Robert Bryce

Robert Bryce is one of America’s most prominent journalists. A passionate and engaging speaker, he is a leading thinker on energy production, power systems, and innovation.

The author of five books and over 1,000 articles, Bryce is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His work has appeared in a myriad of publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times and the National Review to the Sydney Morning Herald. He has given over 200 invited and keynote lectures to groups of all kinds, ranging from the Marine Corps War College to the Sydney Institute.

His most recent book, Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong was published in 2014. The book shows how today – despite decades, and even centuries, of doomsday predictions from people like Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich – more people are living richer, freer, healthier lives than at any time in human history. It shows how ongoing innovation in everything from solar panels to microprocessors is allowing humans to harness more energy more effectively than ever before. And those gains – all of which are coming thanks to the inexorable trend toward smaller, faster, lighter, denser, cheaper – will catalyze continuing prosperity.

Bryce’s first book, Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron, was named one of the best nonfiction books of 2002 by Publishers Weekly. In 2004, he published Cronies: Oil, The Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, “America’s Superstate.” In 2008, he published Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of “Energy Independence.” A review of Gusher in the New York Times called Bryce “something of a visionary and perhaps even a revolutionary.”

His fourth book, Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future, was published in 2010 by PublicAffairs. A reviewer in the Wall Street Journal called Power Hungry “unsentimental, unsparing and impassioned; and, if you'll excuse the pun, it is precisely the kind of journalism we need to hold truth to power.” The Washington Times called it a  “magnificently unfashionable, superlatively researched new book dares to fly in the face of all current conventional wisdom and cant. 

In addition to his many publications, Bryce appears regularly on electronic media outlets ranging from Bloomberg TV and PBS to Fox News and Al Jazeera. He lives in Austin with his wife, Lorin, and their three children. 

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