Musings of the Carbon King

In light of Tennessee's recent work to encourage statewide nuclear energy production, we sat down with Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute, to discuss the country’s energy landscape. A staunch supporter of free-market energy solutions, Isaac has testified in front of Congress four times about the dangers of ESG and the importance of energy security. You may recognize him from his appearances on Fox News and PragerU, and his articles published in the Daily Wire.

Thanks for joining me, Mr. Isaac. As a former legislator in the Texas House of Representatives, you have insight into a myriad of things, but today we're here to talk about nuclear energy. I hear that you self-identify as the Carbon King. Some say you have a long history of climate denial. How did you get the nickname, and what did you do to earn it?

I really owe the credit to Congressman Jamie Raskin, from Maryland, who referred to me as that during a congressional testimony in which I introduced myself as “I'm Jason Isaac, I live a high carbon lifestyle and I think the rest of the world should, too.” I followed that by saying places that have high per capita CO2 emissions are the places that have the most economic prosperity, and those countries are the ones that have the best environmental leadership, just like the United States. We're number one when it comes to access to clean and safe drinking water, and wouldn't that be great if the rest of the world could get to experience what we do? Instead, we take it for granted and worry about made-up problems, and that's just a concern that I have. Congressman Raskin didn't like the fact that I was advocating for a high-carbon lifestyle, but I do unapologetically. He thought it was a bad thing to call me the Carbon King, and I embraced it.

I know you're a Texas man, but recently Governor Lee announced another nuclear energy partnership with a company taking advantage of Tennessee's Nuclear Energy Fund. From your perspective, is Tennessee leading the charge in nuclear energy? What are we getting right and/or wrong in our approach?

I really think that Tennessee is kind of leading the front on adding more additional nuclear capacity to the grid, and that's a great thing because it provides stable, affordable, reliable base load generation. Unfortunately, I would say that the bad part about it is kind of what Texas is doing. Texas constitutionally created this Texas Energy Fund to provide low interest rate loans to companies to build natural gas generation. I'm all for natural gas, I'm for coal, I'm for nuclear—we need more affordable, reliable electricity on the grid. What I'm not for is the market distortions of subsidies. You're taking taxpayer dollars, providing them to companies, and it’s unfortunate that we have to do this.

We just need to reform the market. The federal government has done an awful job, and it puts states in a really bad position. The federal government has done it through the production tax credit that benefits wind and solar astronomically compared to reliable, affordable generation from natural gas, coal, and nuclear. You're in this situation where we have state subsidies competing with federal subsidies…I call it subsidies chasing subsidies. There needs to be a reliability standard that gives favorability to generation that's available on demand when consumers need it, not necessarily when the weather is cooperating.

You mentioned subsidies battling subsidies, which seems like a cycle that we're stuck in right now. Do you see a way out?

I am cautiously optimistic that if November goes well, you have a clean sweep, and you have people that are in control in DC who will work to eliminate and scale back these subsidies, then the market will reform. The only reason people are building wind and solar right now is because of the subsidies. 

If we can start to pull back those subsidies, what we'll see is a market created to build new natural gas and coal-fired generation, and more nuclear. With the artificial intelligence and the chip manufacturing that's coming back to this country, we would have another economic renaissance, if that were the case. 

It's happening in China right now. China has been expanding their energy production, they've been expanding their refining capacity, and for the first time in their existence, they are exporting energy. They've always been net consumers, because they don't produce a lot other than coal. And now they're actually exporting energy, partly because they're importing a ton of oil from Iran to the tune of about $5 billion a month.

That wouldn't be the case if President Trump were still the president right now. The Biden administration has completely turned a blind eye to the sanctions against the sale of Iranian oil…and China is taking that oil. [China is] refining it to make jet fuel, home heating oil, and diesel fuel. They're exporting those fuels…into the global market using cheap Iranian oil. That's what we should be doing here in this country. Unfortunately, the Biden-Harris administration has demonized fossil fuels and put up regulatory hurdles. And they've convinced Wall Street to go along with them with this ESG agenda that really is just for the benefit of China, the Middle East, and people who don't like us very much that would prefer we fall apart as a leading world economy.

You are the CEO of American Energy Institute, which encourages free market policies to support American energy strategies. I've seen you all use the term Kamalanomics. Why do you think that a Harris-Walz presidency would harm American energy?

The policies that [Harris] advocated for during her time in service in California, they go back a long time to when she was a DA in San Francisco implementing an environmental justice unit. [It] was to go after energy producers to make them pay for, really, this mental health agenda—which the left has pushed down people's throats—to make [people] fear the weather and blame energy producers for causing that weather, which couldn't be further from the truth.

You're already seeing it play out with this EV mandate…and it's a mandate by a thousand regulations—or death by a thousand cuts….Automobile manufacturers [have to] meet the federal government's requirements for the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards. So everything that Ford produces, they have to make an average of 59 miles per gallon. Well, the average gasoline car gets 25 miles per gallon. 

Through some accounting gimmicks, an electric vehicle—which is rated at 113 miles per gallon—actually gets credit for nearly 750 miles per gallon because of this crazy multiplier that I exposed in some research I published last year. That's why fleets are being forced to produce EVs, because it's the only way they can get to this Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard, which, by 2030, increases to over 90 miles-per-gallon.

That's just one example. There were things in the Inflation Reduction Act that continue to push people down this path. Just [last] week, you had a ruling by a judge in Louisiana that by December could put a halt to all offshore oil production. We're talking new and existing and current production. About 15 to 20 percent of the oil that we produce in this country could potentially go offline by December, stranding billions of dollars of assets. This is something that the Harris-Walz administration would support even more of.

People are getting crushed with higher costs for energy, and that's all their policies do. They don't do anything to change the climate. They don't do anything to improve the environment. They actually make the environment worse, but they do overwhelmingly increase the cost of electricity, and that's Kamalanomics. 

Is there anything else that you'd like to share with our readers here in Tennessee?

I hear politicians take the lazy way out. I've heard it so many times in Joe Manchin's office, “Oh, well, Senator Manchin, he's an all-of-the-above energy policy guy.” I keep hearing people say, “I'm for all of the above,” and it's just lazy messaging. In my presentation, there’s a picture from Gilligan's Island that has one of the characters pedaling a bicycle to generate electricity. That is all of the above. Wind is also all of the above, solar is all of the above, and those don't survive without subsidy.

I am for affordable and reliable electricity, affordable and reliable energy. I am absolutely not for all of the above….And it's awesome now that I'm leading a trade organization of energy producers that are okay with me advocating for policies that would reduce the cost of energy, that would reduce the cost of a barrel of oil, because you won't hear any other trade organization or any other major oil and gas company say, “Yeah, we want to reduce the cost of our product.” They just don't want to do it. They like the higher margins. And the people that I work for, they understand the power of the free market, and they understand the impact of having access to affordable, reliable energy on human flourishing. They know there's three and a half billion people on the planet that don't have that access and could be lifted out of poverty with energy.