Debate on fossil fuels: RFK Jr. vs. Alex Epstein

hello everyone welcome thank you so much for coming out tonight and braving the traffic and the parking issues oh my goodness but we're very glad to have you here and hopefully we're going to have a very entertaining and fun evening together i'm heidi ganahl and one of your cu regents at large and i'm the founder of the free to be coalition along with neil and desai and madison meeks as well as marcus potainos who's not here tonight as well and madison is the leader of our free to be student club at cu boulder so let's give her a hand she was amazing in putting all of this together thank you madison the free to be coalition is an effort by leaders on college campuses here and across the nation to encourage students to challenge their beliefs through the guarantee of free speech and intellectual debate our hope is to honor the words of the great president bruce benson our president here previously for cu for 11 years that we should teach students how to think not what to think the free2b coalition launched our campus efforts early last year with the vincente fox nigel farage debates here and at uccs by bringing diverse voices to campus free to be then followed up those debates with a candidate debate in the fall of 2018 and a panel discussion on the opioid crisis last spring we will continue to bring forth important and timely issues that are relevant to the community in order to promote and demonstrate healthy civil discussion and expose students to different perspectives these days you seldom find real debates over important public issues on our college campuses that is the finding of political science professor george leno in his book silence stages laneu writes debates can create recognition and a space for dissenting ideas that will enrich classroom discussions research agendas and hiring decisions policy debates can function like tilling exhausted soil so that new life can grow exhausted soil and that's a good description of many college campuses and as a region i can attest we do get exhausted sometimes but we have free to be believed that what is lacking is respectful and intellectual combat perhaps some of our students at cu who are utterly certain of their correctness might utter at the end of this debate like this wait i never thought about that that's what we hope for our other hope tonight is to open your mind to model for our students what feisty collaborative debate looks like and how we might re-examine where the intersection of right and wrong exists 60 years ago chief justice earl warren warned our nation that we had a choice either teachers and students must always remain free to inquire to study and to evaluate or our civilization will stagnate and die there was no third option we're at a turning point in our country's history the free to be coalition aims to turn us towards respect to listening to each other into finding the best solutions for the biggest problems by hearing from all sides we ask each of you to model this tonight respect and openness and to hear both perspectives and ask clarifying questions at the end to help you come to the best conclusions tonight's discussion will be moderated by guy benson political editor of townhall.com a regular guest on mpr's all things considered and the host of the nationally syndicated by guy benson show along with matthew burgas assistant professor of environmental studies here at cu boulder and a member of the heterodox academy also joining us tonight are alex epstein and robert kennedy jr sorry alex epstein alex i knew i was going to do that i'm so sorry robert is an agent of agent of change among environmental activists who holds a bold vision for america's future in which energy independence and sustainable technology revitalize the nation's economy as president of the board for waterkeeper alliance kennedy continues to lead the fight against those that pollute the nation's waterways robert cemented his reputation as a high-profile activist with the publication of crimes against nature which called into question the country's environmental policies he has also been involved with numerous clean tech corporate and venture capital groups despite his presentations it's easy to see why robert was named one of rolling stone magazine's 100 agents of change his expertise is evident and is passion palpable as he outlines the steps we can take to reduce the national debt and increase u.s economic competitiveness by investing in the development of sustainable technologies robert believes it is truly possible to protect the planet and make the world a better place for future generations alex epstein is a philosopher who argues that human flourishing should be the guiding principle of industrial and environmental progress he found its center for industrial progress in 2011 to offer a positive pro-human alternative to the green movement alex is the author of the moral case for fossil fuels a new york times bestseller arguing that if we look at the whole picture human flourishing requires that humanity use more fossil fuels not less the book has been widely praised as the most persuasive argument ever for our continuing use of fossil fuels winning epstein the most original thinker of 2014 award from the mclaughlin group alex is known for his willingness to debate anyone anytime and his publicly debated leading environmentalist organizations such as greenpeace the sierra club and 350.org over the morality of fossil fuel use he has made his moral case for fossil fuels at dozens of campuses including harvard yale stanford and duke his alma mater i'd like to now to bring up all of our speakers and our moderator guy benson to take the stage and kick our discussion off tonight thank you good evening good to see you all out here uh as you just heard my name is guy benson uh and i felt like i would just begin by offering a note of transparency uh so with my background and what i do for a living i think it's important for me to say right out of the gate that i am not unbiased i think it's preferable for people in my line of work in the media to disclose where we're coming from rather than pretending to be neutral arbiters if we're not so i am center-right i'm a conservative i'm trump skeptical i think you could say um i do political reporting analysis and commentary at fox news and at townhall.com as well you did hear npr all things considered they let me on from time to time which is nice i enjoy doing bubble busting exercises because i think sometimes we're in our own bubbles and that can be unhealthy and one of the busting bubble or bubble busting exercises that i have enjoyed in the past i've attended maybe four to five conferences on world affairs here at cu boulder which has been a learning experience i have sat in this very ballroom on this very stage being outnumbered four to one on very low-key uncontroversial issues like guns and abortion um and it was fine a little hissing and booing never never deterred me but it's always great to be back in colorado to be back in boulder and i have to say about five weeks ago i just married a coloradan so it's a special treat to be here although he went to school up the road in fort collins so he was trying to get me to say go rams i'm like no no no it's go buffs tonight for sure i have to i have to ingratiate myself to the crowd um so right school ride conference let's be clear um on this broader issue so in my work i'm a generalist i am not an expert like either of these guys are i like to think that i can think things through on my feet and ask fair questions but i'm not an expert my overall approach again in the interest of transparency i believe that climate change is real i believe that humans contribute to climate change very significantly i believe taking action to combat climate change is morally the correct thing to do and something that we ought to pursue uh in terms of policy i am skeptical of some of the government-centric solutions um that are sometimes floated just to be just to put that out there i'm also skeptical of doing so just as the united states if some of our global competitors don't have the same type of skin in the game but i think because it is such an important issue i'm very curious about what the right solutions look like and i think what's exciting about an event like this tonight we're not up here debating whether climate change exists that is not what this debate's going to be there's no one up here saying it's a total hoax made up by china that's funny it's so true it's very true uh it's not true uh so that's that's not the starting point right we i think will tease this out a little bit we have something of a similar starting point and then the question is okay how serious is the problem what's the timeline and what is realistic and correct to do about it uh so with that that's not a comprehensive uh take on what i believe but i wanted to give you a sense of where i come from my general goal tonight is to keep the train on the tracks foster a good conversation and let each of these gentlemen build their case in a fair way um so what we're going to do is start with opening statements each gentleman will have 15 minutes uh to 20 minutes oh they they told me 15. they changed it 20 sounds fine to me i was not going to turn off your microphone but i was like i'd start like nudging you and then like maybe dashing with some water but 20 minutes it is uh and then we'll go to some questions for me and then some questions from all of you uh well maybe some of you uh so we'll begin with mr kennedy all right um i first want to start by apologizing for my voice i uh um i used to have a very very strong voice and when i was 42 years old i got struck by a a neurological illness called spasmodic dystonia and it makes my voice tremble usually when i speak for a while it flattens out a little and it becomes less painful for people to listen to um so i'm hoping that happens some days some days today is particularly bad um but i'm happy to be here and the question that was presented at least on the post that i read for the first time today is should the government come in and abolish all fossil fuels and i would have to say that that would not be my approach i don't think that i agree with ben that that kind of um aggressive government intervention is wouldn't i have a good outcome and i don't believe in that i'm a very market-based person i spent 35 years representing commercial fishermen who were capitalists and i'm in love with a capitalist system and wanted it to work for them spent the last 20 years in the green tech space at least for part of my time i was involved with the construction of the biggest solar thermal plant the concentrated solar plant in america with one of my companies and um i also one of my partners a partnership in a group that funded tesla we were the largest first under another group that i continue to advise at a stake and has built the largest pv a solar plant in north america i've been involved in construction of transmission and wind and many other things and i believe in markets and i believe that the market will reply ultimately the solution um lord david putnam gave a speech before parliament about 10 years ago and parliament was debating i i believe that at capitalism people have asked me for 30 years what's the best thing that could happen to the environment and i always said the same thing true free market capitalism which we don't have in this country we have corporate crony capitalism capitalism where if you want to bring a product to market you pay all the cost of getting it there including the cost of cleaning up your mess which was a lesson we were all supposed to learn in kindergarten lord david putnam gave his speech before parliament like i said about 10 years ago parliament was debating a cap and trade system that was designed to impose market discipline on the discharge of carbon it was a way that was offended by conservatives cap and trade it was a way of saying you're dumping your waste into the public commons you ought to pay something for it and something that will incentivize better behavior that's how market works and um in in parliament in england virtually everybody understands the urgency of climate change very very strong support that is on a ultimately passed it there were vested interests in others who's we have to be careful we we have to move incrementally we can't move precipitously because it will create the economy lord bladdman gave this wonderful speech where he reminded parliament that 200 years before the same body had debated the abolition of the slave trade and at that time everybody in england considered slavery a moral abomination a cataclysm morally they knew it had to be abolished but again people said we can't do it suddenly because slavery represented 25 of the gmp of great britain and it was a principle source of energy for the entire british empire free human labor and but after he and they said if we abolish it overnight the economy is going to collapse after a year of debate parliament made the moral choice abolish slavery literally overnight the slaves right and instead of collapsing the british economy exploded as tens of thousands of entrepreneurs rushed into that space to create new forms of energy mainly mechanical ones in an era that we now know as the industrial revolution which was the greatest epic wealth creation in the history of mankind and the abolition of slavery had exposed all of these hidden inefficiencies that were associated with free human bondage well today we don't need to abolish carbon to understand that our deadly addiction to it is the principal drag on american capitalism the international monetary fund which is not a liberal organization says that the global subsidies to carbon today are 5.2 trillion dollars in the united states we give subsidies to carbon 669 billion dollars a year that's more than we spend in our defense budget it's 10 times what we spend on education these are mature industries here there may be an excuse for subsidizing a the jump starting industry these are 100 year old industries there's no excuse that an issue of them should have subsidies in addition to the direct subsidies we have all the indirect subsidies things that i think alex they don't exist global warming the ice caps melting the wars the acidification of the ocean you know the the um my house today my wife just called me before i walked in here and to tell me that we are under evacuation in california because of the second time in two years i represent because the fire season lasts two months longer than it used to i represent about 200 people who lost family members in the last five were property yesterday i was talking about ben because he lives on cape cod too i have a summer house on cape cod and the public dock which has been there for 65 years has been destroyed two years in a row for the first time ever we just got hit by a northeastern i showed him pictures of that doc we're all living with it you know alex has a daunting problem which is to me a daunting challenge he not only has to disagree with with 120 years of science you know 120 years ago science is understood you put carbon the atmosphere and warms it up exxon's own scientists we now have their internal emails where they said this is going to heat the climate it's going to melt the polar ice caps and it's going to give us new drilling opportunities out there and but also the insurance industry which has its hair on fire swiss women you'd agree biggest insurance companies in the world are saying this is the biggest threat to our business model the military the cia the pentagon report after reports saying this is the biggest threat multiplier for the 21st century but also just our common sense he has to convince us not to believe our lying eyes you know the i've watched i've been scuba diving for 60 years i've watched the coral fields disappear the frogs are gone salamanders my children are living in a different world that i lived in i go you know forever keepers in 44 countries the glaciers are melting on every continent this is not something that is going to happen in the future it's something that's happening today and not only the global warming issues you know are part of a subsidy at a hidden subsidy of the wars the um the mercury and our fish there's now i buy a fishing license for 30 bucks every year the new york state constitution says the people that stay on the fish that every freshwater fish in new york state has mercury levels that are dangerous to eat 19 states all the fish have advisories 49 states some of them we're living in a science fiction nightmare because of carbon today because that mercury is coming from coal burning power plants i take my kids to the adirondacks on the weekend 20 of the lakes are dead zero life in them because of the acidified acidification all of the lakes on the high peaks of the appalachians from georgia to northern quebec acidified and dead that's because i work and have litigated for 30 years in west virginia i see the legacy and the cost of this industry to our public we have cut down the 500 biggest mountains in west virginia that coal industry has flattened an area larger than the state of delaware 1200 miles of rivers have been buried like phil 2500 poisoned the water for almost all the major cities charles and morgantown are poisonous you can't drink them you have to drink bottled water this is a science fiction nightmare this isn't something that's going to happen in the future it's happening now now here's the thing despite all these subsidies we're still beating them in the marketplace and i'm going to read something that i pulled up last night last year i'll tell you something really quick avery lovin showed me he had two pictures he has one was taken in new york at 38th street looking uptown up fifth avenue 1903. the other one and there's in that picture there's a hundred horse and buggies and one model t ford he has another one taken in 1913 exact same photo this one there's 100 model t fords and one horse buggy what happened what happened was in a 10-year period henry ford dropped the truck the price of the model t by 67 percent that's all that happened guess what the price of the solar panels has dropped by 80 percent in the last five years and five years before that another eighty percent so here's what's happening and this last year we built despite all the subsidies to carbon we built 63 percent of the new capacity generated capacity on the globe was wind and solar it was renewable here i'm going to read you what i pulled up from bloomberg last night bloomberg these are the prices from wind solar for all the energy sources and this bloomberg tracks every transaction on the globe these are super accurate numbers up today nuke 267. a level eye levelized levelized costs a megawatt hour what that means is the cost of financing the plant the interest on the plan the operation maintenance cost fuel costs all added up 267. new goal 112 about a half new gas combined cycle 57 dollars about half what goal is when 42 dollars a third less and and get asked um subsidize wind that's unsubsidized subsidized wind is 11. one fifth the cost of gas utility scale solar 26 so we could make energy if we wanted by burning prime rib why wouldn't we use the cheapest form of energy and i'll tell you why not only because of the subsidies even with the subsidies we're beating them but oh well let me do this quickly here's what's happening i read in alex book i read your book last night i think interesting on the plane i got here at 2 a.m and i read here um somebody gave me a transfer debate with kevin only in that you say um no coal plant has ever been depleted displaced by by renewable energy and never will here's what's happening that's not a quote but what i don't think i said and never will but it's in our lifetime now here's what happened nipsco indiana's biggest utility is closed and announced that it's closing its two biggest coal plants and it's closing them to build new wind and solar because new wind and solar is cheaper and exists in coal excel in this state closing the comanche plant for the same reason in iowa iowa just announced that it is closed the biggest utility in iowa it is bringing buying six gigawatts of solar and wind power mainly displays coal and that company is owned by warren buffett who is making a lot of his money on coal so he's doing it because dollars and cents makes sense india just announced two weeks ago that it is cancelling 14 gigawatts of new coal power because of the free fall in solar energy 14 gigawatts is more than an entire coal fleet for great britain which invented gold burning power plants so this is what's happening around the globe reason we didn't we i said 63 percent of the new markets belong to us reason we don't have a hundred percent is because the power of the incumbents of coal oil and nuke to block us from accessing the markets they will not let independent power producers like my plans onto the marketplace they do everything they can and that's not fair you know i i built a house in mount kinskin new york i have solar power on the roof state-of-the-art solar and i have geothermal my home is a power plant i produce more energy than i use almost 365 days a year when i'm away from that house it's just a power plant i ought to be able to sell my power to the power company the same as con ed does or any other generator so that's called net metering and they have it in 42 states in one form or the other but it's never actually pays you fairly they'll pay if energy produces that power i'll pay him 13 cents a kilowatt hour only pay me seven the end of each month they raise all my savings and start over again that's not fair we ought to have a market in this country a fair market market that does what a market is supposed to do which is to reward good behavior which is efficiency and punish bad behavior which is inefficiency and waste and said we ought to have a market that that allows every american turns every american into a energy entrepreneur every home into a power plant and allows us to power this country on human engineering ingenuity what franklin roosevelt called america's industrial genius rather than back in crude and alberta tar sands and appalachian coal we ought to have marketplace instead we have a marketplace that is governed by rules that were written by the incumbents to reward the dirtiest filthiest most poisonous most toxic most warmongering fuels from hell rather than the cheap clean green wholesome and patriotic feel from heaven thank you [Applause] with with a few minutes to spare very efficient uh mr epstein you're up all right um so i want to share with you a position tonight that is is definitely not a position i ever expected to have when i was growing up and that is the position that if we want more people in the world to have long healthy opportunity filled lives we need to continue our massive use of fossil fuels and we actually need to expand it as a world so you're definitely going to get a different opinion than you than you just heard now again this is an opinion i never expected to have sometimes when people hear that oh you're you're really enthusiastic about fossil fuels i think oh the industry must have paid you to do it or maybe you grew up in kentucky or something like that so i didn't even know anyone in the fossil fuel industry when i came up with my ideas and i grew up in a place called chevy chase maryland which is a super liberal place and the only thing i ever heard growing up about fossil fuels is that their co2 emissions are causing global warming which was a concern to me and which i still agree with to a certain extent but i was never really interested in energy my my biggest interest in life was and still is philosophy which many people consider the least practical subject in the world and i consider the most practical subject because philosophy is really about clear thinking methods and i think that so much of this debate tonight is going to be about what is the proper method for thinking through this issue and which person up on this stage is actually thinking about this issue um clearly so one key idea in philosophy is that whenever you're making a big decision in life you need to look at the full impact of the decision so that means you need to look at both the positive impacts and the negative impacts and when you're considering a radical change to our way of life uh you really need to make sure that you're considering the positives and the negatives so for example you know there are certain people who have hostility toward vaccines and say that vaccines should be significantly restricted and they say well look at all these side effects we're going to protect ourselves against if we restrict vaccines and i would say okay that's legitimate to do as long as you're precise about the side effects and you don't exaggerate or distort them but you also need to look at what are the benefits that you would lose by restricting vaccines and i believe the same thing is true with fossil fuels if we're considering dramatic restrictions of fossil fuels and i believe this is something that robert does advocate he's publicly supported the green new deal he's publicly supported extinction rebellion which is basically like that's instantly get off fossil fuel so we're talking about at least a radical and rapid change so i think we need to look at okay what are the side effects that we're going to be avoiding particularly climate related that's important but we also need to look at what are the benefits that we might be losing and you know for most of my life before i started studying energy i didn't really think that there were any benefits that we would um be losing because i thought well you know like fossil fuels are pretty much interchangeable with other things or you know we can use this clean green patriotic energy that we've heard so much about you know why are we still using these antiquated technologies but when i started studying the issue there were two things that i realized that that really changed my perspective both about how important the benefits of fossil fuels are and also how difficult to replace or substitute that they are and so the first realization is that low-cost reliable energy is far more important to the amazing way of life that we have and that billions of people aspire to then i realize so low-cost reliable energy is far more important to the amazing way of life that billions of us have and that billions of people aspire to than i realized and the second one is that low-cost reliable energy is far more difficult to produce than i realize so i want to start out with low-cost reliable energy is really fundamental or indispensable to the amazing lives that we enjoy and i really want to stress amazing lives that we enjoy because you've been hearing about all the problems with the world and all of these bad things and there are certainly problems in the world but i think realization number one that we have to have is that we are unbelievably lucky to be alive right now this is the greatest time to ever be a human being if you look at a chart of what life expectancy was like throughout human history it looks like a huge hockey stick thousands of years people are living below 30 and then 200 years ago it starts shooting up dramatically so you know average person can live to around 70 now if you look at income which is really close to how much opportunity do you have that again is flat for so much of history and then goes way up and so we live in a world that just has so much for billions of people that for certain people at least has so much in terms of life expectancy and health and opportunity so it's really important to recognize what is making that possible and make sure we don't make decisions that make it worse and we also need to see how do you extend that to more people and i never thought about energy as particularly important i just thought well energy is just one thing among many but then somebody pointed out to me well no energy is is different it's more significant than you think because the reason that we're so prosperous and have so much opportunity is that we've gone from being a manual labor civilization to a machine labor civilization and what is energy energy is machine calories machine food so energy is what allows us to use machines to improve our lives the lower cost energy is the lower cost everything is the higher cost energy is the higher cost everything is and that includes having a good environment people often think oh the environment is great and then all we've done is ruin it with you know all this toxic stuff we live in the cleanest environment than anyone's ever lived in history in terms of sanitation clean water we have quite clean air throughout most the united states and a huge part of it is because we use energy low-cost energy and machines to take the environment which is naturally dirty and dangerous in many ways and make it far cleaner and safer than it would otherwise um be so low cost reliable energy though it has to be low cost and reliable because it's not low-cost and reliable then many people cannot afford it and take advantage of it and here we run into a real issue three billion people in the world lack low-cost reliable energy you almost never hear about this which is interesting because it's a fundamental tragedy you have over a billion people in the world who have no electricity you think about that no electricity so that's no refrigerators no modern hospitals no lights to study with and we rarely talk about that almost three billion people in the world their source of energy for heating and cooking is wood or animal done which has all kinds of toxic indoor air pollution and yet we don't talk about this so realizing how fundamental energy is to the amazing way of life that we enjoy including the amazing environment we enjoy and also that billions of people aspire to made me really interested in okay how do we preserve and expand what we have in terms of low-cost reliable energy and also how you expand that to as many people as possible so that was the first realization now you might say well and robert would say well like what does that have to do with fossil fuels and that's what i thought as well like well do we really need fossil fuels to do this and this relates this then connects to realization two which is that low-cost reliable energy is far more difficult to produce than i than i thought and i want to share with you three facts that changed my perspective on our energy choices and i want to differentiate the kind of facts that i'm going to share tonight with the kind of alleged facts that robert shared in the sense of what i'm going to try to share with you are validated big picture empirical facts that tell you the overall picture of what's happening or that's different than oh i read something in bloomberg last night that said this or this study said this i want to show you the big picture of what's happening with energy and what's happened we'll talk about climate as well and if you're interested in the sources on this you can just go to fossil fuel debate.com and i have all the documentation of everything you can see from nonpartisan sources okay so fact number one is that over the last 200 years entrepreneurs have tried to produce low-cost reliable energy using many different fuels including sun wind water waves tides geothermal heat wood crops uranium thorium and of course oil coal and gas the three so-called fossil fuels so these have been around there are lots lots of forms of energy been our that have been around for a long amount of time and interestingly we've heard for many decades that many of them are going to be the energy of the future so interestingly robert mentioned amory lovens and how amery lovens just told him something really new and important about energy well here's what anne-marie lovins says recent research suggests that a largely or wholly solar economy can be constructed the united states with straightforward soft technologies that are now demonstrated and now economic or nearly economic so that sounds plausible right except that was in 1976 amory eleven was saying yeah we don't need fossil fuels we can do away with fossil fuels he actually said let's do away with most electricity because who needs electricity and guess what like the internet needed electricity a lot of things needed electricity so people have a history of claiming oh all sorts of different forms of energy are gonna work but what is the actual reality this leads us to fact two so despite the existence of many forms of energy production fossil fuels are the energy of choice over 80 percent of the time and are also the world's fastest growing energy source so they're the energy of choice over 80 of the time they're also the world's fastest growing energy source now how do we reconcile that with what robert said about solar and wind being the fastest growing energy source and here i want to highlight the key aspect of looking at the full impact of our decisions which is that we need to use precision that we cannot use sloppiness so there is in the realm of energy just a huge amount of distortion and sloppiness about the truth and one of them involves the word capacity so capacity is used to mean how much energy could a power plant produce if it worked to 100 to its full potential 100 of the time so for a nuclear plant that's a pretty you know it'll be at 90 capacity so if you hear the nuclear plant has 100 megawatts of capacity okay that basically means 100 megawatts but for solar and wind they operate at 30 of capacity because they're dealing with unreliable fuels so if you're equating something that operates at 30 with something that operates 90 that is a distortion so either you're not aware of that or you're misleading people but i would not i we should not allow this kind of sloppiness and and misrepresentation so what is going on why are fossil fuels um so dominant now i should say that in terms of promising forms of energy there have also been two prominent forms of energy that have shown some significant potential and one is hydroelectric energy which is great in terms of low-cost reliable electricity so it's good for electricity it's not good for heavy-duty transportation fuel which is what we need for agriculture and for shipping and for so many of the things that make our economy work but most of all we need it for food because agriculture a lot requires heavy-duty transportation energy but nevertheless hydro is good it's limited by the number of hydro locations in the world interestingly who are the biggest opponents of hydro not the big bad fossil fuel industry or the big bad small bat i guess alex epstein it is the modern environmental movement including robert f kennedy jr is a major opponent of hydroelectric energy it's interesting why how low-cost reliable energy from those sources that's carbon-free or very low carbon is opposed by the people who claim to be concerned about carbon the most promising alternative to fossil fuels in the last 50 years has been nuclear power because nuclear power you can build it anywhere it doesn't do much doesn't do heavy-duty transportation except for like air aircraft carriers and and submarines but nevertheless it's shown amazing potential to actually in reality give low-cost reliable energy to a lot of people and it was really growing in this country and doing some pretty amazing things until guess what happened it was demonized and criminalized by the modern environmental movement the same people who claim to care about co2 emissions so places like france are getting 70 of their electricity from nuclear and at say half the price of germany which is getting five percent of its total energy from solar and wind but has still doubled its electricity prices because of that and yet there is this bias against nuclear so this will be an interesting thing to talk about why is the modern environmental movement that claims to be so concerned about co2 why are they so hostile in particular to nuclear now why this raises the question that why why are fossil fuels so dominant i think the key is it's actually really hard to produce low-cost reliable energy for all the different things we need it for for billions of people around the world and the reason is because energy is a process to use energy we have to take some form of raw energy like the sun or the wind or coal or oil we need to go through a whole set of steps to get it to an end user to say run a harvester now why do solar and wind have so much difficulty this leads me to fact three which is that solar and wind depend on backup from reliable fuels and the more they are used the more expensive energy is so if you look at um and this will be on fossil fuel debate.com so you can see the specific data but there's a very strong correlation between the percentage of solar and wind that countries use um which is almost always mandated by by the way and their electricity prices so it's like the higher percentage of solar and wind they're using the more their electricity prices go up now why is this you hear all these stats like oh solar panels are going down in price but you have to look at the whole process to produce it and the the the lie behind all these claims about solar is they're just taking one part of the process the solar panel is like oh the solar panel is cheap therefore the whole process is cheap that's not honest you have to look at the whole process and what happens is because solar and wind are unreliable fuels you need a process that turns unreliable fuels into reliable energy what that means in practice because batteries are so expensive and they're all built by fossil fuels by the way is that you need 100 backup from reliable fuels which is usually coal gas or nuclear well because the unreliable fuels can go to almost zero at any given time you need a hundred percent backup from a reliable fuel energy system well guess what if you need to pay for the reliable 100 reliable energy infrastructure and unreliable energy infrastructure which is going to be cheaper to just have the reliable energy infrastructure or to add on this whole other unreliable energy infrastructure obviously more expensive with the unreliable energy infrastructure so this is what happens in practice so there's all these accounting gimmicks but the the truth is in the more you use it the more energy costs and also it is dependent on the reliable fuels so i am the biggest enthusiast of competition and innovation and that's why i'm so enthusiastic about say pursuing nuclear and pursuing other forms of energy but it's very wrong to favor only one form of energy these so-called renewables are really the unreliable renewables because most of the environmental movements against hydro like that is a really irrational policy that's not a pro-market policy that's an anti-well that's really an anti-energy policy so the conclusion is we wanna nuclear has a lot of potential it's been held back decades given the current state of energy and the current need for energy um the quality of life in the wealthy world in the poor world the next several decades requires continued massive fossil fuel use i mean if you if we want to continue our way of life and also expand that to billions more people there's just nobody has close to the ability to provide that energy for that many people we should get started on alternatives again by stopping the demonization and criminalization of nuclear and we should allow solar wind to compete without a whole bunch of special privileges that they have um but fossil fuels are going to be really really crucial and if we have significant radical uh restrictions i know robert said he only read the debate title uh today i'm not sure whose responsibility that is but he does advocate and more importantly our culture advocates radical restrictions on fossil fuels you see in in colorado you're talking about going fossil free the green new deal is talking about 100 renewable that means fossil fuel use is outlawed it's not saying oh we have a lot of optimism because robert f kennedy is bankrolling some really effective companies and they have a lot of promise that would be terrific it's that we by next year we are not allowed to use fossil fuels and that is really really catastrophic so if we radically restrict fossil fuels we we lose on we lose basically the modern way of life for billions of people now there's a question what about the side effects and that's what i want to talk about now is it might be worth it maybe climate is such a bad thing that we need to take a huge hit to our standard of living but make no mistake reducing fossil fuel use dramatically means a big hit to our standard of living so when we're talking about climate it's crucial to be precise and so there's a difference between believing that we cause some warming which is what i believe and that we cause runaway catastrophic warming and so i want to give you three other facts that change my perspective again available at fossil fuel debate.com so fact number one is that environmental thought leaders have been predicting imminent climate doom for 30 plus years so when you hear oh my gosh the world is going to end we have 12 years left well it turns out that those claims have been made for 30 to 50 years so just to give you one example president obama's leading science advisor john holdren said in the mid-1980s it's possible that carbon dioxide climate-induced famines could kill as many as a billion people before the year 2020. or 1989 in 1989 the u.n said that entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. so clearly these apocalyptic scenarios didn't happen but you might think well it's getting really bad right we can't ignore that well this leads to fact number two which is that human beings are safer from climate today than we've ever been and nobody believes this but there's actually a data point which i've brought up in my book and i've brought up in debates and no green movement person has ever been able to answer this because it's from the international disaster database and what it does is track how many people are actually dying from storms and flood and heat and cold not an anecdote about oh a neighbor of mine died and so it's getting worse now how many people are dying and what actually happened is in the 1930s you had millions of people a year and many of those years dying 10 million a year adjusted for population when my book came out it was 30 in 2014 it's 30 000 climate-related deaths so there's a huge decrease and then people think it must have gotten worse so last year there were 5 625 total climate related deaths now how is this possible there are two basic reasons one is that the people who are predicting doom they ignore the fact that low-cost reliable energy from fossil fuels and the industrial civilization they power protects us from climate dramatically climate is not naturally safe and we make it dangerous it's naturally dangerous and we make it safe so what we've done is we've made our climate far safer by having this amazing fossil fueled civilization the other thing though is that not only did they ignore the huge climate protection benefits of fossil fuels they dramatically exaggerated and distorted the side effects just like people do with vaccines so this leads to fact number three which is that while prominent models and thought leaders have predicted runaway warming and rapid sea level rises we have experienced warming of only two degrees fahrenheit in the last 150 years with sea level rises that are very slow compared to our ancestors so it's not that we haven't caused any it's not i'm not saying we haven't caused any warming i'm saying we've caused some warming but the people who are who are publicizing it at least are you telling me i have time like one more minute no i i timed it exactly it says 19 minutes and i wanted to make sure i didn't get screwed okay and so i get that 17 seconds back to it so i got one more minute according to my clock okay so what's actually happening is in the world is yes we're having an influence but that influence is far milder and more manageable so what we're having is a very manageable side effect with an amazing benefit so the conclusion is that fossil fuels are making our lives amazing and that they can make our lives even more amazing and that the way to make our lives most amazing is to have energy freedom including stop the demonization and criminalization of nuclear by the green movement allow all forms of energy to compete and allow billions of people to have prosperity by using the best energy sources for their lives so i believe that is the path forward for the future i look forward to diving into some of the specifics and i think you'll see where the truth is thank you and uh the gentleman yields back the remaining 3.72 seconds of his time as he was calculating um so i want to start before we get into some of the significant substance that we just heard about and some of those disagreements i did some of my throat clearing myself earlier about my own vantage point on some of this my own job there there are elephants in the room so as we prepared for this event i went online to read some of the comments about this event before it happened it's always an uplifting and edifying experience reading online comments uh and there were some themes that came up from time to time and i thought it's important um to at least address them and acknowledge them out of the gate and then we can move to substance um so for mr epstein there were a lot of people who were going along the lines of saying you really shouldn't have a platform on an issue this serious because you are a science denier right so rolling stone listed you among the climate change denier elite a number of years ago um you've been quoted praising the oil industry as producing the lifeblood of civilization i think you agree with that but i think a lot of people blanch at that type of framing um your critics as i said call you a science denier say that you have personally profited from or gotten money from or been funded by big oil big coal koch brothers they note that you cheered the since ousted epa administrator scott pruitt as heroic early on in the trump administration so when you hear people try to disqualify you because that's a lot of what art and this is for both sides a lot of our political debates these days are trying to disqualify the other person out of the gate so we don't really get into the substance it's sort of part of cancer culture and the deep platforming movement when people say to you that you it's problematic that you have a personal financial stake in undermining science or undermining sound public policy what's your response to those critiques yeah so i think that there are two important issues criticisms here so one is the science denier criticism and the other is the shill criticism and they're somewhat related but i think they're different so the science denier position is just somebody is saying your position is somehow anti-science and i tried to explain that earlier in terms of no my position is very pro look at the science as precisely as possible and integrate it so that we understand the full impact of different choices so like you know just as like if you're looking at vaccines you need to look at the science about the side effects and science about the benefits so with fossil fuels you need to look very precisely at the science about the side effects the science about the benefits and that includes things like not exaggerating not distorting things not like that capacity fallacy not equating mild warming with catastrophic warming not saying 97 of scientists agree with catastrophic warming when they only agree with wild women like these kinds of things are really important so i regard myself as a as a as a science lover and somebody who really respects science and it's it's proper role um in terms of the um the funding thing i should say that although i don't get funding from the industry i think that that people involved in the industry should speak up a lot more people you know being funded from the industry what does that mean i mean that just means that they're producing energy and we're buying it and i think we should absolutely hear from those people and i wish you would hear more from them my own background as i said is i came to this issue from totally outside the industry i didn't even know anyone in the industry but what i did do is i had a i wanted to build a business in terms of promoting my ideas and so i decided the way to do it was i wanted full independence as much independence i could get so i i didn't do the conventional non-profit where you raise money from different people and they have some kind of influence i decided to do a for-profit business where basically i charge people for my ideas so like i'll come to a place like this and say well you know you can pay me for my ideas and the thing that i do with different industries but particularly uh mostly the fossil fuel industry as i say in cases where i agree with you on policy if you pay me i'll help you get better messaging but my goal is to help them use my ideas uh effectively so it's the opposite of they're paying me to say what they think no they're paying me to tell them uh what they should say that's something i'm really proud of and i think if you if you grasp the arguments that i've made today and the evidence that i've given i think the fossil fuel industry is an amazing benefactor of human life certainly there are plenty of mistakes and plenty of individual bad people but of course i'm proud to be associated with the industry i would be proud to be funded by them in the conventional sense i just happen uh not to be okay and mr kennedy uh you frequently appeal to the authority of science as we heard in your initial presentation and yet quite controversially as alex has alluded to a few times you've engaged in what critics call anti-vax conspiracies those critics include several prominent members of your own family who publicly condemned you on this subject in may calling you quote tragically wrong in a political politico op-ed which also accused you of helping to quote spread dangerous misinformation over social media and being quote complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines others note that you have a large personal carbon footprint relative to most people on the planet what's your response when people suggest that your commitment to science is perhaps selective and that your lifestyle could be hypocritical let me first answer the question that you asked him about whether people should be able to censor him because alex because they don't like what he says i'm offended by that i think any american should be offended by it you know i don't agree with him but he has a right to make his argument and we ought to be able to process those arguments in the market of debate and the and you know it's any american it's any democratic democracies don't work unless you have free flow of information i don't agree with a lot of things that have been happening on the campuses where people are um you know are shutting down speakers because they're controversial he has a right to to make his point and i would defend that right till you know to the end because that's what we do in this country wanted i want to take maybe my time but maybe the time the two minutes that i had left over some of the things that were said about me by alex and also the challenge he put up about and nobody's been able to answer the question on his graph about why huma why why why carbon has gone up at this in lockstep with a decline in karmic and climate deaths the answer is and here's you can no longer say nobody gave you the answer the answer is because the two things have nothing to do with each other it's called correlation not causation reason climate deaths have gone down is because we're better at forecasting we're better at uh disaster relief we have radios we have televisions uh we you know i had friends who were in grand bahamas they survived because they knew what was happening and what was coming and that's why climate deaths if you really want to know the answer to that question about whether there's a relationship between use of carbon and um and the injury or disasters you need to look at property damage and you'll see it's gone sky high and locks up with carbon i are you going to ask about nuke later because okay so i won't do that i also just want to respond to one other thing he said the 1.3 million billion people in this world who don't have energy and they're not going to get it unless we do it with carbon that's exactly the opposite of true those are people who were left behind by the carbon economy these are the people that i deal with in my work there are people in remote areas who will never get carbon because you can't build a pipeline to them nobody's going to do it you can but you can build a road i and then you can give me an oil or oil boiler and you have to ship oil to them and nobody's going to do it because they have no money the solution for them is solar panels and distributed power it's not carbon it would be a terrible terrible investment for us to invest in carbon i'll talk about vaccines and by the way i agree to this debate i would love it if somebody would debate me on the subject of vaccines and since it's a great seems to be a great interest of yours i challenge you to make that to debate me on it and i'm going to tell you just what my position is and my position is not any science my positioning is exactly aligned with the national academy of science and the institute of medicine people don't know my position because people call me an anti-vaxxer but i'm not i'm pro-vaccine i had all my children vaccinated i believe the vaccines should be tested safety tested people don't know you cannot sue a company that that makes vaccines that injures you no matter how egregious the injury is no matter how negligent that company was no matter how toxic the ingredient furthermore they're completely insulated so there's no incentive for them to make vaccines safe furthermore they're also exempt they're the only medicine that's exempt from safety testing so now one of the 72 vaccines currently given to our children mandated has ever been tested against a placebo that means nobody knows what the risk profile is and nobody can say with a scientific certainty that vaccine is averting more problems than it causes and i don't think that we ought to be mandating medical interventions for unwilling americans unless we know precisely that that vaccine is going to end up hating helping people rather than hurting them the institute of medicine is the ultimate arbiter of vaccine science according to congress and hhs and the institute of medicine has time and again in 1991 1994 2011 2014 has scolded and rebuked and screamed at cdc for not doing safety testing on any of these vaccines and we've seen vaccine schedule i had three vaccines when i was a kid my children got 72. it changed into 89 and if you were born prior to 89 your chance of having a chronic disease rheumatoid arthritis diabetes autism food allergies is 12 if you were born after 89 it is 54 according to hhs and nobody's explaining where is it all coming from where's all the autism coming from if it's not vaccines i is it in my generation one in 2500 kids had autism and in this generation 1 in 34. cdc is supposed to tell us where the diseases are coming from why is it in my generation one in 400 kids had food allergies peanut allergies and one intent today and guess what look at the vaccine inserts all of the 400 diseases that are now epidemic in our children all right so we're we're a bit over time that could could be we want to have this conversation but i'm not going to shy away from it okay um so we've we've had our we've had our say on on those two issues uh most of those two issues um let's move on to my next question it seems clear based on both of your passion that you are concerned about the well-being of all people on this planet and particularly the world's indigent populations uh mr epstein has argued that a premature curtailing of fossil fuels will prevent sorely needed economic development and could have a regressive effect on the poor mr kennedy's argue that climate change could have a disproportionately devastating effect on the poor so you both want to help people you both want to make sure that vulnerable populations are safe and able to flourish can you each discuss why you believe the risk balance tips in the direction of your world view on this and perhaps as sort of a corollary is there evidence that you would need to see in order to convince you that you were wrong about which side has the better uh the better case and we'll start with mr fsi um just sorry i don't want to keep going this but the vaccine thing so that i don't just make clear on my position on the vaccines no no my position is it's a model that i did not say anything about robert's specific view of vaccines i'm interested um in his view but it's not expertise i'm bringing up vaccines as a model of we need to look at the full impact of things with precision so he's claiming to be doing that i have suspicions about that i'm certain he's not doing it with energy but i'm just that was a model it's not the same i don't know no because i don't have specific knowledge about it and they stopped attacking me i just said i'm attacking you for distortion no we're having a debate on energy which you are distorting as i've demonstrated and we'll continue to demonstrate okay so let's go to thank you audience advisor um okay so let's let's let's okay give you a check from big oil my best friend okay so let's let's talk about um why is it that i think that um that the freedom and i want to stress the freedom to continue using fossil fuels is essential so i'm not there's i'm not saying we need to have a law that prevents certain people in certain places from having solar panels i'm all for that i don't want that to be um to be forced on people and so why do i think that it's so important for people to be able to use fossil fuels well basically my entire opening that energy that low-cost reliable energy is indispensable for people to have the ability uh to flourish so that's point one and point two is the fossil you know fossil fuels are a unique source of this in terms of that can provide low-cost reliable energy for all of our different uses including heavy-duty transportation on a scale of of billions of people and i think the history here is really instructive because what i find in a lot of these debates is you hear a lot of people making claims about the future and it's really the track record is really important and the track record that for decades people have been saying oh yeah renewables can easily replace fossil fuels and particularly saying we're going to have mass death and devastation from climate and then the fact that actually fossil fuels were by far the most effective way to get a lot of energy for a lot of people and that that devastation hasn't happened in part because people empowered by fossil fuels protected themselves more against climate that's very very relevant and so if you look at just let's look at just china and india like a combined almost 2.5 billion people where you've had quintupling or more of fossil fuel use in the last 40 years and life expectancy increases of at least seven years so you think about two and a half billion people have industrialized using fossil fuels and extend their lives by at least seven years that is really fundamental whereas and as i said like climate in terms of its actual impact on human life the the claims about disaster damages um those are wrong we'll put those on fossil fuel debate.com and also we'll do a podcast on wednesday like going into the sources and all this stuff but if you look up roger pielke jr i believe is affiliated with this he's kind of the expert on actual climate damages so you can look at that but in terms of climate related deaths remember it was forecast that millions of people would be dying and yet it's not happening because we're building a durable civilization so i think it's clear that the benefit to poor people is huge and there's no reason to think that poor people around the world can't do what china and india did and actually with modern technology and best practices do it a lot more uh cleanly so i think it's just totally clear that the freedom to use fossil fuels is essential and that res that taking away that freedom is really i mean i regarded as energy genocide response to that one thing is the alex you're using you're using a lot of debating tricks um which is and one of them is is using the word conflating the word energy with oil interchangeably and it's not i believe we should have energy i think we should use the cheapest kind of energy you made this statement earlier that i somehow you know did some kind of bait and switch when i was talking about the pricing of energy and you dismiss bloomberg which i you know bloomberg's leading authority on energy it looks at every single transaction the costs i was giving you are levelized costs and that means all the fuel all the operation and maintenance it is the all of the capitalization and that's the cause that is the only way of making a fair costly and they're cheaper it's one-tenth the cause of the of nuke so why wouldn't we isn't it better for poor people if we use the cheapest energy doesn't it mean we can get to more poor people i want to say this i work with poor communities i see what happens what we call the oil curse if you have oil i just came from cancer alley a million people between baton rouge and new orleans with poison water their lives are not good i do a lot i've been 30 years i've been litigating in west virginia when i was a little boy my father said to me talk to me about a mountaintop remove it was just called strip mining and they were just starting he said they're not only doing it to cheap in the their mining but they're they're doing it to get rid of workers and he told me that in 1968 there were 114 000 unionized mine workers in west virginia today there's 11 000 miners left in this state and very few of them probably a quarter of them are unionized because and they now and they you know they're they're mining with machines that cost half a billion dollars are 22 stories high and practically dispensed with the need for human labor and west virginia is the richest state in this country if you look at the coal beneath the ground if you look at the people it's the poorest it has the worst education system it has the worst healthcare it has the worst of everything the water is poison the air is poison and the people are demoralized and beaten and that is the legacy of carbon so i feel like obviously there's disagreements about some of the measuring sticks here and what is cheaper uh and what's more affordable what isn't one of the key questions in this debate is what should be done about it from the level of the us federal government right and the the jurisdiction that we have the sovereignty that we have and you you get these generally kind of superficial arguments about government intervention versus the free market and i guess my question is what is the proper role for the federal government on this issue versus the role of private industry so one argument uh mr epstein would be if climate change is an existential crisis which is something that many people believe whether you dispute it or not many people especially younger people believe that right and so if people in their core believe that to be true wouldn't that justify a dramatic governmental intervention of some sort and um that's point one and point to what in your mind is appropriate for the government to do in this overall realm you mean with the doomsday scenario or not in the second part so you're saying assume doomsday so so i guess so if people believe it's doomsday right would that justify massive government intervention and then based on what you think is actually happening what should the government do and not do yeah i mean so but i think it's i mean you can do this hypothetically like if it's doomsday but the main thing is people need to understand what actually drives uh a hot like human florida i call human flourishing so long healthy opportunity filled lives i think the the core reason people think there's doomsday is because they have the view that basically the planet is perfect in its natural state and then where any time we impact it there's this delicate balance and we're going to upset the balance and it's going to go haywire and i think it's really important that that's not how the planet works at all the planet is wild potential it is not you know it's not stable it's not it doesn't give us sufficient stuff for our needs we need to transform it it's not safe so we need to dramatically impact the planet to meet our needs and to provide for a lot of people and so that takes energy and you want to use the lowest cost most reliable energy and most of the time when people are in reality um that's fossil fuels for people so this is really important because if you're talking about doomsday you need to realize that the the the thing that makes our amazing lives possible and i keep want to stress we have unprecedented amazing lives is this low-cost reliable energy if you just take out what that one variable with all the knowledge and all the technology we have if you don't have low-cost reliable energy powering your machines nothing works you can have all the knowledge in the world all the technology if those machines don't have calories um nothing works so we should be afraid of doomsday from energy restrictions that's why i call it energy genocide from these prohibitions that will deprive people of the energy that they need to live and thrive let alone deprive people of new opportunities so it's really important that it's crazy that people see oh two degrees fahrenheit warming in 150 years oh my gosh the world is going to end and people talk about policies that will cause blackouts and worse and are already starting to cause blackouts and are already starting by the way in europe to cause people to die from hypothermia in greater numbers because their energy is more expensive like the actual world being good depends on low-cost reliable energy does not depend on specific climate conditions if we have low-cost reliable energy we can deal with any climate conditions almost if we don't we can deal with no climate conditions now if if there was something like an incredibly rapid rise in sea level um and you in something really dramatic that was really existential yes the government would should do something about it and but the pro-human way would be to really look at what is demonstrated to work and what's most effective and the thing you would do i mean the thing you would obviously do given the actual record of nuclear in terms of how much energy costs or electricity cost nuclear is you would that mean the first thing you did is try to build up the whole world with nuclear power plants that would be the obvious thing that you would do um if you cared you wouldn't keep making promises about these unreliable fuels uh being able to transform everything even though in reality they always add cost because again for the obvious reason that you always have to add the unreliable energy infrastructure to the reliable energy infrastructure so i don't know i'm out of time and i want to respect time but you really need to realize low-cost reliable energy that's the thing you should be afraid of losing you should not be afraid of fairly modest changes in climate conditions the temperature of this planet used to be 25 degrees fahrenheit warmer than it is today co2 levels used to be at least 10 times higher we're not in some unprecedented territory for the planet but we have an unprecedented unprecedented good life because we have an amazing ability to produce energy using fossil fuels and i hope that people out compete it but to prohibit it is energy genocide so on the competition let me answer the question let me put a pin right here that everything alex said that i understood i disagree with and i'm going to i want to answer the question which is what should government should be doing i don't believe that alex trying to put words in my mouth that i want to outlaw fossil fuels oh i want to create markets as the american ideal we ought to do we ought to create fair markets where every american can participate and you know we did this with the internet 1979 we passed the bill that created the arpanet the federal government built the infrastructure for a marketplace in 1980 a year later the ceo of ibm said that personal computers are a dead-end technology and they got out of the business in 1980 well what happened because we had a marketplace everybody got a personal computer and what happened to the cost of information of bits and bytes it plummeted to zero if i want to know what mal's say tongue's favorite lunchtime meal is i can look it up on google you know how much that information would have cost you before they did that you would have had to go to the library of congress and spend a week in the stacks and but today it's free information forever because we created the market 1996 we passed the telecommunications act we and bill clinton said all the baby bells have to unify everybody gets on the lowest cost providers prevail in the marketplace that's why we all have cell phones in our pockets i can do all this stuff and and what happened to phone calls when i started working at pace it was only one phone call in the campus where you were allowed to make overseas calls it cost 75 dollars to call london people at all kids don't believe this it's free phone calls forever because we built a market that's what's going to happen if we build a market for energy a real market and not one where the incumbents can block access to people like me we because you know what they have they're their coal is uh what is that five minutes or two minutes or what two minutes their gold costs money their way it costs today about a billion dollars a gigawatt to build a solar plant cost five billion to build a coal plant but then you've got to pay for the goal you've got to cut down the appalachian shop across the country earn the coal poison every fish with mercury kill 18 000 people a year with ozone and particulates sterilize all the lakes in the adirondacks and do all these other bad things the the photons are hitting the earth every day for free all we have to do is build the infrastructure to allow people to harvest them and then sell them back on the grid and you know what's going to happen we're going to have free energy forever and we have the best solar energy in the world in this country the scientific americans that if we put solar panels on an area 75 miles by 75 miles a desert southwest we produce three times the amount of energy for the entire north american grid we have more when we where the saudi arabia of wind we have enough wind in montana hardest when texas north dakota the power of the entire american grid so all we need to do is build the marketplace and then we get free energy forever because there's no fuel costs and what happens then it releases the energy of our country it's like a permanent tax break for every business and every american and it democratizes the grid rather than concentrating that power and making a few billionaires and impoverishing the rest so i i think the idea of creating the marketplace and allowing true competition that that speaks my language right that's something that's very compelling to me i guess part of the question is when you look at policy proposals like the green new deal for example we didn't get this amazing explosion of cell phone technology you know cellular technology by outlawing pay phones right we didn't outlaw typewriters to have computers uh advance massively right greenlee i disagree with that approach i think we ought to have markets so you think the green new deal you don't support you know there's probably parts of it that i support putting a price on on if you need to discharge a pollutant like carbon you ought to pay a price for it and so that you know i believe we should we need to get rid of externalities alex doesn't seem to know what an externality is he thinks this is cheap energy that you know coal is 11 cents a kilowatt it's the cheapest you're paying for the coal roads and the mercury's and the wars and all this other stuff out of your other pockets just coming out of your income tax you're not paying it at the pump it's coming out of it you're still paying it so let's let's go there so i want you to respond to that and also i'm going to throw in one extra question on my own which is this uh one of the words that you keep using is reliable when talking about energy sources and robert has mentioned the major advances in solar technology it seems to me that the sun is quite reliable and i wonder you know is that is that something when we talk about expanding our our capability technologically is solar something that you think has a high ceiling to eventually replace perhaps carbon okay but three minutes these are two big questions i mean are we relying on the sun right now like what do you mean i mean reliable means so it'll it'll be back in a few hours and we know when it'll be all right let me deal with that one quickly since i think it's pretty straightforward and then remind me of the other oh i want to do it with the extraordinary because that's much when i say reliable it means reliable for your purposes so modern life that has been created mostly by fossil fuels is we are used to and and have built our lives around having low-cost energy on demand so that we can use amazing machines to improve our lives at all times like if you want to run run an incubator for a baby you want to be able to do it all the time it you want to be able to turn the lights on anytime you want to be able to have a respirator work anytime so when you have a stored fuel then you can rely on it for on-demand energy when you have an intermittent flow you can rely that it'll be it'll be there sometimes but it'll mostly not be there when you need it and then there's this question of backup and so i've discussed that and i've discussed how that's that's the key to why it always jacks up the price and why it's dependent and why it doesn't actually work um uh in practice very well in terms of so there's a question of like does it have a high ceiling i think the highest ceiling is going to be from nuclear just because nuclear is so naturally concentrated a form of energy solar is always limited because it's very dilute you need a lot of space um to harness it but i want to talk about um externalities in terms so and i'm glad robert you brought this up because i forgot to uh address what you said in your opening statement you mentioned the imf international monetary fund and you mentioned that they had this they said well there are 5.2 trillion dollars in subsidies so it's really interesting uh to look up what that means because a subsidy means and this is the kind of subsidy solar wind gets it means basically the government and some of the companies that you bankroll and maneuver for like bright source and stuff like when they get subsidies that means like the government is basically giving them money they're like paying them money and so ultimately we are paying extra money for the energy so if you look at say the energy information administration it will say that solar and wind get 14 times more subsidies than all forms of energy so that that in terms of like that's what a real subsidy means giving people money now there's this other idea that i'm going to calculate what i believe are all the negative consequences of this and i'm not going to that people aren't paying for but i'm not going to calculate what are called the positive externalities all the benefits that people aren't paying for so whenever you're doing stuff um there's certain benefits people are paying for there's certain benefits they're not paying for and there's certain harms that people aren't paying for and what happens with these externality calculations is they only look at negatives so it's this same kind of bias only looking at the negatives and then they have huge free reign to make up anything they want and a good indication is the imf calculation i believe in one year it increased by two trillion dollars so one year they said i don't have the exact number something like three trillion and the next year they say 5 trillion and so what's happening is they're just making up models that are saying we're only going to look at the negatives and we're going to make up all these crazy scenarios and then we're going to blame you now and what we're they're saying in effect is yeah you think that this energy is low cost um but it's not actually it's totally ruining your life but how does that square with the fact that the more of this stuff we use the longer and better lives we get so what's happening is people are completely inflating and distorting the so-called negative externalities and completely ignoring and evading the positive externalities this is what happens all the time with fossil fuels and for that matter with nuclear people are ignoring the amazing benefits and they're exaggerating and distorting the side effects so actually what is happening in the world and and so the climate related deaths are an indication of this people are saying yeah you need to calculate negative externalities because there's going to be all this massive suffering and death and then it doesn't happen because in part of all these positive externalities of fossil fuels so the world is getting much better which means that there are a lot more of these positive externalities than there are negative externalities and so it's pseudoscience to say oh yeah coal should so here's an interesting question for robert like what should a gallon of gasoline cost because in europe it's something like ten dollars a gallon so it's already about twice what we pay and yet solar and wind have not dominated there they haven't revolutionized there they still use gasoline so there's a question of basically what he's saying is not that he has a really cheap way of producing energy or that there is one on the market he's saying let's make fossil fuels unbelievably expensive and then everything will be great and no if you make fossil fuels unbelievably expensive everything will be unbelievably um expensive so no actually fossil fuels are low cost and the externality argument basically means there is no no real low cost energy like we're used to uh available so we should just make i don't know what should gasoline cost so let's let's address that positive externalities are you ignoring a huge part of the equation no of course positive externalities this is kind of a sophomoric view of course they're measured economically it's called profits that's what they're selling us and they're charging us for it so and you know i here's what i would say about gasoline what is the true cost of gasoline if we and you know if we have to go to saudi arabia punch holes in the ground bring up the oil refine it expensively i'm genuflect to the sheiks who despise democracy and are hated by their own people and don't let women drive cars and cut off american journalists bone is that a good thing for our country and then take that oil bring it across the atlantic with a military escort guess what exxon doesn't pay for it you and i do and spill it all over valdez spill it all over the gulf and leave us with the cleanup bill and burn the oil produce three uh ozone particulates and benzene towing and xylene that cost our health care system and respiratory and cardiac illnesses every year 365 billion dollars oh and then getting periodic wars the last one we got in cost three trillion dollars as part of the cost of oil when you when the world trading center came down that's part of the cost of oil because we put our troops in saudi arabia to protect their oil wells why would we do that why is america doing that shouldn't we be making our own energy right here where we've got a huge abundance of it and taking that money and putting it in schools so we ought to have a price of gasoline we ought to have a price of gasoline at the pump that reflects all that cost we're paying for 200 million dollars 200 billion a year to protect the infrastructure and the gulf of hormuz why are we doing that we're not even using that oil anymore but it's important to our oil companies to do that because of what it does in the international price what if we just got off of oil and so what what would happen if you did add all those costs of oil yeah the gasoline price the pump would go up to 12.50 what would happen we'd all be driving electric cars because the market would be sending us appropriate signals and that's what you want you want if markets are going to work if you give somebody a subsidy it distorts the marketplace and people don't get the appropriate signals and they act irrationally and if you want to maximize wealth for a nation you have true free markets with no subsidies and no externalities and that's what we ought to be making the american ideal and we ought to be spending that money not on wars in the gulf but on building schools for our children and police and hospitals and making this the best country in the world and not sending all of our money and our and our treasure over there and then bringing home our young boys and caskets that's part of the cost of oil and we're and so alex on that on that point it's a powerful argument that people hear and we we do have significant financial interests over there and there are conflicts in that region obviously and have been for quite some time there has been a pretty big boom here at home when it comes to natural gas for example uh what's it's not a political point it's just it's just a statement of fact right so so is there is there a happy coming together that's possible based on the argument he's making against foreign intervention and the cost they're in negative externalities and what we're doing here at home yeah i mean i thought for a second he was going to say well let's liberate domestic oil production if it can compete i'm all for it yeah so there's so many things i want to talk about that i want to talk about like let's talk about what let me just say something about how energy how policy should work so because i have a very different view of how to do it and i want i think the externalities way of do so basically externality's way of doing it is that robert or whoever robert designates can arbitrarily say yeah i think first of all this idea there are no positive externalities except for profits that's that's just nonsense i don't know where that came from but like okay there's so many things to say so just just to take a positive extra like what's the positive externality of low-cost reliable energy in the 1970s and 80s mostly from coal making possible the internet which you gave a nice tribute to earlier like nobody paid the coal companies to free up the time and to give the opportunity to create the internet and yet the abundance of time and the availability of electricity that led to amazing innovation so one of the great things about low-cost reliable energy is not just that it allows you to use machines um more effectively directly but it frees up an amazing amount of time to innovate so so much of the innovation that we have in the world is based on low-cost reliable energy and we owe a huge thank you to these alleged destroyers of the earth who freed up this amazing time and gave us these amazing lives to create something like the internet now robert's uh i don't know if it's a friend but ally amry levins i should say again in the 1970s was saying we can replace fossil fuels with nuclear i'm sorry he was anti-nuclear as well he said we should replace fossil fuels with renewables and efficiency and he said we and this is in chapter one of moral case for fossil fuels which you read last night i appreciate he said we need to restrict the use of electricity so and because all these negative externalities so you can see this viewpoint just allows you these complete fascist destructive controls where you can say yeah i'm gonna say there are all these negative consequences and i'm gonna do a study i'm going to make a calculation and therefore i can jack up your gasoline price uh to 12 and reassure you that there's going to be some um amazing alternative but there is a question of how do you deal with things that he's classifying as externalities things like real pollution so situations where coal is actually polluting and i think the way to do it is you need to define rights you need to define property rights and the key thing you need to do is you need to define in different areas thresholds of how much emissions of x is okay and how much isn't and one key principle of this is you cannot assume that any amount of it is dangerous and a lot of the kinds of studies robert is mentioning in these statistics that he's throwing around what they're doing is they're based it's based on what's called linear no threshold response what that means is that if some quantity of something is toxic then any quantity of something is toxic and in reality no some quantity of everything is toxic but there's always a benign level and often there's what's called a hormetic level which is a beneficial level so i do believe that we need to set standards for things like pollution and if co2 was a provable huge problem that was actually killing a lot of people then yeah and and we really had replacements for fossil fuels then we should talk about okay how do we define something like a threshold i just don't think we're there but absolutely you don't want to have it so that like many dictators get to say oh i'm going to jack up this price here for this externality we need to define the rights in a rational pro-human way and i believe that right now there should be no limit on co2 because co2 is such a necessary byproduct of something that we need to do more of namely produce low-cost reliable uh energy with fossil fuels let me just take one thing on the foreign policy the foreign policy it is not fair to demonize the substance to blame the substance on all policies that are related to the substance every time you're dealing with energy there are going to be good and bad policies for relating to it and guess what if we build solar and wind the way we're doing which is a lot by you know abusive chinese labor with really dangerous mining practices of rare earth metals where they're cornering the market in china you think that's not going to be a foreign policy issue dependence on you know there's dependence on saudi oil which we can get rid of a lot through our own production what about you know dependence on chinese magnets nobody talks about that but so there's this bias of we're only going to talk about the negatives of fossil fuels we're going to call renewables clean even though there's such dirtiness in the manufacturing process we're going to ignore all the foreign policy challenges with that so i think we need a rational foreign policy and i have huge criticisms of the way our oil policy has been conducted and i think there are much better ways but i don't think it's rational to say oh well we shouldn't be allowed to use oil because oil policy has been conducted irrationally and therefore we should commit uh energy genocide okay so i want to make sure that we get time for audience questions so last subject and just uh i'll sort of cheat a little bit and do a twofer uh point of privilege one has to do is i know you're chomping at them to talk about nuclear so i'll sort of hand you the football in nuclear to respond to some of the points uh that mr epstein's epstein has been making all night i also just want to ask because we're talking about uh foreign policy and we're talking about our nation and other nations what do you what do you say to americans who say okay i'm sort of on board for a lot of the points that you're making but if we're going to do it and handcuff ourselves and possibly hurt our economy when these developing nations with billions of people aren't really going to play ball with no real skin in the game aren't we sort of just whistling past the graveyard not making a real dent in the problem because they're out emitting us anyway and we're hurting our economy to what extent is american unilateralism needed leadership and how much of it would be possibly hurting our economy without other other countries playing keep up if if you will and then go ahead and you give me two questions yeah i hope you give me double the time i will um and then and then one response then we don't have to worry the chinese and the indians don't want dirty energy they know what is killing 400 000 people a year pollution in beijing china they don't want it anymore china is much more aggressive about adding renewals than we are china's are very aggressive the most aggressive for a nuke poly nuke program in the world they're adding more solar every year than their entire new fleet so they they're you know if you look at china um india the united states and germany the four biggest economies last year um we we reduced four of them together 36 terawatts of power and we added 39 terawatts of um of power and as i said and india and china are doing their fart india just cancelled 14 gigawatts of coal plants more a bigger fleet in the entire british fleet you know they're doing their stuff i'll talk about nuke nuke and by the way it makes us more competitive the more that you get rid of fossil fuels the better quality of life more competitive the more we're developing technologies that the rest of the world wants doesn't hurt us the imf says reducing fossil fuels is a net benefit to our economy of 1.3 trillion dollars it helps us it's not a cost there's transition cost but it's not a cause nuke i'm all for nuke i'm a market guy i'm all for nuke if they can make it economic and if they can make it safe right and by the way nuke did not get destroyed like he said like alex suggested because of environmentalists it got destroyed because of chernobyl and three mile island that was their problem nuke if if it's economic as i say the volatile power plant in georgia supposed to be 12 billion dollars a gigawatt it's 1 billion to build a solar plant and guess what the costs now look like they're going to go up to 25 billion that's not good i gave you what the cost of nuke is it's five to seven times what solar is who would want to do that we can build burn and we can make energy out of like i said prime rib why would we do that and is it safe here's the thing it's not me who's saying it's unsafe it's the insurance industry who's saying we you are so hideously dangerous we are not going to insure you that's why the nuclear industry had to go to congress in a sleazy legislative maneuver in the middle of the night and passed the price anderson act so which says that if a nuclear power plant explodes or has an accident in your house is injured they don't have to pay you for it that's the deal they got what kind of deal is that what other industry has a deal go look at your homeowner's policy everyone in the country says we do not insure you against losses from radiation from a nuclear power plant now so you're you have the most expensive nobody would build a nuclear power plant unless the government intervenes and you have the most expensive fields and you have to take the few of the waste and store it for 30 000 years which is five times the length of recorded human history how is that a moral how can you make a moral case this is a what polluters do it's a way of of passing the cause of our generation's prosperity onto the backs of our children it's not moral and to pass it to jet to a thousand generations of children that's what he wants for the the solution to his energy problem is make the future generations pray pay for it you can't sell that as a moral cost today right now we spend a hundred billion dollars a hundred million dollars a year taxpayers paying to store nuclear radiation waste radiation on site at all these power plants and it's going to double and triple every year why should taxpayers have to pay that utilities should have to pay that we you know alex does not believe in markets he believes in the kind of energy that he's talking about if you look at it which is big um hydro uh carbon energy and and wind and a nuke what do they have in common they all can be controlled by wealthy billionaires and what i want and you know if we do that if we have an energy the political system tends to reflect the economic system and if we have an economic system that's controlled by a few people we will lose our democracy too and what i'm suggesting is let's get a energy system that all of us can participate and that democratizes it so last response before we get to audience questions specifically on nuclear power uh the issue of cost the issue of safety yeah so um observing consistently saying that what's happening with robert but it's not about robert it's about the way the culture and particularly many of the thought leaders who like i would call the environmental thought leaders think or or think improperly is that they they just consistently ignore or dismiss the amazing unique benefits of fossil fuels and they consistently exaggerate really wildly exaggerate and distort side effects and i think it's interesting to see this done in the case of nuclear and we could have a whole discussion about nuclear but i'll just give you like just take one thing in terms of the safety if you want to measure how safe something is one good way to do it is to measure i think the best way is how many deaths occur per unit of energy produced and guess what the safest form of energy ever created is by far nuclear now you mentioned so chernobyl that was um i mean not even that many deaths by the standard of many other things but chernobyl was a soviet thing controlled by a totalitarian government um in terms of the actual free world with any kind of civilized laws the example he gave was three mile island right so three mile island how many people died from radiation there zero people died from there so what is going on why is it hard to ensure nuclear the reason why nuclear has difficulty and the reason why nuclear costs have dramatically increased in multiple decades despite the fact that knowledge of how to do it has increased you'd expect to become more efficient is because i said it's been it's been demonized and criminalized by the modern environmental movement and part of that is is that there's such hysteria and demonization around nuclear where people are terrified of being sued for any kind of crazy thing related to nuclear it's not that it's actually going to kill you it's the least likely thing uh to kill you he mentioned nuclear plant exploding nuclear plants can't uh explode the the radioactive material in them cannot explode physically so what's that yeah no that was not an explosion of the radioactive material there's like an explosion of like a hydrogen thing there okay well so fukushima is also interesting because fukushima was also uh zero deaths the only deaths that come from these things are deaths from hysterically moving people out of the area which particularly hurts older people so what i just want to stress is there's a lot more to say about nuclear but i mean the fact is that nuclear is actually providing low-cost reliable electricity certainly compared to what renewables have done in germany uh in france and so if you actually believed in an existential threat from rising co2 levels you'd really place priority on nuclear now what you're hearing tonight is just that oh well solar and wind even with everything i've said even though they've had decades even though they have this fundamental problem of the unreliable fuel even though they always require the unreliable energy infrastructure plus the reliable energy infrastructure even though they always increase the cost essentially what he's saying is i robert f kennedy jr contradict all of that i've got this amazing market which hasn't been defined at all in which these unreliables that actually are the worst performing things are somehow going to be the best performing things and so we need to implement that in some magical way and i'm not going to be clear at all about what's prohibited and what's not and alex is against market so what i'm saying is no we need to be free to pursue all forms of energy we need to clearly define rights based on actual science not pseudoscience and uh distortions and we need to stop this bias against fossil fuels nuclear and hydro he says i like them because wealthy billionaires are involved in them no it's the exact opposite people become wealthy billionaires involved in them because they're actually good technologies just like people become wealthy billionaires on the internet because it's valuable jeff bezos becomes a wealthy billionaire because it's valuable because he can deliver a low-cost valuable product to a lot of people um profitably so that's what is not doable by right now these imaginary energy industries i wish you and all of your investments the best of luck but you need to compete on a real market with profits not on some sort of uh not on a market not a non-market that prohibits us from using the most important form of energy in our lives okay so we're going to put a pin that the insurance industry aig aig's wizardry munich are the ultimate arbiters of risk in our society they're not stupid people they're not running away from an investment if they can make money and you know for you to say they don't know what they're talking about and you know more about there is nuclear power plants and them is a we're we're departing from fact-based reality you know you're you're saying the meteorology you know more than the meteorologists more than the pulmonologists more than the climatologists more than the is you know more than the insurance industry and it's just at some point we have to wonder whether we can trust that you know that judgment okay so i i know that i know that the environmentalists have made nuclear have have allowed all kinds of crazy lawsuits for nuclear that insurance companies wouldn't want to ensure that's why i say stop demonizing you think morally that we should be able to impose on our generations of children to take care of it because if you can make it you can make it safe you can actually transform it um into energy i don't know why you're assuming that we have to leave it in the most precarious form nobody's figuring it out forever actually okay absolutely they have and nobody is dying from that waste but people are dying for lack of low-cost reliable energy you and your friends are prohibited so we will we will stipulate profound disagreements uh for the moment and i'd like to welcome to the stage uh my time here blessedly is now over and i will turn it over to a member of the faculty here at cu his name is matt burgess he specializes in environmental studies and economics and he's going to be moderating the q a from the audience my only contribution to this part is to say a brief reminder that for our purposes especially with how long we have left 10 15 minutes a question is one to two sentences with a question mark at the end of it please so are we going to line up with mike's is that the microphone right in the middle um the heidi said we have 20 minutes regardless if we go over a lift over and i just want to say i just want to say a couple things one is that i think polar regardless of what we think about this issue i think we can all agree that polarization is really hurting our ability to solve big problems and so i think it's great and really important that we have these kinds of conversations and then secondly while there are definitely big problems across the country and across the english speaking world in fact in college campuses i just want to point out cu is a leader in a positive direction where are the protest mobs i don't see any i also don't see any metal detectors and i want to acknowledge our our regents um and and and some of our other campus leaders for enshrining some of those those values we have protections for free speech and academic freedom and non-discrimination political grounds so use that freedom freedom is useless if you don't act free um so go so go forth and use that in your questions show time okay there we go um so alex you said something about rare earth minerals that i really want to follow up on and i've heard a lot about the environmental damages and danger to mining rare earth minerals specifically cobalt and it don't i don't think it's something we really talk about enough um and how those minerals are used in renewable technology and that in the united states we could mine them but they would violate our epa laws so we can't so then we purchase them from other countries and as a young generation as a millennial that really bothers me that we don't look at that side of the coin that we just ignore that so i'd like to understand why why is this not something that we're saying when solar panels are so great why don't we talk about this um thank you for the question and i think you you stated a lot of true facts in the questions i don't know anything to argue with in the facts that you mentioned the question of of why is so i'd put it on two levels one is that there's this clear i mentioned this clear tendency to ignore the benefits of fossil fuels and exaggerate and distort the side effects related to that as there's this tendency to uh understate the side effects of certain forms of energy namely solar and wind and to ignore the downsides and so and well and to exaggerate the benefits i think what's going on is we could ask why is there such an obsession with renewable but not just renewal but solar and wind why are we just focused on what's really the best energy and i believe that it's because we have this idea that we shouldn't be impacting the planet and people think although incorrectly as your question implies that solar and wind are somehow perfectly natural and in harmony with nature and therefore it has this idea of yeah we're not going to really disturb the planet we're just gonna take the sun in and as you're indicating that is total nonsense because you need a whole process to convert energy and including to make the unreliable uh reliable and so it's it's this massive process and there are all these ignored practices now this doesn't mean i don't think that solar and wind should be prohibited i just think that we should have rights protecting policies with the different practices for rare earths i mean but rare earths do have a lot of dangers with them but i think that you can have good uh laws about them but i would really encourage people to reject this idea that we should be choosing things based on how natural they are we should be choosing things based on how beneficial to human beings they are and that's why i choose things not whether billionaires are involved but how good things are on balance for human beings mr kennedy hi um so i want to thank you guys both for coming uh i guess it struck me throughout the discussion that the kind of a core disagreement both of you have is how easy it will be to actually make the transition to renewable fuels it strikes me there's a policy you guys could potentially agree on if you put a price directly on carbon not a cap and trade system not regulations but said we're going to have a price on it and rebate the money if you're right alex uh then you would then you would not see much emissions reductions and you would get mild wealth redistribution and society would go on flourishing and if you're right robert then we would reduce emissions very very quickly is that am i am i wrong here is that something that you guys both couldn't support a price on carbon that rebates the money is an effective bet to see who's right about just how hard it is to transition off let's start with mr kennedy i'm for it i mean i i i there's a lot of different structures for you know for doing carbon pricing and they're all interesting and but what what i think is that we should have markets that if people are going to dump something into the common space the commons they ought to pay the cost of that and alex says there is no cost the arctic's not melting the sea level's not rising the glaciers aren't melting on every continent the oceans aren't acidifying and you know so that's to me that's the problem if we could agree on kind of the facts there's no mercury in art you know in our fish et cetera and i think we can agree on a pricing mechanism but there's lots of attractive pricing mechanisms over imposing market discipline on the discharge of pollutants mr epstein okay well you can solve that problem by recognizing what i actually said which is that i do believe those things happen they're just being wildly exaggerated and they're much smaller than the benefits we're getting and also i said we need i did not say you can just dump anything anywhere i said we need to uh develop we need to define rights based on science actual science and actual what's actually going to benefit human beings um so no i mean what's going to happen is you know what you do with these taxes is you're making energy the way it works is usually that you're making like your the idea is usually you rebate it it's usually you rebate it to consumers right so what's happening is and people think oh they call it net new um what is it um i'm sorry so it's called revenue neutral and people think oh this is really good revenue neutral must be neutral but revenue neutral just means from the perspective of the government the government isn't going to take it and spend it on something else it's going to be given to you but the issue is not what's happening with the government it's what's happening with individual productive decisions because the whole purpose of the tax is for less money to go into the lowest cost energy production and that's going to make things more expensive everywhere and this is what happened i mean we have a lot of case studies like in australia they passed a carbon tax it drove up their energy their electricity prices by 20 and they rebelled against it because it was increasing their cost of living so the last thing you want to do is do anything to make energy more expensive because the lower the higher cost energy is the higher cost uh everything is i want to make one other note about and this relates to guys question about should we unilaterally do things as the us what i'm really scared about in the world is not a global radical restriction of fossil fuels because many countries are way too smart to do this um in this kind of renewables delusion that we've heard tonight one thing is that china is somehow like really pro renewables they built 60 coal plants in 2018 in china and commissioned 90 around the world so they're really really pro coal they seem to have not discovered the magic of ultra cheap uh renewables and so what's going to happen and what does happen if we make our energy more expensive we just dealt we just make other companies who have truly lower cost energy more competitive and we outsource our missions and we also outsource it to companies with more emissions in in general so no um i think that whether you define a law like that the only reason would be you'd have to be really confident that there's a real disaster that we can actually do something about with the law and if there was a real disaster you'd have to do something globally not make a senseless unilateral sacrifice um that wouldn't actually do anything globally okay let's move on to another question that's okay yes um yeah i just want to thank you guys for coming out i was really great to hear all your ideas um i have a question for kind of both of you but first robert so i i actually appreciate your praise for like the free market and your distaste for subsidies and everything but um if solar and wind are actually um better and cheaper than the forms of fossil fuels that um you're talking about why do you need to ban fossil fuels in order to beat them in the market um since you're such a proponent of them why do you need to ban them yeah why do you need to ban them i've said it from the beginning i'm not banning them your support degree new deal though i didn't say that but you did well in reality he did it so not on this stage i'm gonna i'm gonna use i'm gonna take moderate privilege here he didn't get clear let me make it clear i don't support a ban on fossil fuels what i support are market mechanisms and to the extent that that's part of the green new deal i don't support that part of it try basically because i can my question's more for robert um robert in the wake of the greta thundberg skeptical spectacle uh it became something of a joke uh on in my twitter circles and friends sorry the young woman speak fast um that you know lefty journalists and you know people trying to prescribe everyday solutions for people were basically prescribing three main things being eat bugs have less kids and eat less meat um and at the end of the day i i if that's what it takes to kind of be an environmentalist i'm fundamentally unwilling to play ball because at the end of the day because at the end of the day if mr epstein is a bought and paid for koch brothers shill and all the things you'd suggest he is i'll side with him first on the matter of human dignity because i don't want to sell my family out first what was the question so so i guess the question would be about you know we do hear from some environmentalists it's like morally wrong to have kids or too many kids that's that's a tough step i i have nothing but admiration for greta but what is she 12 years old 16 16 she's 16 so i mean i you know her she's trying to do something idealistic she has a legitimate worry about the you know the state of the globe and i admire her for that um do i when i go to her and say if let's say if i were president would i appoint her the secretary of energy no i wouldn't because i don't think a 16 year old girl has that level of sophistication when i was 16 i didn't i saw things that were wrong i felt an urgency to change them and that's what she's trying to do but i don't think that you should make up your mind about what environmentalists stand for and what they don't by listening to you know to somebody who is that age i you know i laid out a platform tonight that i think is a rational pragmatic platform that people that admit that that supports american values and supports free market capitalism at rationalize our marketplace so that um you know a market does what it's supposed to do which is to reward good behavior and punish my behavior i believe in free market capitalism because i believe that the marketplace promotes efficiency efficiency means the elimination of waste pollution is waste a free market would would urge us to properly value our natural resources and it's the undervaluation of those resources that cause us to use them wastefully in a true free market you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community what polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor they raise standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of life for everybody else and they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market and forcing the public to pay their production costs you show me a polluter i'll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and force the public to pay his cause thank you let's move on to another question let's provide another question thank you advice on that hi uh i have a brief question for each of you mr kennedy what are your criticisms of hydro and mr epstein is there any place for government-funded research into nuclear power let's start with mr epstein uh what what are your criticisms of hydroelectric power well i don't like big hydro i like you know there's a lot of little hydra in river hydro that's very interesting now and that i would support i've supported a couple of projects in chile but i think big hydro is a boondoggle at it um it that it's not cost effective in many cases and that over over time with the reason dams are coming down now is not because environmentalists suddenly got powerful is that the dams don't work anymore they fill up with silt they destroy the rivers they destroy other values so i would say i wouldn't outlaw hydro i'd if i could find another way to make energy that was cheap and reliable i would do it and solar and wind are cheap and all reliable mr epson um okay i'll answer your question in five seconds so i can address what he said so the um no i mean what needs to happen with nuclear is the whole i mean i mentioned stop demonizing and criminalizing like you need a whole a new infrastructure not a new infrastructure rather you need a set of laws that hold nuclear to objective safety standards compared to everything else right now there's just this prejudice where nuclear even though it's the safest has to do the most and so if you make some if you impose enough safety regulations on things then it just becomes impossible to afford it's just like if you said well to be safe alex you have to go around with five bodyguards all the time yeah then i couldn't afford to live that wouldn't actually help my life and that's basically what we have um with nuclear i want to make a response to just this idea of does robert support the green new deal on this market thing like you haven't said anything really specific about this what this would be you've promised a lot of things in terms of these technologies that fail would somehow succeed but i remember at the outset you talked about net metering so that's the most concrete thing i've heard and so we might let's talk about metering for one second so net metering basically means you're saying i'm generating unreliable energy from my home and i want to be paid and practice what net metering means is you get paid over twice the whole wholesale price so basically you get paid twice as much for energy that is unreliable wow i wonder why people don't like that and resist that yeah they don't want to overpay a bunch of so-called energy let's take two more questions yeah that's just that's that's another debating trick putting words in my mouth and i'm having to support yourself let's move on to another question you're actually supporting next question hi i just wanted to thank both of you for coming out and i just appreciate um civilized discussion but i just wanted to ask a question um about a comment you made earlier alex so i heard you say that um there used to be levels of um co2 uh ten times as high as they are today but um the organisms back then were completely different entirely different adapted and evolved for 10 times higher co2 so if um as co2 is rising as it is today um organisms us what we have today if if we have to adjust to that overnight i think that'd be a lot different um wouldn't it be cheaper to try to um adjust for that now and prepare for that now by through innovation and renewable resources rather than just like patching that up with a temporary solution through say fossil fuels so just to take the the incorrect factual assumption uh many many of our plants are actually uh were developed in areas with much more co2 than we have today so i mean in general what what has happened with more co2 is a lot more global greening which has been a huge net benefit which is another case where the benefits of fossil fuels are being ignored and again the side effects are being wildly exaggerated and distorted and the whole question is well shouldn't we do this with innovation and renewables well first of all forget renewable as a concept i don't care whether it's renewable or natural or whatever i want it to be good so yes we should support innovation but that means freedom including stop the criminalization of nuclear as i keep referring to but if you're talking about oh shouldn't we just do this and get rid of fossil fuels no because that means getting rid of the quality of life of billions of human beings which has been my whole point tonight this is an unbelievable value in our lives that we don't realize how good it is and we don't realize that what we're taking for granted is the most amazing life anyone has ever had and it's because there's this one industry that's figured out how to produce low-cost reliable energy for all of our different needs for billions of people that is an unbelievable achievement we should welcome others approximating that achievement but nobody has come close and if we want our standard of living and billions more want it we need to leave the fossil fuel industry free to produce energy and we need to be free to willingly buy it misery mr kennedy do you want 30 seconds to respond and then we'll take one last question well i i would just point out another thing which is that last week the ohio state legislature which are essentially indentured servants for um the you know the incumbents the energy and cummins voted to bail out the utility in ohio to the tune of one billion dollars because of cause overruns at their nuclear power plant oh i mean does anybody i i don't even understand where you know this is socialism for the rich it's socialism for you know these incumbents and it's a very cushy socialism for them and a ruthless merciless capitalism for everybody else okay we'll take one last question i'm being told one more so let's so my question is for you i understand that you believe that fossil fuels might not end the world like tomorrow but empirically fossil fuels are going to stop being sustainable at some point in time so why would we not start transitioning now if we can and realistically isn't it truly moral to moral to prioritize our future today instead of just waiting until climate change eventually does become that apocalyptic scenario that you're talking about okay what's your website yeah so there's kind of these two apocalypses these two contradictory apocalypses one is we're not gonna have enough fossil fuels and the others we're gonna have two we're gonna have not enough and we're gonna run out we're gonna have too much and it's gonna cause a a catastrophe and so i think we need to look at with with having not enough where people are constantly if there's freedom they're constantly searching out better ways to produce energy now often the best way to produce energy is more fossil fuels but the fact that we use fossil fuels now or in 10 years doesn't mean that people aren't looking for better alternatives they are all the time and that's why i'm so emphatic about being free to pursue all alternatives instead of this religiously restricted oh let's just do renewables or small renewables or unreliable renewables in terms of climate that's just a total assumption that that's going to be an apocalypse that we're going to we've changed the amount of co2 in the atmosphere from 0.03 percent to 0.04 then we might change it to 0.05 and that's going to be a disaster this is the assumption here is that significant human impacts on nature are inevitably self-destructive uh whereas the reality is is that sometimes our impacts can be destructive but overwhelmingly what we need to do is massively impact the earth to have a good life for human beings before humans massively impacted the earth life was terrible like you know you could be rich only if you exploited other people robert mentioned slavery at the beginning why did slavery end well one big reason is we harness low-cost reliable energy from fossil fuels so people stop trying to harness energy uh from humans so in terms of our future we can have an amazing future if we're free to use all forms of energy we can keep having huge benefits from fossil fuels we can keep having very manageable side effects we can find better things and life can get better and better for more people just as it's gotten better and better for billions of people in the last 40 years so 40 years ago people were saying let's stop using fossil fuels and if that had happened billions of people today would have shorter life expectancies what i'm saying is those same calls now those same calls now are being said for now what i'm saying is we're free to use fossil fuels and other forms of energy life can continue to get better for billions of people and if we radically restrict it then it's going to get like life is going to get worse for billions of people do you want a quick response yeah i mean i like mention you know the end of slavery because a more efficient form of energy came along and i it sent me to remembering that when i was in college i took a course which was a course about the moral justifications for slavery and it was the same kind of justifications you hear for fossil fuels today that you know it came from the greeks it came from the egyptians that slavery allowed leisure time allowed us to create art and then it came from preachers in the south and there were a lot of sermons that we had to read about people who were quoting the bible to justify slavery so do it the reason slavery ended in this country was not because a more efficient fuel came along or because it was immoral it's because we beat them in a war and that that energy source was willing in order to hang on to their profits and their old immoral discredited form of producing energy they were willing to destroy this country they were willing to kill 669 000 americans and that's what happened it was a very very difficult transition and the economic stake of fossil fuel industry in this antiquated model is at least as great as the slave owners had in the south so yeah there's going to be a struggle to transition where it's going to transition because simply because we're more efficient we can produce energy cheaper than they can and we're doing it today it's cheaper it's more reliable and that is why it's going to change thanks everyone i think yes or no i think i've been told that we have one that that was the last question so i'm just going to thank all our debaters and welcome madison meeks so many of us at the university level have come to find that the university truly is a bubble so i want to thank all of our speakers for coming here and popping a little bit of our boulder bubble i also want to thank our student leaders from free to be for helping our event move so slowly or so so swiftly and i want to thank all of you for being here because you guys truly are the push for intellectual diversity at our university level

Channel: ImproveThePlanet

Views: 38,486

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Id: q352jBT6I_k

Length: 132min 3sec (7923 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 10 2020