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Alex Epstein

Alex Epstein was a writer and a fellow on staff at ARI between 2004 and 2011.

Power Hour Episode 7—Speculation Demystified with Eric Dennis

Tuesday, August 2, 2011 by Alex Epstein

We hear all the time about evil “speculators” driving up the price of oil and other forms of energy. But there is little explanation of what ”speculation” actually is. Yet understanding speculation is not only crucial to understanding these accusations and whether they hold water, but to understand the whole world of energy today. Therefore, the goal of this month’s Power Hour is to demystify speculation and debunk some popular myths about the practice.

To give us clarity on speculation, I brought in an expert on financial markets and speculation, Dr. Eric Dennis. Dr. Dennis was actually trained as a theoretical physicist at CalTech, Princeton, and Santa Barbara—but now works as a high-level executive at a major financial institution, using his mathematical skills to build complex models of financial markets. I have been fortunate enough to know Dr. Dennis for several years now, and he is my go-to person whenever I have a question about speculation or financial markets, since he knows them inside out and can break down the issues in plain English.

Listen to the episode and learn:

  • What exactly is speculation?
  • Is it a problem that speculation is growing in oil markets—or a good thing?
  • Does speculation really drive up prices?
  • Do speculators have undue influence over prices?
  • What is hedging, and how do speculators make it possible?

And much more!

(By the way, if you want an easy way to fit Power Hour into your schedule, download it to your MP3 player and listen to it during your commute.)

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The incredible efficiency of the incandescent lightbulb

Monday, July 25, 2011 by Alex Epstein

In the latest issue of The Energy Advocate, editor and physicist Howard Hayden gives a thorough explanation of how different forms of light bulbs work, and why incandescent light bulbs are the most pleasing to most eyes. Here’s an excerpt:

Filaments in [incandescent] electric lamps are not as hot as the surface of the sun, yet the light they emit is very similar. Each one emits light in the entire wavelength range visible to the human eye . . . .

Incandescent lamps are notoriously inefficient, emitting less than 10% of the input power as visible light. The problem with more efficient sources like fluorescent lamps is that their light is not a continuous spectrum, but rather a handful of individual wavelengths. The effect is to distort colors of objects illuminated by the light.

Note that this “inefficiency” of incandescent light bulbs is the source of their scorn by the environmentalist left and their effective ban by the federal government. Energy Secretary Steven Chu reveals the mentality behind the ban when he says, smugly, of a law preventing individuals from buying the light bulbs they want: “We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.”

What is Chu ignoring when he calls the choice to buy regular bulbs a “waste”?

Well, for one thing, he’s ignoring the fact that while incandescent light bulbs are not efficient in the sense of producing as much light per unit of energy as possible, they are incredibly efficient in the sense of producing the most desirable light for our money (including our energy). There is a rarely consulted passage of a rarely consulted document that champions “the pursuit of happiness.” When I choose to buy an incandescent light bulb, I do so because that gets me the best light for my money—with “best” emphatically including the quality of illumination I will enjoy as I read books, talk to friends, work in the evening, etc. To our government, such considerations are irrelevant; as long as I can fit neatly into government statistics that say I’m emitting less CO2 but I’m still alive and have access to illumination, why should it matter whether I enjoy my life more or less?

The ultimate standard of efficiency (be it energy efficiency, economic efficiency, or any other form) is the individual’s life and happiness. If anyone ever tells you that something you love is “inefficient,” and the cure is to shove something you hate down your throat, then “efficiency” has become a mere rationalization for tyranny.

 

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New article on nuclear safety on FoxNews.com

Monday, July 25, 2011 by Alex Epstein

FoxNews.com has just released a new op-ed of mine on the nuclear safety issue. In the piece, entitled, “Nuclear Power Is Extremely Safe — That’s the Truth About What We Learned From Japan” I write that:

To think rationally about nuclear safety, you must identify the whole context. As the late, great energy thinker Petr Beckmann argued three decades ago in his contrarian classic “The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear,” every means of generating power has dangers and risks, but nuclear power “is far safer than any other form of large-scale energy conversion yet invented.”

To read the whole article, click here.

You can buy “The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear” here.

Finally, to listen to my discussion with Dr. Jay Lehr on nuclear safety on Power Hour, my monthly interview show on energy issues, click here.

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The assault on Alaskan energy production

Tuesday, July 12, 2011 by Alex Epstein

Alaska is the home of Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil field in American history. It is also the home of many other potentially momentous oil discoveries, which have for years been thwarted by the arbitrary, anti-development power environmental groups wield over the state. As Dave Harbour explains on MasterResource today, the situation has reached a critical juncture:

It is indisputable that for the last 2.5 years the Federal government has undertaken a campaign of economic genocide against Alaska.

The Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) is 2/3 empty and declining at a 6% annual rate while billions of barrels of oil lie untapped on federal lands…

The Obama Administration will have killed Alaska’s economy and thwarted America’s economic recovery if TAPS ceases operation for lack of readily available but off-limits federal oil.

As I have described in the Wall Street Journal, environmentalist opposition to Prudhoe Bay and the Alaskan pipeline helped contribute to America’s energy crisis of 1973. Make sure to reader Harbour’s whole post to understand what’s at stake today.

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“Mainstream” environmentalism

Monday, July 11, 2011 by Alex Epstein

One popular view of environmentalism is that while there are some “extremists” or radicals who are truly anti-development, anti-industry, and anti-capitalist, the core of the movement is advocates and intellectuals devoted to making our environment a better place to live.

But if one looks at many of the statements of “mainstream” environmentalists, one finds some truly disturbing ideas. I shared some of these statements recently on my Facebook page.

Here’s one from Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich, an environmentalist icon: “A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.” That quote was actually co-authored by White House science “czar” John Holdren (in the book Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions) and not renounced by either.

Another revealing quote from Ehrlich is

A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.

This quote is from The Population Bomb, the best-selling book that, due to its embrace by the environmentalist left, transformed Ehrlich from an obscure butterfly scientist to a celebrated “ecologist” at Stanford.

Or take this one, from billionaire Ted Turner, a “mainstream” environmentalist if ever there was one. “A total [world] population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”

Why is it that Ehrlich and Turner (as well as many others) are not outcasts but heroes in the environmentalist movement? A good place to start in answering that question is my discussion of environmentalism with Dr. Onkar Ghate on Power Hour. On that episode, Dr. Ghate explains how environmentalism–the philosophy that untouched wilderness takes precedence over human life–is dangerous in any dose, whether it is used to stop vital drilling in Alaska or to pine for a world in which 95% of us don’t exist.

(To subscribe to Power Hour—”the show where today’s top energy experts break down today’s top energy issues”—click here.)

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Power Episode 6: The Truth About “Alternative Energy” with Tom Tanton

Friday, July 1, 2011 by Alex Epstein

On the latest episode of Power Hour–the monthly Internet Radio Show where I interview today’s top energy experts to discuss today’s top energy issues–I talked to energy consultant Tom Tanton, an expert on the technology and the politics of “alternative energy.”

We hear all the time about the exciting promise of “alternative energy”–and the variations of it: “green energy,” “clean energy,” “renewable energy.” “Alternative energy,” roughly speaking, refer to sources of energy that are not successful on the market now but that proponents claim will be superior to market sources of energy, if only the government gets involved.

For instance, Al Gore, in arguing for the abolition of all CO2-emitting electricity, and much of CO2-emitting transportation by 2018, said that he knows of ”renewable sources that can give us the equivalent of $1 per-gallon gasoline.”

On past shows we’ve looked at some of these so-called alternative energies on a technical level, understanding why it’s so hard for, say, solar panels to be affordable and reliable as a major source of energy. On this show we take a different angle. We are going to look at some of the history of how government-led alternative energy works in practice. How does it actually work when the government promotes wind turbines or electric cars?

To talk about this issue, I brought on Tom Tanton, a man who knows as much about the reality of alternative energy as anyone–because he worked for three decades at the California Energy Commission, which has spearheaded numerous alternative energy programs over the decades, including programs for just about every “new” technology we hear about today. I think you’ll learn a lot from this episode.

(By the way, if you want an easy way to fit Power Hour into your schedule, download it to your MP3 player and listen to it during your commute.)

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Four dirty secrets about clean energy

Tuesday, June 7, 2011 by Alex Epstein

FoxNews.com has published my latest article, “Four Dirty Secrets about Clean Energy.” Here’s an excerpt:

“Clean energy” advocates often intimate that private investors and existing energy companies are too short-sighted to see the wondrous potential of their products. But this is far-fetched. Oil companies invest billions of dollars in research and development that will only pay off decades into the future. Can anyone doubt that with increasing worldwide demand for energy, they wouldn’t jump at the chance to add new sources of profitable energy to their portfolios? Or even if they are myopic, what about the enormous capital-allocating machine that is U.S. financial markets? Is Wall Street going to pass up on “one of the greatest new floods of wealth in history” by failing to make profitable investments?

But aren’t subsidies needed to correct some unfair advantage possessed by coal, oil, and natural gas? No. Solar and wind are the ones given an unfair advantage; per unit of energy produced, they already receive 90X more subsidies than oil and gas. And they have been subsidized for decades.

The one legitimate argument that energy investment in new technologies, including carbon-free ones, is too low is that heavy government taxation and environmental regulations drive many investors out of the energy sector. But “clean energy policies” such as cap-and-trade bills call for more taxes and regulations, not fewer.

The real reason why activists demand “clean energy policy” is simple: the “clean energy” sources they favor–especially solar and wind–are at present too expensive and unreliable to replace carbon-based fuels on a large scale. The only way activists can hope to have them adopted is to shove them down our throats.

Read the whole thing here, and be sure to share it on social media.

 

 

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Power Hour Episode 5: Climate Change with Richard Lindzen

Wednesday, June 1, 2011 by Alex Epstein

On the latest episode of Power Hour—the monthly Internet Radio Show where I interview today’s top energy experts to discuss today’s top energy issues–I talk to leading climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen.

Today’s discussion of energy policy is dominated by the claim that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels are warming up the planet, with catastrophic results on the climate. We’re told that this is a matter of consensus among all the top scientists, and that the time for debate is over–it’s time for action.

Power Hour is a show based on the idea that to draw the right conclusions for action, you first need to be informed. And in my opinion the time for debate is certainly not over because the vast, vast majority of us don’t even know what the debate is about, let alone what has been proven and what hasn’t, let alone what the action implications are.

That’s why I decided to do this episode on climate science and climate change. One reason I brought on Dr. Lindzen in particular is that even though he is an extremely prestigious scientist, he doesn’t count on that prestige when he explains issues—in fact, he is very critical of the phenomenon of people taking the pronouncements of climate scientists on faith.

The purpose of this episode is not to definitively establish how much CO2 is impacting the climate. Rather, it’s to get a more objective idea of where the field of climate science actually is in answering that question. Is it really known that man-made CO2 is leading to catastrophic consequences, as many prominent figures claim? Is it really known that man-made CO2 is having only benign consequences, as other prominent figures claim? Listen to the show to hear Dr. Lindzen’s intriguing views on these and many other issues.

For more on this episode of Power Hour, and to be notified of future episodes, sign up for my free monthly newsletter (“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Energy”) here.

(By the way, if you want an easy way to fit Power Hour into your schedule, download it to your MP3 player and listen to it during your commute.)

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Vindicating Standard Oil, 100 years later

Friday, May 13, 2011 by Alex Epstein

May 15 is the 100th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s breakup of Standard Oil, history’s most notorious “monopoly.” In a new piece in The Daily Caller, I challenge the conventional story of Standard Oil—a story often used to disparage capitalism—and explain how Standard Oil earned its incredible success, thanks above all to the genius of John D. Rockefeller.

Here’s an excerpt from the piece.

In 1865, when Rockefeller’s market share was still minuscule, a gallon of kerosene cost 58 cents. In 1870, Standard’s market share was 4%, and a gallon cost 26 cents. By 1880, when Standard’s market share had skyrocketed to 90%, a gallon cost only 9 cents — and a decade later, with Standard’s market share still at 90%, the price was 7 cents. These data point to the real cause of Standard Oil’s success — its ability to charge the lowest prices by producing kerosene with unparalleled efficiency.

John D. Rockefeller had a rare business mind. He was at once a visionary, foreseeing a world in which his kerosene illuminated millions of homes, and an accountant obsessed with day-to-day penny-pinching.

Read the whole thing here. And for an in-depth examination of Standard Oil, monopolies, and antitrust law, read my essay “Vindicating Capitalism: The Real History of the Standard Oil Company.”

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Power Hour Episode 4: Nuclear Power with Jay Lehr

Monday, May 2, 2011 by Alex Epstein

The subject of this month’s Power Hour–my monthly podcast/Internet-radio-show–is nuclear power and nuclear safety. This is the most prominent energy issue in the news these days, following the damage to nuclear power plants in Japan following the country’s once-in-a-century earthquake and tsunami. We have heard ominous media report after ominous media report about releases of radiation, radiation above government-approved levels, radioactivity, radioactive waste, meltdowns, and on and on. The net effect of all this has been to make many Americans very worried about the safety of nuclear plants in this country, and even worried about radiation coming from Japan, thousands of miles away.

What is urgently needed in this situation, I believe, is education—education in what nuclear power really is, how it really works, what its dangers really are and aren’t. So on today’s Power Hour, we’ll give you a step-by-step breakdown of all things nuclear and then break down the situation in Japan. Joining the program to explain all this will be Dr. Jay Lehr, Science Director of the Heartland Institute and a scientist with 50 years of experience in the nuclear industry

For more information on Power Hour, as well as other commentary on energy issues subscribe to my newsletter “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Energy” by sending an email.

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