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Kathy Lundy's avatar

Such a good and positive interview. We need Alex to speak up constantly, there are too many people with too much power in La La Land. They are smothering our way of life and our futures 😃 Thank you for all your good work and may God bless you!!

Kathy

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Joel Bowman's avatar

A pro-human perspective. Fancy that! 😀

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MarcusTC's avatar

Thanks Joel! Safe travels to your next destination. Have heard interviews with Epstein before and he is a great spokesman for a rational view on energy. He highlights the absurd idea that we don’t need highly dense and transportable energy for human life, especially in harsher climates. What arrogance for western developed countries to now demand emerging countries forgo the benefits of cheap energy. If you haven’t heard Epstein before, probably due to censoring, he is worth the time. Have a great Sunday all.

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Luisa B Fijman's avatar

I could not agree more .We have to help him disseminate his ideas .Any suggestions????Luisa

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John Greensmith's avatar

Brilliant - but who is listening? We need this sort of information to go viral. Perhaps Musk's 'New Twitter' could help - he seems to be keen on overcoming the 'anti-free speech' brigade.

Another worthwhile book on the topic is Steven Koonin's 'Unsettled' - perhaps Steven would be prepared to chat to you, Joe. Should help to reinforce Alex's message.

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Garfield Logan's avatar

Just voiced the same sentiment

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Mackinac's avatar

I've read Steve Koonin's book "Unsettled", just plain excellent book and matches my thinking exactly and I spent my career as a mechanical / chemical engineer / statistician at fortune 500 companies, IBM and Dow Corning, where I worked essentially improving processes to improve energy efficiency and cost efficiency and quality of the products.

In Steve's book his essential view is that the UN, which controls the climate change narrative, uses studies by academia in statistically incorrect ways, ALWAYS slanted toward supporting climate change narrative and anti fossil fuels to drive their narrative. They basically do things like take a smaller sample of data than representative of an issue but which the smaller data set supports climate change like maybe temperature was increasing during the period considered. Dr Koonin shows how the UN uses example after example to support climate change but their choices are not statistically sound. Any serious engineer studying a problem would not make progress on that problem using their inept methods and data selection. They obviously, to a reasonable and expert statistician, would not make the mistakes the bureaucrats controlling the UN narrative make.

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norminhk's avatar

I also extend my thanks to Joel for his interview with Alex Epstein. Alex's book sits proudly in the centre of my bookcase - so thanks for your contribution also, Alex.

Al the best to both of you. There are more sane people on the world who need to speak up to overcome those who are blindly advocating the impossible.

As a Civil Engineer, I am amazed by the number of Engineers who remain silent about this false god (at best) and those who promote solar, EVs etc, (at worst - as professionals, with support from the National Engineering Institutions) without taking note of the actual cost to the community.

Best regards, Norm

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Mackinac's avatar

Well said Norm. As an engineer and mathematician I agree completely. Just go ahead and spend trillions to create a form of energy that is lesser cost effective that fossll fuels, drive the west into debt that is not economically sustainable. That's obvious because we are defaulting on our debt now with inflation. That's what inflation is.

A reasoned discussion without cancellation of different views. We should call in the expertise of different fields which actually have expertise in energy and engineering that energy rather than buying support through grants to academia. It would also be much more believable by society in general if the anti fossil fuel contingent wasn't cancelling every opinion that went against their narratives and rather actually defended their positions in an open environment.

It seems to me that every argument against fossil fuels and for alternative energy has been bought in some way whether through grants or through debt to simply build alternative energy projects without consideration of the economics or approval of society in general. And now the price and debt is greater than the world has ever seen before.

I was reading a couple months ago how Duke Energy and Dominion Energy both had huge losses on their alternative energy projects driving both companies to lose money in a recent quarter. They still had conventional fossil fuel energy and obviously large capability but the alternative energy lost so much their fossil fuel portions couldn't make money. The same type of example is exhibited by Germany who has polluted more since they have reduced nuclear energy and now have been forced back into coal to supply energy to their manufacturing sector and supply heat for winter. My point is lets get real about where the true status is of this incredibly wasteful move into alternative energy chosen by politicians. If it truly is not cost effective and isn't working lets abandon the profligate spending immediately. Let's put together a team which really understands energy and work together and forward.

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Tom Sanders's avatar

Well said Norm!

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JayCee's avatar

Encouraging to see pragmatic common sense green shoots, emerging from noisy solar farmers fields of sun drenched idiocy.

That so many, have in so few years, been brainwashed to use extrapolations of selected data is frightening in the new age of AI, representing ‘truths’, created in micro seconds, from volumes of selected fiction.

The power of one or two human brains to fight this monetised destruction of human life takes us back the era of the Sun revolving around the Earth.

Fortunately that man derived wisdom found it’s way into the realms of ridicule and derision.

In future years, the thought that men and women in 2023 in white coats, at lecture pontificating as if learned but with catastrophic agendas, had the forums to change nature, command the world to avoid extinction by carbon dioxide, was nothing but grandstanding hypocrisy, that just almost destroyed their civilization.

All hail to the minorities fighting for common sense, in this age where critical thinking is almost deemed an oxymoron.

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Mark1's avatar

“… and how quickly it can be lost if we neglect reality and we neglect rational thinking.” Best line in the interview.

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JJ's avatar

And the TRUTH shall set you free, but beware of misinformation, , often known as the "official word ( story).

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Frank Moreno's avatar

Alex has a great thesis! However, I think Dr. Shaw's thesis about peak people is THE most significant existential threat to humanity. If we cannot keep up the population with 2.1 births per woman, the Human Race is doomed, regardless of our adoption or shunning of fossil fuels.

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Joel Bowman's avatar

Thanks, Mr. Moreno. I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago. An article called “Peak People.” Should be in the archives section here on the site. Cheers!

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MarcusTC's avatar

Now we battle on two fronts! We need more sex and more energy!

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MarcusTC's avatar

Thinking about this more deeply those two may be positively or negatively correlated e.g wealthier nations have lower birth rates.

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Steve L's avatar

Study the “mouse utopia” experiment to see where man is heading 🤔

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Rudy Conrad's avatar

What school you went, Joel?

For Christ's sake!

Sesquipedalian...

Thanks be to Wiktionary!

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George Miller's avatar

Interesting perspective. I didn't understand that the leadership of the anti-fossil fuel movement was entrenched in opposition to any of the efforts to extract energy from the earth. Thus they would embrace any mirage for energy replacement (wind/solar). They don't need successful models for replacement, they only need a concept that they can sell to the hoi-polloi, because they hate the digging and transmission lines.

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Skip's avatar

Not sure I buy into your theory. In any case, we dig a lot stuff out of the earth in order to create the solar and wind energy. So the anti-fossil fuel folks aren't actually accomplishing what you say they desire. I think the real issue here is adding CO2 to the environment and thus contributing to a rise in average temperatures. I also think the answer is NUCLEAR with maybe solar and wind contributing. And of course, we have to hope that naturally occurring cycles in the earth's environment don't continue to drive the temp up after we get to net zero.

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Pat price's avatar

Great. Thanks

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Richard Vedder's avatar

The best read I've had from you.

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Joseph L Gilio's avatar

Gentlemen, All this politico-eco talk, appropriations and actions to reach net Zero of Carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere is based on a scientifically unsteady climate model, namely, that man produced carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels is the only or prime driver of measured atmospheric temperature increases since 1850. Notwithstanding that man's emissions have increased, these increases do not closely correlate to temperature increases as a cause and effect would. Dr. Steven Kooning,former Obama undersecretary for Science USDOE, Ph.D. physics, Stanford prof., NAS wrote UNSETTLED ? What climate tells us ,what it doesn't and why it matters.

His thesis is that thorough examination of the UN's IPCC data is not scientifically accurate enough to point the finger of global warming only or mostly due to man's emissions; hence UNSETTLED. There are 40,000 miles of undersea volcano ranges spewing out water at ~ 240 degrees F, heat emissions from the earth's interior, perturbations of the earth's path and inclination towards the sun, unknown changing solar output, natural methane emissions from the frozen methane "ice" below 15,000 ft, deep. All these must be known and found lacking as causes of global temperature increase. Bottom line-Net Zero may be a premature no- achievement if man is REALLY NOT the major cause of atmospheric temperature increase, then we are on a wild goose chase of dubious results. Joe Gilio

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Steve L's avatar

Another words, they are all full of 💩🤔

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John Greensmith's avatar

...sorry - Joel!

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rKf's avatar

Good discussion. Thanks.

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Tom Sanders's avatar

The simple answer is: with 1500 active volcanos on the planet spewing out 96% of the CO2 ..... Man is only responsible for about 4%.

Man cannot alter this equation ... it is just simple math stupid!!!

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