After Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) denounced the law once known as the “Big Beautiful Bill,” largely over its proposed Medicaid cuts, which he said would threaten insurance coverage for many North Carolinians, he called out the bill’s problematic approach to energy — and one climate crisis denier credited with helping to craft those provisions, in particular.

“It’s another classic example where think tanks and people that haven’t worked a day in business are setting policy in the White House without a clue about what they are potentially doing to our grid,” Tillis said Sunday night, just hours after announcing he would not seek re-election in 2026. “I had an Alex Weinstein, who is a self-described philosopher and expert in this area in my office, talking with three people, practitioners that actually work in it.”

Alex Epstein, author of the pro-fossil fuel books The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Future, seems to have recognized himself in that description (despite the senator’s apparent confusion about his name). The following day, Epstein published a Substack presenting his version of events, writing that he’d recorded his own comments during a “secret meeting” with the senator.* 

The remarkable meltdown in relations between Epstein and the Republican senator from North Carolina comes as the megabill, currently headed back to the House following a 51-50 Senate vote, has been deeply unpopular, polls show. The most recent results from Fox News, for example, put opposition to the bill at 59 percent, versus support at 38 percent. The bill throws the weight of the federal budget behind Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and tax cuts, which it funds by slashing Medicaid, food stamps, and clean energy programs.

Any shift away from clean energy in the U.S. will have major consequences for the climate, but accelerating human-caused climate change is hardly the only reason for concern.

“If enacted, the BBB [Big Beautiful Bill] stands to be the biggest job-killing bill in the history of this country,” Sean McGarvey, president of the North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU), which represents over 3 million construction workers, said on Saturday. “Simply put, it is the equivalent of terminating more than 1,000 Keystone XL pipeline projects.”

Senator Tillis warned of potential disruptions to grid reliability as new natural gas turbines face a half-decade order backlog. Other critics in Congress nicknamed the draft the “Big Blackout Bill” because of similar concerns.

“I have to vote against a bill from my own party that I have never parted from before because we’re rushing to an arbitrary deadline with people who have never worked a day in this industry,” Sen. Tillis said on the Senate floor, “maybe philosophized, have written a few white papers on it, but haven’t gotten their hands dirty.”

Senator Tillis’ office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Epstein’s claim to have recorded their conversation.

Who is Alex Epstein?

Back in 2011, Epstein, who has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and describes himself as a “philosopher and energy expert,” founded a for-profit think tank called the Center for Industrial Progress, a fossil fuel advocacy group. ExxonMobil, Chevron, Phillips 66, Valero, Enbridge, and TransCanada (now TC Energy) are among the “many large energy companies” he’s delivered presentations to, according to a 2019 bio accompanying a piece in the Journal of Petroleum Technology.

While the Center for Industrial Progress generally doesn’t disclose its funders, the Prometheus Foundation, which calls itself “an independent, nonprofit enterprise whose mission is to promote Ayn Rand and advance her philosophy,” filed a 990 tax form showing a $25,000 donation to Epstein’s group in 2020. In 2018, Epstein also disclosed the Kentucky Coal Association’s president Tyler White and a now-defunct website called “The Coal Truth” as clients.

“I proudly work with and accept contributions from fossil fuel companies/executives and other companies/executives that support energy freedom policies. By contract, no company or person has any editorial influence over me and/or my projects,” Epstein told DeSmog in 2022.

In response to questions from DeSmog, Epstein wrote: “You already have my public post on Tillis, which is the main thing. Re: funding issues, it seems like you are trying to assemble a misleading set of associations involving trivial sources of funding that have (like all the others) zero control of what I or my team say.” He pointed instead to his Substack post announcing the Energy Future Fund, calling his own approach “the most conducive to intellectual independence that exists in the energy/environment/climate world.”

Epstein’s hostility to climate action was on clear display in 2021, for example, when he called international climate talks “not a progressive scientific conference but an anti-human, primitive-religious attempt to commit mass genocide.” Epstein maintains his own ways of discussing fossil fuels are “pro-human” and focused on the benefits of fossil fuels, particularly for poor nations, rather than just the negatives. As DeSmog has reported, Epstein’s past writings have claimed the “superiority” of Western culture over some of the non-Western cultures he now boosts fossil fuels to, and blamed Martin Luther King, Jr. for an increase in “Black crime.”

“Their approach has been described by critics as a new kind of climate denialism. One that doesn’t dispute that global warming is real but rather frames it as a lesser problem — often with the use of cherry-picked data and a misrepresentation of scientific findings,” E&E News reported in a May profile of Epstein and other influential climate crisis deniers.

In February, Epstein launched a new outfit, the Energy Freedom Fund, a lobbying and advocacy organization— donors not disclosed. Epstein laid out the organization’s “unconventional” structure in a Substack post, writing that he intended to serve as its president on a volunteer basis, that donors would have “no control over what positions we take or how we allocate resources,” and that he would make all those decisions, though he was “not myself a lobbyist.”

In the months since, Epstein’s been widely credited (or faulted, depending on who you ask) with shaping some of the Big Beautiful Bill’s energy provisions. In mid-June, he briefed Senate Republicans at the Capitol, E&E News reported, adding that Epstein had been lobbying for Congressional Republicans to scrap Inflation Reduction Act credits for solar and wind energy.

In late May, for example, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-OK) appeared on Epstein’s podcast, where the lawmakers thanked him for his help with crafting the House version of the bill.

During that same podcast, Rep. Roy dismissed concerns the law would spur massive job losses in the clean energy sector. “I’ve heard people on K Street. ‘Chip, you’re gonna hurt jobs, future jobs, you gonna hurt jobs if you hurt the already existing projects.’” Rep. Roy said. “What about the fact that you don’t want to have jobs being subsidized to produce something that makes your country weaker?”

“Fentanyl jobs,” Epstein said, as Rep. Roy seemed to compare some energy jobs to selling “illicit drugs.”

Epstein pushed particularly hard against a wide range of energy tax credits, like the ones that have helped millions of Americans install rooftop solar. “I am concerned about his approach to this,” Sen. John Curtis (R-UT) told E&E News in late June. “It’s more of a dagger in the heart.”

Epstein has been faulted for offering up questionable information to public officials in the past. In the wake of the deadly 2021 Texas freeze, for example, NBC News reported that talking points from Epstein “made their way to the Texas governor’s office and to the state’s oil and gas regulator, known as the Railroad Commission of Texas. One commissioner amplified the talking points on Twitter, while another commissioner’s aide forwarded them to top Texas oil and gas lobbyists.”

Epstein’s talking points, NBC News noted, blamed wind and solar for the blackouts; in fact, federal energy regulators later concluded, “[n]atural gas-fired units represented 58 percent of all generating units experiencing unplanned outages, derates or failures to start” (solar, meanwhile, was behind just 2 percent of those problems).

Nonetheless, Epstein has gained audience with some of Trump’s Cabinet members. Earlier this year, he met with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin for 30 minutes, Politico reported, and he was invited to dine with Doug Burgum, now Interior Secretary, last year at the then-North Dakota governor’s residence, public records obtained by the watchdog Fieldnotes show. Former fracking services CEO Chris Wright also appeared on Epstein’s podcast Power Hour in 2021 and has been cited as influential in shaping the now-Energy Secretary’s views on climate change.

Of course, any time that powerful policymakers spend listening to philosophers and “self-described” experts, as Tillis put it, comes at the cost of listening to those actively participating in the energy transition, which is moving rapidly worldwide.

“The thing about renewable energy, as everyone knows, is that it’s intermittent. We don’t control when the wind blows and we know when the sun is shining, but we have no control over it,” Joseph Vellone, CEO of ChargeScape, a tech company that’s signed up thousands of EV owners to use their car’s batteries to keep the power grid reliable, said at the Reuters Global Energy Transition conference last week. “And so what we’re doing at ChargeScape is we are soaking up as much of that intermittent renewable electricity as possible, storing them in EV batteries.”

With enough electric vehicles, you can eliminate the need to build natural gas “peaker” power plants, which have historically been used to keep the grid dependable when demand is high relative to supply, Vellone said. In other words, it’s a lot cheaper and easier to pay someone who owns an EV to help balance out the grid than it is to build a new natural gas power plant, especially at a time when natural gas turbines are under a severe backlog.

But that’s the sort of thing Trump’s megabill could make harder, energy trade groups say.

“Despite limited improvements, this legislation undermines the very foundation of America’s manufacturing comeback and global energy leadership,” Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association said in a statement following the Senate vote.

“It will strip the ability of millions of American families to choose the energy savings, energy resilience, and energy freedom that solar and storage provide,” she said. “As the House reconsiders this legislation, every member should ask themselves what kind of future they’re voting for. Our communities, our businesses, and our futures are on the line.”

*Recording your own conversations is generally legal in Washington D.C. and North Carolina, a guide from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press indicates.