Juice goes Dutch, new podcasts, & fair dinkum from Down Under
Happy Friday
Howdy. The last few days have been busy. I have been recording podcasts, doing webinars, and last week, I got on a jetliner for the first time since March 10. I spent three days in Montana. Few things rival the beauty of aspen trees in the autumn. (The hot springs in Bozeman were also fantastic.) I capped off the trip with a speech to the Montana Electric Cooperatives' Association in Great Falls. It was great to escape the Texas heat for a few days but even better to come home again.
Okay, enough on that. I have three items in this update:
New distribution for Juice
Podcasts with Ted Nordhaus and Robert Apodaca
Stellar review of AQOP from Down Under
Amsterdam-based Off The Fence adds Juice to its roster
This week, we got some more good news about Juice: It will be carried by Off the Fence Productions, a Dutch company that “makes, acquires, localizes and distributes titles that cover a broad cross-section of nonfiction programming. With autumn and the corresponding market season—virtual or otherwise—upon us, the company has a catalog boasting fresh, compelling programming for keen buyers on the hunt for titles that can sate viewers’ healthy appetite for factual content.”
On Wednesday, it announced that it had worked out a deal with our distributor, Gravitas Ventures, to launch such “new titles as Juice: How Electricity Explains the World from Electric Elephant Films.” Off the Fence works with the Smithsonian Channel and other outlets. Juice is now listed on their website as a feature documentary. While it’s not clear what will come of this, it’s great to see the film getting traction with a European producer. Our film is global, and it appears to fit well with Off the Fence’s mission of “distributing and producing high-quality and thought-provoking content.”
Ted Nordhaus and Robert Apodaca on the podcast
Last week, we released an episode with Ted Nordhaus, the co-founder of the Oakland-based Breakthrough Institute and an original signer of the Ecomodernist Manifesto. I talked with Ted about the effect the ecomodernist movement has had on environmentalism as well as the future of nuclear energy. He told me that the manifesto was part of an effort to “reconstruct an alternative paradigm for...thinking about the environment and human development and the relationship between them.”
I was also intrigued to hear about Ted’s exchanges with his uncle, William Nordhaus, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2018. Ted’s uncle has argued that one of the solutions to addressing climate change is the implantation of a carbon tax. But as Ted told me, that idea is implausible because low-income countries have no incentive to place a tax on their citizens. We also talked about the future of nuclear power, why we need to think more about adapting to a changing climate, and why, as he said, “renewables with reasonably cheap gas is going to be a pretty reasonable low-carbon pathway for a long time (and in) a lot of places.”
This week, we welcomed Robert Apodaca, the executive director of United Latinos Vote to the Power Hungry Podcast. Apodaca has been a social activist in California for five decades and he continues to be involved in some of the most important fights in the state, including the issue of affordable housing. He told me that “upwards of 70 percent of people [in California] cannot afford to buy a home and it’s a real problem.” Moreover, he said the state’s policies are making the problem worse. Much of our discussion focused on a September 24 advertisement that United Latinos Vote published in the Los Angeles Times that was headlined, “An Open Letter to the Sierra Club.” The letter was a direct response to an ad that the Sierra Club published in the same paper six days earlier. In their piece, dubbed an “Open Letter to the People of California,” the Sierra Club urged the state’s politicians to stop permitting all new oil and gas drilling, pipelines, and infrastructure; accelerate the state’s transition so that “all of our electricity is 100% zero-carbon by 2030,”; phase out the use of natural gas in homes, and “phase out polluting cars and trucks” and move to “100% zero-emission vehicles sales by 2030.”
Apodaca told me that the Sierra Club’s letter made him angry and that anger led to his scathing response in the Los Angeles Times, a response which declared, “your world is not our world.” Apodaca told me that the Sierra Club and other environmental groups are advocating for regulations that will make it more difficult for low-income Californians “ to buy a home and more difficult to not be driven into poverty because of the higher cost of higher cost of living.” And he quickly added that the cost of housing and energy and transportation are the main items that are driving up the cost of living,” in the state.
My discussion with Apodaca provides yet another example of the growing backlash in California -- a backlash that's coming from minority communities -- about the state's energy policies, which are, in practice, imposing regressive taxes on the poor and middle class.
I encourage you to give both podcasts a listen.
Fair dinkum Down Under
I was also pleased to see a new review of A Question of Power published by the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne. (I spoke at a couple of IPA events back in 2014). In his review, Tristan Prasser wrote:
wrote:
This is a highly engaging and enlightening book, using colourful illustrations and relatable real-world human examples to underscore his key arguments. Bryce uses his typical American refrigerator to illustrate the vast consumption disparity between “high-watt”, “low-watt” and “unplugged” countries. About 3.3 billion people in “unplugged” countries use less power than it takes to run his fridge.
Australians seldom think about this, yet for decades access to reliable and affordable electricity has been fundamental to our own economic and social prosperity. It has enabled us to overcome geographic remoteness and vast distances; master a continent of drought and flooding rains; and rapidly transform ourselves from a country of farmers to one of sophisticated and highly skilled urbanites. Without it, life would be impossibly difficult, with Australians scratching out a poor lonely existence on a dusty plot of dirt.... The fact Australia finds itself where it is today on the energy front only serves to highlight Bryce’s point that no country becomes prosperous by making electricity expensive and unreliable...There is a need to seriously address how we generate electricity affordably, reliably and cleanly if we are fair dinkum about ensuring Australia remains a prosperous and resilient nation moving further into the 21st century.
And a short piece about my House testimony...
Finally, I published a brief article this week on Medium about my October 1 testimony before the House Energy Subcommittee. I launched into the topic by recalling my interview with David French on the Power Hungry Podcast about his new book, Divided We Fall, in which he underscores the many divides — political, geographic, and religious — that are undermining our cohesion. As French told me on the podcast, “there’s a measurable and severe increase in enmity, in anger between our red and blue tribes. And all of these things can’t keep happening forever.”
While French’s book doesn’t look at energy, I wrote that “it is readily apparent that America is also deeply divided about policy approaches to energy and climate. That fact was made clear to me last week when I testified (via WebEx) before the Subcommittee on Energy of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.” I went on, saying that “each side — the Republicans and the Democrats — came to the hearing armed with their talking points and they were not going to talk about anything else. That is deeply unfortunate. The energy sector is the world’s biggest and most important industry. Every facet of the economy depends on the energy sector. Alas, when it comes to Congressional hearings, factionalism appears to matters more than energy realism.”
Okay. That’s it. Have a great weekend.
What can you do?
1. Subscribe to the Power Hungry Podcast and give it a five-star rating here.
2. Rent or buy Juice on iTunes or Amazon Prime.
3. Buy my new book, A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations.
4. Follow me and Juice on Twitter.
5. Forward this note to your friends/family/colleagues so I can add them to the email list.
Thanks!