Texas Electricity Crisis — the big picture | Center for Industrial Progress

In this issue:

Texas Electricity Crisis, continued
The Big Picture in Six Pictures
Two New Power Hours

Texas Electricity Crisis, continued

Let me start off by saying that I am thinking about all of you in Texas and I hope you are coping with the (very preventable) problems your grid is experiencing right now.

As I wrote yesterday, I think we are in the middle of the most teachable energy moment of 2021.

Accordingly, I’ve been attempting to create every necessary message (and image) to properly explain what’s going on.

So far, I’m seeing a lot of success:

My Twitter thread (also available at EnergyTalkingPoints.com) on the Texas Electricity crisis has over 2 million impressions! (Impressions are the number of times it has been seen.) I also have 3000 new followers in the last week.
I was interviewed by The New York Times, who linked to my long Twitter post.
- “…proponents of fossil fuels are using the current crisis to emphasize why they think fossil fuels need to be part of the overall mix of options to power the grid. ‘The anti-carbon movement has really placed no value on reliability,’ said Alex Epstein, author of ‘The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,’ who expressed his views in a long Twitter thread.”
I was interviewed by Glenn Beck.
I was interviewed by Fox News last night.
I was interviewed by Michael Berry (a prominent Houston host) this morning.
I was featured in articles by Fox News and OilPrice.com. (Note my “Back to the Future” reference in the Fox News piece.)
I was just interviewed by Congressman Dan Crenshaw for an hour on his podcast.

If I may pat myself on the back, I’ve been doing all of this while spending many hours a day editing my book manuscript, which is due in two weeks :-).

I certainly could not do this without Steffen Henne, who has been giving me great rapid-fire data and analysis. Thanks to all the Accelerators who support my amazing R&D resources, including Steffen.

The Big Picture in Six Pictures

Take a look at electricity use in New England, New York, the Mid-Atlantic, the Midwest, the Southwest, and Texas during this cold spell.

All tell the same story: unreliable wind and solar electricity (green and yellow) completely fail to keep us warm or powered when needed the most.

Instead, the media are telling the story that “fossil fuels failed” because certain gas and coal plants went offline in one of these regions–Texas–due to preventable problems. (We know that these problems were preventable because places that are much colder and snowier than Texas use gas and coal with great success.)

Two New Power Hours

Of course of all weeks this turned out to be the week that I scheduled two new Power Hours.

I know there’s a ton going on this week, but I’d highly recommend flagging both of them for listening at some point.

The Failure of Unreliable Energy in Texas and Around the World with Steve Milloy

Just as the devastation in Texas was reaching a peak, Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com, another whistleblower on “unreliables,” joined me to talk about what’s happening in Texas and around the world. I also asked him about his efforts to oppose certain ESG policies, and his views on the “fossil fuels cause 1 in 5 deaths” claim.

FYI I addressed that claim in a Twitter thread. Here’s the summary:

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.

You can watch on YouTube or listen on Apple Podcasts.

The Future of Oil with Michael Lynch

This week I also interviewed Michael Lynch, the oil guru who has been more right about oil economics over the past several decades than anyone I know. Mike was the second person I ever interviewed on Power Hour, and when he talked about long-term oil prices being in the $50/barrel range in 2011 I couldn’t believe it (even though I couldn’t argue with his logic).

Now he has a new essay on claims that the post-pandemic world will mean “the end of oil.”

I highly recommend this essay and Mike’s energy economics work in general.

In this interview we covered: false past predictions of a green future, the real economics of EV batteries, what post-pandemic culture will look like, how much oil exists in the world, and much more.

You can watch on YouTube or listen on Apple Podcasts.

That’s it for this week, except below I’m going to share some of my most popular Tweets this week. It’s really amazing how a well-explained idea on Twitter can take off–especially when it is supplemented with good visuals.

To Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Energy,

Alex

https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/1361128716391227394?s=20