I do think ultimately most normal thinking environmentalists would eventually come to the conclusion that it will be impossible to do carbonized without destroying people's standard of living in the absence of a nuclear renaissance and the quicker we all come to that conclusion the better.

If we truly care about carbon emissions, then this is a path that we must follow.

I'm Chris Hill, and that's Dumburg, a writer on the number one financial publication on Substack. Dumburg is anonymous. If you look for a photo on Twitter or Substack, you're just going to find a cartoon chicken, but you're also going to find a deep understanding of energy policy.

You may recall that Mountleful Senior Analyst Nick Cypill interviewed Dumburg last fall about Europe's energy crisis. Today they talk about some key things that have changed since then, as well as the future of nuclear energy, and one storyline that could be bullish for the price of oil.

One of the topics we talked about last time, and something I've heard you talk about elsewhere, is the idea when it comes to energy policy, there's really no solutions to energy problems just trade off.

Before we kind of get into some of the energy topics of today for our listeners, can you walk through that concept and why it's the case in energy?

You bet. When it comes to energy, the first thing that you have to understand, which we talked about last time, is that energy is, of course, life, and your standard of living depends on how much energy you get allocated to impose order on your local environment. These are the standard laws of physics that are just immutable and can't be circumvented through any form of magic.

And so, given that all humans everywhere, with a higher standard of living, the question becomes, and should be the emphasis of our discourse, how do we generate as much clean energy as possible for as many people while minimizing our carbon emissions?

And there's this belief in the renewable sector and the anti-falsafield sector, that there's a magic wand that we could wave, where everybody has as much energy as they need, and everybody has a great standard of living in, there are no consequences, and there are no trade-offs.

And that is really the false bargain that has been sold to the general public in the name of climate alarmism.

And so, once you have that equation in mind, where the numerator actually exists and it evolves, the integrated standard of living of all humans on earth, divided by our carbon emissions, then and only then can you begin to make reasonable trade-offs about which energy forms we will exploit, and which energy forms we will avoid, and what the consequences to both the carbon emissions and the global standard of living, what those consequences will be.

And that's what we mean by there are no solutions, only trade-offs. That's a phrase we stolen from somebody whose name escapes me right now, but that's really the core to the energy argument.

The key flaw in the ongoing debate is this concept that we're simply not implementing renewables because big evil oil and gas companies don't want us to, which couldn't be further from the truth.

Sure. So with that in mind, let's revisit some of the topics that we talked about last time, some of the things that have happened over the past six months.

So last time around, we talked about Europe's coming energy crisis, a crunch, partially due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, partially due over the long term in particular to the attacks on the Nord Stream.

Pipelines, you look at how Europe came through the winter. The crisis doesn't seem to have played out as extreme a level as maybe some had expected.

With that thought process of there's no solutions, only trade-offs. How would you rate how Europe solved its energy crisis over the winter?

I would object to the use of the word solved and let's walk through the trade-offs that were made in order to circumvent the worst-case scenario, tail risks that we had been discussing and were fearful of, back six months ago.

Let's focus on Germany, of course, because there's a heart of Western Europe and the epicenter of the energy crisis for lots of reasons, many of which self-imposed.

So how did Germany get through the winter? The first thing they did was they postponed the shutdown of their last three remaining nuclear reactors, which was a wise decision and one that we applauded.

Second, they scoured the world for every BTU of energy that you get their hands on, regardless of carbon footprint, cost or impact on the emerging world.

There was serious impacts to the emerging economies, which we can discuss. They also blew half a trillion dollars in this effort.

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