>> be up-to-date in the latest in publishing with booktv podcast about books with current nonfiction book releases last bestseller list as well as industry news and trends through insider interviews pick bin find about books on c-span now, our free mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts. >> we have this compelling debate on should america rapidly eliminate fossilel fuel use to prevent climate catastrophe and we want to givee them the full hour. we did this debate at the university of miami in florida and at cu boulder last week and in the case it was alex epstein debating general wesley clark and you can find both of those debates on steamboat institute youtubetu channel. today we have alex epstein but we have different debate opponent, and let me briefly

introduce, i will read their bios and then i believe they're going to come up to the stage after i introduced them. we are very pleased to have with us this morning professor andrew tesla, professor of atmospheric science at texas a&m university. professor tesla as a climate scientist who studies both the science and politics of climate change. he i is the chair in geosciencet the texas a&m. in 2022 he was he was named director of texas a man's texas center for climate study. professor dressler also served in the clinton administration during the last year. he served as a senior policy analyst in the white house in the white house office of science and technology policy. his latest book,te introductiono modern climate change, one the 2014 american meteorological societies lewis authors award. we are also pleased to have alex epstein, president and founder

of the center for industrial progress, author of the moral case for fossil fuels. alex is a philosopher who argues human flourishing should be the guiding principle of industrial and environmental progress. he is the author of the "new york times" bestseller theue mol case for fossil fuels. and alex is known for his willingnesss to debate anyone anytime and is publicly debate a leading and five organization such as greenpeace, the sierra club, and 350.org over the morality of fossil fuel use. and finally our moderator for this morning's debates is dan njegomir, the editorial page editor of the denver gazette youral van as a longtime journalist and more than v 25 yr veteran of the colorado political scene. he is been an award-winning newspaper reporter and editorial-page editor, senior legislative staffer at the state capital and political consultant. let's welcome professor dressler and alexd epstein and dan

njegomir to the stage. [applause] you just make me babyt because it sounds good. can everyone hear me? well? yes, good. let's get right down to business so that you've had the introductions from jennifer. oh. not everyone can see me, but you can hear my voice. we're going to ask each of these gentlemen to offer us an opening statement on his view of the proposition, which you've heard stated for you and let me just repeat it just for the record that is should america rapidly

eliminate fossil fuel use to prevent climate catastrophe. what we're going to do is we're going to have andrew go first. and he's going in an open. we're going to let each one do an opening statement kind of stating where they're at. give them about seven and a half minutes each. and as i said andrew will go first and then he'll be followed by alex and then afterward we'll give andrew a chance to rebut anything. he feels really needs to be addressed. that any point that alex rays so andrew. so slides thanks. so let me begin by saying energy is the most important thing in the world if you have energy you can do anything else you want. so the real question is what's the best way to generate energy now, we generate most of our energy from fossil fuels right now, but let me talk about some of the disadvantages of fossil fuels so let's talk about number one climate change. let me explain why i personally

am extremely concerned about climate change. let's go back to the last ice age. this is basically what north america looked like it was covered with thousands of feet of ice or about half covered there were different ecosystems. sea level is 300 feet lower. it was a different planet if you walked outside you would not recognize your planet. now it was about 10 degrees fahrenheit colder at that time. so think about that 10 degrees fahrenheit and the global average you cool the plant you get an ice age. we're gonna call that an ice age unit 10 degrees. so let's think about the future we are on track for five degrees of warming. that's half of an unit that has the possibility of completely remaking the surface of the earth. now we can try to adapt to this. but it is possible or even plausible that if we do that in 2100, our descendants are going to be spending all of their money building seawalls and energy and water infrastructure things like that. they will be significantly

impoverished by this. moving on fossil fuels poison the air they kill millions of people every year around the world due to air pollution. in addition, there's obviously the national security risk. so these are some headlines are actually not that far out of date, but i feel like they're out of date texas gas prices could reach $4 per gallon as energy sector response to us russia tensions. now, let me give you a headline that will never be written. texas win price of skyrocket has energy sector responds to us russia tensions. saudi arabia rejects biden's plan to increase sunlight as midterms wound doesn't headlines will not occur. we will never invade kuwait. in order to rescue wind and sun. and the fossil fuels are commodity. so the prices vary and these price variations, which we're experiencing right now gas is five dollars a gallon. this is causing incredible pain, so i have an electric car. i fill up my tank for my tank for 10 dollars and it's 10

dollars last month. it'll be $10 next month. it's always the same and so this variability is extremely economically damaging when if you're a small business owner how what's the price of gas going to be in a year? nobody knows how do you make plans when you can't predict the price of energy? okay, so now let's be clear that we need energy in a fossil fuels are the only way to go. i would be the first person in line saying let's burn just burn stuff. we dig out of the ground, but we have an alternative. the alternative is wind and solar and those actually are the cheapest power sources now now when i show people this and i point this out people are often stunned. in fact, they'll get angry at me because they don't realize we're in the midst of an energy revolution right now. most people have don't keep track of this their knowledge of energy prices are a few years old, but the people in texas who build energy they know this and so if you go to the ercott website or cot runs the grid in

texas and they publish statistics on what people are connecting to the grid. it is 90% solar wind and batteries 10% gas because they realize that the cheapest energy is wind and solar. sorry about that. because my phone beeping i will turn that off now the cheapest energy is wind and solar they know this now i put a question mark there because people will often say well what about subsidies and i don't want to get into that. i'm happy to argue with that and the q&a if people want to talk about that, but let me talk about something. that's not arguable. let's look at the trend. so this plot shows. unfortunately people on that side of the room will have to look all the way over this shows the price of energy in 2009 and 2019. this is solar going down from there there and that's wind going down from there to there. this is the trend and this trend is not going to stop this trend is key is gonna continue to go and what that means is that we can argue about what's cheapest now, but women solar are the cheapest energy of the future there can be no debate about

that. okay now people will tell you yeah, but, you know women and solar are intermittent and that of course is true. and so then the question becomes can you build a grid that uses that uses intermittent renewable energy, that's still reliable and cheap now, i'm not gonna give you my opinion. i'm not gonna give you a hunch. i'm not just gonna claim. i know the answer there is an enormous amount of peer reviewed research has gone on this over the last decade so we know the answer. all right, we know the answer unless you can say where these people went wrong. you know, you're the what your feelings don't matter this is this is a math and physics and engineering problem. people have solved this. so i'm going to talk a little bit about how you build a grid that runs mainly on intermittent energy. that's still reliable. so the first thing you have to do is you have to realize are really two classes of energy. there's what you what you might call the fuel savers that's wind and solar that's intermittent power and then there's the firm dispatchable power you can turn

on and off anytime you want. so for example, the fuel savers are women solar batteries. they don't burn any fuel the firm dispatchable power could be nuclear hydro geothermal gas with carbon capture long-term storage and what you want to do for the cheapest grid is use as much renewables as you can and anytime the renewables don't give enough power you turn on the firm dispatchable power that gives you the cheapest great now you might reasonably ask, why do this why not just have a grid that's 100% firm dispatchable power 100% nuclear and the answer is it's gonna be a lot more expensive if you want to pay the least amount of money. this is the grid you want to look at and on average the grids can be about 75% renewable and the numbers very different groups have different numbers, but it's sort of around that order magnitude and about 25% firm dispatchable power. so, let me just wrap up. so, you know we need power, but we can we can get power from wind and solar it is the cheapest energy source of the

future. we can build based on a decade of peer-reviewed research. we can build a grid that does reliably provide energy at low cost and i'm happy to talk more about that and that grid will avoid the social costs of climate change the fact that fossil fuels poison the air the economic cost of price fluctuations the fact that fossil fuels don't pull us into wars. so i'll wrap up there. thank you. that thank you andrew you came in basically with 45 seconds to spare. i'm sure you i can't believe i didn't use those 45 seconds. alex all yours all right. so when you have a debate like this particularly involving a respected climate scientist, which professor destler is, i think the usual assumption is that there's going to be a big differences over climate science. and for the most part, i think that's not true. i think the key difference here between not just me and professor destler, but between me and the whole net zero

movement is methodology. my background is philosophy. i think a lot about methodology and i have a very particular methodology for thinking about this issue. i don't know where to point this. and what's interesting about this methodology is nobody has ever disagreed with this methodology and yet i've never met one opponent of fossil fuels who even remotely follows it. so let me just explain it. there are four key factors. we have to consider when thinking about fossil fuels and climate we need to think about the harms of rising co2. we need to think about the benefits of rising co2. we need to think about what i call climate mastery our ability to master or adapt to any kind of climate danger and then the benefits of fossil fuels and so my analysis is that usually what happens with the net zero movement is they do talk a lot about rising co2 harms. they tend to overstate them. i think professor destler. does that less than others although even already he's done a little bit of distortion and that realm rising co2 benefits

tend to be trivialized or or denied climate mastery denial tends to not be discussed at all, and then fossil feel benefit denial is rampant, and i'll show that that professor destler is doing this despite seeming not to so through each of these factors explain my view and explain where professor destler and then the the net zero of you just go very wrong. so i'm going to start off with the harm. so i generally find professor destler reasonable. i think he's one of the more honest commentators what he and the ipcc say is nothing resembling what we hear in the media for example with sea level rises. you're talking like three feet by the year 2100 and extreme scenarios. not like 12 not like 20 feet in several decades like al gore talks about and on joe rogan. he said explicitly we have no idea in terms of what three degrees c will do and i cannot, you know cannot tell you what's going to be bad, but i think it could be bad. so i think that's a kind of measured thing when we talk about degrees fahrenheit though. it's important to recognize. we're already up two degrees fahrenheit. so when you talk about five degrees or 10 degrees, like that's i don't like that.

i think we need to be more honest about that. so you're talking about five degrees, you know, it really means three degrees from now and today is the most amazing world that has ever existed and so that brings us to rising co2 benefits, which even if you think the harms are big the benefits are demonstrably huge particularly fewer cold related deaths far more people die of cold than heat in the world. we have bjorn lombard here and i'm using his chart which has been vetted many times and attacked unfairly many times. there's also global greening in terms of you know, crops benefiting a lot and this is very significant often measured in the trillions of dollars. so the fact that this is not mentioned or acknowledged as significant by the netzero movement shows a kind of bias that we're going to see much more apparently with climate mastery and here's where we really get into problems with that view. it is a fact that climate related disaster deaths so from extreme temperatures storms floods wildfires and drought are down 98% over the last century and it is also demonstrable that fossil fuels which provide 80%

of the low cost reliable energy. we use to master climate that they are a key cause for example using fossil fuels to power irrigation and transport to make us safer from drought our master. so great that a hundred million people in the world live below high tide sea level or they live. yeah, so i mean in terms of like the sea level for 100 million people, they're below it and they're totally fine. so here's what i find totally objectionable. this is never mentioned. the ipcc does not mention. it's got thousands of pages. it does not mention it professor destler. i've never seen him mention it. he doesn't mention it here. this is like discussing polio and the effects of polio without discussing the fact that we have a polio vaccine. we are masters of climate to not discuss. this is climate mastery denial pure and simple and nothing. i want to really emphasize this nothing a climate mastery denier projects about future harms of co2 can be trusted because they

deny our climate mastery abilities applies to the ipcc reports certainly applies to professor destler. and so the final factor, which is he even more egregious denial if that is possible is denying the benefits of fossil fuels. so fossil fuels are uniquely scalable and versatile source of energy scalable means provide energy for billions of people and thousands of places versatile means all types of machines. you might have noticed professor destler only talked about electricity. what electricity is only 20% of global energy use fossil fuels are growing particularly in china and other parts of the world that want the lowest cost most reliable energy. it's curious why china is not going all in on solar given that it's so allegedly cheap and if we look at solarwind if we look at the actual performance around the world, it's very very clear. they're only used in places that have large subsidies and mandates and they add costs so when you see more solar and wind the electricity prices go up now, why is this? it's very simple you look at this graph of germany, and you see that sometimes solar wind

can go to zero. what does that mean? that means you have you need a hundred percent backup so you have to pay for the cost of the 100% reliable grid and all the unreliable infrastructure including transmission lines, but most importantly the reliable power plants when you try to cut costs unreliable power plants or resiliency measures, which is what happened in texas or where i live in california, then you have disasters on top of this billions more people need low cost reliable energy like the one third of the world using wood and animals, so, appeals are uniquely cost-effective and yet professor destler says it's low cost to rapidly eliminate them. how can he claim this? well, he's using two denial tactics that either he's unaware of or he's being very manipulative and these are called partial cost accounting and then relying on near-term impossibilities. so partial cost accounting he used this levelized cost of energy slash electricity anyone who uses this is either ignorant or defrauding you and i mean this very literally if you look at the actual number, it says

explicitly does not take into account reliability related consideration. so it only looks at basically the cost of the solar panels but not the transmission lines and not the backup. that's like saying i've got a really cheap employee. he's only 18 dollars an hour instead of $20 an hour. but yeah, you have to pay to to bust them in to work and that's expensive and you have to pay for a hundred percent reliable staff but 18 dollars an hour. it's so cheap right? you need to look at the full cost. this is partial cost accounting. and then in terms of near-term and possibilities professor destler often talks about nuclear hydro and geothermal in terms of supporting this magical grid so nuclear doesn't work with intermittent solar and wind nuclear is the red one on the bottom. it works very steadily. it doesn't work with intermittency gas. the tan one is the one that goes up and down hydro is location limited professor destler also recently said i agree that hydro is not something to expand and then geothermal is highly location limited. it's you know fraction of a percent it's not practical. so either we're dealing with a

tremendous amount of ignorance about energy. he has some fantastic argument that i never heard of or he's engaging and deliberate deception and if somebody is distorting the present they cannot be trusted to predict the future. so i look forward to engaging these issues, but dr. destler has a lot to answer for if you could wrap it up. thank you perfect time. thank you both. as agreed what we're going to do is ski of andrew a chance to briefly refute some of the salient points. he thinks need addressing and if you could take maybe an a minute and a sure sure, so. yeah, so i'm not sure where to begin. keep up my slides back up, but i'm gonna flip through some slides and to show one slide. i'm not going to bore you guys as i do too much, but all this kind of again first of all a lot of the advantages that mr. epstein talked about when he talked about the advantage of fossil fuels are not the advantages of fossil fuels they're actually the advantages of power. it doesn't really matter where you get the power if you get the power forum if you get the power

from renewables or you get the power for fossil fuels are still going to be important power sources that are going to solve the problems and reduce the deaths. i'm almost there. almost right. so this is a plot. i showed he showed a plot that had germany and california on it. i mean, come on. this is a plot of all the states the x-axis is the price and the y-axis is how much renewable energy they have there's no correlation here. it is not more expensive to add renewable energy. okay, that's false as far as nuclear being impossible. say i have to say i did talk about adaptation the thing that he's not talking about. so he says we have climate mastery. he said i didn't talk about it. i didn't mention it and what he doesn't talk about is the cost of climate mastery. so if you want to build a seawall that's tens of billions of dollars for houston. who's gonna pay for that? well, we are that's gonna make us poor climate mastery makes us

poor if you go to california you go to the almond producers. they are not historic trucking in water. they're not heroically building a pipeline to bring water and they're just ripping their trees out of the ground co2 fertilization. is it helping them? the mastery of the climate isn't helping those too expensive to do it. it's too expensive to master the climate when you have cheap renewable energy available now, certainly there are casa associated with building transmission those exist with all systems, and if you look at the studies that have been done like the berkeley 2035 study or the net zero american study, they include the cost of transmission lines in that i mean again, you have to look at the peer review literature on this you can build a reliable grid now he is right that we all need to electrify things. so that's another part of the problem things need to be electrified. we use a lot of fossil fuels but we can electrify many of them probably 95% of our last 5% is hard and you get to get to the last five percent of

electrifying like international flights that can be difficult andrew. thank you a don't like the guy sure. i hate to cut you off yet. i gotta and i could go on. well you both have written plenty on it and extremely knowledgeable about it, and i might add that our audience. has includes many energy experts or that's the late term or lay person like me would use and i can see that from the questions that are coming in and what i'm going to try and do is balance some of that with maybe some some of the more technical questions that a lot of which assume things that are over my head, but i know not over yours or yours, i'm gonna try and balance that maybe with some values priorities policy type questions. let me start off with one of those that i kind of thought to myself and i noticed that alex has written on these energy talking points website that's stopping fossil fuels would make make the earth unlivable for billions. andrew wrote this month in rolling stone the amount of

warming the world is on track to experiences enormous and will transform our planet in unimaginable ways. well, somebody like me who's not an energy expert. looked at both of those and thought you know, what if they're both, right? in which case instead of sparing no expense in attempt in an attempt to curb climate change. should we try to adapt? and can we and let me go ahead and ask andrew first? well, certainly we have to adapt any climate change. we don't have we don't we don't avoid but people people have to realize adaptation is not magic. okay, people say we will use fossil fuels to master the client, but that is extremely expensive. i'll give you one example the ike -- in houston. so houston almost got wiped out by hurricane ike in the late 2000s. so we've been they've been proposing to build a -- to basically safe. you said she's looking at wiped out without this and at some point this century 30 billion

dollars, so cheap compared to the price of houston, but they just can't get the money and so so it is extremely it's expensive to adapt. so certainly we have to adapt to what we can't avoid, but we can avoid at low cost a lot of the warming and if you can avoid it for more cheaply than you have to adapt you should do that ellis. do you have an observation on that? yeah, so i've seen disappointed by andrew's response to my opening because i mean it's putting myself in his position if somebody had pointed out that i am using fraudulent statistics in terms of levelized cost of energy and also that i'm just using imaginary scenarios that totally defy the physical realities in terms of this like hydro and nuclear and mainstead of referring like all, there's academic studies in the future. i want to reiterate that the conclusion that the earth has

become more livable with o fossil fuels and fossil fuels are needed to make a living is looking at the full context which is what the professor continued not to do. if you look at the benefits of fossil fuel it provides low-cost reliable energy to power machines for billions of people to be reductive and prosper including a naturally safe claimants . we are 50 times safer with climate then we were 100 years ago. that is amazing and needs to be stressed. if you look at climate damage they are flat. in some cases they are declining. there is no climate crisis at all and there's actually a climate renaissance now. the idea that three more degrees will be disastrous is cherry picking . it's anecdotes, it's not looking at the big picture. net zero means mass impoverishment and mass premature deaths to >> i seek to follow up on

that because if indeed there is an increase in average global temperatures from 1 to 5 degrees by the end of the century, does it make more sense nonetheless i think is the question to adapt and expend what we have orather than necessarily trying to go to net zero on carbon emissions. >> so net zero is already mass murder andshould not even be on the table if you look at the full context . but what policies should you have given that energy is so important. the key thing is to engage tin any liberation that is possible with low carbon alternatives and we are fortunate we have an unbelievable low carbon alternative that was cheaper for electricity than fossil fuels in the 70s which is nuclear which was

unfortunately virtually criminalized by the green movement to the point nuclear prices are 10 times more today adjusted for patients than they were in the 70s .s i think everyone should be in onfavor of decriminalizing nuclear as well as liberating natural gas . these waste were to reduce co2 emissions but they also make energy more available to more people hrbut again it's the green movement and you look at professor dressler's record. until this year he's been very hostile to nuclear and then he called it expensive but that is another distortion. only expensive because of the green movement that he is a major part of and support her off so liberate nuclear, liberate natural gas, liberate alternatives but let 8 billion people have energy and do not hold them back by this total denial and distortion about nuclear and wind. >> i'm going to ask you a different question rather than follow up on it nuclear. and environmental justice seems to require making life for the poor and middle-class more expensive. is the only solution to reducing fossil fuels use?

>> making american familiesby tesla . >> i hate to do this to you. i athave to respond to alex saying i'm being dishonest. in france they run run nuclear plants, most of their electricity is nuclear, they have to scale up and down nuclear plants so the reason we don't do it in the us is regulatory. him stating we can't do it is absolutely wrong. getting back your statement, we do need to switch. if we want to get to air pollution gaps which mister epstein hasn't mentioned and millions are killed by fossil fuel poisoning. if we want to get away from that which i think we should then we need to switch. if you buy a tesla one thing you see happening is 10 years ago people would t'have laughed at you if you uttold them the

penetration electric cars would have today. what's going to happen in the future is there's this innovationcycle driving down renewable energy price and all these other prices and remember , again just to hammer on this pointthat mister epstein is telling you something is wrong . the bizarre numbers you can complain about them but look at what the texas producers are doing they're building wind and solar. they don't care what lazar says, they're doing the calculation . they made the calculations on clean energy sources so certainly this revolution of energy that we are now experiencing, this is going to driveinnovation. i think everyone will be driving an electric car in 10 or 20 years . >> is like a flatscreen tv as we called it in 1999 versus now. >> in 1998 you telling me everybody's going to have an computer.

>> you mentioned the last human study and here's another reference by one of our audience members. does the 2019 study include the full cost of power includingthe backup required for wind and solar generation ? >> that's a great question and that's a fundamental mistake that people think about when they say renewable energyneeds backup . as i talked about if you want to know the grid, it's a mistake to think about this as an energy versus energy source. think about it from the grid standpoint and what you want to do on the grid is generate as much power and fuel savers as you can , from wind and solar. if you can't get enough power eayou turn on your backup power. it's not that it's including the cost, that's part of the grid. it's completely the wrong way to think about it and specifically i think that the lazar study is just the amount of energy but your thinking about it wrong if that's the way you think about it. >> can i respond? this is a great difference between us because i think he

was completely wrong and i wanted to reexplain it. you have to look at the full cost of things. if you take something like all of this solar and wind you can think of that like an unreliable worker who is willing to workcheap . i work for $18 an hour instead of $20 now but there are costs associated. i mentioned transmission costs but the most important things are back up cost. maybe professor dressler is being too literal but what that means is system cost to make an unreliable input like solar and wind and turn it into a controllable tereliable output and you absolutely have to look at the full cost and he mentioned there is no correlation. the real thing to look at is what happens to the numbers when you add solar and wind and there's a strong correlation with prices going up . some of the places he's showing are places that have cheap electricity already. this is a huge distortion to act like putting the same

price on something that is unreliable and something that is reliable as one executive put it i like this analogy. it's like putting the same price on a car that runs the board of a time at a car that works all of the time . they're different in the way solar and wind are having increased presentationis we have an unfair grid that pays the same for reliable and ounreliable and subsidizes unreliable on top of that . it's not an amazing economic renaissance, it's this instead of decriminalizing nuclear and getting something done. >> can i respond to that? people have done that study. he says you need to look at the full cost, that's what the net zero american study. that's what they've done. they've done that. this is inot something that we are ignoring and i mean, look at the study. >> first of all any protection. i have a rule any projection about the future that is not knowledge the present is n not

bound. everyone that i've looked at their in total denial. they claim solar and wind have made things cheaper already. that shows you the skill of their accounting. hyit involves all sorts of denial about the future and also to making up things based on faulty assumptions. what i like is what has actually happened . 10 years ago europe was saying all the same things you were and they are in total predicament where there dependent on yrussia because they believed these fantasies instead of looking at reality. these ideas are so great implementthem in one place, do not force us to ban fossil fuels which is what you're advocating in the name of economic , just total fallacy and fantasy . >> let's shiftyears. >> ,on . >> this is true. there's denial going on but it's denial from the energy groups. >> don't shoot the piano player.can any good, of higher average global temperatures down the road?

if they were to come to pass and you know, i think both of you say that that is likely. >> if there's good of higher global temperatures?r >> that there will be higher global temperatures. >> there will be. >> let me ask you first alex, is there any goodaction, that ? >> i indicated this but there's the greeting which is huge and it's important with the warming. of fact about warming that professor dressler knows but has not publicized because it's incriminating to the warming industry is that warming tends to take place in colder places during colder seasons and that at colder times so it's more the world becoming less cold in cold places and d times and more warm on the waiter in the warmest places. again even if you think there significant negatives there are huge positives.

people like work. warmth is crucial to life. heat -related deaths are far fewer than cold related deaths today so i want to point out a point of philosophy. the reason why people don't care about this is a half of philosophy i call the perfect planet premise. that is that the planet we inherited was perfect and some any impact we have is immoral.nd this is a primitive religious dogma and unfortunately i think mostpeople accept it . that's why they are so concerned with all these negatives and they don't seem toappreciate how amazing we made the earth. if you look tat the world from a pro-human auperspective where in a climate renaissance, not a climate crisis . >> the temperature we have now isthe best temperature because we are adapted to it . if you look around the world we have built our entire world around this temperature so people in siberia bird build houses on permafrost cause the permafrost they assume is never going to melt

and when it melts the house splits. people build houses on the sea. i won't make you flip through them but we make trillions of these tiny adaptations so for example bridges. when you build a bridge you assumea temperature range . if the temperature gets out of that range you have to repair the bridge. and so there are going to be extremely expensive for us to ns adapt. now, will there be some positives? i have no doubt. there are some people somewhere that are going to be positive. i point out gabout where warming the high latitudes more than where warming the equator. where warming below latitudes a lot. i live in texas. i don't care what happens in canada. i care what happens in san antonio and austin and in houston and they're doing a lot ofwarming. not just in winter but also

the summer and it's going to be expensive . it's going to be very expensive for us to adapt. >> another one from the daudience and i'm going to skip to the end. it's an interesting question. challenges against conventional thinking. canwe talk about co2 parts per million and how fossil fuel paved the planet. plants were about to die is increased co2 ? is that faulty reasoning? >> i don't think the planet was about to die at 280 parts per million which is preindustrial. >> but the part about our generating more co2. >> i think we've increased 4about 40 percent. >> and are we helping plant life? >> if that wasthe only thing that was happening , certainly we would be helping plants. if you're a greenhouse you can inject carbon dioxide in and people do that but that's .ot what's happening

it's not the only thing that's happening. i mentioned in california you have these farmers revving up their almond trees because they can't get water so as the climate warms co2 is going up, great for that iplant but other things are happening and i would also point out that actually i want to point out . >> can i respond? it's definitely true that co2 has benefits and the historical perspective and interesting. but i want to just actor in the two biggestvariables which are the enormous benefits of fossil fuel and climate mastery . i want to reiterate fossil fuels provide 80percent of the world energy and growing especially the parts of the world that care most about low-cost reliable energy like china. the world is drastically short of energy. this is important . 80 percent of energy is uniquely cost-effective in a world that needs more energy re land energy is crucial to

people being able to use machines to make themselves productive and prosperous. here we have solar and wind nd which is subsidized and lied about but they are three percent of the world energy that are dependent on other reliable sources of energy mostly fossil fuels and we have this claim that we can rapidly ban the world's most desperately fneeded source of energy and replace them with solar and wind. this is why i call it mass murder. this would add billions of lives prematurely so it details what co2 does or doesn't do is trivial. anything in therealm of possibility is masterful and nothing compared to the sentence if we followed professor dressler's policy . >> we 'accept the assumption about the impact of human activity and climate change, how much can the us and europe mitigate it when china soon to be the world's largest economy and kenya which is soon to be the world's roads most populous produce so much of the world carbon emissions and a

follow-up question but let me throw that one out there for each of you starting with you anthony . >> obviously it's a global problem. tthe us can't solve the problem by ourselves. but that's a political issue which i really probably, i'm not someone who is an expert on internationalnegotiations . but the point is we can do this physically. we just need to convince, i'll say that most of the other countries of the world with a few exceptions maybe australia and the us are already convinced. they're looking for us leadership on this problem. the us has an honest leadership capability that we lead the way other people will follow. other countries recognize these problems. >> it's amazing how china and india have no idea what their interests are because there have vastly more fossil fuels. china has more new coal plants in the pipeline so fossil fuels are by far the t most cost-effective energy

going forward. that's why people are using so many of them now and why they're planning to use them in the future. if you care about emissions the only demonstrable way to deal with it is not agreements, we've seen that failed a lot in terms of co2. is coming up with lower-cost sources of low carbon and no carbon energy and the insistence on solar is contrary to that because it reinforces the criminalization and creates great unfairness that favors up and down unreliable's . it favors over nuclear which is why plants are being shut down so we need to recognize mpnuclear has amazing potential, prioritize decriminalizing it, liberate natural gas. this will be ngood for the world in terms of energy and lower emissions long-term. this is a win-win policy. you empower the ioworld and you lower emissions over time in a totally humane inway but as long as we're on this solar

and wind dogma which is this primitive religious idea that we want our energy from the sun and wind as long as we're doing this for going and billions of lives prematurely and if we focus on doing it in america we're going to become even worse than germany is with russia. europe has been the leader on this issue and lookat them now . >> let's delve even further into the morality. is going green a luxury of post industrial economies as excellent told our economy is and is is an unrealistic burden to keep on economies that are still developing? let me ask you first. >> green philosophically is the idea of minimizing or eliminating human impact on nature. i've said before i think this is based on primitive philosophy which is the idea that our impact on the world is somehow immoral and somehow inevitably self-destructive. sort of like you violate the

commandment you're also going to go to hell and the global warming narrative a modern there's no more plausibility hi like three degrees of fahrenheit but people have this religious view where it really went to hell. this is a primitive view and yes, it's not you that's held by nanybody lives in nature so if you live in nature you understand you have to master nature only when you've been so elevated by other people's mastery you take for granted the world you live in and you think that as natural to you support about these green policies and unfortunately what we do is we have a totally nongreen society but then we impose these antigovernment rain policies on the rest of the world in the name of paul sustainable development telling them not to build coal plants or gas and then to somehow use to learn and win and you may use it to power a flashlight or charge a cell phone instead of having a real economy so this modern green movement is fundamentally immoral and in practice is harming the poorest people in the world. >> is there an implicit elitism in the green movement and i believe that's a broadbrush.

>> the people that work on this and i'm kind of amazed by the discussion. the people who work on this and the people who in. search and identify the cheapest energy is wind and solar. mister epstein is makingstuff up when he says it's more expensive . show me a study that shows that. the problem with these debates is we can't really check each other on the fly but show me a study and i'll he read it and you can argue. but the point is is not elitist because it's the cheapest energy. if people cannot in africa or less well places cannot affordrenewable energy they cannotafford fossil fuel. especially when you add in all the costs you have to spend to master the climate. let me emphasize this. mastery of the climate is an incredibly expensive . building c walls is expensive . building infrastructure is expensive . it's going to impoverish us. i don't think it's going to end humansociety but it's

certainly possible and i might even say plausible . i said this initially we're going to be spending all our time, i plan to be but other people might be. spending all their money just trying to stay alive and master the climate is not cheap. the c walls, but all the kinds of investments people have to make. >> he keeps coming up and i feltlike i do with it but apparently i haven't . when we actually see, i'm very big on human productions of the future acknowledging the president the present and we've been increasing the amount of co2for over 70 years. we had two degrees of warming , two degrees of warming. what we've seen is mastery hasn't been cost. it's drastically reduced the rate of climate related disaster that's a mastery of something we do anyway to deal with the dangers of nature and if you helook at the kinds of change are talking about their extremely slow and they are in involved in a civilization that's always rebuilding itself anyway so you have three slow master ov changes.

giving billions in poverty is not a slow master of change. i keep pointing out every real-world examplearound the world where you try to use unreliable solar wind is increasing the cost .>> last election. which i regardless charlatans were mostly not economists, their yenvironmentalist who decided to make up an environmental scenario. most economists know fossil fuels are crucial for the future including thecolonists in china and india are making real decisions . there's this energy denial to justify the inhuman qualifications. it's so great find a place and make it work because in practice it's just killing people and making people insecure like europe right now. >> when they had renewables that is wrong at the data, the problem with these debates is i can't go to these aei websites and show he's wrong but i'll doit after this . >> i do like conflict and i wish somebody could get a feel of me doing this. let me do a signed check here.

let me do a time check with you jennifer. we want to reserve a minute or so for each of our speakers to sum up what they come here to say and what they have to say in the debates. at the same time tremendous amount of questions that show how learned you all are have come in and we've only scratched the surface of them. i'd like to get to a few if there's time . >> there's just a few more minutes. >> i'm not sure how you want to do that. you keep saying 12 minutes, that sounds good some of them overlap. that's why i'm trying to call and pick and choose . some of them have been addressed in various ways but a number of them touch on the cost of renewables. the real-world cost of them and a number of these pointedly addressed to andrew. your variously referred to as

dessler and dressler. just for the record you are dressler. on the fall into that rubric. you said your electric car costyou $10 to fill up and will continue to do so for the future because renewables are the cheapest form of energy .why do you think california and europe have such high electricity prices when they built the most renewable energy infrastructure? >> that's a good question. you have to look at the time of when people built out their infrastructure. if you looked at that, the what lazar shared it showed 10 years ago solar was the most expensive power today solar is the least expensive power so many built a lot of power when it was expensive . authat's going to drive up the cost. we should thank germany because they're spending a lot of money on it to help drive the price down so now it's the cheapest power. that's a texas what texas

energy producers are doing.. they're building solar in the next few years . it's cheap. i know people don't like to hear that. i was on popular podcast recently and you can't imagine how many people emailed me about that but we're going through an energy revolution. you all have to know that. you can't have a reason to make about that if you don't know the revolution we're going through right now. >> i'm going to try to say something not competitive . the okay, so this again, it's all the same energy. it's true as imentioned . solar and wind are not replacements for fossil fuels. they are cost supplements because they again depend on a 100 percent or near one 100 percent osreliable infrastructure so it's true as some of theprices go down a will have less cost but they still do o have cost . everywhere their use. there was one i forget, one other r price.

i guess i'll try to remember it. >> you wanted to ask about the universityof chicago reethics honey. was that in already ? >> neither of us have mentioned that. >> but you're familiar with it and that audience member points out a study that shows renewables are more expensive is the 2019 suniversity of chicago ethics hhoney. are you familiar with this study. this was directed to professor dressler. >> i'm not familiar with that study. >> i think these studies tend to be way tooconservative. we have to keep looking at it . one thing is the ability to like solar and wind because there unreliable replacing the first 10 percent is cheaper than replacing the second 10 percent. so we're doing you have to add more and more of this unreliable infrastructure to get a larger and larger percentage but you need the whole unreliable infrastructure as well. look at a place like texas they spent about seven $70 billion according to robert bryce to get to 21 percent solar and wind so to get to

dressler's 70 percent number your 3 and a half times that. you have to spend all this new money on infrastructure and what a really important point is this price of cost so what happens is you deep on reliable power plants . professor dressler he talking about the free market is doing it . it's subsidies mandate preferences. thegrid pays the same for unreliable electricity as reliable electricity . not one person including the professor would pay the same amount for reliable employee in an unreliable employee so llthis is a total corruption and we're not even talking about the 80 percent of energy is not electricity not talking about the billions of people who lack the idea that solar and wind can justify rapidlybanning fossil fuels with no cost . it's just a murderous farce. sit is texas the nation's second most populous state as a renewable energy standard of mandates like colorado

which i understand and as a longtime colorado and ithink it's aggressive but doesn't have one and is that part of what's driving some of this ? >> the way the texas grid work not all of texas is it's a free market energy system and this i've seen is right that they have an option every day where energy producers come in and say this is how much i will charge and ercot says we need 60 gigawatts and we're going to take the cheapest 60 gigawatts of power and wind and solar because their omarginal cost is zero they have an advantage . i 100 percent agree the texas market because of that the incentive for energy producers to continue building wind and solar essentially forever because that's the cheapest energy source. i understand there's

disagreement here and all i can say is you guys may not believe me now but you'll believe me in a few years . i don't remember that name but he was right. you will ndunderstand i'm right in a few years if not sooner. so in n texas people are building wind and solar, cheapest energy and you're going to end up adding wind and solar. it will eventually create an unstable grid. as i talk about you need to have this actual power is zero incentive for you to build nuclear in texas or to build other types of foreign power and that's aproblem with the market. is not a problem with the energy and that's a big difference .when and solar are not a problem. the problem is the market. we need to redesign the market to give some advantage to power because you have to have that on thegrid . it's the market, you just say for this actual power we will give you extra.' >> it's ercot, the texas legislature.>> so it does require moreregulation . >> needs to come in and solve

that problem. >> but the way to think of it is the problem proper policy is the government is monopolizing something i call ed a long-term system cost. you look at the electricity and you look at what mixture of things will in the long term the mosteffective and when you do that you tend to favor favor baseload things like nuclear, decriminalize coal and rtnatural gas . remember the point i missed, the main distortion involved in solar and wind is he not looking at all costs . it's important that even with the raw materials like solar panels, those do not go down indefinitely because they are real physical materials were seen as long as materials are nd going up and in particular chinese alert panels are dominant because they involve chinese coal. china is not using solar panels to mix a panels, they're using coal. why is that solarpanels are so cheap so they're using

cold and that advantage they have over us .the other thing is there using low environmental standards the other thing is there using labor labor. oh great. somebody wanted me to say that. it's all i got, like cotton is so cheap. yes, but there using slave that's relevant to the situation. china's using slaves to make solar panels that's relevant as well. it's a humanitarian people but 'it's one of the smaller distortions that he has either engaged in or repeated without knowledge but it is an important one overall this picture of energy is a crazy distortion. >> what you said right now addresses at least one of the questions coming from our audience. i like to give the audience for their boat both their knowledge and insights. this one was directed to you and said can you explain the manufacturing environmental impact of wind and solar. it's sort of a variation on the theme but what about that, whether you want to look at that access for what

alex just brought up now. yes, they're making these solar panels chief but they're doing it with coal. at some point in the production chain, setting aside questions of ethics and morality is there some of a car before thehorse ? >> a couple responses. china probably five years ago in inner mongolia drive down the road and there would be a coal-fired power plant under construction and then if you tell me there's a way you can see wind turbines and as i said , i'm not an expert on the chinese grid but my take on that is they recognize they need both. everybody understands that. >> for us laypeople when you say y firm and dispensable use. >> power you can turn on and off. nuclear. be again, it could be hydrogen. hydroelectric. there are lots of firm

dispensable technologies. it could be long-term storage. they understand that so they are building fossil fuels because they need to stabilize the grid and you need to have firm dispensable power. at least they were building nuclear, alas they're not doing that as far as the other part ofyour question , ... >> it was distracted. >>certainly there are supply chain issues . >> what does that do to climate action if you are using traditional fossil fuels to create it? >> i don't see a problem. once the solar panels are there you shut off the thought fossil fuel. that's how you make advantages. use the power you have to get to the power you want. >> let me ask each of you to do a summation, just about a minute and let's keep the order starting with . so andy, you go first.

>> i can do it. >> your memory is better than mine. >> i kind of want to reiterate what i said. the key methodology is to look at the full context and look at the harms of co2, benefits of co2. climate mastery and the impact of fossil fuels benefit. if you look at the reality you recognized the more it works the situation is fossil fuels have unique massive and near-term irreplaceable benefits for billions of people who have the energy and the billions more who need it. the claims that are not necessary are based on while distortions including the idea that solar and wind even though the supply chain is controlled by china. let me point out about 10 specific distortions professor dressler hasengaged in . i don't mean to attack him personally but the net zero based on distortions about denying fossil fuels benefit and denying climate mastery.

when you look at the full context it is obvious the world needs avastly more energy . most elcome from fossil fuels and net zero 1180 fossil fuels rapidly is a death sentence for billions of people and should be morally hacondemned as an evil idea on falsehoods that's what i tried toexplain . >> as i said in the beginning esand i'll say again we need power. no one doubts that the question is was the power source that the best power source to use. people have the analysis have shown that we can significantly eliminate our fossil fuel use . i don't think there's any analysis outs can point to that says that. he says things i think are not correct, a lot of facts are just wrong and i'm happy to engage with anybody in the audience if you email me and i'm happy to look into the call these things of all the evidence of people who are experts suggests we can do this.

when and solar are the cheapest energy of thefuture. look at what people are installing now . tothe idea that if you will energy e the cost of is not correct. this is a problem solving climate change is its use rest. fossil fuels was in the atmosphere sand it's a security issue.pu look at ukraine. look at the e price of gas these are things that don't exist in a world with renewable energy so those are significant disadvantages . >> let me just point out that 56 people sent us questions and obviously we're only able to fax the service. it goes to show how engaged you all work with this debate and how engaging a debate like this is for both of them for in the spirit of steamboat institute coming together civilly and engaging like this for all of our benefit people with starkly differentviews and i'm very impressed by this .

even by this debate so much as the fact that the forum is here to provide just such a thing and. so let's applaud bothof them . [applause] >> thank you gentlemen. takes a lot of courage to get on the stage and there are many people who refuse to do it so kudos to professor dressler . [applause] >> if you're enjoying tv sign-up for our newsletter using the qr code to receive the schedule of upcoming programs, author discussions, festivals and more. de every sunday on c-span2 or anytime online at c-span.org. sell television for serious readers. >>.

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