Washington, D.C. – Congressman Michael C. Burgess, M.D. (R-TX) hosted Alex Epstein, Author of Fossil Future and The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, for an eye-opening conversation about America’s Energy Future.
America's Energy Future
Doctor in the House
Listen to full episode here.
Highlights:
Burgess: “This year, Americans and others across the globe have felt the sting of the anti-fossil fuel agenda. In the name of sustainability, the Biden administration, on its very first day, has attacked energy producers and crippled or attempted to cripple the energy industry. And it was not lost on me that what provided the fuel for democracy over the last century and a half. What allowed us to win the war against fascism until totalitarianism in World War Two, what took us to the moon, and most recently, which provided us with geopolitical independence from some of the worst dictators in the world.”
Epstein: " I think one point that resonates with people, particularly now, is that we've been ignoring and denying the benefits of fossil fuels. And that leads to very bad things. And the same way as if you ignored the benefits of the polio vaccine, and you just looked at the negative side effects, you would make very, very bad decisions. And fossil fuels are really the poverty vaccine. That's really what they do. Because what they do is they give us low-cost, reliable energy on a scale of billions of people that allows people to go from manual labor lives you mentioned cold, brutish, and short. That's what life is like in nature, to what I call machine labor lives where machines produce huge amounts of value for us.”
Burgess: “We are facing a very hard winter, if not in this country, in Europe. The war in Ukraine has created some additional stress points that are going to have to be managed. So, although I see that as, as an upcoming threat, it's also what the people in academic world would call it teachable moment. It is a point to remind people that the abundance of affordable and available energy, the economical abundance of affordable energy is, is just so critical to our lives and our way of life.”
