In part one of our interview, Mark P. Mills, the Executive Director of the National Center for Energy Analytics and the author of numerous books, dove into his twenty-year-old – yet timeless – treatise on energy, The Bottomless Well, (co-authored with Peter Huber) and explored the tenets of "energy realism." In this second and final part, we again look back on the book, and I asked Mark about how an energy realist would deal with climate change.

RP: Do you think that carbon emissions and climate change should be a limit on extracting oil and natural gas?

MM: No. And no more than I did then. We wrote a chapter in the book, “Saving the planet with coal and uranium.” We haven’t learned anything substantially new about climate science in two decades. If we learned anything, it’s that the curve has been bent down – the models that are meaningful at the IPCC have pushed down, not up, the predicted consequences of what might occur in the future.

It’s not helpful to go down the climate rabbit hole now for the same reason we didn’t then. What we did is lay down the facts with respect to the magnitude of carbon dioxide fluxes. Climate science is an entirely separate magisteria from energy and energy physics. What we meant by “saving the planet with coal and uranium” is that you aren’t going to change how society can produce power that it can afford. It’s locked in to the physics of energy and into the engineering that we can do. What that meant was that we would use more coal. In fact, we’ve been proven to be right. China is building a coal plant a week, and India will shortly follow that trend. The point is that we can’t bend the curve of CO2 emissions with magic aspirations once you understand how the physics of energy works. We’re going to burn more hydrocarbons for the conceivable future. So if one is concerned about the consequences at a future date, then what you want is adaptation and resilience, because you’re not going to stop it. Even Bill Gates recently said that even if we do all the stuff we’re trying to do, the absolute change in predicted temperature will be a tiny fraction of a degree.