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The case for fossil fuels, with Alex Epstein
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The UK government is "going for growth" whilst pursuing an aggressive net zero energy policy. Are the two goals compatible? Spoiler alert: No.
In this conversation with Will, philosopher and energy expert Alex Epstein dismantles the accepted climate science narrative, and advocates for a world with more fossil fuels, not less. Alex's most recent book is titled, 'Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas - Not Less'.
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Read The Spectator Australia here.
Read Alex's Substack here.
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Transcript
00:00:19
Speaker
And
Introduction and Host
00:00:20
Speaker
welcome to Fire at Will. I'm Will Kingston.
UK Heatwave and Climate Narratives
00:00:23
Speaker
It's been an unseasonably hot week in London. And the one thing that you can always guarantee after a UK heatwave, in addition to shirtless Brits sunburned and drinking pints in public parks,
00:00:38
Speaker
is climate catastrophizing from the mainstream media.
Media and Political Climate Agendas
00:00:42
Speaker
The weather maps turn a foreboding shade of red. The BBC starts telling you that the end of the world is nigh and Labor politicians merrily jump on the bandwagon to push their net zero ah agenda forward.
00:00:56
Speaker
And the troubling thing is that this mindset is so rarely challenged. It's become something more than a so a scientific conversation amongst the liberal
Introducing Alex Epstein and Challenging Narratives
00:01:09
Speaker
elite. it's It's an article of faith, which is why voices that do challenge this narrative are so important.
00:01:16
Speaker
And there is arguably no more important voice, in my opinion, in the broader climate science conversation than the author of Fossil Future, Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal and Natural Gas, Not Less.
00:01:31
Speaker
Alex Hepstein.
Climate Concerns: Livability vs. Change Opposition
00:01:32
Speaker
Alex, welcome to Fire at Will. Happy to be here. thanks Thanks for the intro. We'll try to live up to it. I'm sure you will. Maybe we can start with the the warming. It's just interesting, I think, because you you mentioned it might not be about science and stuff like this.
00:01:47
Speaker
mean, an interesting question when you're thinking about these BBC reports and stuff like that is like, what's what's the goal? Like, what's what's the concern and what's the goal? So is the concern that people are going to have heat-related deaths, that it's going to be uncomfortably hot, that it's going to you know, somehow the world is becoming less livable for humans?
00:02:06
Speaker
That's one kind
Human Flourishing vs. Climate Catastrophe
00:02:07
Speaker
of consideration, which is ah at least a pro-human consideration. The other kind of consideration is just it's wrong that we might have changed things. And that's that's a philosophical issue. It's always important when you hear people talk about climate change. Is is the concern that you think this is on balance bad for humans?
00:02:25
Speaker
Or do you just think that human impact is bad? Because if you think it's on balance bad for humans, then I can give you a very clear explanation of why it isn't. But if you think human impact is bad, then really you're against the core of human life.
00:02:41
Speaker
which is impacting the world, changing the world to meet our needs, which always includes different byproducts and side effects, including some atmospheric warming, I believe. Like if if you're just against impact as such, I would try to convince you, you have an anti-human view of of life and our species. And I would try to talk you out of out of that. But
Philosophy's Role in Climate Perspectives
00:03:00
Speaker
was just just to see how much this diverges, it's just a fact that basically by every climate-related indicator that relates to human life and human flourishing, human beings are at record highs in terms of well-being.
00:03:12
Speaker
So the death rate from climate is way lower than it used to be. It's gone down by 98%. We're safe from heat deaths. We're safe from cold deaths. So The starting point has to be factually with climate.
00:03:23
Speaker
We're, from a livability perspective, we're in a renaissance, and you can start to guess why, because our our ability to master climate and be resilient has far outpaced any adverse changes, and then there are also some positive changes.
00:03:34
Speaker
You have to recognize we're in we're in a climate renaissance from a human perspective, so if somebody is acting like we're in a climate catastrophe, it's either they're ignorant of the facts about the human perspective or they don't have a human perspective on it. They have it an impact as evil.
00:03:49
Speaker
perspective.
Epstein's Path to Energy and Climate Debates
00:03:51
Speaker
That's why it's a philosophical issue. And of course, your background is very uncontroversial about human well-being in relation to climate. And of course, your background is in philosophy. You are a philosopher.
00:04:02
Speaker
How did you move from the study of philosophy into the study of climate science? Well, I i mean, i always think of philosophy. i was i had a very practical bent to philosophy. So philosophy is often thought of as something that's that's impractical. And i I mean, I came from a computer science background and like kind of more entrepreneurial focus when i when I began college. So I always have a very practical bent. And I think of philosophy as this is, you know, this is the operating system.
00:04:30
Speaker
ah for human beings. And just like the operating system dictates a lot about how a computer functions, so philosophy determines a lot about how a human functions. So things like thinking methods are the thing I just mentioned, this question of what's your goal?
00:04:44
Speaker
Like, how are what are you actually pursuing? And because that's going to define what you consider good and bad in relation to your goal. Like a philosophical approach is to ask those questions instead of just jumping in and having climate change bad. Are we having climate change, if so, bad? Like that's a non-philosophical approach. And then you end up you end up just parasiting on someone else's philosophy. And it's it's implicitly the philosophy that human change is is bad. And now that's that's an anti-human philosophy, as I explained. So it was natural for me to go into something ah practical. I definitely didn't want to, the state of academic philosophy, I definitely didn't want to be, you know, a PhD philosopher in that sense.
00:05:22
Speaker
And then
Energy Policy and Climate Discourse Bias
00:05:23
Speaker
I wrote about a lot of topics before energy. And the thing that attracted me to energy was one it it's a fundamental, like philosophy is fundamental to how humans think it act, and but energy is fundamental to how humans live because it's the industry that powers every other industry.
00:05:42
Speaker
If you have more abundant energy, that really means you can use more machines, which means more work gets done, which means more prosperity, flourishing, safety, opportunities. Et cetera. So I really liked that there is this one industry that if you could change policy for the better, everything would get better.
00:05:59
Speaker
But by contrast, if you change it for the worse, everything would get worse. And then that that brings me the second aspect, which it was pretty clear to me early on studying it and learning about it, that the thinking was very bad in in two respects. One is it's just pretty transparently biased, where people only talk about negatives of fossil fuels and not positives.
00:06:19
Speaker
Or even with climate, they only talk about negative climate-related effects, not positive, even though pretty clearly warming in a lot of places is a good thing. Greening in ah in most places is certainly a good thing from CO2.
00:06:31
Speaker
And then the energy we get from fossil fuels that we definitely can't get at the same scale from other things at the moment That definitely makes us very resilient against climate. So just seeing that,
Questioning Climate Science Consensus
00:06:40
Speaker
well, we're only talking about negatives and positives, that's a clear evidence of bias.
00:06:45
Speaker
And then there's a question of why are we biased and why are smart people biased? And if if if everyone is biased, including the smart people, it's not an ignorance issue. It's usually a values issue. it's It's like they're not actually, it seems like they're biased if you're pursuing the goal of human flourishing, because why are you ignoring all the positives human flourishing?
00:07:04
Speaker
But then if they're pursuing the goal of just eliminating human impact, then it makes sense. Because actually the positives in terms of farms and factories and prosperity, that's actually a bad thing from ah from an impact is evil perspective. Because the more impact we have, the the more prosperous we are, the more impact we've had.
00:07:22
Speaker
on the earth and And having known about anti-human environmental philosophy for a while, I could pretty quickly see, oh, this is what's happening. The anti-human environmental philosophers have really dictated how we think about this field.
00:07:35
Speaker
they want to Their whole premise, and they've had this way before any climate concerns, is impact is evil. And the way they put forward that philosophy, if they just said impact is evil, you're evil, you should die early, that doesn't sell very well.
00:07:48
Speaker
So instead they say like impact is evil and they highlight all the negative impacts and they ignore all the positive impacts for human life. And
Knowledge Systems and Climate Actions
00:07:57
Speaker
they pretend, you know, more recently they pretend, oh well, all the positives, like all the energy, we can easily get that with other things like solar and wind. So that that's that's part of it. That's still not very plausible, but it it definitely wasn't plausible when they were trying to get rid of fossil fuels.
00:08:12
Speaker
30 years ago. it It's ultimately an anti-human philosophy that leads to, that's trying to get rid of impact. And fossil fuels have the most impact because they're the best form of energy. And energy is what allows us to impact the world for the the good. So ironically, it's like people who are against human impact and human life are targeting fossil fuels actually because they're so good very for human life. But they're pretending they're just against the things that are bad for human life, even though in fact, those are far outweighed by the good from a human perspective.
00:08:42
Speaker
And we'll get to what those benefits look like because it is a scandalously under-discussed part of this whole debate. yeah But before we do, i think you very wisely start your book with the experts and what you've just been alluding to, which is this collective failure of thinking holistically about this subject.
00:09:00
Speaker
And so many people look at the so-called experts and say, well, you know, if 99% of climate scientists all say one thing, how could they be wrong? Or you know there is now a consensus that yeah know around climate science, we can move past this you know this being a a debate.
00:09:18
Speaker
how can see and I think collectively you call this the the the knowledge system and a breakdown in the knowledge system. Can you explain this to me and explain you know your response to that soft-quoted remark that we have a consensus, we need to now move past it?
00:09:32
Speaker
Sure. So you could think of the knowledge system as the set of institution and people that are giving us knowledge to guide our action. And both of these things are are important.
00:09:46
Speaker
Knowledge to guide action. Because ultimately, The main reason, i would i would argue the only reason in the end we get knowledge is to guide actions. If you take something like climate science, why are we learning about climate science? Why are we discussing climate science? Well, the the end thing that we're, it's not like everyone suddenly became interested in atmospheric physics a few decades ago, right?
00:10:07
Speaker
There are these questions of what do we actually do about energy policy? Right. What what do we do particularly about fossil fuel use, which puts more CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere? And that has certain effects. And what do you do about that? So it's a system that's giving us the knowledge. it it's It's giving us knowledge and it's guiding our our decision making. And I think of this as there are four phases or components of this. And it's very important to have them separate in one's mind.
00:10:35
Speaker
So, you know, at the beginning, you could say we have the researchers and these are just people who are studying in very specific domains. What are the cause and effect relationships in the world?
00:10:46
Speaker
So, for example, how does is there a greenhouse effect? How does it work? How does it does it get stronger as you as it as but as you have more CO2 or does it get weaker? So things like that. So and there's all there's a million yeah more than a million different subfields. So those are just the people doing the research.
00:11:04
Speaker
Now, the second category I put is the synthesizers. So these are the people who are trying to distill all this massive specialized research into some sort of more unified understanding, usually with, you know, some kind of purpose in mind. So you
Research Distortion in Climate Policy
00:11:21
Speaker
might have we have something called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC.
00:11:25
Speaker
I'm argue it does a terrible job. But the the premise of it is is decent, maybe leaving aside intergovernmental, but the the premise of, hey, we want to know overall what's the state of climate science that can inform policy, that that is good. And this is something where, you know, you need the synthesizers even for You know, certainly for policymakers, but even for just people in a field, because most people in climate science don't know the vast majority of the research and in and climate science. People have this idea of, oh, you're a climate scientist.
00:11:55
Speaker
You know everything about climate science. No, the way you got your PhD in climate science was doing some unbable or meteorology or whatever specifically it was. was doing some incredibly niche research that somebody rubber somebody stamped as you made some new contribution.
00:12:10
Speaker
But it really means that you at most have a kind of overview of the field and you don't know all the details about all the other things. So you need synthesizers. That's very valuable. Now, when you're talking about the public,
00:12:22
Speaker
and to some extent policymakers, there's another stage, which is what I call the disseminator. So these are the people who write the newspapers and popular accounts and this kind of thing. And we need those because most of us aren't even in ah one field like energy or climate.
00:12:37
Speaker
Most of us are trying to make decisions about everything, right? In the U.S. right now, we have controversies about health care and immigration and energy and AI, right? So we can't even just all study the whole synthesis of each field.
00:12:52
Speaker
We need somebody to distill it for us. And that's what we often rely on newspapers and this kind of thing for. So we have the the researchers, you know, we get this narrowing. There's the researchers, the synthesizers, the disseminators.
00:13:04
Speaker
And then the fourth part is particularly important because it's it's a bit of a different dimension. it's It's now
Climate Policy and COVID-19 Comparisons
00:13:09
Speaker
translating things to action. So it's what I call the evaluators. So these are the people who are evaluating what are the implications of what we know for actions.
00:13:17
Speaker
And this definitely includes commentators and it definitely includes politicians. Like ultimately, this is what politicians are doing, right? They're trying to evaluate what should we do And they're drawing on knowledge from the knowledge system.
00:13:32
Speaker
So there are kind of at least two big failures that can happen with knowledge systems. So one is from research to dissemination, just that things get very, very distorted.
00:13:46
Speaker
But the other thing is is that the evaluation screws up everything. So if you take the example of COVID, I think it was a really interesting example where but of both of these. So you could be, well, I think we got often distorted, catastrophized accounts of what researchers said, certainly overconfident accounts given how new the thing was.
00:14:07
Speaker
But what was most interesting to me was the evaluation piece of it, because you'd have what you'd have was certain infectious disease types. And let's even say they were right about, hey, there's this threat level.
00:14:17
Speaker
That translated immediately into, therefore, nobody should be allowed to do anything because we want to minimize the threat of this virus. But think about it. Why would your goal be minimize the threat of one virus?
00:14:29
Speaker
That's an insane policymaking goal, right? What about the other viruses? What about the other health care thing? What about other values in life? This was really the philosophical problem, methodological problem, and ultimately a values problem with the lockdown approach.
00:14:42
Speaker
is it wasn't so much it was wrong about science, although certainly many people were, understandably, but it was wrong about methodology. But but the the the problem was people took the fact that it was scientists in some way informing this to uncritically evaluate, to to be uncritical about evaluating the actions. And this is where every citizen needs to realize no scientist, researcher, whatever can do the evaluation for you.
00:15:09
Speaker
They can give you information. But you yourself have to make the evaluation or or you have to like have someone you trust, you follow their process.
Science and Policy: Critiquing 'Trust the Science'
00:15:18
Speaker
And the evaluation is always going to be very interdisciplinary.
00:15:21
Speaker
So what you have to watch out for with the COVID example, and then we'll we'll turn it to climate, is somebody in one particular discipline trying to dictate action. And they appeal to their authority and they say, hey, we the experts believe this.
00:15:33
Speaker
And a they can distort about what the experts believe. And B, they can definitely distort what the implications are for action. So this is what's happened in in climate where the disseminators of climate science have dramatically overstated the negative implications of climate science, just even on climate.
00:15:54
Speaker
But the real crime has been the lack of what you call the holistic thinking. So they've just focused on negative climate side effects. They've ignored largely positive climate side effects.
00:16:05
Speaker
They have ignored what I would call mastery or ah resilience. So the the energy makes us far safer. So even if we had a little more drought, we have the ability to irrigate.
00:16:15
Speaker
And it turns out that's much more important than any change in drought that's occurred or is plausible. So they're not even on the climate thing. They're just looking at climate negatives. They're not even looking at climate livability. And then climate livability is only part of the bigger picture of like food and clothing and shelter, et cetera. So what's happened is they've taken the prestige of climate research, which is Not perfect at all, but it has a lot of virtues. They've taken that prestige and they're taking it to dictate an insane energy policy, but they're using the prestige to dictate it. But if you understand, wait, they've distorted the research and they've they've drawn crazy implications or evaluations from it, then you can you can square all that. you can say, yeah, we value experts, but we need accurate syntheses, accurate dissemination, and we certainly need a holistic evaluation. That's really clear that theyve they failed.
00:17:06
Speaker
Yeah, that's very well explained. And we heard so often from politicians that now, tired line, trust the science as if that was somehow, you know, an end in and of itself.
00:17:19
Speaker
But the science never tells you what to do.
Economic Impact of Climate Policies
00:17:22
Speaker
And if somebody's appealing to authority, if they're saying the science, like a specific scientific conclusion tells you what to do, they're obviously manipulating you.
00:17:33
Speaker
And in a bad way, in an unethical way. And then you should also be suspicious of what even they say the science is, because because you know that they're not trying to inform you, they're trying to manipulate you.
00:17:47
Speaker
And so if they're willing to manipulate you by having you ignore all the holistic considerations, they're likely to manipulate you by focusing only on negatives within the science or exaggerating things, et cetera, because clearly they think the end of whatever goal they're trying to achieve justifies the means of misleading you using by false appeals to science.
00:18:09
Speaker
Perhaps the most important consideration amongst that those collective considerations is the economic implications of climate policy. In the UK at the moment, we have a government that has said their number one objective is that they are going for growth, that they are prioritising economic growth.
00:18:27
Speaker
Now, a
Net Zero and Economic Growth Debate
00:18:28
Speaker
lot of people would argue that... That's exactly right. Yeah, a lot of people would argue that higher regulation and higher taxes isn't exactly the best way to go for growth. But at the same time, they are still pushing towards this net zero policy.
00:18:42
Speaker
The question would be, or the prefacing question would be, can you simultaneously have a net zero climate policy and a focus on economic growth? Are they compatible?
00:18:57
Speaker
trying to think of an analogy to express how absurd that is. i can't think of one at the moment, but I mean, it's it's the it's the opposite. So there's nothing that could be worse for growth than a net zero policy. Because what a net zero policy basically means, let's even be charitable, is we are going to make energy far, far, far more expensive and less reliable.
00:19:24
Speaker
i would think ultimately if you're, if you're literally try to do net zero on the timetables they're talking about, I just think everything will collapse and you'll just descend into chaos and mass death. But even if you were to be charitable, it's just, there's just no plausibility whatsoever of having a net zero energy system.
00:19:40
Speaker
And that's, by the way, why they need to force it on us, right? If it were just that, hey, these economics of solar and whatever batteries are just so great, then great, let's get out of the way. I'm all for those things being free to compete.
00:19:52
Speaker
But the reason they have to set it as a goal and then and then coerce people, and the coercion is going to get a lot worse. So people have to realize with all these net zero targets, when they're safely in the future of 2050 and it's, you know, 2015, well, they only will do modest coercion. You can already see very negative consequences in the UK in terms of energy bills and people freezing to death who shouldn't and and this kind of thing.
00:20:16
Speaker
that you know, certain sectors of the economy getting offshored. But it's nothing compared to what's happening, what's going to happen if you continue to to pursue it. So it's it's, yeah, it's just, I mean, they I guess the key thing is just that there's nothing resembling, there's nothing for the foreseeable future that's close to fossil fuels in terms of having energy that's affordable, reliable, versatile is really key to power every type of machine, including airplanes and container ships and lot of industrial equipment and that kind of thing, a lot of industrial heat.
00:20:46
Speaker
And then scalable, available to billions of people in thousands of places. There's just nothing close to fossil fuels. And if there were, again, they wouldn't have to force it on us. So you're basically saying we're going to make energy far more expensive and unreliable, which means that every industry is going to be far less, far more expensive and less reliable, which means that if you try to do that, a lot of your industry is just going to disappear.
00:21:11
Speaker
and and and go to other places. And that means your productivity is going to be way lower domestically where you're going have lower income. And then if the world does this, then everyone is going to be poor. So it's just an unbelievable, it's like the worst possible, it's the worst possible thing to ban.
00:21:28
Speaker
Because now you can just think of it as net zero is just banning fossil fuels. that
Green Technology: Economic Opportunity or Not?
00:21:31
Speaker
That's what it boils down to. So you're literally banning the most fundamentally economically beneficial product in the economy.
00:21:39
Speaker
So is that good for the economy? No. Like if you look, if you ban Barbie dolls, that's bad and it's sad, right? And kids are going to be deprived of joy and stuff like that. doesn't destroy your whole economy. But energy is the industry that powers every other industry.
00:21:51
Speaker
if you ban the essential and far superior form of energy, then you just destroy your economy. And so what what you're seeing now is just the very beginning of that. Now, I don't think that the UK or anyone else is going to go goingnna go fully there.
00:22:06
Speaker
But it's the wrong direction. And there's already a lot of hardship. And one of the problems is that the people who cause the hardship are always blaming everyone else. So the anti-fossil fuel people have not at all taken accountability for all the global energy-related crises they have created and all the the industrial suffering in Germany and the UK, et cetera.
00:22:25
Speaker
And that's part of it is they're not they're not just going to, the leaders of it don't even really care about growth. I mean, the leaders are really anti-growth. So for them, the anti the poverty is a feature, not a bug.
00:22:36
Speaker
But they'll they'll keep lying and saying, oh, if we had only done more solar more quickly, then you would all be prosperous. In the UK, mind you. Let's knock down a couple of the arguments that would come back at you from those particular advocates of net zero.
00:22:53
Speaker
The first would be that this represents an economic opportunity as opposed to being economically limiting. you know You hear about these kind of green technology and green green industries and and this is where the future, ah kind of a future growth engine will be.
00:23:07
Speaker
How do you respond to to that argument? Yeah, I mean, it's like saying I have an amazing economic opportunity. I have this green phone that's so much better than the iPhone, but i I refuse to make it on my own and compete with the iPhone. First, we need to ban the iPhone and in fact, all smartphones.
00:23:21
Speaker
And then these green phones made of bamboo, I promise these will work out. Like that you would obviously think that person is just a crank, right? you never let them dictate policy. Obviously the way that if you have an exciting opportunity, we have giant capital markets, we have lots of capital that's eager to find a home.
00:23:38
Speaker
just prove it. It's very easy. So the the it's just, there's no, if somebody wants to ban the current superior and desperately needed essential product, it doesn't mean they have something better.
00:23:52
Speaker
It means they have no idea they They either know that that there that there is no replacement or they're an idiot. But in either case, they shouldn't be. just so My response to that is great. I'm so glad you're excited about these technologies. They haven't worked out very well for you for the past couple decades, but but feel free to try them.
00:24:11
Speaker
But let's make sure that there are no bans on anything. The other argument, of course, is that whilst it hasn't always been the case, we are now at a point where alternative energy sources, particularly wind and solar, are as cost effective, if not more cost effective, than fossil fuels.
00:24:29
Speaker
Again, it's... Talk
Renewable vs. Fossil Fuel Costs
00:24:30
Speaker
me through the pricing side. but So I always have two minds here because one is, yes, I could explain, and I'm happy to do it for a minute, the actual economics of these things. But the thing is, your viewers won't be able to follow, the follow my explanation, but you know you have to sort of look into a lot of different things to so and it's going to change all the time. But what I want to say, that's why I keep stressing the first thing that's obvious is if this is true, then you don't need to ban the competition.
00:25:00
Speaker
It's just so so, so you should always know that there's some fraud going on. And then, yeah, in the case of solar and wind, it's pretty easy because one of the things is they, they are, they're equating apples and rotten oranges.
00:25:13
Speaker
So the apples are reliable energy. That's what fossil fuels produce is reliable energy. They produce reliable energy and not just electricity, by the way, they produce energy for like industrial heat. They produce energy to fly planes, to move ships, et cetera.
00:25:29
Speaker
So, On the one hand, we have the apples, which are reliable energy. And then the rotten oranges are unreliable electricity. So it's not even most forms of energy that we use. It's just electricity and it's unreliable.
00:25:41
Speaker
So you you have these idiot ah studies that say things like, well, the levelized cost of energy for solar and wind is lower now than fossil fuels. And I'm sure the BBC, certainly the New York Times will post a nice headline. but But what they're measuring explicitly, if you take that this LCOE thing, which this firm Lazard has pioneered, it explicitly says,
00:26:00
Speaker
excludes reliability-related considerations. Well, who the hell wants unreliable electricity? So it's it's so stupid to say, well, yes, i have an ah i mean I have a child, so I think about this now in terms of babysitters.
00:26:13
Speaker
Like if you say, okay, well, there's this company and it has reliable babysitters and they're going to charge us, whatever, 25 bucks an hour. Great. And then there's this other company that says, no, we have unreliable babysitters. So we don't know if they're going to show up and we don't know if they're going to leave while you need them.
00:26:30
Speaker
And they cost $15 an hour. You guys can convert to pounds. Like that's not that's. and And then they announce, wow, unreliable babysitting company has cheaper babysitters now than reliable babies.
00:26:43
Speaker
Who cares? It's so stupid. So A, you need to be always with electricity. You need to do apples to apples in terms of reliable electricity. And with the solar and wind, you always need to look at what is the full cost needed to take this unreliable and and intermittent input and make it into a reliable output.
00:27:01
Speaker
And that's why the cost increases, because you ultimately need a full backup grid. Either like but you need enough fossil fuels to just power a grid itself, and or you need like huge amounts of batteries, and even then that can only fix it a little bit at the margin. So that's why these places that add all of this cheap solar and wind end up having more expensive electricity. And insofar as they try to keep it cheap by cutting back on the reliable sources, then they have reliability problems, which we have certainly in California where I live, which we have in Texas, et cetera. So that those are the specifics of it. They're equating, again, reliable energy with unreliable electricity.
00:27:39
Speaker
But you should know that something is wrong when they say, we've got this great new cheap technology, but in order for you to have it, we need to ban what you're using now.
Nuclear Energy's Potential
00:27:49
Speaker
How does nuclear play into this story? So in my home country of Australia, there's been a vicious debate around nuclear energy. The right-wing conservative National Coalition Party advocated a nuclear policy and ironically, it was the left-wing parties, the so-called parties that are for you know net zero energy sources that were opposing them.
00:28:12
Speaker
Is nuclear a viable alternative? Well, first, think that your observation shows, so part of what I'm trying to show is that a lot of the stuff that people claim is driven by interest in humanity and by economics is really ultimately driven by a philosophy that says impact is bad and we just want to get rid of impact, even though that's going to hurt human life.
00:28:34
Speaker
by definition, because life is basically an impact for any species, including ours. So the nuclear thing is revealing because they say, hey, we want net zero and and cheap energy and reliable energy, but we're going to put off the table the thing that historically has most provided this in terms of, particularly in the 60s and 70s, in the United States and other places, nuclear energy provided affordable, reliable electricity that had the potential to scale anywhere.
00:29:02
Speaker
Hydro has provided reliable, affordable energy that's non-carbon, but it's limited by location. You can't just do hydro everywhere. So nuclear is the one with a proven track record where you can basically run a country on it huge, huge portions of a country, which we've never seen with certainly solar and wind and batteries or anything.
00:29:20
Speaker
like that I guess the other thing is in you know in and Iceland, they use quite a bit of geothermal, but that's even, they have very, very unusual geology that allows that kind of geothermal to work. So basically nuclear has been for decades by far the most promising non-carbon thing.
00:29:35
Speaker
So it's really odd that people who wanna be non-carbon want to ban the most promising non-carbon thing. So it's, again, why do they want to ban it? Now, in this case, they'll say, oh, well, it's dangerous and blah, blah, blah. But in reality, it's it's actually the safest form of energy for a whole bunch of ah reasons.
00:29:51
Speaker
When stuff goes wrong with nuclear, it's A, incredibly rare, and B, it's incredibly slow. So you have a lot of time to react. doesn't explode like other things. So the The safety ah overall is is actually by far the best. So ultimately it comes down to the people in charge who are saying they want to be net zero. It's not because they want a more stable climate to benefit human life.
00:30:13
Speaker
It's just because they're against impact. So just as they think it's wrong for us to impact the atmosphere with more CO2, even if overall we're better off, so they think it's wrong for us to impact the world by splitting the atom or creating what they call nuclear waste, which is really just used fuel, because it's like, well, that's going to be around a long time. but Okay, who cares? it's It's pretty easy to deal with.
00:30:32
Speaker
Why is it wrong for humans to create something that's been around a long time? Just like plastic. They hate plastic because it's around a long time. Well, you can turn it into energy, but also why aren't we allowed to create something that's allowed to be around a long time?
00:30:43
Speaker
Again, it's an anti-human perspective. so So that's what the opposition is. Now, the opportunity is if you can get rid of that opposition, there we do have evidence that it can be a very viable thing, but it does...
00:30:56
Speaker
It
Symbolic Climate Actions
00:30:57
Speaker
requires overcoming a lot of the bad policy, which is something i'm I'm working on a lot in the U.S. and trying to encourage others to do. But it is it is hard to do with that, with the anti-nuclear stuff, plus just the in general hostility toward permitting, toward building things, etc.
00:31:15
Speaker
Insofar as nuclear large-scale stuff, it's going to be disproportionately harmed. by that. I mean, this is one of the nice things about solar is very problematic and batteries are problematic too, but batteries in particular, like they're limited. But one nice thing about them is you can manufacture them and they can be kind of chunked up in small ways and they can be moved around. And and unfortunately, in our current regulatory state, it's harder to do big things. So you find that the things that most succeed aren't the things that are optimal.
00:31:44
Speaker
but the things that are possible. It's one reason why oil, particularly in the United States, does really well, because you can get a ton of it in a very small space, and a lot of those spaces are in Texas. So just takes a few days to get a permit, and they can do that, versus where you have to build across a long swath of area, then things take forever. So it's another thing to fix. So we can fix nuclear, but it's definitely not a near-term replacement for fossil fuels.
00:32:10
Speaker
We'll finish with though with some of the policy work that you are doing in the US. But before we do, I am interested in another in another way that this anti-human mindset so obviously manifests itself in the po political realm.
00:32:25
Speaker
And that is that net zero policies in countries like the United Kingdom and Australia, by definition, symbolic policies in the sense that Australia and the United Kingdom cannot influence the global climate.
00:32:38
Speaker
you know, in the way that potentially, say, policies in China or the United States or India can. Why, this is a choose-your-own-adventure question perhaps, but I've never really heard a sufficient response to why these countries are so obviously damaging their economies for no impact on the climate, as opposed to potentially treating this like a foreign policy issue and putting more pressure on the likes of China and India,
00:33:06
Speaker
to change their policies, which doesn't seem to enter enter the equation when you speak to climate change advocates. It's the right question, but then it's another thing where it is explained by the anti-human thing, because it's an end in itself. for This is not all the people in the movement by any stretch, but for the leaders who really know what's going on, for them, it's an end in itself to stop impact.
00:33:30
Speaker
And stopping impact, means like green means poverty. That's what it really means, to to reduce impact. Now, yeah People think of green as we want to reduce pollution. Well, yeah, you want to reduce pollution insofar as it overall benefits life. You definitely don't want reduce pollution to nothing.
00:33:45
Speaker
But but if if you want to reduce pollution, you talk in terms of minimizing negative impacts or or unhealthy impacts. You don't talk about minimizing impact because the whole I mean, the whole way you reduce pollution and make a good environment in the first place involves a lot of impact.
00:33:57
Speaker
It's not like nature gives us all this Evian and Perrier and we just ruin the water. Like, we need to create clean water systems, right? We need to create abundant food. we where Impact is needed to make our environment actually a livable place and in every environment.
00:34:12
Speaker
dimension. So I do think that for the leaders, they just the idea that the UK will be using less energy and having less impact, that's that's an end in itself, even if it doesn't happen other places. Now, what they would say is they'd say, well, we're going to be a leader, right? We're going to be a leader, but this goes back to the coercion piece.
00:34:33
Speaker
It doesn't make sense to say we're going to be a leader I mean, what's the best version of it? I guess they could say, well, we're going to be a leader because we're going to ban fossil fuels here. And then we're going to magically discover these alternatives that we wouldn't otherwise discover.
00:34:47
Speaker
And then the whole world is going to use those. I guess that would be the best ah version. of But what evidence is is so but the thing is the thing you're banning fossil fuels is the thing that makes the prosperity of your country possible, including the potential for innovation.
00:35:01
Speaker
Believe me, if you are just suffering, if everyone is getting miserable, that is not the context in which you are going to come up with a lot of new
Climate Actions as Religious Rituals
00:35:09
Speaker
innovations. In general, you come up with innovations during periods of prosperity. For example, in the United States, we had the shale revolution, which has benefited us and people around the world.
00:35:17
Speaker
Like that came about in a period of prosperity. Didn't come out when oil prices were $20 and everyone was just... shutting down. It came hang him up when we had more money to research and experiment because it takes so long to make things work. So it doesn't make, so that was the best argument that you're banning it so you come up with some innovation, but that's that's not how innovation ah works. Innovation of this kind requires a lot of prosperity to do. So in the end, it's just For some people, it's just the anti-humanism.
00:35:46
Speaker
And then related to that, there's this, I think you mentioned symbolism, where, and this is, it has a very strong religious quality, the whole anti-impact climate catastrophe movement.
00:35:58
Speaker
And if you think of it as there's signaling with rituals, it helps you understand how they how they function. Because, the you know, for a while in the U.S. at least it was, well, buy a Prius.
00:36:10
Speaker
and then buy a Tesla. And then people are mad at Elon. So I don't know what it is at the moment, but it's, you know, maybe ride a bicycle or whatever whatever it is. But it's it's just do this thing. And you think, well, let's take the Elon example. How is paying Elon Musk to buy me a very labor-intensive second car, saving the planet from CO2 emissions? Yeah.
00:36:33
Speaker
Because the grid, if you ignore all the emissions in creating it and you ignore the fact that the grid isn't very green, but you're hoping it'll be green and doesn't make any sense, right? But people, because the atmosphere is anti-impact and and specifically anti-climate impact, people feel like, oh, I've done my little my little religious ritual in order to satisfy that. And that that that is a lot of it with these things. And you're It's like you have to think of it that way, that if you think of it as a religious ritual, it explains a lot of the particularly the mass following of it.
Religious Mindsets in Climate Beliefs
00:37:06
Speaker
I sometimes wonder whether the decline in organized religion in Western countries, which has been slower in the U.S. than in countries like the U.K. and and Australia. But nonetheless, there has been a decline in organized religion.
00:37:16
Speaker
I do sometimes wonder whether that has created a vacuum for things like climate science almost to take their place. so I have a different view. So i'm not I'm not religious at all myself, and I'm the leader of the pro-human movement. So obviously it's not a necessary thing to be religious. Otherwise, i would have to be religious.
00:37:33
Speaker
I think it's the, it's more that, I think it's actually more that people have, like religion is very dominant.
00:37:43
Speaker
I mean, it's been dominant around the world, and and even in the Western tradition, it's dominant. And often people take they've They've been, like, we've had religion so long that they they hit take a religious approach even to even when they think they're being non-religious. Like, there's there's examples of this effort. I'm a big fan of Ayn Rand, the objectivist philosopher who wrote Fountainhead and Out.
00:38:05
Speaker
um Like, one of her arguments, and and I think this is true, it's a very controversial argument, but um I find it very convincing, is, like, the whole emphasis on sacrifice and morality and, like, what it means to be a good person is just to sacrifice and to give up et cetera, that comes from like, like that, that's been the view in primitive religions and more modern religions, et cetera, like sacrifice, you know, sacrifice for a sun god or sacrifice for something.
00:38:30
Speaker
And like that that, that when the secular people got into morality, they never really questioned that premise. And her, and her argument was, well, in particular, that might've been plausible because before it was proven by the Industrial Revolution that human beings can live in total harmony so we can have mutually beneficial prosperity. We don't have to sacrifice.
00:38:52
Speaker
We don't have to have predators and victims. We can just all benefit. Like capitalism has shown that, but it that wasn't true, you know, a thousand years ago. So her view, which I agree with, is capitalism and and the Industrial Revolution really showed that we can have a fundamentally non-sacrificial, happy, mutually beneficial society.
00:39:10
Speaker
way of life So that's ah that's one perspective. But here, you have to notice that the way people think of the environmental issues, it has a lot in, it has a ah religious model to it, right? So there's ah there's a hell, right? There's global warming.
00:39:27
Speaker
There's a hell. There's sort of like a, the number one thou shalt is like thou shalt not impact. and the And there's an idea of like a vengeful kind of supernatural thing, which is the, you know, which is, you know, non-human nature. It's like if we impact non-human nature, if we don't impact it, it'll be nice to us and give us nice things.
00:39:47
Speaker
But if we violate it and we make it angry, then it's going to punish us. So and think people have to realize that the the religious model has been very much copied, at least by the modern environmental system.
00:40:00
Speaker
movement. Now, you can argue very compellingly, it's a lot worse in this case, because it's an anti-human one. I mean, it's like directly, directly anti-human.
00:40:12
Speaker
Like you can argue sacrifice harms people, and I'm not in favor of sacrifice. But in this case, it's it's literally sacrifice in the form of not impacting nature, which is how you you survive.
00:40:22
Speaker
And
Shifting Climate Discourse to Human-Centric Goals
00:40:23
Speaker
who's really the beneficiary? There's not even a beneficiary. It's just the the the The goal is a is in is an earth without human impact. So the goal is just fundamentally human destruction. That's that's really the goal.
00:40:37
Speaker
If you say your goal is to minimize impact, no nothing benefits consistently from that. Even the rest of nature, it's not like the other species are going to be so happy. If we're gone, a lot of them will be worse off. but So it's really just destroying humanity as an end in itself.
00:40:51
Speaker
So that's why it's it's the most anti-human religion ever created. I think this is a good segue into how do we go about changing the public discourse? Because, of course, a religious belief is much harder to change in someone than perhaps their understanding of of ah of a situation where it isn't as deeply held.
00:41:13
Speaker
How do you go about... breaking down that that belief when, again, there's so many people, and again, at an institutional level, it is an article of faith? How do you change the conversation? I think it's quite a bit easier than like the religion that somebody grew up with. mean, if you look statistically, like the religion people grow up with, very, I don't know what the numbers are in different places, but very, very high percentage of continuation, right? If somebody's born even within us a sect of Christianity or Islam or something like that, like
00:41:45
Speaker
I mean, well, well over 50%. Political party's pretty strong too, not quite as strong. What I found with the environmental issues though is it's it's it has the quality of a religion, but it also has the it's it has the explicit claim that it's about science.
00:42:04
Speaker
And that's its that's its weapon and its undoing. Because its its weapon is you get a lot of people to take on this anti-human faith because they want to be scientific. But because it's supposedly scientific, you can you can analyze it in a way that that people are are open to because they're not they're not ultimately claiming you have to believe in a supernatural thing and and take it on faith. There's no, they they won't say you have to take anything on faith.
00:42:29
Speaker
So if you take them at their word, okay, you're not asking me to take anything on faith. Well, let's look at let's Let's talk about this issue. So let's talk about climate. what's What's our goal with respect to climate? Do we want a livable climate or do we just want a non-impacted climate?
00:42:43
Speaker
Because non-impacted climate we had for a long time and we all died from climate all the time. So that's the anti-human. Do you want a livable climate or non-impacted? And if you get, we want a livable climate, okay, great. Well, obviously we need a lot of energy to become really resilient so we can deal with all the the naturally dangerous things climate does in anything we add positively or negatively. No matter what, it's going to be a dangerous system. So we you can start to have the discussion that we've had.
00:43:08
Speaker
And I find that In particular, you talk about the goal. I mean, talk about the goal. So again, is the goal livable climate, livable environment, or an unimpacted one? That's a big distinction. Another thing is, do you have this dogma that the rest of nature, specifically the unimpacted climate, is what I call a delicate nurturer?
00:43:27
Speaker
So is it this nice nurturing thing that's nice to us if we don't impact it and it's mean to us if we do? So it's without us, it's stable, won't change much. It's sufficient. It gives us what we need.
00:43:39
Speaker
It's safe. Or in reality, is it actually dynamic, deficient, doesn't give us everything we need, and it's very dangerous. Like, well, obviously it's dynamic, deficient, and dangerous, right? I call this the wild potential view.
00:43:52
Speaker
So you get if you change the the anti-human goal and then the anti-human dogma about the way the thing works, because it really is an anti-human thing to say, oh, it's nice to us as long as we don't impact anything. That's an anti-human dogma.
00:44:04
Speaker
view. If you get rid of those and then you show, hey, with fossil fuels, they're being very biased. They're only looking at and ah the negative impacts on human life and other things and not the positives.
00:44:15
Speaker
Then you start to get, oh, there's something wrong with the whole framework. It's got anti-human values, anti-human assumptions, and in a very biased, ultimately anti-human way of things. So i I found that it's infinite, I mean, much probably At least 10 times, i mean, I'm focused on this issue, so it's not like I'm going around trying to change everyone's religion, but based on my experience with those kinds of conversations, it's at least 10 times easier, maybe 50 times easier, to change somebody's mind on this kind of thing. Now, there are some people who are like totally dogmatic or they're committed anti-human,
00:44:48
Speaker
But I don't think it's it's most people because you can change their framework and then you can educate them about some of the specific issues. And they they start to see over time, yeah, wait, those net zero people said they would make us really rich and we'd have booming industry. And yet the opposite has happened.
00:45:01
Speaker
What's going on?
Following Alex Epstein's Work
00:45:03
Speaker
Yeah. Well, Alex, in addition to going out and getting a copy of Fossil Future, which I could not recommend more highly to everyone, ah how can viewers and listeners keep up to date with what you're doing and read and hear more of your stuff?
00:45:16
Speaker
Maybe the best thing is I have this Substack newsletter called Alex. You can just go alexepstein.substack.com. it it It also, a lot of that stuff posts on a website called energytalkingpoints.com, but the Substack is the easiest way to follow the new stuff.
00:45:29
Speaker
Also related, we I have an AI that I know some people in the UK like, so it's alexepstein.ai. You can use it for free and it's It's very good at answering a lot of these questions. We've probably at this point invested close to a million dollars in it. So it's very powerful custom AI that's designed to make me pretty ah scalable because I've got a lot of things going on.
00:45:48
Speaker
ah i've I've started to do, ah I've been playing around with a little bit of policy work in the UK. So hopefully there will be more of that if you follow my sub stack. At the moment, I'm very, very immersed in the US policy stuff. So if you if you read my stuff, then you might,
00:46:05
Speaker
like hopefully you can transpose it to the UK issues, but I am very focused on US stuff. If the US gets their policy right, I do hope that the rest of the world follows suit.
00:46:16
Speaker
Alex, thank you so much for your time today. false Fossil Future is one of the most important books I've ever read. I think it is just a stunning contribution to one of the most important issues of our time.
00:46:27
Speaker
Thank you for writing it and thank you for coming on the show today. Thank you, Will. Great to talk to you.