Best of the Program | Guests: Justin Haskins & Alex Epstein | 8/31/22

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Here's the podcast.

You're listening to

the best of the Glenbeck program.

This is the Glenbeck Program.

Welcome to it.

We've got a couple things going on today.

I'm going to give you an understanding of the First Amendment

in a way that I don't think you've ever heard.

and it is vital that you understand this.

They just passed in the California Assembly and it's going to Gavin Newsom's desk and they keep saying, if he signs it, of course he's going to sign it.

The state is going to be the arbiter of all truth now.

And when it comes to doctors, that is terrifying.

Something else is going on.

You're being intimidated and harassed.

And they're trying to set examples of why you shouldn't get involved.

Nikki Haley is with us.

She's a former U.S.

Ambassador to the United Nations, former South Carolina governor, and founder for Stand for America.

And there was a problem with the Attorney General's office in New York with Stand for America.

They accidentally leaked some documents.

Nikki is here to tell us all about it.

Hello, Nikki.

How are you?

Hey, Glenn.

Thanks for having me on.

You bet.

You bet.

So tell me what happened.

You know, basically,

we have

a policy organization that we go out, we send out newsletters every day to over 3 million people.

We talk about anything from the fact that it's wrong to make someone who doesn't go to college pay for someone that does go to college.

It's, you know, that we need term limits, that we can't, $30 trillion in debt is a problem, and spending more is not going to help the inflation situation.

Why men shouldn't be playing in girls' sports.

We talk about all kinds of things.

We hit Biden.

We hit Pelosi.

we hit Gavin Newsom, we hit anyone that has liberal policies, and we talk about conservative solutions.

So we've had this for about three years.

It's called Stand for America.

And all of a sudden, we get contacted by a news organization that says, we have a copy of your tax return, which is supposed to be completely confidential, just like personal tax returns are.

And we're going to release all of your donors off of it.

Well, we said, okay, send us the copy that you say you have.

And we look at it, and on the last page, it's stamped by the New York State Attorney General's Office.

The New York State Attorney General released this tax return to try and intimidate conservatives.

And Glenn, they have done this.

I have said this for as long as I can remember.

Republicans are too nice.

They're too nice.

When something like this happens, they whine, they complain, and then they turn around and it happens to someone else.

Well, we are not going to do that.

We are suing the New York State Attorney General's Office.

We are calling on Merrick Garland to investigate the New York State Attorney General's office, and we're going to make sure we fight back.

It's not going to be cheap.

It's not going to be easy.

But if we don't do it, at some point, this has to stop.

And I hope that every conservative listening today will join us in that fight and go to standforamerica.com.

And let's say no more.

Let's show them that when you mess with us, you've messed with the wrong person.

Are you going to sue Politico?

Because Politico was the one that released the names, correct?

Yes, so that is also something that we're looking at.

You know, they've obviously said, oh, these are First Amendment rights, but we are also looking at what it's going to take to sue Politico.

We're going to sue

definitely New York State Attorney General, definitely going after Merrick Garland to have to answer for this.

We are looking at suing Documented, who is the one who got the information from the New York State Attorney General and gave it to Politico, and we're looking at what we're going to do to Politico.

We're looking at every actor that put their hands on this.

I mean, they would never, ever, ever publish the dark money network of Arabella advisors.

Never.

And

there's so much money running through that dark network.

Democracy Alliance, they would never even think about doing this.

They're only doing it.

None of those.

None of them.

None of those have ever been leaked.

Right.

And yet they have gone after President Trump.

They have gone after the NRA.

They've gone after pro-life groups.

Now they're going after us.

Anyone that gets, that is a thorn in their side, they turn around and think they can intimidate us just by doing something like this.

It takes a lot more than that to intimidate us.

So let me ask you, Nikki, do you think the

intimidation will work to some degree?

I haven't met them yet, but are there people who are saying, you know what, I'm not going to get involved.

I don't want my name on a list.

You know, I mean,

we have Stand for America america pack which is a political organization we have hundreds of thousands of donors and we publicize all of those because political organizations by law you do that policy organizations typically donors they care about policy they just don't want to get into the political mess and so this was a way of trying to do that everyone we contacted every donor before this happened to let them know and every one of them said we support you we appreciate what you're doing you go out there and fight and so you know we all i was very proud of, you know, how our donors handled this.

And it's not about the donors themselves.

It's about the fact they don't want us talking about what's right.

They don't want us calling out the truth.

And they don't want us to expose them for what they really are, which is running our country in the ground.

Well, I hope you

make progress in

this lawsuit.

This is so dangerous.

It is.

Honestly, they have weaponized the government in states where they control, and they've weaponized the federal government, and they think that somehow or another, that's going to help them win.

I don't think so.

I think this wakes America up.

Well, and keep in mind, this is a violation of state tax law and a violation of federal tax law.

So if nothing is done to them for this, where will they go next?

I mean, at some point, something has to give.

And every conservative out there who has complained about the Biden administration, complained about these liberal attorney generals who are getting involved in things to hurt conservatives, everyone don't complain about it.

Do something about it.

We need you to go to standforamerica.com.

We need your voices to be loud.

And we need to let them know we are fighting fire with fire.

And I think that's something that Republicans have not done well.

It is time to turn the corner on that.

because if they can do this to us, they can do this to everyone else.

And rule of law matters.

It matters.

And the Democrats have decided they're going to break it anyway if it fits their narrative.

We've got to make them be held accountable for this.

I have, you know, this is one of my complaints with the Republicans that are currently in office, and not all of them, obviously, but the people like Mitch McConnell.

I don't even know what they're running on.

I mean, I think they're just running on, we're not those guys.

I think that's what Mitch McConnell's plan is.

Well, and, you know, I'll tell you, if you're tired, you need to leave.

That's why I'm such a fan of term mummits.

But if you're going to represent the people, you have to be willing to do the things that are uncomfortable to do.

You have to be willing to go into the fight and say, we're going to fight for freedom.

We're going to fight for the rule of law.

We're going to fight to get our country back.

And we're not going to stop until it happens.

And when the Democrats play dirty, guess what?

That's politics.

You play dirty right back with them.

What do you

do it?

You legal, fight dirty legally.

Fight strong.

Yeah, you know, I I mean, look,

I went up against China and Russia at the United Nations.

It wasn't easy.

It wasn't always nice.

But you do it because you know you're fighting for good.

You're fighting for the right thing.

You're fighting for truth.

You're fighting for a better way.

And that's what this is about.

Republicans, their policies lift up everyone, not just a small group of people.

They lift up everyone.

And that's why we fight as hard as we do.

Democrats don't like it because, believe it or not, they fight for elitists.

They fight for lining their own pockets.

They fight in a way that's corrupt just to fit their narrative.

And we're calling them out on the fact that they're not doing that.

Don't tell me that minorities are incapable of getting an ID to go vote.

They're perfectly capable.

Yes, we call them out when they're against voter ID.

Don't tell me that parents are incapable of picking the school that their children should go to.

We call them out when they're against school choice.

Don't tell them they're being fair when they're taking, you know, students who didn't go to, people who didn't go to college and telling them, oh, now you have to pay for those that did go to college.

It's wrong.

It's criminal.

And so, yes, we call them out, but we call them out because that's the truth.

And that's what I've always done is fight for the truth.

And that's why we're going to fight for it again on this, because we will not be intimidated.

We will not be bullied.

And every conservative out there, don't complain about it.

Do something about it.

We all need to be united in this.

Nikki Haley,

former ambassador to the UN and governor, and you were a Tea Party candidate, if I'm not mistaken.

I was, yes.

Do you sense this is a wave election like it was with the Tea Party?

I hope so.

You know, three months ago, I would have told you yes.

Four months ago, I would have told you yes.

It feels shaky now.

I know we're going to win the House.

The Senate is going to be iffy.

I'm going to try as hard as I can.

I'm out there.

We have endorsed 50 candidates.

We're going to be all over the country September and October helping these people get over the finish line.

But it's going to take all of us to do this.

It's really that important.

And what I don't want to see and what we're seeing is Republicans are, you know, you hear the media saying, oh, but this isn't a good candidate or that's not a good candidate.

You know what?

Every one of our Republican candidates is better than the Democrats.

Yes, exactly right.

We have to fight for that.

Exactly right.

So we'll be there for Herschel Walker.

We're going to be there for Dr.

Oz.

We're there for Sarah Palin.

We're going to continue to be there.

for all of these conservatives because honestly, we need their voice.

We do.

We need their fight.

We do.

And I'm going to be there to fight with them.

Nikki, thank you very much.

Nikki Haley.

She is the founder of Stand for America.

You can find more information and join the fight at standforamerica.com.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program, and we really want to thank you for listening.

Now, not everybody is up on their

Lizzo

rap, if you will.

But

I'm, you know,

I'm from the mean streets, just

west of Southlake, which is weird.

West of Southlake, what's that?

But it's their mean streets.

Mean.

Mean, mean streets.

Ugly.

And I have to tell you.

You got to be a hardened criminal

to survive out there.

Wow, you ain't kidding.

And everybody's all up in everybody's physicial, physicial,

all up in that area.

In that entire vicinity.

Worried about the oppression of Lizzo.

You know, she just won a, I don't know, MTV Music Award, which who knew that was still something.

And

she's won that music award and immediately great too.

Oh, checking up that too.

Wow.

Man, I can understand why she's a big celebrity.

She is a big celebrity.

Huge, huge one.

You know, but she's oppressed.

And I just would like to point out to her: you cannot claim oppression if you made money on this.

I mean, she made money.

Okay, 215, the lights come out.

How is she supposed to get home without her phone?

I mean, how is she supposed to get home without her phone?

Well, they found her phone.

They found her phone.

Yeah, she thought it was.

She actually, it was tragic.

They thought it was a tumor there for a while, but it had fallen in.

It was an old flip phone.

She lost it years ago, and it went into one of the folds of fat along with a cheese sandwich.

And it just kind of, it looked like a tumor.

But when they removed it, they were like, ah,

found your phone.

So.

Now, was that before or after she released the song?

I hate to think it was an inauthentic.

No,

she didn't know.

She didn't know at the time.

She didn't know, you know.

you don't get warnings like that you know that oh my gosh you have a tumor weight no it's a phone and a cheese sandwich now i will say this uh glenn you you you seem to be making some reference to her weight being uh excessive in some way it's beautiful and i i first of all we should note that both of us are you know

donous type figures and it's difficult for us to understand people who can't control their eating it's i don't i don't remember i do not remember i was sitting on my couch last night having a bag of chips

and dip and thinking to myself, that very thing.

I don't understand people who can't control their eating.

It's kind of disgusting to me, you know, as a person with such immense self-control,

I find it personally revolting to see people who are even the slightest bit overweight.

Me, too.

I just don't understand it.

I hate it.

But I am told that Lizzo does work out.

She teaches a Peloton class.

She teaches.

Teaches a Peloton class.

Peloton.

Now, if you remember, there was the time.

I did not think that metal was that strong.

I really didn't.

Right.

And this is, first of all, should be a commercial for Peloton.

You say, hey, if they ran the commercials and said, hey, Lizzo teaches a class, it holds her up.

Right.

It's obviously very sturdy.

That would be a good ad campaign.

Where's the seat go?

That's that's let's move on.

Let me go to.

I think we should note that, remember, Peloton got criticized because they put a very attractive woman on a bike and

she got it as a present

and everyone criticized them for that.

And no one criticized them for having Lizzo teach classes.

Could it possibly be that this is part of the reason their stock is down 85%?

Yes, because there you go.

Thank you for making the point.

Oppression.

Oppression.

Let me go to Justin Haskins, who is joining us.

He is the co-author of the great book still available called The Great Reset.

He's also the Heartland Institute editorial director in stoppingsocialism.com, and he has been working with several teams around the country trying to stop ESG.

There is some new research out that is really

quite disturbing about our public pension funds.

And we welcome Justin now.

Hi, Justin.

Hi, Glenn.

How are you?

Good.

Well, I haven't lost a phone and a cheese sandwich in any of my folds lately, so I'm pretty good.

No, you know,

I just got to say, this whole lead-in to this ESG pension discussion featuring Lizzo

is I've never had that happen before.

This is

a radio hall of famer.

Exactly right.

Exactly right.

A lot of the audience goes for chiropractic adjustments from the whiplash that they get on this program.

Anyway, so tell me what's happening with the pension funds because we've been worried about

BlackRock and all of those guys, but the pension funds

are showing something really truly remarkable.

Yeah, that's right.

There is this incredible study put out by...

Morningstar, which is a financial services company that actually supports ESG.

So they're not on our side of this issue at all.

And what they did was they looked at public pension funds.

Those are pension funds that are funded by taxpayers, directly or indirectly.

So if you're listening to the show right now, you have contributed, it's very likely you have contributed to one of these pension funds.

And what they did was they looked to see how these pension funds were voting in ESG shareholder resolutions.

So when companies have an ESG resolution that comes up,

a corporation,

if you own stock in that company, and that includes pension funds, you can vote in favor or against these shareholder resolutions.

And these ESG resolutions are usually favoring very far left-wing causes, okay,

like battling climate change or misinformation on social media platforms, things like that.

And what they did was they looked at pension funds to see how they were voting.

And what they found was that in 90% of the vote,

90% of the time, public pension funds were voting in favor of these ESG-related resolutions.

Okay, now wait a minute.

I just, I want to put this into perspective here.

So this this is your public pension fund.

You have any kind of pension that you're getting from the state or whatever, a teacher, whatever.

These are your public pension funds.

They're voting 90% of the time with ESG.

The ESG-focused funds, so the ones where people are like, I want ESG, I'm intentionally putting my money there, I believe in all this, are only voting with ESG standards and all that crap.

85%.

85%.

So, your regular pension fund is outdoing the ESG

funds on ESG.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

And some of the biggest champions of ESG that get all of the press, and rightly so, like BlackRock and State Street Global Advisors, they're at 74% and 66%, respectively, for those two asset management management companies.

So publicly funded pension funds, but from taxpayers, are far more likely to support ESG than even BlackRock or State Street or, like you said, an ESG fund.

And this isn't a small amount of money either, in just the states that were covered in the study, which are not all the states because of availability of data.

It was 14 million workers covered through these pension funds with 3.4 trillion, trillion with a T assets under management.

So they're using trillions of dollars in assets in order to promote left-wing causes.

And it's not just in Democrat-run states.

It's all over the country that this is happening.

Now, Democratic states are worse.

Their pension funds, 98 times out of 100, they're voting with ESG.

Split state pensions are 85, but it only goes to 80 with Republican states.

Yeah, that's right.

The red states, according to this study, are

eight times out of ten voting in favor of these ESG metrics.

And to give you an example of an actual shareholder resolution that some of these supposedly freedom champions of freedom are voting in favor of in red states, there was an ESG resolution put up for Facebook, now Meta, that was trying to battle misinformation, okay, and make it extremely difficult for misinformation to be allowed on the platform.

Now, of course, everything you and I believe, Glenn, is misinformation according to Facebook.

We already know this, right?

So this resolution comes up for a vote.

And among the many pension funds that voted in favor of this, the vast majority of them voted in favor of it, of the many pension funds that voted in favor of this resolution with Facebook, you had the Florida retirement system,

the employees retirement system of Texas, the teacher retirement system of Texas, the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System, the Nebraska Investment Council, the North Dakota State Investment Board, etc.

So in all of these red states, some of them deep red states like Nebraska and North Dakota, where the Republicans have a 30-something point advantage in some of these places, they are voting in favor of silencing people on Facebook.

Think about how insane that is.

It's insane.

Okay, so what do people do about this?

How do we stop this?

The primary way to stop it is to get state governments to put policies into place, either through executive action or ideally through the state legislature.

Through the legislature, please.

Yeah, we're not going to promote ESG causes in the state using publicly funded dollars.

It's not going to happen.

There are several, there are many states,

two dozen states or so that have been looking at this issue, that are trying to put laws into place

some places have done some of this like in West Virginia I know you've had Riley Moore on a bunch of times they've done a lot of good stuff there in Utah Marlowe Oaks Texas has actually passed a law on this a limited law

and Florida recently Governor DeSantis came out and said no more of this in the state of Florida we're done doing this in the state of Florida he's good he is so good

oh he's very good on this issue and he's taking the lead on it nationally and that's exactly what we need.

We need someone like Ron DeSantis taking the lead.

So that's what needs to happen, but it's only happening in a handful of states right now.

And even in some of those states, they're only focused on the E in ESG.

They're only focused on stuff related to energy and oil and natural gas and climate change and all of that stuff.

And that's important.

But what about silencing people on Facebook?

Where's the law preventing that?

States are not doing enough on that issue.

And the S and the G is what's going to get the average person.

I mean, the E is going to cause all kinds of energy problems.

And I mean, it is why.

Have you seen what's happening in

England with their energy costs?

You know,

they didn't take that Trump pause with the Paris Accords.

So they're ahead of us.

But

what's happening over in England is outrageous, outrageous.

And that is going to affect all of us.

Look, this will impoverish all of us.

If your goal, your stated goal is you will own nothing by 2030, how are you going to get the Western world that was built on ownership?

How are you going to make that happen in seven years?

You have to make it so you can't own anything.

You'll be impoverished.

They'll take it from you.

You'll have to sell stuff.

They'll They'll sick the IRS

onto you.

You won't have anything left.

And that's by design.

It's got to stop.

It's got to stop.

Yeah, without a doubt.

And the genius of, in a very sort of evil, maniacal way, the genius of the great reset, which is what you're describing, is that in America and in places where we have constitutional protections in place to prevent the government from doing these kinds of things to us, you now have government working hand in hand with private corporations and businesses who are not beholden to those same rules and constitutional guidelines, who are now doing the dirty work on behalf of the government in order to limit people's rights.

And this is, stories are coming out about this literally every single day.

In fact, just yesterday on theblaze.com, I saw a story, just browsing the website, I saw a story.

that was titled New York Lawmakers Ask MasterCard and American Express to flag gun store purchases.

That is the great reset.

That's what it is.

They want MasterCard and they want American Express and other credit card companies and other servicers to do the dirty work for the government because the government can't get these laws passed.

It's terrifying.

Thank you so much.

Justin, we are making huge inroads on this, though, don't you think?

Without a doubt.

We've seen more progress on this issue in the past six, probably eight to 10 ten months, than we've seen in the previous 20 years.

Yeah, it's remarkable.

It's a huge inroad.

It's remarkable.

And much the thanks to

you and the research that you did for the book, The Great Reset.

Great Reset is available everywhere.

It's my latest.

Justin is my co-author.

And it is a remarkable look at what is all true.

By the way, we are not even allowed to say the words, The Great Reset, on YouTube.

Can't say those words.

Mr.

Brilliant Radio Hall of Fame here named his book after it.

Now he can't even say that the title of his own book.

So here's what I would suggest: you get the book while you still can get the book.

The Great Reset available everywhere.

And there you have it.

Another example of why Glenn Beck is in the Radio Hall of Fame.

He's not in the author's Hall of Fame, let's be clear.

The best of the Glenn Beck program.

program.

Let's go to Alex Epstein, who is with us now.

He is the author of Fossil Future.

Hello, Alex.

How are you?

Hey, Glenn, great to be back.

I have to tell you, I've been waiting for weeks for this interview

because you are the guy.

You not only, in your new book, you not only give us the way out what we should be doing, but you're actually describing what's coming.

It's insanity to

cut our legs off before we have another chair.

You know what I mean?

We are turning off all of our energy supply, and it can't be done this way.

I mean, one thing I talk about throughout Fossil Future is this phenomenon of fossil fuel benefit denial.

We hear a lot about climate change denial, but the real denial is the huge benefits of fossil fuels, which provide 80% of the world's energy in a world that needs far more energy.

And yet we're talking about rapidly eliminating fossil fuels without any evidence of a viable replacement.

And that has been the insane strategy that you're talking about.

Yeah,

go through some of the benefits of fossil fuels.

Because everybody's like, oh, fossil fuels, okay, I get it.

Petroleum, so you got your cars.

Yeah, I mean, the real benefit of fossil fuels, as I talk about in Chapter 4, is a livable world.

I mean, people talk about, oh, I'm worried that fossil fuels would make the world unlivable.

But you have to recognize first that fossil fuels are the only reason why the world is livable as you know it.

So the world naturally is a very deficient and dangerous place.

It's very low on resources and it's very high on threats.

We in what I call the empowered world experience the world as an abundant and safe place, but that is a very unnatural phenomenon.

Specifically, it's a phenomenon of being able to use machines to radically expand and amplify our productive abilities.

So expand means we can produce things using machines powered by low-cost, reliable energy that we simply can't do with our physical bodies, like provide an incubator that can save a baby's life.

And then we also amplify our abilities.

We can do things like run a combine harvester that can reap and thresh a thousand times more wheat than a really good manual laborer can.

So we only exist in this abundant and safe world by the grace of all of these machines doing work for us.

And that only works to the extent energy is cost effective, which means low cost, reliable, versatile, meaning being able to power any type of machine, and scalable.

So providing energy for billions of people in thousands of places.

And what we're seeing with this energy crisis is when you make energy less cost effective, everything becomes less cost-effective.

And you see Europe afraid of winter, which is an embarrassment, and you see real threats of starvation around the world.

Now, people will hear in America will say, well, it's not going to happen here.

That's just because Europe screwed up somehow, and I don't want to think past that.

They actually just didn't take the pause on the Paris Climate Accords, right?

So they're just a little ahead of us.

Yeah, well, nobody is following the Paris Climate Accords.

In a certain sense, we are following it more than they are, but nobody is really following it in terms of rapidly eliminating CO2 emissions.

But this is what's scary, is that the net zero agenda has maybe had one to two percent success in terms of slowing the growth of fossil fuels, because fossil fuels are still growing around the world, mostly in

underdeveloped places that are less restrictive.

But in general, fossil fuels are still growing, but they're shrinking in what I call the empowered world, the freer parts of the world.

And even that is causing an energy crisis because energy is so important and it's so desperately needed.

So people don't really understand what it means not to have energy.

Over in, I think it was Scotland.

Amazon and Microsoft shut down some server farms because they just couldn't get enough electricity.

We are a country and a civilization that is reliant on our technology, not just our engines, but also our technology.

And if you don't have the power, you can't keep it at today's standards.

But I don't know if anybody's noticed this.

What's happening in the technological world is only getting bigger

and more invasive in our lives, not smaller.

We need more electricity in the future, not less.

For sure.

So this is something I talk about in chapter five of Fossil Future, which includes talking about, you know, it's an expanding pie in terms of the need for energy.

The biggest reason is just most people are very energy poor in the world.

We have 6 billion out of 8 billion people who use an amount of energy that you and I would consider unacceptable.

We have 3 billion people using less electricity per person than a typical American refrigerator.

We have a third of the world using wood and animal dung as their primary fuel for heating and cooking.

So we have that.

But then as you're pointing out, the parts of the world even that are empowered, we're finding new ways to use energy.

And particularly in the realm of information technology, we have rapid growth.

And

what you're finding with some of these tech companies, it's really tragic or in a certain sense shameful, is they are huge consumers of electricity who are rightly using more electricity, and yet they're huge boosters of the idea that we can get off fossil fuels rapidly.

And one way they do this that's particularly insidious that I talk about in chapter six on alternatives is they claim to be 100% renewable.

And the literal way they do this is they pay grids to give them credit for everyone else's solar and wind and to give everyone else the blame for their coal, gas, and nuclear.

So, this is really shameful, and it's promoting all the wrong ideas, even though the world needs more energy and their exhibit A of why.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Can you talk a little bit about, I mean, the problem with our information system that we have now, where people believe global warming is a catastrophe, and yet we have more information now or access to more information than ever before.

Yeah, I have a term I coined called knowledge system to really capture the set of institutions.

We often call it the media, but that's too much of a simplification.

The set of institutions that are designed to give us expert knowledge and guidance.

And I think one key thing is that you have these different phases by which knowledge is acquired and transmitted.

And so there's the research phase.

But we don't just get things from the research.

The research needs to be synthesized by institutions and then disseminated.

And then ultimately, we evaluate what do we do about it.

And with something like climate, what you see is the actual research has quite a few biases,

but that research, even as it exists today, in no way justifies this idea of climate catastrophe and certainly in no way justifies the idea of rapidly eliminating fossil fuels and replacing them specifically with unreliable solar and wind.

And yet we get this narrative that, oh, the scientists say we need to get off fossil fuels and replace them with 100% renewable.

That doesn't follow at all.

And so, what's happening is we are getting a distortion from what I call the knowledge system.

The institutions we're trusting to get expert knowledge, they're distorting the actual state of the research to the point where we're being told that fossil fuels have no benefits, and yet reality is proving they have huge benefits, and losing those benefits is catastrophic.

Alex,

put this on,

I mean, you've been warning about this for a long time.

Put this on what's coming in some sort of scale that people can understand.

What is life like in 2030 if we continue down this path?

What's it like in 2024, 26 if we continue down this path?

I think there are two versions of this that we need to contemplate.

One is less realistic and one is more realistic.

So the less realistic one is the one where we all pursue anything resembling net zero, where we all seek to reduce our emissions without a viable replacement.

And certainly there's nothing resembling a viable replacement by 2030, particularly because you're basically not allowed to build nuclear now.

So

if everyone did that, it would be like much, much, much more extreme than what Europe is experiencing right now.

And you're just seeing it, you know, their power bills are going up by a factor of four.

All these shops are shutting down.

You just see the whole economy crash because it's interdependent and energy is the industry that powers every other industry.

So the price of energy determines the price of everything.

So you just see prices skyrocketing and things crashing.

So there's that happening on a global scale everywhere.

But the reason I say it's unrealistic is, let me ask you, do you think China's going to participate in this, Glenn?

No.

Do you think China's going to rapidly lift?

No, they're going to.

Is Russia going to?

No.

They're going to love this.

They'll be providing oil for any country that is not adopting this insanity.

And so this is one of the things I warn about in chapter 11 of the book,

which I call unilateral disempowerment, which Europe is exhibiting right now, which means the freer countries decide, hey, we're going to restrict our emissions,

we're going to lower our fossil fuel use.

But what happens then is you empower often the less free places like China and Russia.

And China in particular loves using huge amounts of coal to produce huge amounts of unreliable solar and wind that then ruin our economy and our way of life.

Like that's great for their ambition of becoming a global superpower by 2049.

So that's what I think is the most realistic is that we kind of sacrifice unilaterally and we make ourselves much less secure, much more dependent on powers that do not wish us well and that are not pro-freedom.

Tell me what we lose besides freedom.

Tell me what the average person's life, how is this going to impact?

How is this going to change their life?

Well, I would just ask, have you ever been really poor?

Yes, he has, Alex.

He has.

I've seen it.

I've seen it in action.

I have.

No, I'm just saying, like,

you know, most of us even who have had success have had periods where we didn't have much money.

I've certainly had that in my life.

And like, it will be much, much worse than that.

I mean, this is the thing because, you know, you have the element of just becoming much poorer, which people experience even with modest rises in gasoline prices.

You cannot afford as much.

But part of, it's not just, so it's this combination of you become poorer, but also you are in a society that is disintegrating.

And so what you're like, look at Sri Lanka and other places where you have these riots.

What happens is the decline is not this just smooth thing where, okay, I made $100,000 and now I make $60,000.

It is chaos.

I mean, you just look around the world.

Every time you have these fuel price crises,

it is chaos.

And it's not like America is in a particularly stable state right now, now, politically.

I had noticed that we don't this is not what we need.

Now, the nice thing is we have all the physical resources in the world to produce enough energy for a lot of people to have a good life.

Like, this is totally a political I mean, it's cultural beneath that, but it's a political phenomenon.

So we can produce a lot more fossil fuel, we can produce nuclear energy, we can pursue what I call energy freedom.

And that's a lot of my work right now, besides making clear this idea of a fossil future, is promoting energy freedom policies so that we can get there and also get to new alternatives.

So I only have about a minute left.

And I want to ask you about your energy freedom because you're saying, let us build nuclear power.

Let us, you know, real promising alternatives.

Let's

release the hounds here.

Let us do our work.

Chances of that, I mean, I'm starting to see people love nuclear energy more than I've ever seen it since I was a kid.

I know.

That's an exciting development.

So reality, you know, this crisis, they're helping us open people's minds.

If people want to check this out, go to alexepstein.substack.com and you'll see near the top the energy freedom platform.

I should say, you know, I used to have no influence at all on DC, and now I work with something like 300 staffers on policy in different ways.

So I'm optimistic that there's a real appetite for a new energy policy that gives us all the energy we need in the present and promotes the positive evolution of energy going forward.

Alex, thank you so much.

Thanks for all of your hard work.

Founder and president of the Center for Industrial Progress and the author of a great new book.

It's called Fossil Fuel, sorry, Fossil Future: the real story on energy that no one else will tell you about.

And it is important that you hear it so you know what's going on.

Alex Epstein.