we want we have this compelling debate on should america rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use to prevent climate catastrophe and we want to give them the full hour we did this debate at the university of miami in florida and at cu boulder last week and that in that case those two debates. it was alex epstein debating general wesley clarke and you can find both of those debates on steamboat institutes youtube channel today. we have alex epson, but we have a different debate opponent and let me briefly introduce. i will read their bios, and then i believe they are going to come up to the stage after i introduce them. we're very pleased to have with us this morning professor andrew desler. he's a professor of atmospheric science at texas a&m university. professor destler is a climate scientist who studies both the science and politics of climate change. he is the rita a heinz chair in geosciences at texas a&m in 2022. he was named director of texas a&m's, texas center for climate studies. professor destler also served in the clinton administration during the the last year he served as a senior policy analyst in the white house office of science and technology policy his latest book introduction to modern climate change won the 2014 american meteorological societies louis j. batten authors award. we are also pleased to have alex epstein he is the president and founder of the center for industrial progress author of the moral case for fossil fuels. alex is a philosopher who argues that human flourishing should be the guiding principle of industrial and environmental progress. he is the author of the new york times bestseller the moral case for fossil fuels and alex is known for his willingness to debate anyone anytime. is publicly debated leading environmentalist organizations such as greenpeace the sierra club and 350.org over the morality of fossil fuel use and finally our moderator for this morning's debate is dan nigamir. he's the editorial page editor of the denver gazette. dan is a longtime journalist and more than 25-year veteran of the colorado political scene. he has been an award-winning newspaper reporter and editorial page editor a senior legislative staffer at the state capitol and a political consultant. let's welcome professor destler and alex epstein and danier. you just make me baby here just 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 h