with but isn’t
- The right way and wrong way to think about “changing the system”
- Why the view that we are in a climate crisis is a religious, not scientific, view
- Fossil fuels, opportunity, and happiness
- Human beings’ capacity for caring and how it is manipulated
- What actually leads to a better future for future generations
- How property rights are required for a proper relationship between human beings and the rest of nature
- The untold devastations of our anti-property rights policies such as the Endangered Species Act
- A thought experiment: how would we think of fossil fuels if they sucked CO2 out of the atmosphere
- Why people expect rising CO2 levels to be bad even though science tells us they will a) significantly increase plant growth and b) warm mostly the oldest parts of the world.
- The “anti-impact framework” underlying most of today’s energy and environmental thinking
- Why the moral case for fossil fuels does not depend on CO2 having a negligible impact
- Sea level rise as by far the most plausible threat of rising CO2 levels—and why even that is a weak threat
- The disingenuousness of “climate justice”
- The four major types of energy
- Why it’s wrong to compare the prices of reliable and unreliable energy
- How “unreliables” don’t replace the costs of reliables, they add to the costs
- How “unreliables” cannot make themselves but depend on fossil fuels for their existence
- 100% renewable plans as “equal parts ignorant and genocidal”
- Why the anti-fossil fuel movement is anti-nuclear
- Why electricity prices in the US have gone up despite cheaper natural gas and coal prices
- How the anti-impact movement stopped the trend of declining energy prices
- The motives of the anti-impact movement
- The role of envy
- “The anti-impact framework”
- How anti-impact, anti-human moral ideas attract power-lusters
- The human flourishing framework
- Why hydrocarbon companies don’t stand up to the anti-fossil fuel movement
- The difference between executives’ and politicians’ public views on climate and their private views on climate
- When are we obligated to speak the unpopular truth?
- The power of one courageous voice
- Why I focus on spreading the good news about climate livability
- My relationship to the fossil fuel industry
- Are we going to run out of fossil fuels?
- Why having “good intentions” must include the intention to understand the relevant facts
- How I approach thinking about moral issues
2 hr 20 min
July 22, 2020 False Alarm, the book the New York Times doesn’t want you to read
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
53 min