A challenge

By Gilbert Kuipers

gilbertkuipers@outlook.com

I live in North Dakota District 24 and have been challenging the district Republicans about their understanding of climate science for years. There has been no serious response to my letters to the editor in the Valley City Times Record, Bismarck Tribune, and Fargo Forum. In 2022, I spent about $1,000 on Valley City ads, trying unsuccessfully to get a serious response. It would be nice to have a meaningful discussion to understand what they believe. So, I’m now challenging North Dakota’s Republicans to get their energy expert Alex Epstein to reply to the two questions in this essay. Because he probably doesn’t read this publication, a month should be sufficient time for someone to contact him and try to get some kind of reply.

According to Alex AI, “Alex Epstein, like any thinker or scientist, acknowledges the possibility of being wrong. The pursuit of knowledge and truth often involves revising one's understanding based on new evidence or better arguments…In any case, Alex welcomes open honest debate about these issues. He believes that such debate is essential for advancing our understanding and making wise decisions about energy and climate policy.”

Let’s begin with his keynote speech at Basin Electric’s 2024 Annual Meeting in Bismarck. For the first 40 minutes, you're traveling through another dimension — a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. But this dimension is beyond that which is known to ordinary science. Your tachyon engine takes you to a parallel universe of the Heartland Institute, alternative science and crazy conspiracy beliefs.

He claimed in his “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” “Take the prediction we hear today that we will soon run out of fossil fuels — particularly oil, because they are nonrenewable. This prediction was made over and over by some of the most prestigious thinkers of the 1970s, who assured us that their predictions were backed by the best science. In 1972, the international think tank the Club of Rome released a multimillion-copy-selling book, ‘The Limits to Growth’, which declared that its state-of-the-art computer models had demonstrated that we would run out of oil by 1992 and natural gas by 1993 — and for good measure, gold, mercury, silver, tin, zinc, and lead by 1993 at the latest.”

That’s not what the book said. Instead of debating a strawman fallacy, let’s consider the actual report. The report didn’t predict a hopeless future, but analyzed possible choices. It warned that the earth doesn’t have infinite resources and can’t absorb infinite waste. “The earth’s interlocking resources — the global system of nature in which we all live – probably cannot support present rates of economic and population growth much beyond the year 2100, if that long, even with advanced technology.”

“The earth's crust contains vast amounts of those raw materials which man has learned to mine and to transform into useful things. However vast those amounts may be, they are not infinite.”

A simple projection of the “present rates of growth” that they were observing would result in the Earth’s population reaching over 500 trillion people by 2300. In other words, for each person today, there would be 64 million people by 2300. If per person energy use expanded at that same rate, the global energy and material demand would be 4 quadrillion times what it is today. All their computer models showed an end to that growth. However, the economist Julian Simon disagreed and claimed that this growth could continue for another 7 billion years, or in other words, the earth could support essentially infinite growth.

On page 213 Epstein acknowledged the importance of Simon on his understanding of energy. According to his “Energy Truth 3”, it is a myth that the Earth will be a highly livable place with sufficient resources if we don’t impact it too much.

He claims instead that “Earth is very inhospitable — dynamic, deficient, dangerous — unless we have the productive ability to transform and impact it to be abundant and safe.” So, apparently, Epstein believes that human flourishing means expanding the use of fossil fuels to infinity so that the world population can grow to infinity and give each person infinite wealth. Can Epstein defend his claim that we need that much growth?

Epstein was a keynote speaker at the 2023 Heartland Institute Climate Conference. Alex Newman, another North Dakota Republican science expert, attended that conference and reported in the 24 April 2023 New American, “One of the major themes throughout the conference was the ongoing global-cooling trend observed in the temperature record.”

In April of 2020, the president of the Heartland Institute reported the death of Fred Singer and claimed that “Singer was a leading voice for realism regarding global warming…. For many, Singer will be most remembered for his annual appearances at The Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC) events.”

On July 26, 2018, Singer wrote, “While most people still worry about global warming, I am more concerned about the next Ice Age.” Perhaps Epstein wants to prevent a glacier from covering North Dakota.

In 2021 Newman reported in The Epoch Times that global warming is caused by the sun getting hotter. Newman’s 2020 “Using ’Climate Change’ to Enslave US” used a John Christy chart to prove that the Earth’s climate isn’t changing. Newman couldn’t tell if the X-Axis data represented 18 years, or maybe it was 21 years. He didn’t explain why the Y-Axis data was for the region of the sky near Mount Everest. Epstein doesn’t seem to care that Heartland climate speakers contradict each other. The main thing is that climate scientists are all wrong and it isn’t important to understand why they are wrong.

Newman was a speaker at the 2020 Red Pill Expo, where the two speakers before Newman were David Icke and Kern Rivera. Icke claims that reptilian beings from the Draco (dragon) constellation control the Earth. Rivera claims that drinking bleach will cure Autism. The Expo’s founder claims that cancer can be cured by eating apple seeds. Bill Jasper warned at the November 2024 Expo that global warming is a hoax and described how his organization the John Birch Society has spent decades fighting a political war against preparing for a sustainable future. Although I haven’t found evidence that Epstein attends those Expos, he is part of that loose right-wing information network.

At 44 minutes, his presentation moved on to science, with his favorite chart claiming it shows that climate related deaths have dramatically decreased with rising CO2 emissions. The data is from EM-DAT and shows that climate disaster projections for the 21st century didn’t happen in the 20th century and that people die during wars. The bar chart format hides the individual events, which were due to political situations in China and the Indian subcontinent. Removing those produces a flat distribution or no change which is what we’d expect because the Limits to Growth warnings were about the 21st century, not the early 20th century. Can Epstein explain how that chart was created and what it really means?

On Feb. 23, 2023, Epstein posted on X, “’Listen to the scientists’ on fossil fuel policy sounds compelling because clearly we need info from climate scientists. But these scientists themselves are not qualified to make FF policy because that depends on multiple fields e.g., energy, economics, and adaptation.”

Apparently, he believes that his philosophy degree from an elite university makes him a better thinker than scientists, who are simple technicians incapable of thinking outside their limited specialties. He claims that less than 2% of climate scientists believe that humans are the main cause of global warming and his reference is the economist David Henderson. That percentage is probably correct for his supporters but not accurate when describing real climate scientists.

On November 10, 2022 the Heartland Institute wrote that they “had recently commissioned a survey by Fairleigh Dickinson University to get scientists’ thoughts on climate change. The survey results dispel the notion that 97% of relevant scientists believe humans are causing catastrophic climate change.”

It found that 99% of the scientists believe the Earth is warming and only 73% selected the worst catastrophic answer available. In January of 1989 I attended a scientific conference in which there were 30 scientists reporting on climate change and only Fred Singer on a panel to represent the other side. That’s a 97% consensus more than three decades ago.