Energy policy, including climate policy, will be one of the main issues of 2021. I believe that the best policy for America’s future and the world’s future is a policy of energy freedom, in which all sources of energy--including fossil fuels--can compete to produce the most reliable, lowest-cost energy for billions of people. I am extremely worried that much of our government is advocating…

Introducing LVC -- Long-term Value Creation.

Anti-development policies on America's federal lands have created crisis after crisis: from forests with deadly "fuel loads" to dependence on China for vital materials. The Biden Administration's anti-development "30 by 30" plan would make our public lands crisis far worse.

We need an electric grid that provides power when we need it, even under adverse conditions.

One of the most obvious opportunities the US is currently squandering is the export of LNG--liquefied natural gas. LNG can provide low-cost, reliable, clean natural gas around the world. But LNG's enormous potential is being strangled by irrational permitting policies.

The top priority of a proper infrastructure plan would be liberating the construction of American highways--which are unnecessarily congested, slow, and expensive due to anti-development policies. Biden's "infrastructure plan" would slow highway construction even more.

In my career studying energy, I have never been more scared of a government policy than I am of the Federal Government's push for a "CES"--"Clean Energy Standard" that would dictatorially mandate 80% "clean," including 50+% unreliable solar and wind, electricity, by 2030.

The proper policy toward EVs, which are promising but not cost-effective for the vast majority of Americans, is 1) let them compete on a free market and 2) make sure we have plenty of low-cost, reliable electricity. Our President's new Executive Order does the exact opposite.

This is Alex Epstein's testimony for a hearing by the House Natural Resources Committee on June 30, 2021.

The ESG divestment movement poses as a long-range, financially savvy, and moral movement. In reality it is a short-range, financially ruinous, and deeply immoral movement that perpetuates poverty in the poorest places and threatens the security of the free world.

This is Alex Epstein's testimony for a hearing by the House Natural Resources Committee on May 19, 2021.

There is a lot of conflicting "information" about the TX blackouts. Here's the bottom line: the root cause of the TX blackouts is a national and state policy that has prioritized the adoption of unreliable wind/solar energy over reliable energy.

Q: Aren't we in a rapid free-market energy transition from fossil fuels to solar and wind?

A: No. The 3.8% of American energy that comes from solar and wind is due mostly to anti-market policies that force utilities and consumers to buy unreliable, cost-increasing energy.

Joe Biden's energy plan would shift us from energy production that is low-cost, high-reliability, and America-centered to energy production that is high-cost, low-reliability, and China-centered.

This would destroy, not create, millions of well-paying American jobs.

Q: Won't a carbon tax reduce CO2 emissions without hurting our economy?

A: No. A carbon tax would raise energy prices, make every American industry less competitive, and offshore our CO2 emissions to the countries that outcompete us.

Quick and direct answers to common questions you're likely to encounter about energy technologies.

Quick and direct answers to common questions you're likely to encounter about climate change.

In the last 15 years America has become the world’s leading energy producer thanks to energy freedom -- allowing all sources of energy to compete and innovate. To make even more progress we need more energy freedom -- not mandates of renewables or bans of fossil fuels and nuclear.

Joe Biden’s energy plan calls for outlawing reliable fossil fuel electricity and mandating unreliable solar and wind electricity. This will not stop CO2 emissions from rising but it will destroy American industry, impoverish American consumers, and jeopardize American security.

California is experiencing blackouts because of "green" policies that reward or mandate unreliable electricity from solar and wind and punish or outlaw reliable electricity from nuclear, natural gas, coal, or hydro. We need to understand and apply this lesson this election.

The solution to dangerous, out-of-control wildfires in California is addressing the root cause: “excess fuel load” from bad forest management. Focusing on climate change, a minor variable that we have no near-term control over, is a craven political ploy.

Fracking is one of the most important technologies in our economy and can be done very safely. Government should ban only dangerous misuses of fracking, not all fracking. A fracking ban is the fastest way to create a global recession and an American depression.

While climate catastrophists claim that our climate is less livable than ever because of fossil fuels, it is actually more livable than ever thanks to our fossil fuel powered climate protection systems. Rising CO2 levels will cause mild, manageable warming as well as significant global greening--not a crisis.

The only practical way to lower global CO2 emissions is to encourage innovation that could make low-carbon energy cheap for everyone. Policies like the Green New Deal and the Biden Plan that would outlaw American fossil fuel use won’t stop global CO2 emissions from rising--but they will ruin America.

10s of millions of Americans live in energy poverty--a growing problem thanks to wasteful, unreliable solar and wind infrastructure. If we want to stop making our poorest citizens choose between food and heat or medicine and electricity we must end favoritism for “unreliables.”

The Wind Production Tax Credit is a perverse policy that pays utilities to slow down or shut down reliable power plants whenever the wind blows. It is driving reliable power plants out of business, leading to higher costs and lower reliability.

The widely-publicized claim that fossil fuels cause 1 in 5 deaths is the worst kind of pseudoscience. It ignores fossil fuels' life-extending benefits and wildly overstates their negative side-effects. In reality, fossil fuels lengthen 5 out of 5 lives.

Joe Biden's escalating bans on domestic fossil fuel production, combined with mandates of unreliable solar and wind overwhelmingly produced by unreliable China, are an existential threat to our energy security and therefore our national security.

Biden’s ban on oil/gas leasing on federal lands is a dictatorial measure that will 1) increase US energy costs, 2) decrease US energy security, 3) destroy US companies, 4) destroy US jobs, 5) discourage US industry, 6) decrease US tax revenue, and 7) increase global emissions.

The House Democrats' "CLEAN Future" Act, by forcing us to depend mostly on unreliable wind and solar, would destroy our standard of living--and global emissions would still rise. It should be rejected in favor of an aggressive nuclear decriminalization policy.

The widely-condemned "flaring" of natural gas is a vital safety measure that decreases the energy efficiency of US drilling by less than 1%. And that number would be far lower without the infrastructure-blocking of anti-fossil fuel activists who claim to oppose flaring.

Q: Is the solution to TX's reliability problems to join the national grid and be regulated by the Federal government?

A: No, because the Federal government is pursuing policies that are *even more anti-reliability than TX's*. The solution is pro-reliability policies.

Background The Paris Climate Accords are a 2015 international agreement in which countries committed to specific short-term cuts in CO2 emissions along with the general goal of somehow eliminating almost all human-caused CO2 emissions by 2050. These emissions cuts are allegedly necessary to keep the average temperature from increasing by more than 1 degree C or more (2 degrees since preindustrial…

Unreliable energy sources receive dozens of times greater subsidies than fossil fuels, in addition to other unfair advantages. Without these, they would hardly be used at all.