Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal, and today we're joined by

Mark Mills. We're going to discuss energy and technology and some of his recent stories for

City Journal, including his most recent, which we titled Will Never Have an Energy Transition.

Mark is a City Journal contributing editor, and he's the executive director of the National

Center for Energy Analytics. He's also a faculty fellow at Northwestern University's McCormick School

of Engineering and a co-founding partner in Montrose Lane, which is an energy investment firm. Mark

is the author of a number of books, most recently, The Cloud

Revolution, How the Convergence of New Technologies will unleash the next economic boom in a roaring

2020s. His articles have been published very widely, not just City Journal, but Wall Street Journal,

Forbes, USA Today, Real Clear Politics,

and many other outlets. Mark also served in the White House Science Office under President Reagan,

and early in his career he was an experimental physicist and development engineer at Bell Northern Research.

Mark, great to have you on again. Always good to get your perspective on these

energy and economic issues. It's great to be back, Brian. I like framing my articles for

City Journal as stories, because I think of them as stories, telling the truth in a story.

Well, there is a kind of narrative consistency to these pieces in a way there

a sustained argument. Let's talk about the most recent one. President Trump recently boasted that

he'd put an end to the Green New Deal and other Biden energy policies, which were quite extensive.

But voices in the press continue to tout the transition to green energy as inevitable. They often cite other modern

advancements. For example, when a newly adopted technology makes an older technology obsolete,

as happened with smartphones eclipsing landline phones. I wonder, do those comparisons hold up when it

comes to energy? Are we on the verge of a complete transition to new forms of green technology?

...