Modern Wisdom - #324 - Alex Epstein - Can Fossil Fuels Save The World?

Episode Date: May 22, 2021

Alex Epstein is an energy theorist, the founder and president of the Center for Industrial Progress and an author. During any discussion about fossil fuels, the focus only ever seems to be on the negative side effects, but what about the positives? Alex believes that we need more, not less fossil fuels to improve global human flourishing, and today he makes his case. Expect to learn why solar & wind energy can't fix our energy problems, how nuclear plants have become so demonised, why Alex thinks that climate change activists fundamentally hate humanity, his views on Extinction Rebellion, why fossil fuels reduce environmental catastrophes and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://puresportcbd.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW20) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels - https://amzn.to/2QyDkeE Follow Alex on Twitter - https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Alex Epstein. He's an energy theorist, the founder and president of the Center for Industrial Progress and an author, and we are talking about whether fossil fuels can save the world. During any discussion about fossil fuels, the focus only ever seems to be on the negative side effects. But what about the positives? Alex believes that we need more, not less fossil fuels,

to improve global human flourishing, and today he makes his case. Expect to learn why solar and wind energy can't fix our energy problems, how nuclear plants have become so demonized, why Alex thinks that climate activists fundamentally hate humanity, his views on extinction rebellion, why fossil fuels reduce environmental catastrophes and much more. Alex is just like a magnet for really passionate conversations where people completely detest the position that he's putting forward. So he's a very robust guy. It's taking this particular narrative, pushing this type of an agenda in 2021 with so much climate activism coming from the other side of the fence is a superbly brave. And as with everything, if you want

to fully understand the situation, you can't just hear one side's narrative. And today Alex gives us a great run-through of exactly why fossil fuels might not be as bad as we've been led to believe. Don't forget if you aren't already signed up to my three-minute Monday newsletter you can go and do that right now at chriswillx.com slash life hacks You'll also get a free copy of my ultimate life hacks list with 200 ways that you can upgrade your life instantly And it will add you to that three-minute Monday newsletter list. But for now, it is time for the wise and wonderful Alex Epstein. I'll accept Stein, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me.

You're a philosopher. What are you doing talking about fossil fuels? Yeah, it's kind of an interesting thing. I don't know. A lot of people who follow me probably not. Most people have seen this clip where I'm testifying in front of the Senate in front of Barbara interesting thing. I don't know. A lot of people who follow me probably not. Most people have seen this clip where I'm testifying in front of the Senate in front of Barbara Boxer. And I'm from California, so she's my senator.

And I give this whole presentation explaining why I think that some of the then Obama administration's policies were in the wrong direction. And she just like dismisses all of that. And she just asked me, Mr. Epstein, she that's how she pronounced my name. That's the nice one. Are you a scientist? And I said, no, I'm a philosopher. She said, oh, you know, why do I have a philosopher? And I said,

it's to teach you how to think more clearly. And that's really how I think about it. I mean, my, so my background is actually I sort of was an aspiring tech entrepreneur until I was 20. I sort of went to very elite math science computer science high school. I was when I went sort of went to a very elite math science, computer science, high school. I was one I went to Duke. That's what I was planning on being a tech entrepreneur. And actually I fell in love with philosophy because I found that for me it was the most practical subject. Because philosophy deals, you can think of it as three things. It deals with our methods, our assumptions, and our values. And we could go into any of those and we may end up mentioning all of them. But all three of those things are fundamental to every kind of thought process that exists.

So for example, like the world is obsessed with renewable energy. Why is the world obsessed with renewable energy instead of say cost effective energy or even low carbon energy? Why renewable? And I would argue that's ultimately a value issue. People think there's a certain value in doing something that can be repeated over and over and over again, or something that is sort of drawing on more supposedly natural forces like the Sun and the Wind versus digging stuff up from the ground. That's a moral issue, a value issue. That's not an issue of, it's not like a scientific issue, but people think it's a scientific issue.

And so it doesn't strike most people as bad that we oppose nuclear, even though that's a non-carbon source of energy that I believe is much more promising than solar energy. And so it's just one example among many of how methods, assumptions, and values shape everything. And so my goal was to be a practical philosopher. And so for the first seven years of my career, I just wrote about everything. And so my goal was to be a practical philosopher. And so for the first seven years of my career, I just wrote about everything. And I was just trying to apply philosophy to help people think more clearly about every issue. So it was like cloning, foreign policy, the economy. And then with energy, it was the first thing that I really wanted to become an expert in.

And I think the thing that appealed to me about it was, this is the industry that powers every other industry. So sort of like philosophy is the science that guides every other science. And I do think of philosophy as a science. Like, energy is the industry that powers every other industry. And so our thinking about energy affects everything. So if we make a decision, you know, that doubles the price of oil, like that has ramifications for everything in the world because energy's what powers our machines and our machines are what accomplish just about all the productive work that exists in the world.

So that's why I got interested in it and why I think philosophy has to deal with energy in general and then how we think about fossil fuels in particular. You talk about the fact that the fossil fuels, climate change debate has a lot of actors contributing to it, from physicists to climatologists to meteorologists to the numbers people, to the policymakers, and quite rightly, that thing about if you're in a dark room trying

to touch an elephant and you could feel different bits of it, no one really has that entire perspective. Is there a role on both sides of this debate? Do you think for someone to come in like yourself, who is perhaps an all-rounder, and can start to pull together what all of this means, as opposed to just looking very narrow and deep within one domain? Yeah, I mean, I'm biased, but I think so,

and I think so in two different respects. So one is just with any interdisciplinary question, where nobody is going to be a specialist in all the different elements. So if you just think of the issue of climate, I mean, it clearly involves, or should clearly involve things like, just all the physical things related to how rising CO2 levels affect the global climate system.

But then because the rising CO2 levels come from using fossil fuels, it involves all of our economy. It involves energy economics, questions like, can solar and wind actually replace what fossil fuels do that kind of thing. So it's clearly an interdisciplinary question. So you need some sort of generalist who has hopefully good judgment to then survey the relevant experts and decide, you know, or at least make a good judgment, you know, what's the best thing?

So I think that's true, and then I do try to do that. I think the more important thing though that people don't understand is that it's very possible for almost everybody to be thinking incorrectly about an issue. And so I just want to summarize very quickly why I think almost everyone thinks incorrectly about the issue of climate.

And this is independent of what the scientific facts happen to be. So I'll try to make this quick, but I think it's important. I think there are three principles of thinking about our impact on climate that almost everyone will agree with, but almost nobody uses. And so that's an always an interesting situation where everyone agrees that it's right, if presented to them, but nobody uses it. So one is that we should think of what we call climate change, right? I'd say climate impact. We should think of it as a side effect of fossil fuel use. So just like I think, you know, I decide to take a COVID-19 vaccine.

I evaluate the benefits and the side effects. You need to do that with everything. So when you're thinking of climate impacts, you need to not just think of the climate impacts and certainly not just the negative ones. You need to think of the benefits that come along with them. So that's one principle. And I think that's pretty flagrantly violated. People just say, oh, listen to the scientists by which they mean climate scientists, but

they don't talk about the benefits of fossil fuels. But obviously we should. The second thing is we need to not look only at the benefits of fossil fuels in general. We need to look at the benefits of fossil fuels that specifically neutralize climate danger and can neutralize the negative potential impacts of rising CO2. So, you know, when I take a COVID-19 vaccine, it has some side effects, you know, the pretty minor,

in my experience, and I think most people's. But you still have those side effects. The vaccine itself doesn't cure its own side effects. Right, and that's true with antibiotics and other things. What's interesting about fossil fuels is they do often cure their own side effects because what fossil fuels are providing is energy and energy allows us to use machines to produce value for us and so you see in the issue of climate. We can use let's say let's say rising CO2 levels cause some challenge with drought okay but fossil fuels also power the machines that alleviate drought. So you have to factor that in. And when you look at the last 100 years, it's really interesting because over the last century, if you tally, how many people are dying from climate related

disasters, like extreme temperatures, drought, wildfire storm sleds, those are down 98%. So that's really astounding. Like you're likely to have dying from a climate related disaster is 150th of what it used to be despite rising CO2 levels for the last 100 plus years. So that either means that the rising CO2 levels haven't done any net damage or that they have sort of been a net negative, but the positive of what I call climate mastery from fossil fuels has far, far outweighed it. So when you're when we're thinking we have to look at the benefits, but specifically the climate mastery benefits. And then the third thing, and this really brings up

the issue of values, is when we're looking at the climate impacts of fossil fuels, we cannot assume that they are mostly oral, negative, let alone catastrophic. We're certainly open to that possibility. But we need to be open to positive, neutral, and negative impacts. And so one example that I found very revealing, because I didn't even think about it before I started studying this, is the obvious phenomenon

of the fertilizer effect, which is that when we put more CO2 in the atmosphere, you have a lot more plant growth. And it's really astounding how much global greening there has been that can be directly attributed to rising CO2. And in the history of the planet, it kind of makes sense because we're less than one tenth the historical high of CO2. And a lot of the history, the history of life on this planet where life really flourished was when you had plants big enough to feed dinosaurs. And they needed a lot more CO2 than we could possibly provide. So that doesn't mean it's all good. It just means we cannot have the bias that it's bad. Even with warmth, we can't have the bias that it's bad. It turns out cold-related deaths exceed heat-related deaths by a factor of 15.

And in general, and every climate scientists will agree with this, in general, the way global warming works is it warms mostly places that are the colder, more polar regions of the Earth. It warms more during the colder seasons like winter, and it warms more at night, which are generally the times we want warmth. So it's not to say it can't cause negatives, but we have to be open to positive, neutral and negatives. And what I see with climate is people have this assumption that if we impact climate, it's

wrong. It must be a disaster and we should immediately get rid of fossil fuels. And I think that's ultimately a kind of a moral and ultimately religious assumption. I think that the root of all of what I call climate catastrophe and we'll go into the details, but is not that there's actually an existential catastrophe for human beings. I don't think there's any evidence of that.

I do think we impact the climate, a significant amount. But I think it's based on this idea that it's immoral for us to impact the climate. And when we do something we think is immoral, we expect it to be bad. It's a lot like religion where if you do the wrong thing, like if you violate the commandments, then you go to hell. And I think that the whole global warming climate catastrophe is really kind of a secularized religious hell narrative. Because I think if you look at the benefits of

fossil fuels, the climate mastery benefits and you actually look at the impacts, I don't even think you can show the impacts, the climate impacts on their own or net negative. I don't think anyone can prove that. Let alone that they're so bad that we should do without the energy that billions of us use to flourish and that billions more need. Can you sink into that a little bit more, the perfect planet premise? I think you call it. Yeah, and sometimes I call it the delicate nurture premise. And I think of it as just so you get that I call the overall thing the the anti impact framework. And so that you can summarize the anti impact framework as it's more it's intrinsically

immoral for us to impact nature significantly. And then it's it's inevitably self destructive. And so delicate nurture, perfect planet deals with inevitably self-destructive. And so, delicate nurture, a perfect planet deals with inevitably self-destructive. So, if we have significant impact on nature, then somehow it's going to come back to bite us. And delicate nurture is the idea that nature in its unimpacted state. So, before we start allegedly screwing it up, is a sufficient, safe, and stable, delicate balance.

And so, you can see this in something like, you know, the Lion King, which I don't want to, which I like a lot as a movie in a lot of ways, but, you know, they talk about it at the beginning, you know, the delicate balance and the circle of life. And you have this idea that kind of everything is in harmony. And then if you disrupt that, then everything is gonna sort of go to hell.

And this is not at all, this is unfortunately passes as a scientific view, but this is not a scientific view. This is just a faith-based view because there's no evidence for this at all. If you look at the history of the planet, including human beings, what you see as nature is not sufficient, safe and stable. It is deficient, dangerous and dynamic.

It's, that's why our average life expectancy historically is 30. The planet is not a very nourishing place. It's why our average life expectancy historically is 30. The planet is not a very nourishing place. It's not a very safe place. And so what happens is most of our lives are just spent trying to find some kind of nourishment, some sort of protection from all of nature's dangers, with very little opportunity for the kind of fulfillment that you study on your show. And it's only once we figure out not only how to use tools to make ourselves more productive, but how to use tools that have non-human sources of energy, because we're very weak ourselves. Once we can make these tools that have non-sources of energy, namely

machines, that's when we live in an amazing world. When machines can do work for us, like the Combine Harvester that can do 700 times more work, more reaping and threshing of wheat, than the best manual labor. And I think of the world today, as I think of it as an amazing place, I think of it an amazing place for human beings. And I think it all comes down to machines because if you look at every, all the amazing value in our world that did not exist 200 years ago, it falls into one of three categories usually more. Either is a machine, you know, like my washing machine or the heating machines

or the cooling machines, like that makes me super comfortable or it's produced by a machine, like my whole house is produced by machines, like hundreds of machines ultimately, or it's produced by time freed up by machines. You think of like what both of us do for a living, like that's only possible because machines allow us to produce the basics so easily that we can have jobs like practical philosopher and you know modern wisdom expert or whatever your exact thing is. And so I people tend to think of today's world as bad. And I think of it as it's not perfect, but it's I think it is an amazing world where we have machine laborers like serving us and making our lives amazing And so much of what we experience as like the stability of things is only the stability of having mass machine labor

That you do not experience nature as stable if you live in nature draw the line for me between energy and that well-being then. The more energy that we produce, the more machines that we can fuel and the greater the human flourishing, is that the basic premise? Yeah, and so one way I've come up with to explain this is what I call the private jet problem. So I'll just speak for myself. I cannot unfortunately afford to travel by a private jet. Many, both. A lot.

And why can't I? We have all the technology, right? We know how to do it. But it's not cost effective. As in the value most people can get from it is not worth all the value that they need to put into it, including human time. So let's say, you know, private jet round trip costs 50 grand. Well, maybe it saves me five hours total or 10 hours total. including human time. So let's say, you know, private jet round trip costs 50 grand.

Well, maybe it saves me five hours total or 10 hours total, but I can't make enough money to justify that. Whereas Tim Cook can, right? It's total or worn buffet. Like worn buffet as a private jet called the indefensible, but it's not indefensible because his time is so valuable. So for him, a private jet is cost effective for, but for most of us, it isn't. And one thing to notice about the modern world is it's a very rare phenomenon that a life-giving

machine is not cost-effective. It take like a washing machine. A washing machine is cost-effective. Now, washing machine, it does take human time and resources to make it possible, because we have to build it, and we have to provide the fuel, the energy to operate it. But we have to build it and we have to provide the fuel the energy to operate it But we've figured out how to do so with little enough human time and resources where most of us can afford it Although there are billions of people who can't and that's why I say we need even more Cost-effective energy. So the idea is that the more cost-effective machine labor is The more the more we can benefit from machines when it's not cost-effective machine labor is the more we can benefit from machines. When it's not cost-effective, it doesn't matter if it exists, we can't benefit from it, just like in previous generations.

People like kings had a lot of our modern standard of living, not all of it, but a lot of it, but it wasn't cost-effective to provide. It required basically abusing human beings as machines. So cost-effective machine labor is like the key to everything. And the key to cost effective machine labor is cost effective energy, because the energy is the food for the machines. And it's one way, well, you just want to make sure. So you think of the private jet.

It's not just the fuel of the private jet, although that is very expensive, and that's a big variable. You have to think what made the private jet, and the private jet was ultimately made by thousands of different machines. If you think about the machines that mind for the materials and process the materials and transported them and manufactured them, et cetera, et cetera.

So if you think of every machine that we have as the product of thousands of machines, that machine not only uses the energy it operates on, but the energy that the thousands of machines operated on to make it. And so you get this idea that the cost of energy determines the thousands of machines operate it on to make it. And so you get this idea that the cost of energy determines the cost of everything. So if we have energy that is super cost effective, and I think of it as it's low cost, it's on demand, it's versatile, so it can power every kind of machine. And it's on a global scale of billions of people in thousands of places.

If you can produce energy with that kind of ultra cost effectiveness, then you have billions of people who can benefit from the miracle of machine labor. But if you double triple quadruple the price of energy, then more and more of our amazing machines become like private jets. So inaccessible. This sounds great. It sounds, yeah, I want modern world with lots of things done for me so that I can spend time on myself. But you haven't talked about any of the externalities. And there's

this many, many, many stats and many people who are probably part of the green movement who are listening now, who are thinking, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great Alex. But the acidification of the oceans and the melting of the ice caps and the polar bears are losing their homes and were polluting and there's smog and 97% of climate scientists say that climate change is real. How can you lay out some insights to do with fossil fuels externalities that might surprise people? Sure. There's also the other thing that raises, well, can't we do it without fossil fuels? We can talk about that as well, like, let's not use fossil fields. Let's use these other sources, which I'd be in favor of if you could.

I'd in favor of anything that's better. But if we talk about what's called the externalities, the first thing I want to observe about this whole externalities perspective, is it is it violates the principles that I talked about at the beginning? So when people are talking about the externalities, that's kind of a technical way, and it's the negative externalities notice. That's a technical way of saying we're going to ignore the benefits, and we're just going to focus on the negative side effects. If you think of the positive externalities, it also feels like take something

like the existence of the modern internet. Like when people were paying for coal in the 1970s and 1980s, which provided the vast majority of electricity, so people Like when we were, when people were paying for coal in the 1970s and 1980s, which provided the vast majority of electricity. So people would say, oh, that has a negative externality because it puts CO2 in the atmosphere and that's causing warming. We can talk about the consequence of that. But what about the positive externality of all of the time and machines freed up for innovation that made possible the internet? And then all the things the internet has made possible in terms of medicine. And just think about like how many people are alive right now with something like COVID-19 because of the internet, because of the knowledge that's disseminated, because of, you know, the rapid ability to develop an

MRN, a vaccine like all of that came from the coal industry. And yet all of these so-called economists, I mean, they are economists, but I think they have the same kinds of prejudices as everyone else philosophically. So they're so focused on the negative externalities, they can't see the positive externalities. There's also, I'll try to make this point quickly, there's kind of a technical point about externalities that that certain kinds of negatives and actually positives aren't reflected in the price of the thing. And so then some economist or economist king should manipulate the prices. But there's a core reason this is a really bad idea because that assumes that the price of the thing reflects the value of the thing. But the prices of things don't reflect the value of things. They reflect the value that very that certain people, they reflect the minimum value of things to people like you wouldn't pay it if it wasn't worth it to you. But you think about oil like when my life gets sick, if I get pulled by a helicopter to a

hospital, what was that oil worth to me? Was that worth $3 a gallon? No, I would pay whatever I have, right? So part of what's going on with ignoring the benefits of fossil fuels with this kind of pseudoscientific, pseudo-economic externality thing is we're ignoring the fact that the value we get from fossil fuels is far, far greater than the price we pay from fossil fuels, which is not the same, say, compared to like Barbie dolls, although for some people, you know, that may be their life. So there's all of these dynamics that are causing people to ignore the truth that the benefit we get from fossil fuels far, far outweighs the side effects.

And then the other thing there, I would point out. So I think of it as, let's just say I'm right, and we'll talk about in a minute, that there is no near term replacement for fossil fuels. So that to have this ultra cost-effective energy that's low cost on demand, versatile global scale, like there's no other way to do it without fossil fuels. I can prove that later, but like if I'm right, then to justify restricting fossil fuel use in a world where three billion people have virtually no energy and three billion more have amounts of energy you and I would consider completely unacceptable. Like you would need to prove like a total cataclysm

from CO2 to justify depriving people of energy. Energy is that important. So I think that's how we should go into the question of side effects. And the fact that 99.9% of people, including climate scientists, don't look at it that way. They don't look at as Ophosophials make our world possible, including they make it livable as we know it, including we're only as safe from climate as we are because of fossil views. That just shows that there's this whole bias against the benefits and only look at the side effects.

And then if you look at the side effects, you need to really look at them from a human perspective, are they bad and you need to be precise about them and you need to look for positive, neutral, and negative. So, you know, you went through various things like the polar bears is one where, you know, the populations are growing and in some ways in a way that's dangerous to people. And so one thing that's kind of dishonest is people ignore that narrative. Like they brought up polar bears

when it seemed like they were gonna shrink but then when they did it nobody brought them up and they're like, oh, I'm so happy. I'm so like, there's this meme like, you know, when Al Gore was born, there were only 7,000 polar bears now only 40,000 remain, you know, that kind of thing. So there's just this whole bias. So I forget the other categories you brought up.

So a certification of the seas, coral reefs being destroyed. Yeah, okay, let's deal with that one. So a certification. So this is interesting term for supposedly scientific movement. As it has a very definite meaning on the pH scale. So it's like lower than seven. So seven is neutral, you know, above seven is alkaline or basic. And so you're talking about the oceans going from about 8.2 to 8.1.

So you should call it neutralization, not acidification. So it's used to like act like, oh, it's acid. And so there's a real question of, why do we expect that going from 8.2 to 8.1 is going to be a catastrophe at all, let alone that justifies depriving billions of people of energy. Why do we think that way? And I think part of it is we don't, I mean, to the value issue. I don't think we value human life and human flourishing enough in these things. So we can talk about that.

But definitely it's a delicate nurture premise. The idea of, oh, the ocean that we inherited was this perfect delicate balance. And if anything changes in the pH, everything is gonna go to hell. And if you just look at the history of the planet, this makes absolutely no sense. Because the oceans were much more neutral in the past

when you had explosions of life, ocean species deal with much more dramatic shifts in the pH than we're talking about. They don't, it's like temperature. You don't deal with one temperature. You don't deal with much more dramatic shifts in the pH than we're talking about. They don't, it's like temperature. You don't deal with one temperature. You don't deal with one pH. You deal with a range. So a shift in temperature is a shift in the range and the shift in pH is a shift in the

range. And also some of the most prolific seas in the world are the closest to neutral in the world. So I think it really is coming from this philosophical or religious perspective that we expect it to be bad. And then we're scientists fit in is you can have like selective science where the government says, Hey, I really want to see some negative consequences of fossil fuels. What can you show me in the ocean?

And of course, there are going to be a bunch of negative consequences in the ocean. I mean, even real ones, right? Any change is going to have certain kinds of negatives. But the question is, are you getting the full picture? And is this anything on the level that we should be considered depriving people of energy? Is it even possible that it's on the level of the amount of benefit we get from global greening on the land, which nobody wants to talk about? So notice they only want to talk about the things that are negative about fossil fuels and not positive, and they have no concern about depriving billions of people of a modern life. So I forget what other examples you brought

up, but that's another one, too, where you can see. I just want to point out it's like the philosophy and the framework is guiding this, and it's distorting science. So there are a lot of people doing good science on this, but that only works if you're asking people to really give you positive and negative neutral side effects. And then if you integrate those with the benefits, although the one other thing to say about the ocean stuff is, why do we care about ocean acidification? So called, why do we care about it? Like presumably a big part of it is because we want a prolific ocean that we can get food from. I like seafood. A lot of people like seafood. Well, from a human flourishing perspective, the natural ocean is a desert. It's a lot of how prolific the ocean is. It's actually related to our activities and our waste. That's why that's one reason

why you have a lot of marine thriving. What do you mean your coastlines? Well, just because they like you think about the ocean, like the ocean has it's it's a lot like an actual desert. It's just like there are certain things that are needed in the ocean, like the ocean has, it's a lot like an actual desert. It's just like there are certain things that are needed in the ocean like iron in order to make these different kinds of plankton that, you know, it's got this whole food chain. But a lot of the lower elements of that are benefit from certain kinds of byproducts of our civilization

because you need that to make the food. But the real point is, if we know that the ocean is a desert, why don't we actively try to improve it? And there's what's called aquaculture, which is usually, you know, that's like making modern salmon, which you see people vehemently oppose, because they think it's wrong to impact nature. And even more excitingly, there's what's called maraculture. So, maraculture is thinking of how do you sort of enrich a large portion of the ocean so that a lot more food appears. So they did this.

There is an experiment with this native tribe in Canada, and this guy named, I think his name was Russ George, they're the Hida tribe, and they basically put a bunch of iron in a certain part of the ocean, and they just had this unbelievable proliferation of salmon. It was great, and it made sense, because the iron was the limiting factor. It was the bottleneck in terms of plankton and other things existing in that place.

And yet was this celebrated? People say, hey, let's just do this. Like, even if there are some negatives on the ocean, hey, let's make the ocean bloom. No, the whole modern environmental movement had no interest in this. And in fact, they were very critical, like one of the main climate catastrophes, Naomi Klein. She was very critical. And she like described it as, I don't like this. All you can eat buffet that we've made. And it, she said it was bad because whales were coming to this bloom. And it was unnatural. So it's like, wait, do you care about the whales? Or you, you want them to die of natural causes versus live of human

causes. Again, it reveals this very, I call this the anti-impact framework. It's the anti-human impact framework. So the idea that everything we do to nature is immoral and it must be self-destructive. And that dogma is just influencing anything. So if you actually care about the oceans from any kind of human perspective, let's keep using fossil fuels and then let's see how we can engineer the oceans to be far more prolific than they are right now. And let's get, let's improve this ocean desert.

Does this fear of impacting nature and the perfect planet premise and the other structures that you've given us? Does that explain why, if what you're saying is true, almost no one talks about it. I'm not hearing politicians campaign on it. I'm not on on which what on any pro fossil fuel talking points. Why is that the case? Why is it that fossil fuels are so demonized? Is it just, is it all explained by the perfect planet premise,

the fact that humans are destroying Mother Nature and it's kind of across a multiple, a few different streams at the moment, it seems almost cool to be human hating, to be whatever the opposite of anthropocentric is, like anthrop... Something else, some other version. Well, they would call it bio-centric, although that's misleading.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a tricky thing to even isolate because it's a specific anti-humanism like I call it human racism Sometimes because like everything the human race does is bad and everything Why do you think that is just generally at the moment? What is this? Ambient pervasive Human racism that we're seeing across not just the environmental movement, but a lot of things at the moment? Well, I think if you look at the history of it, it really started emerging in the 60s and 70s.

If you look at the kind of environmental philosophy of even let's say the pioneers of the greenhouse effect and not the pioneer discoverers who discovered that if we put more so into the atmosphere, it should have a warming influence. Like, they were generally optimistic about what that would mean. And they talked about like, oh, you know, I mean, more plant growth and we'll be able to grow crops in Siberia and won't that be great? So it's interesting that you see how much the philosophy shapes things.

And you know, Ralph Aldo Emerson used to call coal like portable climate, like the idea was, yeah, climate isn't very good naturally, but we can make it artificially good or unnaturally good through energy. In the 60s and 70s, you have this idea that it's wrong to impact nature and it's inevitably self-destructive. I mean, this is a primitive religious idea. It's been around forever, but in terms of having cultural dominance, it's really in the 60s and 70s. And I think a lot of the reason it was spread in very calculated ways throughout the educational system and then throughout the media system. And throughout the political system, and if you ask like why then, I think a big part of it. And there's

a great book by Ein Rand, my favorite philosopher called the New Left, the anti-industrial revolution, and she was living through it and commenting on it. And there was very explicitly, it was very explicit that the anti-capitalist left needed a new cause as communism was collapsing. And once the Vietnam War was over, the Vietnam War is a whole mess that, you know, sort of beside the point. But that was like their issue, then the Vietnam War is over. And they they said explicitly like, let's make our issue that capitalism destroys quote, the environment. Because they had their their previous issue was capitalism destroys the worker destroys productivity socialism will make us productive. That didn't work out well at all. Like everyone starved in the communist countries. So I and ran made this point that the the anti capital aside could either choose

to embrace if they really valued production, they could embrace capitalism, or if it wasn't, if opposing capitalism wasn't really about production, they would find a new reason to oppose capitalism. And the reason they found is capitalism, quote, destroys the environment. Now, this is not at all true, because if you think about, like, you look at the environment of a Soviet Union or of North Korea, like it's horrible. And part because it's a lot of it hasn't the natural environment hasn't been neutralized enough, but also they just pollute all over the place because they have no property rights. In general, it leads to good environments of all kinds as property rights because people protect what they own and they have wealth to clean up their environment, etc., etc. But there were

certain abuses in the US environment and European environments that people could point to and say, hey, look, you know, this lake can catch fire. This city has more air pollution than we would want. And I think a big mistake that the pro capitalism side made is they didn't own that issue. They didn't say no, were for a really good environment for human beings. Like we like clean air and clean water and productivity, like capitalism is where you can have it all. Instead, they ceded that to the anti-capitalist side. And so the anti-capitalist side started identifying

with environment. But it wasn't at the core. It wasn't really about clean air and clean water. It was about eliminating our impact on nature, but those two got blended together. So if you look at the idea of green, green means minimizing our impact. But what does that mean? Does that mean that we don't build washing machines, that we don't build roads, that we don't build factories? Or does it

mean that we don't senselessly destroy natural beauty or senselessly polluting things? Like I'm in favor of not senselessly destroying things and not senselessly polluting, but I want roads and factories and all of these things. And so, but they blended together like either you're for the environment, which lumps together, like you're for being green, which lumps together, like impacts on nature that are good and impacts on nature that are bad for us

or you just sort of hate the environment. You're not green. And part of my own mission was to give a pro human alternative to the green movement. So I think of it as the human flourishing movement, where we're for human flourishing, which means a good environment for human beings. But that means we very highly value production

and intelligently impact nature. We don't worship nature. We enhance, we optimize, we improve nature. So you can love nature, but realize it's very deficient on its own. So it needs to be dramatically engineered and enhanced. And I think that will have appeal. And I think it is growing in terms of my own movement and my own following. But the other side is so entrenched.

And they constantly want us to think that if you want a good environment, you have to be in sync with all of these anti-industrial causes. And what's notable is they've always had some reason why industry is bad, particularly fossil fuels are bad. So first, it was we're going to run out of fossil fuels. Then it's, oh, they're going to make the atmosphere just totally polluted. Then it's catastrophic global cooling, then it's catastrophic global warming. There's never any change in the certainty that fossil fuels, the core of capitalist civilization, is going to lead to some disaster. We just don't know which one. And so what that reveals is it's again, this delicate nurture idea. If we're impacting things a lot, it must be, it must be bad. And these people are so, I mean, I'm talking about the leaders leaders now They're so blind to how good the world is the stat I think is most revealing is when I was born in 1980

42% of the world lived on less than two dollars a day. Think about that less than two dollars a day So it's like $750 800 a year like that is nothing and now it's less than 10% So four out of 10 people are in this desperate poverty. Now just 40, 41 years later, it's less than one out of 10. This is the world is such a much, so much better place for those people. And nobody talks about it. And so this shows how powerful philosophy is because our whole philosophy today is dominated by minimal impact.

Let's not change nature. We've lost any real focus on human flourishing. So we don't even notice how good The world is and when we talk about say you to talk about polar bears, right? I love polar bears They're actually my favorite animal, but it's crazy that we talk about polar bears like this polar bear has to move from one piece of ice to another and that's That should make us cry, but three billion people with no energy. Nobody cares at all About and I as a tell-in moral case for fossil feels like that should make us cry. But three billion people with no energy nobody cares at all about. And I as I tell in moral case for fossil fuels, like what that means if you haven't ever lived it or seen it, I mean, I tell a story about like a young woman who has a baby. And where we live,

they had the baby would have an incubator. It's a premature baby to have an incubator be fine. You wouldn't even remember it a few months later. But there they don't have a live electricity so that that baby just dies. And you see this tragedy of lack of energy is happening everywhere around the world to billions of people and nobody cares because our philosophy has told us to care about minimizing our impact on nature instead of maximizing human flourishing. You talk, you give a timeline in the book of these Cassandra's, the people who make particular predictions. I'm just laughing because that's my girlfriend's name too.

Sorry Cassandra. She's not like that at all. You know what I mean though, right? You talk about in the 70s, this is predicted in 20 years time, 20 years time rolls around and still not there. Okay, now there's a new problem, now there's a new problem, now there's a new problem. Some of the people that are listening will be thinking, right, this sounds great,

but we've got renewable energy. We know that solar and wind and hydro, are potentials that will be able to replace what we're using at the moment. Why can't we just do that? Well, I think it's, those points need to be looked at independently. So first of all, with the Cassandra's or Cassandra's, I think it's important.

They're not that because they're wrong. Like the original Cassandra, Cassandra, my girlfriend's Cassandra, I forget what the original. She's going to come in. If she's somewhere near, she's going to say, is he, is that like shouting me? Honey, what do you want? She's been, she's been warned that I'm on a, on a podcast. I should be happy that she, she, she got the shout out about 20 times. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, they haven't been right. Whereas the original Cassandra was right. That's the

idea. Like if someone right who wasn't being listened to versus somebody who was the boy who cried wolf, which is much more, except we still don't. And but interestingly, people think, oh, the wolf is finally coming. So there's that whole thing. So that people have been totally wrong about fossil fuels causing a catastrophe. And in fact, fossil fuels have made life much better. That's kind of one thing. And then there's another thing of, okay, can we do the same things that we do with fossil fuels? Can we do those with alternatives?

That's certainly something worth exploring. But you have to be clear, are we exploring it from the perspective of life is amazing? Let's make it even better with potential supplements or substitutes, or is it, no, fossil fuels are going to end the world. So we need to just drop everything and sacrifice everything and just come up with some crash scheme

to replace it with alternative. So I think that that's why I say they're independent. And I think there is no evidence at all, despite what people say that from a human flourishing perspective, there's anything resembling a catastrophe. And I think the path of fossil fuels is that they're gonna keep making life better and better. But let's say somebody is not convinced that they think,

I am at least seriously concerned about future rises and CO2 levels. And I haven't given you enough evidence here not to be. So that's a plausible thing. CO2 is different from other emissions because CO2 aggregates in the atmosphere. So like if you have smog, it just disappears from the atmosphere, it doesn't build up over time. But CO2 does build up over time.

So we had a little less than 0.03% in the atmosphere before we started using fossil fuels and now we're a little above 0.04%. We could easily go to 0.05% or beyond. And there is a greenhouse effect. So we can expect a warming impact. There's a question of how much and we can expect that to have other impacts. For various reasons, I don't think those will even be negative at all on balance. But let's say you're very concerned about that.

I respect that. It is legitimate to look at alternatives. But if we go back to the philosophy, you legitimate to look at alternatives, but if we go back to the philosophy, you need to look at alternatives from a human flourishing perspective. So that means you want energy that's cost effective. And if you're concerned about CO2, you want it that's low or almost no CO2. There's actually nothing with no CO2 today because fossil fuels, but well, here's part of the challenge. Fossil fuels don't just provide electricity, which we have the most alternatives for. They also provide heat, and so residential heat, and particularly industrial heat, which

is very high levels of heat. And that's very hard to provide, cost effectively with electricity. That's why the most cost-effective thing for home heating is natural gas, and for industrial heating is often natural gas. And it's pretty staggering price differential. So so much of our society is based on just directly burning fossil fuels for industrial heat. And then there's heavy duty transportation where there's no replacement for fossil fuels for a while. Like you're talking about cargo ships and planes and all these things. I mean, everything people are talking about is not even close to, you know to any reasonable prototype let alone commercialization. So this points out to, it is a real bitch.

If you had a crisis or anything resembling a crisis with fossil fuels, you would view that as a tragic situation because fossil fuels are so good. And if you had to somehow figure out or a near term replacement, like that would be so daunting and so upsetting. And the fact that people aren't upset about it just shows they don't really value, they don't value the benefits of fossil fuels, they don't really understand energy.

So if we look at it from the human flourishing perspective, there is a CO2 issue. If there was, you know, what you want to do is find every cost effective means you can of producing energy with little or no CO2. And the most obvious candidates would be hydroelectric energy and nuclear energy, because hydroelectric, we can produce that at quite low cost reliably, but it's limited by location. So you can't do it everywhere, but where you can do it,

if you have a climate crisis or anything like that, not a crisis, but even a problem, that's good. Notice who is opposing hydroelectric power, the modern environmental movement. Why? Why? There's too much impact on nature. So it's again, the anti-impact framework.

They'll say, like, oh, it interfered with the salmon. It's taking up too much space. It interferes with the free-flowing rivers. And you think, like, wait a second, I thought you said the world was going to end. And we can't dam a river. And it just shows you the whole perspective is about minimizing our impact. It's not really about worrying about a river. And it just shows you the whole perspective is about minimizing our impact. It's not really about worrying about a catastrophe like James Cameron right after he made that avatar thing, which is really

about global warming, like he went down to Brazil to stop them from building a dam. Like that was his immediate activity. And to him, it's one in the same because humans impacting nature is bad. So I'm going to stop it everywhere I can. And this idea that CO2 is going to kill us all, like I think of that as an excuse for rationalizing, stopping our productive impacts on nature. And then nuclear, that's the most promising because that is controllable. Unlike solar when it is controllable, so you can rely on it.

It can be done anywhere in the world. It has these three amazing properties that only fossil fuels and nuclear have. So fossil fuels are nuclear have. So fossil fuels are so cost effective in large part because they're naturally concentrated energy, they're naturally stored energy, and they're naturally abundant. So natural forces have taken raw energy in nature and concentrated into a small space, stored it so we can deploy it at any time and given us just an unbelievable amount like way more than 10 times all that

we used in all of our history, like exists still in the amount, like way more than 10 times, all that we used in all of our history, like exists still in the earth, and probably way more than that, like that's unbelievable. And that's why it's so cost-effective, because nature already did all this stuff to make it pretty convenient, and all we have to do is release the energy. That sort of true of hydro, like nature brings the evaporation of water to the top of the river, like if we had to carry the water the top of a river of a hydroelectric dam ourselves, it wouldn't work, right? It's just a perpetual motion machine that wouldn't work. But nature does that. And with nuclear, it's even more amazing because nature is just harness these unbelievable forces

in the nucleus of an atom. And so if you can release those forces, it's way more concentrated than even oil, like a million times more than oil and oil is the most concentrated thing We use in most of our civilization. That's why it's so good for mobility So it's amazingly concentrated. It's stored and then there's a huge amount of it So you know probably tens of thousands or more years worth of it from if you're talking about uranium and thorium and even more if you Pulled it from the ocean So like why aren't we and we we know that, you know, from history in the US, it was pretty cost effective to do a very reliable in the seventies.

If you had anything resembling a climate crisis, you would be focused on, let's use what we know about nuclear, and at least do as much electricity as we can. It's harder to do the mobility and the heat, but even with nuclear, you can generate a lot of heat, so you should be able to do that. And with mobility, we have nuclear submarines

and aircraft carriers and icebreakers, so it would be a real crash effort, but you should at least be trying to do that. And with mobility, we have nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers and icebreakers. So it would be a real crash effort, but you should at least be trying to do that. But who is against nuclear? The modern environmental movement. It's not the oil companies that are stopping nuclear for the most part. It's the so-called environmentalist. And what is it? Yeah, I know you're going to ask that. Because it's again this, it's more subtle, but it's again this issue of the impact nature too much. So part of it is, it's viewed as unnatural, split the atom. It's just like, oh, they talk about radiation, like radiation is bad.

Radiation is everywhere. But if humans create radiation, it's bad. And we just shouldn't be, so it's the human racism again. And particularly when you look at them, talk about the waste, it's very revealing because they're saying like, oh, no, what about the waste? We can't have this waste. And you think, wait, we don't actually have any problems from nuclear waste.

We've been generating it for generations. Like, it's not, nobody is dying of waste accidents. It's actually fairly easy to store safely. It's very compact. Maybe there are better ways of storing it. We can ultimately repurpose it for fuel, but like, there's no crisis at all. It's a lot more manageable than solar waste

or wind waste from all that huge mining and all of those things. But why are people against nuclear waste? Because it's this, they're like, we created this new unnatural material and it's going to be around for millions of years. Like okay, but if it's a pretty stable material that we can deal with, who cares? Like that's fine. But no, humans have no right to create something that will be around for millions of years. So it's again, this anti-humanism. If you, if you really cared about rising CO2 levels being a crisis for human

life, again, hydro and nuclear, but you're first your obsession, you would not constrain yourself and really castrate yourself by saying, okay, we're only going to use sunlight and wind and then batteries, which are totally made from made using fossils, like you would never make that up. You would use what's proven and tested. It's just a total empirical fact that there is nowhere in the world that runs on anything resembling solar wind and batteries. There's just nothing that does that whatsoever. I don't know if you saw this, but I've gotten in this little with Elon Musk, like whom I really, I was listening to an interview of yours with, what was her name, like, Paulina, Pompley, on or something.

Like she is, I love Elon Musk in a lot of ways. So I like, I was, I started listening to that because I'm really interested in him. He's a really brilliant guy. But he really misrepresents the scalability of what he does. And so he said this thing about, oh, all you need to power the world. And you can see this on Twitter.com slash Alex Ftine. If you watch this in the near future, it'll be, you know, the top, like, oh, all you need to power the world. And you can see this on Twitter.com slash Alex F. time, if you watch this in the near future, it'll be, you know, the time, like, oh, you can power the whole world on solar plus

some batteries. That's what he said. So I ran the numbers at his best cost that he's provided for the batteries. And yeah, for those batteries that you need to backup solar for three days, which is pretty conservative. If you need to run the whole world on solar. And, you know, sometimes in different areas, you don't have to rush on light. Like, yeah, that's $400 trillion. So $400 trillion is like six and a half times global GDP. That's just for batteries mind you. That's not like all these other things. And so this is, nobody is doing this. It's a total, it's worse than a fantasy. And yet people really think that you can put

solar panels, wind turbines and batteries together. And that's some amazing thing. And it's actually gonna work. Even for electricity, let alone for industrial heat, let alone for heavy duty mobility, where we don't have these electric plans or even hydrate, like we're talking about destroying our whole energy system

for things that have never existed and many of which are not close to existing. And the entire world is bought into this. Everyone is saying carbon neutral net zero by 2050. And we're trying to do it while we still criminalize and demonize nuclear. And we're stopping hydro all over the place. If that is not a religious cult, I don't know what it is. What about the problems of risks with nuclear spills and explosions and danger? Yeah, I mean, I'm laughing. I think it's an innocent question, but it's not innocent that it is a question for the public because the fact about nuclear is the safest source of energy ever created. And for a fairly obvious physical reason, which is that it cannot explode. So, of course, a nuclear bomb can explode.

That deals with a totally different type of uranium than exists in a nuclear power plant. The best comment ever by one of my energy heroes, a guy named Peter Beckman, who's unfortunately deceased. Somebody said, like, hey, what happens if we blow up a nuclear power plant? If terrorists blow it up, isn't that going to be disaster? He said if a terrorist blows up a nuclear power plant, they should win a Nobel Prize because they'll have discovered a law of physics that doesn't exist. But Chernobyl blew up. No, no, it's not blowing up.

Not at all. Not at all. Well, that's very important though, because people are associated with it in time. So Chernobyl is also interesting because Chernobyl, well, so it's interesting Chernobyl is the only case where you have any death due to radiation, which is pretty astonishing. There's only one case in all of it. And so what's interesting is it involved a type of reactor that was sort of a hybrid energy producing reactor, but also sort of like a weapon that was never tried or considered in any civilized part of the world. So it's like you can call it nuclear, but it's not the same thing. It's just like you can call everything chemical in a sense, but there are certain types of uses of chemicals that are totally benign, and that can't do things.

So what they tried in Chernobyl was not even considered let alone tried where we were and couldn't have been. And on top of that, and related to that, it was in the Soviet Union, which is one of my favorite economies, economists pointed out like everything in the Soviet Union was deadly. Like imagine how many deaths there were from Soviet toasters, like a hell of a lot more than Chernobyl. So so Chernobyl, you have a couple dozen documented deaths.

You have certain like treatable conditions. And that was, you know, that was a disaster. But that shows you like even we have a couple dozen documented deaths. You have certain like treatable conditions. And that was, you know, that was a disaster. But that shows you like even we have a total disaster by one of the worst regimes in history using something civilized countries would never consider or allow, even then it's limited in its destructive potential. So we should be thinking about nuclear like nuclear is the safest form of energy ever.

There's like solar panels, you know, solar panels, the main problems are not very good at producing energy reliably at low cost. But you can have solar panels have all sorts of issues. Like if you have your, if you know, it catches on fire and the sun is still shining, there are all sorts of problems where fire departments can't deal with these houses.

Because what you have, you have this electrical power plant on the roof of your house, right? And it's connected to batteries. And so it can be hard to shut off and you have all you have this electrical power plant on the roof of your house, right? And it's connected to batteries. And so it can be hard to shut off and you have all these issues with fires. I mean, and you know, there are different ways of dealing with this. You have wind turbines that catch on fire and go out of control. You have all the deaths involved in the mining for those things. Now, I don't think solar wind are particularly dangerous, but empirically, they are more

dangerous than nuclear. The main thing that's dangerous about them though, is that they don't provide energy. So my basic point of view is being useless. Yeah, but that is really important. Like, no energy is more dangerous than no energy. Because then you have to live in nature. I saw a video on Twitter a while ago, and it was an animation of this huge sort of

golem-looking creature, stopping a big boulder rolling down a hill, and it's symbolic of nuclear energy. Have you seen this? No. I'll try and get, if I can find it, I'll make video guide-deen, put it over the video here. Basically, it's just a suggestion that Chernobyl and Fukushima were reason enough and sufficiently public to cause a cascading effect that nuclear is now essentially out of the window by people that perhaps no less than they claim to know. Yeah, perhaps Fukushima, I think, is a perfect kind of of revelation because you look at this situation

Like what are most people associate Fukushima with what are they associate that situation with they associate it with like a failure Of a nuclear power plant yet what happened is what a tsunami kills 20,000 people you are actually a lot safer if you were in the nuclear power plant Well, you were actually a lot safer if you were in the nuclear power plant. Nobody, of course, it's one of the safest places in the world. I mean, imagine 9-11, they tried to crash in a nuclear power plant, like just the people in the plane would have died, which had been incredibly tragic, but it wouldn't have been like, this whole terrorist thing,

like look at what people can do with an airplane in a building, like, nuclear has nowhere near that potential. Again, we're talking about a providing energy, which is crucial to human beings living a modern life. And B, we're talking about these concerns that rising CO2 levels are an existential threat. And people still will just will believe in or more importantly propagate these just totally erroneous notions about nuclear. So, yeah, the Fukushima thing is 20,000 people die from a tsunami. No one dies from radiation. And how do we characterize it?

It's like, oh, nuclear is dangerous. No, nature is dangerous. Nuclear is safe. And of course, what is Japan shut us down all these reactors? And they didn't even like to say, okay, maybe we shouldn't have built it in this particular place. It shows also the religious nature how nuclear is put as this universal package. So it's like, oh, Chernobyl, all these places, we shouldn't explore anything that involves

splitting the atom. What could be more unscientific than saying, we're not going to explore nuclear physics at all. Anything that involves that advanced knowledge and skill, we are just going to put off indefinitely. All we are willing to do is to try to turn sunlight and wind gusts into energy. That's what we're going to limit it to. Like, this is crazy.

Why can't we do that? Why can't we use solar and wind? I mean, we did for thousands of years, and it was very bad. The percentage of renewable energy has decreased over time. What is it not not 0.3? No, no, I know it's not. No, it's, I'm not sure what that language means, not 0.3% percent. What's the current percentage of global energy output created by renewables? Well, so renewables is another kind of vague package. So solar, because I promise, I'm not purposefully trying to use vague terms here. No, no, promise, I'm not purposefully trying to use vague terms

here. No, no, no, I'm not. I keep on stepping on different landmines that have been let down by other people. No, no, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it at all personally. I just meant that this is the terminology. So yeah, renewable because it can renewable, there's this question, does it include hydro and does it include burning wood? So people usually, and the renewable movement is mostly anti-hydro. And actually a lot of the majority, or at least the most renewable in Europe,

is actually burning wood, and which people don't know, often like we chop down trees in the US using oil-powered chain saws, then transport them using oil-powered cargo ships. Oh, we chop them up, probably using natural gas or coal, into these little wood pellets, and we stick them in a plant in Germany, and it's called carbon neutral. So, that's like a real process that's happening, and there's a question of like, why is this

happening? And it goes to, why don't we use solar wind? It's because they're not controllable or reliable sources of energy. So I mentioned that with fossil fuels in nuclear and to some extent, hydra, you have this phenomenon of nature concentrates and stores huge amounts of energy for you, and you just have to release them. And so that's what makes it so cost effective that nature's already done this work. If you have to concentrate and store the energy yourself, then you have to make all these

machines and use all these resources to do it. And with solar and wind, the biggest problem is effectively storing them. Is storing enough of them so that you always have energy when you need it. And it's so non-cost effective that nobody does anything close to this anywhere, except for people using very low energy kind of off-grid. But they're not producing anything significant. They're kind of living a low consumption lifestyle, and even that lifestyle, all the equipment is produced using fossil fuels or nuclear.

It's not made using solar panels. And wind turbines to this. What's happened, unfortunately, though, is in the field of electricity in particular, is that to promote the idea that solar and wind and batteries are viable, instead of actually creating independent systems or power plants that can meet normal standards of reliability. Like if they did that, that would be great. I would be happy to see that.

Instead what they do is they take the existing electric grid with all of these controllable reliable sources of energy, nuclear coal, and most importantly natural gas, because natural gas can easily cycle up and down to adapt to changes. And so they stick solar and wind on those. And then what happens to the natural gas is constantly adjusting to them. So when the sun shines and natural gas goes down, when the sun fan is the natural gas goes up, the same thing with the wind blowing, et cetera, et cetera, batteries are so expensive that they're just a tiny, tiny percentage like in Texas.

When we have these disasters, it's something like 40 seconds worth of energy and even something like that, 40% of that was lost. So it's just nothing, right? Batteries are a trivial thing, whatever Musk talks about. So the real thing that happens is solar and wind are parasites on the grid today. And if you think logically,

like, is it, is it going to be more cost effective to have all these reliable power plants that, and then add on all these unreliable power plants plus unreliable infrastructure? Or is it going to be cheaper to just have the reliable power plants? And it's way cheaper to just have the reliable power plants because you need to build almost as many of them if you have the unreliables because the unreliables can almost always go near zero. So you always need to have 100% reliable plus all this unreliable plus this infrastructure plus the reliable's operate really inefficiently when you cycle them up and down. It's like stop and go traffic.

So it's really this mess, which is why everywhere these unreliables are used, the price of electricity goes up. And yet we hear all this reporting about how it goes down. And this is all just energy accounting fraud. What they do is they don't look at the full system costs of solar wind. They'll say just look at the price of solar panels or just look at some price in isolation. But over and over we see that the more these things are used, the more prices go up. Like Germany pays three times with the US pays, the US pays way more than we should pay. Coal and particularly gas prices have gone down. And yet electricity prices have gone up. There aren't too many candidates. We haven't been building a lot

of new nuclear plants that are expensive. It's because the solar and wind have added cost. And then the other problem is once they add cost, people try to cut costs. And where do they cut costs? They shut down reliable power plants or they defund resiliency. So you see this in Texas where they defunded, you know, weatherizing plants that could be more durable. All sorts of places around the world deal with coal and gas, deal with much lower temperatures and Texas had no problem, but Texas did not have the same resiliency. They also didn't even have enough reliable power online, even if everything had worked perfectly to not have significant blackouts because they've spent at least $66 billion on solar and wind, and that comes from other places.

So, you try to cut down on the reliable, you play what I call reliability chicken, and the biggest offender is unfortunately where I live in California, the biggest offender of the U.S. Because that's why we had big blackouts last summer, and why we've been in danger, because we're trying to shut down as many reliable power plants as we can, including nuclear plants, by the way, which is doubly insane.

And we're trying to rely on our solar and wind, but we're really relying on out of state power from Arizona, from Utah, from Nevada. But the problem is they're trying to have more unreliable energy, too. So everyone is trying to play unreliability chicken and they're relying on reliable. Just one example is an LAI posted something on Twitter last year. At one point, they're getting at least 40% of their electricity from coal, I believe, mostly from Utah. So it's not in California, right? We don't have any coal in California,

but we're getting coal turned into electricity and delivered to California. But the more that this is just, it's this parasite game. And so the reason I'm going into this is because I know everyone is going to hear these claims of solar and wind or cheap, et cetera. And it's all what I call accounting fraud or partial cost accounting. The important thing is there is no standalone solar wind battery thing that anybody uses anywhere because it's so cost prohibitive. And so if anyone thinks it's a good idea, they should prove it in reality by creating like Apple, if they're going to be 100% renewable, great, create your own installation. But instead, what they do is they plug into the grid, they parasite on coal and gas and nuclear.

And then they sometimes add a bunch of unreliable solar and wind and they say, hey, look, we ran on all the solar and wind. And you guys used all the coal. But that's not how it works physically. That's like the analogy is like if you take a sailboat, if you take a diesel-powered boat across the ocean, and you put a sail on it, and the sail gives it 10% of its energy, you as Tim Cook don't get to say, I got there on the sail, and the rest of you guys got there on the diesel.

That's what Apple is doing when they say they're 100% renewable. It seems to me one of the biggest things that is a blindness for most people, and myself, before reading your book, to do with thinking towards the future is the misunderstanding of the fact that energy permits technology advancement and future technology can fix many of the problems that the energy consumption is going to cause in the present. Is that a fair way to frame it? I think it's a very good way to frame it. It does it in the future and in the present, so I've focused a bit on the present because

even if you think about climate, it's very important that climate related disaster deaths are down 98% over the last century. Nobody talks about this, just to show you how biased the system is. The UN IPCC, which has some, that's called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Like, you look at all their reports. It's all about how we're in danger and climate. They never mention climate related deaths or climate related disasters going way down. That is like, I mean, how can you, that's like you're doing a report on like malaria.

Like a malaria decreased by 98% and you were studying like a malaria crisis, like you would need to point out that it's been decreasing. So, but nobody even talks about this. So we have this blindness because we, we have this belief that it's wrong to impact the climate, that it's got to be self-destructive. So we don't even look at the numbers. We don't even notice, hey, wait, haven't we developed all these good technologies for protecting ourselves from climate, like building homes and heating and air conditioning and like drought relief is the most amazing

because drought could kill millions of people in the past. I mean, I have some headlines in my next book, Fossil Future, which is not out now. You can't even get an Amazon. By the way, I just, sorry, one note to interrupt. This is a temporary thing, but do not buy the revised moral case for Fossil Future's an Amazon, because it's a fake book. So don't do that. No way. Who's the nut? No, no, no, no, it's, it's not, it's not anyone screwing me. It's just they messed up. It was basically my book, Fossil Future, was originally conceived as a revision,

and then I ended up writing a whole new book, but still on Amazon, it says Revised, and so it just, it kills me that people are buying that book and is not going to get delivered. So I'll find the correct link, and it will be in the show notes below. Yeah, just more with the one with the blue cover, the bright blue cover that I sent you, that's, that's fine. So sorry for that, but it's just, it's been bothering me lately. So where did we, of course, I interrupted myself on talking about technology, the future of technology. Oh, yeah. You're talking about drought. Yeah, drought. Drought is like these stories about just reading about places like China and just millions of people

dying from these droughts. It's just so so tragic to think about what people living in like a more natural world without modern technology, what that's like. And now we have modern irrigation, a lot of which is high energy. And we have drought relief convoys where you can give food to people who can't grow food. And drought-related deaths now go down to the level of a thousand a year. It's just this unbelievable thing. Nobody talks about drought. We're so good at mastering drought that I have never heard anyone explain any possible situation that could actually be a drought problem globally.

Also, interestingly, it's true for wildfires. Now that seems impossible given what we've seen in Australia and California. But if you look at what we have at our disposal in terms of modern fire management, in terms of if you actually thin the forests, if you don't allow these huge fuel loads to build up, if you build barriers, like there's no conceivable scenario where fires could be a big problem. It's all this man-made stuff that actually comes from this whole anti-impact approach where we say, we're not allowed to clear the brush, we're not allowed to do control burns, we're not allowed to do logging.

And so we basically create, we make the forest a bomb, but that's it. That's not like if the temperature rose three or four degrees and we manage the forest properly, we would not have a problem with fires at all. So it's actually really hard to think of anything that even today's capabilities can't deal with, let alone tomorrow's. I mean, the most plausible is like a super rapid sea level rise. So if you talk about like multiple feet per decade, which Al Gore makes this thing is going to happen because he talks about 20 feet in his movie and he's not very clear about when that's going to happen. But, you know, that what we've been experiencing is like a foot a century and then that, you know, cut some of the high predictions are like three feet in a century. That is not even a problem for today's

levels. Let alone imagine if sea levels were rising and we had an issue. Imagine how many like smart people could help us deal with that. We already have 100 plus million people living below sea level now. So once you start to really think in a pro-human pro-technology way about climate, you don't think of it as this religious thing that oh, it was perfect, and it's wrong if we impact. If you just think of it as, hey, here's another factor that we want to deal with constructively, it's really hard to think of anything that could be like a big problem

with what we have today, let alone the future. And this is controversial, but in the future, we'll also learn how to improve climate. I mean, that's that's that's that's sacrilege, which shows you that it's a religious kind of thing, but like as this guy points out in this really good book, where's my I think it's called, where's my flying car by this guy named J Storrs Hall? Really good book. Like he points out, imagine how much people would pay to make their climate like California's climate, which I look enough to live in California. Like that would be so much value. People are going

to figure out how to do that. And that just goes to show that if we also, if you wanted to, you can, I believe, fairly safely reduce the amount of sunlight coming to the US. Like, you can sort of mimic what a volcano has done. Like, we know that volcanoes in the past have cooled the Earth. Like, you could test that out in mimic it. I believe in a safe way.

I'm not in favor of it now because I don't think it's necessary. But this idea that we're just, we face an existential threat from warming. And all we can do is just outlaw all the fossil fuels and mandate unreliable solar wind. I just want to stress it's a religious perspective. It's not a scientific perspective. None of it makes any sense. I think we should be using more fossil fuels, but even if we weren't, we should be using nuclear, we should be looking at fossil fuels, but even if we weren't, we should be using nuclear,

we should be looking at technological ways to deal with it. And we should recognize that the biggest problem in the world is lack of energy for billions of people, not one or two or three degrees warmer. You've hit one of the tripwires that I've laid around this conversation. You just said existential risk there. What do you thoughts on extinction rebellion? I mean, it's, I don't know how many people even know about them. I mean, I know in the UK, they're very, very well known. Yeah, I mean, did you see them smashing the windows? If was it Barclays or Santander's headquarters? Do you see this?

I see some of it. I mean, like I'm very kind of US focused. Yeah, yeah. Well, I've never seen someone smash a window in a less cool way. That they literally can't smash windows in a cool way. You swing a thing at a big thing and it makes a big crack.

But no, no, no, no, no. They've arrived with this sort of mallet and chisel and with their masks on and a pink beanie doing all of the four corners. It's, what are you doing? What are you trying to demonstrate? Is this wanton destruction of glass, which presumably is going to need fossil fuels

to then re-deliver the glass back to fix it? Or are you enacting some sort of rage? Because if that's your rage, I'm not tremendously scared of it. But yeah, so I have a big problem with extinction rebellion, right? And it's because I'm a big fan of existential risk. Have you read Toby Yord's The Pressapist?

No. Oh, dude, Alex, let me, I'll tell you once we're done. Everyone that's listening has already heard me talk about a million times. Basically, Toby runs mathematical models. He's a philosopher from the Future of Humanic Institute, an Oxford, which is the number one existential risk research lab basically in the world, and he runs the numbers, the likelihood of us going extinct humans, existential risk. So a global irreversible mutoring of our capacity to reach our full potential as a civilization

is roughly the definition he uses of existential risk. And he notes them all down, and he has the natural risks, and then he has the anthropogenic risks as well, over the next century. The likelihood that climate change is an existential risk to us is one in 10,000. The likelihood of super intelligent artificial general intelligence that's misaligned is one in 10. Natural pandemics, one in 30, engineered pandemics, one in 100, super volcanoes, one in a million, gamma ray bursts, one in a billion, et cetera, et cetera. It pales in comparison. And this sort of leads me to the problem I have with extinction rebellion, et cetera, et cetera. It pales in comparison. And this sort of leads

me to the problem I have with extinction rebellion, which is, who's extinction you bothered about? Genuinely, what is the extinction that you're concerned about? It should be existential risk rebellion. If it was that, and they were looking at the actual statistics around, what is the most likely thing to cause humans to go extinct? That's the question that presumably they're talking about, but it gets all conflated with this sort of naturalistic human racism and well, it's not just about that, the animals shouldn't be going extinct either. Okay, cool. Do you know that we need to be able to develop technology to save animals and ourselves

from the non-zero number of natural background risks that occur. So if we were to continue, let's say that we ceased all technological progress now and just went back to being nomads. The human race won't leave the planet, we won't go to Mars, we will die because there is a non-zero existential risk number in the background, whether that be engineered pandemics or natural pandemics where it wouldn't be engineered because those labs would have been shut. Natural pandemics, supervolcanoes, whatever it might be, asteroids, right? So we need technology to protect ourselves. We're also, the lions aren't going to do it for us.

So if we stop doing it, they're all dead. Every animal on the earth will die eventually. Even if you want to roll the clock forward a little bit more, whatever it is, two billion years, the sun's going to expand and the earth's going to be gone. If you want to save the maximum number of future potential lives, both human and in terms of the animals, the best thing that we can do is focus our attention on to not dicking up the big risks that we have over the next century. One in ten is the likelihood that Toby Aud, in the epicenter of existential risk research puts on artificial

general intelligence being the thing that we could, it's the number one risk, right? The number one risk. I mean, I don't, I believe those numbers at all, but I, I, I, I, I agree with a lot of the thrust of what you're, you're talking about. I mean, and, you know, one way to think of it, you could think of technology and progress from the perspective of like of what is human being, what are our capabilities? And all things being equal,

you want more capabilities going forward to deal with a wide variety of things. So when I was drafting fossil futures, I was writing a part of it, this was before COVID. And I was noting like, hey, here are the things I'm really concerned about. And I wish I had said, oh, like a pandemic from a flu-like, but more extreme virus. I didn't say that, but antibiotic resistance is definitely one that I, and it's not existential

as everyone's going to die, but that is a real thing that you can see. Antibiotics are amazing, but they have these side effects and you see resistance. The more capable you are as a civilization, like the more you can kind of deal with anything. So it's a very high burden of proof to show. We should focus all on dealing with one thing, particularly if it has any chance to let alone, I believe, a certainty of neutering our capability. So if it's like, let's stop using energy, Like let's let's make energy more expensive and less reliable so that we can sort of make nature more friendly to us in this one respect.

Like our whole I mentioned before, like everything in our society depends, it's like it's a machine. It's produced by a machine or it's produced by the time, human time freed up by machines. You think about we want millions of people if's a pandemic, to be able to think about it and deal with it and help us treat it like that's only possible with the machine labor civilization. So in general, I totally agree that the more capabilities we, the more freedom you have and the more ability you have to, to make progress, the more you can deal with any of these kinds of things.

So that it's notable that often the anti-technology, that people concerned about technologies, you can say, like, there's one of two ways to deal with it. If you think there's a real threat, you can say, okay, let's sort of evolve and figure out how to deal with the threat, or let's just withdraw technology. And in general, there's a very strong attitude

of let's withdraw technology, and it's such a bad attitude. And it's also completely impractical attitude because you cannot control the rest of the world. Like if you look at fossil fuels, I've been writing a lot about China. Like we are such useful idiots with regard to China. Like China is using more and more coal like in 2020. You know, they have record, 2020 pandemic here, mind you, like record oil imports. They have three Texas's worth of coal plants, new coal plants, under development, like all these different markers of more and more fossil fuels. And China is there like the productive center of the whole

world, like we in the US, you in the UK, you're using China. So we're all using Chinese coal, whether we think about it or not. There's no chance that China is going to stop using fossil fuels so long as it's the most cost-effective way for them to do things. And we are totally delusional about this. And so even if you thought, yes, CO2 is a big issue, like you have to look for truly technological means of dealing with it, which either means you find a way, like to capture the CO2, which is a total bitch, which I don't think is very promising at all, but people can try to do that. You can try to figure out how to cool the planet,

which I think if there was a real problem, that's where you would focus your energies, or you can try to develop like non-carbon alternatives, including nuclear, which, as I said, people should do that anyway, should focus on that anyway. But that does take a long time. That's like a multi-generational thing, but this idea that we're going to stop. This idea that we're going to make our own sacrifices and pledges, and then China's

going to go along with it. It's just another example of, you cannot hold back 8 billion people from making progress. You just better make the best progress you can, including to counter the problems that the progress causes. This is a justification for a totalitarian state, if ever I've heard one. All of these people with the freedom to talk, the freedom to post and tweet whatever they want and do research, North Korea.

North Korea can use as much fossil fuels as they want. China, they can use them all. It is interesting when you think about it a very broad sort of civilizational perspective, you're going to see a power swing. I wonder, neutering is the word that I always use. I wonder how much progress is being muted in the West by a focus on technologies which are inherently less efficient, which inherently slow down our capacity to be able to move forward and to keep up with the East. And China are a terrifying force at the moment. And that's only going to get worse if you decide to strap one of our hands behind our backs. Yeah, it's, it's a really, I've become become I'm surprised I wasn't more interested in this before I become really interested in the last six or nine months

It's I mean there's some things that reassure me just because not a free country so that gives it a lot of of impediments But it's really scary that this sort of totalitarian anti fossil fuel movement because it has a totalitarian quality like we're gonna abolish this and it always involves imposing these new green energy things like like Joe is going to tell us how to do it. So it has this whole so-called central planning government control to it, which is just it's a disaster on its own. And then you're mandating these religiously preferred unreliable technologies. So it is scary to think of the free year countries in general becoming the least free with regard to energy because that's the industry that powers every other industry so that's your economy and it's also your security like the US is only a secure as we are because we have such a productive economy that can you know that can keep us secure by manufacturing these weapons and stuff and then also so we're neutering like our fundamental industry. So we're neutering like our fundamental industry and we're actually like exporting it to China So we're having the Chinese use fossil fuels to make us our unreliable energy Like they're making this solar panels and wind turbines and then using fossil fuels and then that's such a

And then also like there's the whole issue of stealing all the patents and like that's That's totally okay because you know one of the issues with a place like China is innovation. But if you allow people to steal all of your innovations like once you have the innovation and there's a you know you have prototypes of things then that can be copied. And we know that this regime has an explicit goal of world domination or at least you know being the world superpower by 2049. And so the, I really think, I just think about what are the Chinese dictators thinking when they see the US and the EU. I mean, my private joke is like, I think of it as like useful idiots or like US

full idiots and EU's full idiots, you know, for the US and the EU because it's, you just, it's one of these scary things that you feel like you see, like you look at the past and you're like, okay, you got to do something to this Hitler guy, right? Like he is rising. Like this is not going to go well. And it's like, oh yeah, you're in the chamber, and you make a deal with him, yeah, that's really going to work, right? He's going to be totally satisfied. And he'll just hang out with his mistress all the time and be like, no, he's not going to be a piece. And you just look like China's on this clear trajectory trajectory and we fit it into it perfectly by buying unreliable energy, gutting our own capabilities and then praising them. I mean, I don't want to pick on Elon too much, but I'm so impressed with China's efforts

toward carbon neutrality. Larry Fink, the most powerful man in the financial world, head of BlackRock. He's in his annual letter to CEOs, which is incredibly influential. He talked about like his only mention of China and talking about how we're going to become carbon neutralists. China made like an inspiring commitment to be carbon neutral. And I tweeted about this like, this is the same year. They're using record oil imports like five year high of coal production. All these, it's just the idiocy, it's this blindness. Dangerous, man. It's really, really dangerous. I mean, it's dangerous. I mean, it's always

day, you know, nothing's more dangerous than no energy, except no energy and a highly energized, ambitious, uh, enemy. God. Yeah. I am. The useful idiot thing is interesting. Douglas Murray had this quote where he said, When the barbarians are at the door, we'll be debating about what gender they are. And the equivalent here is when the barbarians are at the door, we'll be asking whether or not they're going to knock our door down with green energy-fueled cars or not.

Like, that's how it is. When you saw the Capitol Hill riots, right, when you saw that occurring, Russia and China must have been thinking, I don't know whether how much influence they had on it or not, probably more than most people know because it seems like they always just have more influence on all of the shit that goes on than most people know. But they must have just, even if they weren't, they must have been sitting thinking, I can't believe it, they're tearing themselves apart. We don't have to do anything here. They are literally tearing themselves apart internally. And as much as I love a democracy and I want capitalism and personal sovereignty and meritocracy,

everyone can be whatever they want to be, I don't know, I wonder how long do you let a world power with defined objectives to take over the globe, how long do you allow them to keep going forward before you say, right, okay, sort of the children that want to debate amongst themselves in the EU and in America? We need to have some more forceful or restricted choices in terms of how public policies run, because allowing the public to vote appears to be getting us in a direction that's actually neutering our capacity. Do you know what I mean? I'm not advocating for a totalitarian state here, but if the consensus

amongst the electorate is so far away from what is optimal for the country and perhaps the world at large, How long do you allow that to go on for? Well, there's a question of who because I think in certainly in America and probably, probably in Europe as well, you know, the intellectuals are generally worse. So the, you know, the, when I'm in terms of the intellectual elite of the society, you know, you can think of them as the thought leaders are sometimes called them the designated experts. These are the people, certainly on energy and environmental issues. These are the people pushing for net zero. If you look at the average American when they're pulled and they say, there are these studies to the effect of, like, how much would you

do care about climate change? Yes. How much would you pay per month to deal deal with climate change? They're like less than $10. Like I actually think that's pretty rational. In terms of just like there's a sort of common sense. Yeah, this is kind of something I care about, but it's pretty remote and the world is not ending and people have been kind of talking about this a long time and like I really need that $10 and people really do need their money. It's, you know, must be able to have very much of it. And there's a lot that we need to do. Like versus these, these, uh, the leaders, which I'm really calling the useful idiots, which is they're like, they're totally willing to just risk the entire civilization on this idea.

Like just think about the net zero thing. Even just there's no concern that it might not work as implemented. I say there's no evidence it could work in any way, but like you just think about how badly like your average Amtrak that's the train in the US, like how bad like a rail project is, and they're making all these plans for like trillions of dollars. And we already see what's happening in places like Texas and California with relatively small amounts of unreliables. Like, there's not even a concern that we might do this the wrong way. That's how, so drunk people are on this goal of eliminating our impact, particularly eliminating our climate impact. And then the specific means of what they would call renewable, what I'd call,

unreliable energy. So I think you don't really have a, it's really the leaders and that's the scary thing. Because if we're just, oh, the leaders are wise. And then the people are just on this terrible track, but it's more like, no, the people are finally catching up to the leaders, or I think with Biden and Trump, what we had is there were so many issues about them that were not related to this issue of energy. Like I think it's very plausible that somebody who wasn't Trump and didn't have a bunch

of issues associated with him could have beaten Biden. And then the US wouldn't be going in this kind of direction. But it's at least to the point where what Biden is proposing doesn't strike most people as, oh yeah, that's going to destroy our country. It's like, oh yeah, that sounds like kind of an interesting idea. I've heard that Tesla is, you know, Apple is all solar and wind and Tesla is all solar. And so that shouldn't be too hard. That shouldn't disrupt my life very much versus, no, what you experience in Texas is like a is a dream compared to what we would experience

if these policies actually existed. Catechlysmic, I love it. Alex, man, thank you for coming on. The moral case for fossil fuels, the correct one will be linked in the show notes below. If people want to do a little bit more digging or further educate themselves, where should they go? Thanks for asking. So I put up a website called energytalkingpoints.com and that sort of breaks down every issue you can imagine and in very sort of bite size and well reference chunks. I definitely should check out energy talking points.com. And if you want to be on my mailing list, I sent out one email a week with just the latest stuff that's going on,

Alex Epstein list.com. And then I'm on Twitter.com slash Alex Epstein. Perfect. Man, thank you very much. Good luck with the new book as well. Thank you very much. Good luck with the new book as well. Thank you.