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Economy

A CNN report that hasn’t been published yet. Interview with Alex Epstein of Energy Talking Points

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24 minute read

A CNN reporter interviews me about my political work

A behind-the-scenes look at my work with candidates and elected officials

In mid-February, a CNN reporter who had been following Ron DeSantis’s primary campaign, and had heard the campaign refer positively to my work, reached out to me to learn more about the behind-the-scenes work I do with candidates and elected officials.

I thought readers of this newsletter would enjoy learning more about this work—which, as you will see, is non-partisan, non-exclusive, and principled: my team and I will advise any major politician or candidate who asks, and will only deliver messaging and policy ideas we believe are pro-freedom and pro-human.

(I am keeping the identity of the reporter anonymous, and I am further protecting the person by paraphrasing their questions in my own words so that no specific phrases are attributable to them. Note also that CNN has not yet published my comments.)


CNN Reporter

What kinds of opportunities do you think exist for a Republican president in terms of energy and environmental policy?

Alex Epstein

I do a lot of advising of people in politics, and it actually has no partisan affiliation. So I’ll advise anyone from any party and I never support any candidate. I’ve advised multiple of the presidential candidates and I would advise Biden if he asked me (he hasn’t asked me for any advice yet).

My interest is in pushing what I call energy freedom policies—which we could get into the details of—which I think would be very good for the country.

CNN Reporter

What are energy freedom policies, and how do you go about advising policymakers to put them into practice?

Alex Epstein

The basic idea of energy freedom is that the key to both energy abundance and everything that comes with it, including prosperity here and around the world—but also coming up with long term alternatives to fossil fuels—is ultimately to be free to produce and use every form of energy.

I believe there’s a near term imperative to have as much energy as possible. I don’t think we should be restricting fossil fuel use. But I also think there’s a lot of things we can do to get out of the way of alternative forms of energy. So I’m personally agnostic in terms of what form of energy wins; I just want the most cost-effective thing to win.

For example, in the realm of alternatives, what we really need are alternatives that can be globally cost-competitive, such that China, India, etc., will voluntarily adopt them, versus the current state of affairs where China has 300-plus new coal plants in the pipeline designed to last 40-plus years because that’s the cheapest thing.

So that’s the broad idea. I can send you some links on this, but I’ve broken it down into five key policy areas. And then there are a lot of detailed policies within that. But the broad frame—and again, I can send you documents—but “Liberate responsible domestic development” is one of them. And so, that basically means: allow America to build things quickly. Right now, China can build a subway station in nine hours. We can’t build a yoga studio in nine months. So basically, getting all of the anti-development stuff out of the way. And again, this is energy agnostic. It’s not just for fossil fuels, but a lot of the changes apply to fossil fuels.

Number two is: “End preferences for unreliable electricity.” I think there are a lot of bad policies that favor unreliable electricity, so solar and wind without really accompanying battery storage or other backup. And so I advocate a suite of policies that I think would allow all forms of energy to compete to provide reliable electricity.

The third one is: “Reforming environmental quality standards to incorporate cost-benefit analysis.” Most people don’t know this, but right now, EPA is literally not allowed to consider the cost of its policies. And I think that just violates basic rules, and it guarantees that we do things that are bad for our economy and for health, because wealth is health. And if you can’t consider the cost of your policies, and you can only consider the benefits, then you’re always going to tend toward more anti-industry stuff. So there’s a suite of reforms there.

Number four is: “Address CO2 emissions long term by liberating innovation not punishing America.” So I sort of indicated this before, but I don’t believe in short term restrictions on fossil fuels. I think basically anything we do to restrict ourselves just harms America, and doesn’t do anything to make low carbon alternatives cost-competitive. So I think all the action should be in things like liberating nuclear, liberating deep geothermal, and a lot of this is in the “Liberating responsible domestic development.” If you make that a lot easier, you make it easier to do these other things, these alternatives.

And then the fifth one is kind of a specification on the fourth, but it’s “Decriminalize nuclear,” because I think nuclear energy is the most persecuted form of energy. It has a really tragic history where it used to be cost-effective and now it’s not, because of irrational regulations that have made it 10 times more expensive and yet have added zero safety benefit. They’ve in fact harmed our safety in many ways by depriving us of clean, safe nuclear energy. And so I think there’s a whole suite of reforms necessary for that.

So those are the broad areas and then in each area, you know, my team and I are hard at work detailing, “Hey, what are the key reforms?” And one thing just to note is that I don’t hold any political office, I never will, I don’t lobby for anyone, I don’t endorse anyone, I set up everything so I’m quite independent.

So what I try to do is just say what I think is right, and then persuade people as much as possible. And fortunately a lot of people listen to me, but I have no power over anything officially—but that also allows me to just say what I think is right. So, I’m not under the illusion that everyone is going to do exactly what I think, but they do listen.

And then to your question about what’s happened: I’ve only been working with politicians since really 2020, and we’ve done it through a vehicle called Energy Talking Points—which, everyone can see the messaging at EnergyTalkingPoints.com—and we have only recently in the last 6 to 12 months started getting into policy advice.

We have some policy stuff in the works with a few different offices, and certainly we’ve advised multiple Presidential candidates on policy ideas, but I don’t think we’ve yet seen these energy freedom policies pursued, really put forward, to the extent we’ll see it in the next year or two. Whereas we have seen, I think, quite a bit of my messaging being used.

CNN Reporter

Why has the nuclear energy space become so toxic in recent years?

Alex Epstein

If you look at where nuclear was at its peak, it’s arguably in the late 60’s when you’re really getting cost-competitive with coal. But, you know, safer and cleaner than coal—and I’m a big advocate of coal. I mean, I’m a big advocate of anything that can produce additional cost-effective energy. But I think nuclear was in the realm of out-competing coal back then.

And it has a lot of inherent advantages. It’s very dense. The fuel supply is abundant, the fuel is cheap, safer to mine obviously, doesn’t emit anything harmful in the air. But it was demonized as a unique safety threat, whereas I think in reality—and I talked about this in my book Fossil Future and on EnergyTalkingPoints.com—I think it’s actually uniquely safe.

And we’re doing a lot of work on this in terms of our nuclear policies that we’re working on. But I think the green movement, which is very tied to the anti-fossil-fuel movement, really demonized it to the point where people equated nuclear power with nuclear bombs, thought of it as uniquely dangerous and then set up a whole regulatory infrastructure including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, where the whole focus was on making nuclear infinitely safe beyond any fearmonger’s imagination, versus making it available.

And so they thought, in practice, the best way to make it safe was to make it non-existent. And that’s why since the NRC came into existence in 1975, we didn’t have one new nuclear plant go from conception to completion until last year. And those plants were many times over budget in Georgia.

So I think it’s a 50 year plus problem and when I talk to any politician, what I just tell them is, “You have to be willing to consider fundamental reforms of the NRC and perhaps replacing it with something else, because the status quo is so bad.” Often politicians just like saying that they like things, or kind of tinkering at the margins, saying, “Hey, we’ll give it some funding,” or you know, “We’ll invest in this research,” and I think you have to fundamentally stop treating nuclear as a uniquely dangerous form of energy.

There’s a whole bunch of things that need to be done, but I’m glad people are talking about it more positively. But the policy, we’re in a policy catastrophe with it. I don’t believe any significant progress will be made until we radically change the policy.

CNN Reporter

Have you spoken to DeSantis personally?

Alex Epstein

So, without going into much detail, since most of this stuff is confidential, I have spoken to him before, and I’ve spoken to his team before. And I would say that what you see publicly is reflected privately in the sense of: he and they are very detail-oriented, particularly in terms of implementation.

They’re very interested in: How do you actually get these things to work? And I think that’s something that is very good and it’s something that I try to become better at myself. I mean, there are plenty of things that I disagree with Ron DeSantis about, but I respect that detail-orientation, and I think it explains the ability to get things done in practice.

CNN Reporter

What candidates did you advise this cycle?

Alex Epstein

I won’t say specifically, but a lot of them I either talk to—I always tried to talk to the individual or the team, and that happened in many of the cases. I mean in general we, this project I call Energy Talking Points, we advise something like at this point over 200 major offices. Last year I probably advised 75-plus major politicians. So, I talk to a lot of people to various degrees, and again, I don’t do anything for them except offer them messaging and policy—but I think we do quite a good job with that and I think that’s why they listen. Or, sometimes they listen; definitely not always.

CNN Reporter

What have you learned since you’ve entered the space of politicians who shape policy?

Alex Epstein

From my perspective, as somebody who considers himself more pro-freedom than both major political parties, I’ve been surprised at how open people are to more radical ideas if those ideas are explained in detail and have accompanying persuasive arguments.

One thing I try to do when I advise people is give them solutions, not just vague advice. So if I’m giving policy, give very specific guidance, give guidance on how to talk about it. And this is also true about messaging.

For example, one thing you saw—this is not me revealing anything because it was public—both Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, I can send you an article I wrote about this, but they talked about, you know, the 98% decline in climate-related disaster deaths. So this was at least mentioned by DeSantis in his energy speech in Midland, and Vivek mentioned it many, many times, sometimes mentioning my name and my book, Fossil Future.

And I think this is a really important point for people to understand: that empirically, we’re safer than ever from climate disasters. And I think people should think about why that is and what the implications are for the future.

I was impressed that leading politicians are willing to talk about that. And my experience with people like that is they’ll ask for references. At least some of them. And I was happy to see that the media felt the need to respond.

So we saw—I’ll send you this article—but we saw Reuters responded to it, the New York Times responded to it, PolitiFact responded to it. And none of them could answer the basic fact—they tried to sort of explain their way around it—but none of them refuted the basic fact. And I just thought, okay, I like that people are willing to say and do more pro-freedom and more principled things if somebody really helps them with the details. That was my hope when I started getting into politics and I am seeing that bear out to a significant extent.

CNN Reporter

Have you changed your approach over the years as you’ve watched the public react to your talking points?

Alex Epstein

I’ve been working on these issues for 17 years, so a lot of this stuff, I test it out in different kinds of ways—which is not the same, I mean, I’m not running millions of dollars worth of polls and stuff. But I test it out in front of different audiences. I see how people respond on social media.

I think people are open to a lot, so my own interest is what’s right and do the best job you can of persuading people of it. And there’ll be plenty of people who try to compromise that and dampen it. I don’t need to be the one to do it. I just try to make sure for everything I say, I can make, I think, a case that would persuade a reasonable person who was inclined to disagree with me but wasn’t dead-set on disagreeing with me.

If I have trouble doing that and I think the thing is right, then I try to get better at arguing for it. I don’t just give up. And just as a personal policy, I don’t ever advocate anything I don’t agree with, and I will never help a politician with something I don’t agree with. So for example, as I said, I’m not partisan, but if Republicans want to pass an import carbon tax, I will definitely not help them with that and I’ll publicly argue against them.

CNN Reporter

I noticed Elon Musk receiving some pushback from surprised conservatives, when he posted that the best way to address climate change is with a carbon tax.

Alex Epstein

Well, that’s been his position for a long time. I don’t think it really makes any sense. But what’s interesting I think about him—and I don’t actually attribute this to him taking over Twitter—he has dramatically moderated his hostility toward fossil fuels and his belief in climate catastrophe.

So he has some hostility now, and to some extent, his very rosy claims about solar and batteries, although those have been moderated the least; maybe there are commercial reasons for that. But he’s kind of, you know, if you look at when the Powerwall came out, he’s just like—and this is almost a direct quote—“burning fossil fuels and putting stuff into the atmosphere is the worst idea ever” and “the planet is on fire.” That’s what it looks like.

And it’s just kind of—and then we have this Powerwall and a million things he said about the Powerwall that didn’t come remotely true and would obviously not come remotely true if one knew anything at the time. But now his position [on climate] is sort of, “Yeah, you know, it’s not going to be a problem for a while, but it may be a problem eventually.” And he loves to say, “If I could push a button and get rid of oil and gas, I wouldn’t push the button, and in fact, we need more oil and gas in the US, short-term.”

So he’s become more moderated.

But yeah, carbon tax, that’s a standard thing that a lot of people believe in, so anyone who’s surprised with that just hasn’t followed him at all. And he’s not actually—whatever one thinks of the change in his views—he’s not like a standard conservative. He never was a standard liberal or a standard conservative, I don’t think.

CNN Reporter

Thank you for your time.

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Carbon Tax

The book the carbon taxers don’t want you to read

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By Franco Terrazzano

Prime Minister Mark Carney wrote a 500-page book praising carbon taxes.

Well, I just wrote a book smashing through the government’s carbon tax propaganda.

It tells the inside story of the fight against the carbon tax. And it’s THE book the carbon taxers don’t want you to read.

My book is called Axing the Tax: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Carbon Tax.


 
Axing the Tax: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Carbon Tax 

Every now and then, the underdog wins one.

And it looks like that’s happening in the fight against the carbon tax.

It’s not over yet, but support for the carbon tax is crumbling. Some politicians vow to scrap it. Others hide behind vague plans to repackage it. But virtually everyone recognizes support for the current carbon tax has collapsed.

It wasn’t always this way.

For about a decade now, powerful politicians, government bureaucrats, academics, media elites and even big business have been pushing carbon taxes on the people.

But most of the time, politicians never asked the people if they supported carbon taxes. In other words, carbon taxes, and the resulting higher gas prices and heating bills, were forced on us.

We were told it was good for us. We were told carbon taxes were inevitable. We were told politicians couldn’t win elections without carbon taxes, even though the politicians that imposed them didn’t openly run on them. We were told that we needed to pay carbon taxes if we wanted to leave a healthy environment for our kids and grandkids. We were told we needed to pay carbon taxes if we wanted to be respected in the international community.

In this decade-long fight, it would have been understandable if the people had given up and given in to these claims. It would have been easier to accept what the elites wanted and just pay the damn bill. But against all odds, ordinary Canadians didn’t give up.

Canadians knew you could care about the environment and oppose carbon taxes. Canadians saw what they were paying at the gas station and on their heating bills, and they knew they were worse off, regardless of how many politicians, bureaucrats, journalists and academics tried to convince them otherwise. Canadians didn’t need advanced degrees in economics, climate science or politics to understand they were being sold a false bill of goods.

Making it more expensive for a mom in Port Hope to get to work, or grandparents in Toronto to pay their heating bill, or a student in Coquitlam to afford food won’t reduce emissions in China, Russia, India or the United States. It just leaves these Canadians, and many like them, with less money to afford everything else.

Ordinary Canadians understood carbon taxes amount to little more than a way for governments to take more money from us and dictate how we should live our lives. Ordinary Canadians also saw through the unfairness of the carbon tax.

Many of the elites pushing the carbon tax—the media, politicians, taxpayer-funded professors, laptop activists and corporate lobbyists—were well off and wouldn’t feel the brunt of carbon taxes. After all, living in a downtown condo and clamouring for higher carbon taxes doesn’t require much gas, diesel or propane.

But running a business, working in a shop, getting kids to soccer and growing food on the farm does. These are the Canadians the political class forgot about when pushing carbon taxes. These are the Canadians who never gave up. These are the Canadians who took time out of their busy lives to sign petitions, organize and attend rallies, share posts on social media, email politicians and hand out bumper stickers.

Because of these Canadians, the carbon tax could soon be swept onto the ash heap of history. I wrote this book for two reasons.

The first is because these ordinary Canadians deserve it. They worked really hard for a really long time against the odds. When all the power brokers in government told them, “Do what we say—or pay,” they didn’t give up. They deserve to know the time and effort they spent fighting the carbon tax mattered. They deserve all the credit.

Thank you for everything you did.

The second reason I wrote this book is so people know the real story of the carbon tax. The carbon tax was bad from the start and we fought it from the start. By reading this book, you will get the real story about the carbon tax, a story you won’t find anywhere else.

This book is important because if the federal Liberals’ carbon tax is killed, the carbon taxers will try to lay blame for their defeat on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. They will try to say that carbon taxes are a good idea, but Trudeau bungled the policy or wasn’t a good enough salesman. They will try to revive the carbon tax and once again make you pay more for gas, groceries, and home heating.

Just like with any failed five-year plan, there is a lingering whiff among the laptop class and the taxpayer-funded desk rulers that this was all a communication problem, that the ideal carbon tax hasn’t been tried yet. I can smell it outside my office building in Ottawa, where I write these words. We can’t let those embers smoulder and start a fire again.

This book shows why the carbon tax is and always will be bad policy for ordinary Canadians.

Franco’s note: You can pre-order a copy of my new book, Axing the Tax: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Carbon Tax, here: https://www.amazon.ca/Axing-Tax-Rise-Canadas-Carbon

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Business

Will Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs End In Disaster Or Prosperity?

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By J.D. Foster

“Liberation Day” has come. So what does it mean? Beats the hell out of me.

What we know is that President Trump’s avalanche of tariffs was to hit a peak on April 2; not end, mind you; not necessarily “the” peak, as more could be on the way; but a peak.

No Trump policy more completely breaks with America’s past than his “beautiful” tariffs on just about everything coming into the United States from just about anywhere.

Will this new policy liberate American manufacturing from foreign shackles? Will it usher in a new era of prosperity, keeping in mind the United States had for many years the consistently best-performing economy in the industrialized world, even overcoming the many inane obstacles erected by the Biden-Harris Administration?

Or will it leave the United States isolated, friendless, and weakened?

The correct answer at this point is no one knows, not even the bloviating talking heads on TV confidently predicting demise or Shangri-la.

Think of it this way. Suppose you’re a restaurant chef and a woman hands you a new recipe. Her father turns 75 soon and they want to have a party at the restaurant. The recipe is for the father’s favorite dish, one her mother made for years.

The recipe looks old, with odd ingredients and processes you’ve not seen before. Now judge it as a chef.

You can’t. Even as you start chopping and dicing, mixing ingredients as instructed, you’re not too sure how this is going to turn out. You have to wait until the dish is on the plate and taste it.

That’s the case with Trump’s tariffs. How will this all turn out? It’s too soon to tell.

The stock market sure doesn’t like it, but why should it? The investor class doesn’t understand this any better than you do. What they do understand is this new policy has upended assumptions and created enormous new uncertainties. We know that dish as those ingredients are always good for a big pullback.

Much of the confusion arises because we don’t know the underlying policy and likely this uncertainty is intentional. Trump likes keeping his counterparts, in this case our trading partners, guessing. If it means Americans are confused for a bit, Trump’s cool with that. Breaking eggs to make an omelette. It will pass and America will be great again afterward. Bon appetite.

If the core policy is to erect massive and mostly permanent tariff walls behind which American firms can hide, then we know how this will turn out: America, meet the dustbin of history.

If the core policy is to force our trading partners to deal with America fairly by reducing their trade barriers after which Trump will remove his tariffs, then this could turn out very well. Tariffs (and non-tariff barriers) in the U.S. and those of our trading partners would fall, reinvigorating the free trade that has energized prosperity for decades.

Which is it? Walls and doom or freedom and prosperity? Again, too early to tell.

Whatever else Trump does in his second term, these tariffs will define his presidency, akin in consequence to Ronald Reagan’s pro-growth tax cuts and Joe Biden’s inflation.

Trump in his second term clearly lives by the saying, “go bold or go home.” He’s got “bold” down pat. We will see over the next year or so whether he and the Republicans go home. Has he liberated Democrats from any fear of Republicans in the mid-terms or in 2028, or he’s liberated America from any fear of Democratic socialism and wokism returning in our lifetimes. The chips are all-in. Soon we will see the cards. Uncertainty, indeed.

JD Foster is the former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget and former chief economist and senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He now resides in relative freedom in the hills of Idaho.

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