The US is headed toward energy suicide, in large part because smart people are completely misrepresenting the capabilities of solar and wind energy. To counter this, I held a contest to answer some recent distortions by @elonmusk. Here are the winners. 🧵

Winners, DM me to collect your prize--a signed copy of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels now or a signed copy of Fossil Future when it comes out.
I'll share my full response to Musk's claim next week. Here's the high level. For all-solar to work you need many days of storage. 3 days of world energy use stored at hypothetical $100/kWH is $133 trillion. Realistic real-world cost is 5X that, so $665 trillion. For batteries.
So yes, @elonmusk, "all we need to power the whole Earth" is "some batteries" that cost between 1.5X and 6.5X global GDP.

Please stop deceiving people this way. You're using your deserved reputation as a brilliant person and innovator to make the world stupid about energy.

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More from @AlexEpstein

29 Apr
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.

🧵
Imagine that as a large landowner you hire a property manager whose policies lead to: a failure to do proper maintenance, huge opportunities squandered, and catastrophic fires.

You'd fire that person and immediately change policies. That needs to happen with our federal lands.
For decades America's federal lands, which were supposed to be managed to allow commercial development of resources, recreation, and enjoyment of nature, have been mismanaged by *anti-development policies*--policies based on the idea that all human impact on nature is bad.
Read 9 tweets
29 Apr
If we didn't live in a society so saturated by anti-humanism--specifically the dogma that human impact on the planet is immoral and inevitably self-destructive--we would be open to the possibility that rising CO2 levels, by bringing about more warmth and greening, are desirable.
In a pro-human society, without the pseudoscientific, primitive religious Earth worship that dominates ours, we'd see more headlines like this: "Earth is not the best place to live, scientists say."

independent.co.uk/life-style/gad…
"Being slightly warmer would also make a planet more habitable, with an ideal of about 5 degrees Celsius hotter than Earth thought to be the biggest improvement."

So why are we outlawing most of our energy supply to stop us from getting 2 degrees warmer?

independent.co.uk/life-style/gad…
Read 6 tweets
29 Apr
All pro-freedom US Representatives should join Rep @chiproytx in his effort to bring to a vote Rep @laurenboebert's bill that would reverse President Biden's unconstitutional and immoral moratoria on oil and gas development.

clerk.house.gov/DischargePetit…

THREAD
It is rare and commendable when elected officials propose a truly pro-freedom policy. I rarely see any legislation that I can support. @laurenboebert's HR 859 is an exception, because it directly stops @JoeBiden's unconstitutional and immoral moratoria on oil and gas development.
Here's an overview of why Biden's moratoria--aka bans--were so bad.

Read 8 tweets
29 Apr
What @benshapiro is saying in general is particularly true in energy. Bumbling, "boring" @JoeBiden is unconstitutionally pledging the US to an interpretation of the Paris Climate Accords that gives the Federal government fascist control over all energy.
As if energy fascism isn't an immoral and economically destructive enough framework for energy policy, Biden's particular variant of it involves dictating that we use almost exclusively unreliable solar and wind--which, let us not forget, proved perfectly useless in TX recently.
Read 6 tweets
23 Apr
Biden's "50% by 2030" pledge would require outlawing most of our reliable fossil fuel electricity and mandating mostly unreliable wind and solar electricity. This would destroy American industry, impoverish American consumers, and jeopardize American security.

THREAD
Energy schemes around the world based on “unreliables”—wind and solar—have been driving up electricity costs, harming economies, destroying domestic industries, and harming consumers. Germans pay 3X US electricity prices to get about 1/3 of their electricity from solar and wind.
Instead of learning from the failures of unreliable energy schemes, Joe Biden's pledge to eliminate 50% of our CO2 emissions by 2030, while doing nothing to decriminalize reliable nuclear power, means mandating unreliable solar and wind for almost all our electricity.
Read 19 tweets
17 Apr
"Sorry, We Can’t Sit in the Dark While You Fly Around in a Private Jet"

Indian energy analyst @VijayJayaraj_CC has written an excellent open letter to @JohnKerry. Here are some excerpts.

Let's encourage Mr. Kerry to respond.
"back in 2004, when I was supporting you to win....350 million people in India were without electricity. The U.S population in 2004 was around 292 million. So, literally, you had more people in India without electricity than the entire population of the U.S."
"India muscled its way through in its fight against energy poverty. Coal, oil, and gas together alleviated energy poverty. By 2017, India began producing surplus electricity, and by 2019 it electrified all of its villages."
Read 13 tweets

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