Ezra Levant interviews Alex Epstein, who dismantles the "anti-impact framework"—the belief that human influence on nature is inherently immoral and self-destructive—calling it a primitive, anti-human ideology. Epstein argues fossil fuels improve Earth’s deficient natural state while opponents like Greta Thunberg rely on emotional rhetoric, not logic. Europe’s energy crisis post-Russia sanctions proves anti-fossil policies fail, yet critics avoid debate, defaulting to smears like "denier" instead of addressing core claims. Epstein’s Fossil Future and The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels counter net-zero extremism, exposing how even gradual progress risks catastrophe, while pro-energy voices—from Bitcoin advocates to economists—grow louder. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, the greatest advocate for fossil fuels in the English language, a feature-length interview with my friend Alex Epstein.
It's December 30th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
If you're trying to debate public policy, which is something I do every day, you're always looking for new facts, a new study to prove you're right, or a new breaking news item that accords with your narrative, your story about the way the world works.
But just getting another fact or another detail or more proof, well, that's part of arguing.
But I think when you can really make progress is if you have a whole new way of thinking about it, a new argument that you haven't heard before.
I mean, I think that's how you break people out of their rut.
If you bring something to their attention that they never considered before, maybe you could actually get them to change their mind as opposed to just playing the same old game of ping pong back and forth with your opponents.
And I say that because our special guest today is the man who I regard as thinks as thinking about energy and how to provide energy to the world in ways that are unique, ways that I just don't see being done by other public intellectuals and certainly not being done by the energy lobby.
You know who I'm talking about.
His name is Alex Epstein.
He's the publisher of Fossil Future, a welcome sequel to the moral case for fossil fuels.
And he joins us now via Zoom.
Alex, welcome.
This book is the most important book.
Great to see you.
It's so important for professional arguers, for people trying to actually persuade minds, because you have new ideas here that I have not heard before.
And I pay attention to this file.
Well, I'd love to go into them, and especially what you see as new.
But in general, yeah, I think that one thing I learned from debating people, because I've done a lot of debates, I'll debate pretty much any prominent person I can, is that, you know, when you're on a stage and you're just disputing facts with people, it's very limited efficacy that you can have in part because people don't necessarily trust you, particularly if they expect to disagree with you.
So you often get these conflicting statements of fact.
But what I found is when you go into framework, so the basic ideas that influence everything else, then you can actually move people.
So an example I use a lot is when I am having a discussion, I carefully, I established at the beginning, hey, should we carefully weigh both the negative side effects and the benefits of fossil fuels versus just looking at the negative side effects?
And everyone says, well, of course, we should look at both.
And yet in practice, people almost never look at the benefits.
That's a way of framing the conversation such that people are actually looking much more at the full picture, or as I often call it, the full context.
And it makes a huge difference.
And the more you can frame things in a way that makes sense, I will put it as common sense, but not common practice, the more you can help people think about the issue rationally.
And the more they'll be open to maybe you are right about the facts if you're giving them a framework that makes sense.
Well, and that's what your books are all about.
I mean, your last book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuel, it takes it head on because I think too many people in the industry are self-hating oil and gas people.
They say, yes, what I'm doing is wrong, but it's the lesser evil.
Was sort of the argument I made in my book, Ethical Oil.
I said, you know, go around the world compared to oil from Iraq or Nigeria or Saudi Arabia.
Canadian American oil is better.
But you came out and said, no, no, no, it's not better.
Oil is positively good.
It's positively moral.
It is a very brave, principled stand.
But let me just tell you an example, what I mean by changing the way, changing an argument, changing, as you say, the framework.
And it's chapter three of your book, Fossil Future, the anti-impact framework.
And I'm going to make a confession here, Alex.
I bought into that.
You know, the anti-energy extremists always say, well, we have to get to zero emissions.
We have to get zero impact.
We have to erase any impact from this energy.
And for some reason, I accepted, yes, we must do that.
But you make an excellent point.
Why don't you make it here instead of me paraphrasing it?
You challenge the anti-impact framework.
So the best way to sum up the anti-impact framework is you could think of it as a dual idea.
It's the idea that human impact on nature is one, intrinsically immoral, and two, inevitably self-destructive.
So, and I think it's helpful to think of it as a religious view because I do think it's a religious view.
It poses as a scientific view, but you could think of it as there's a commandment.
It's kind of an earth or non-human worshiping primitive religion.
And so the commandment is thou shalt not impact nature.
And then the idea is if you violate the commandment, then you're going to go to hell.
Then the earth is going to be terrible.
And you see, like the perspective on CO2 emissions is an example of this.
It's just treated as the most important thing in the world is to eliminate our impact on climate.
Like that's treated as the number one goal in the world.
It's not to give everyone available energy.
It's not what I use the goal often of global human flourishing, which makes a lot more sense as a goal.
Why the hell is our goal to eliminate our impact on climate?
It's just a bizarre thing to put as your primary goal.
Perhaps it could be a derivative goal, although I even question that.
But it goes to show that we're just so saturated in this idea that human impact is intrinsically immoral and inevitably self-destructive.
And if you think about it, and this is a, I didn't know about energy for a long time, but when I was 18, I learned the following and it changed my life.
If you believe that our goal should be to eliminate human impact, you have to recognize that we survive and flourish by impact.
So this is a fundamentally anti-human idea that our impact is bad.
It's just as immoral or anti-us idea as a lion acting on eliminating lion impact or a bear acting on eliminating bear impact.
It's such a self-effacing, anti-human thing.
It's really, and then the other element that people get away with it using is this idea that it's inevitably self-destructive.
So if we impact the earth, the earth is portrayed as what I call a delicate nurturer.
So it exists in this delicate nurturing balance.
It's stable.
It's sufficient.
You know, it gives us what we need as long as we're not too greedy and it's safe.
And all the danger is about us impacting Earth.
We are parasite polluters.
All we can do is take from the earth and make, you know, make the earth ugly and ruin it.
It's just a totally false narrative.
Earth is wild potential.
It has huge potential, but it's naturally dynamic, deficient, and dangerous.
And human beings are producer improvers who largely make the earth much better via our impact.
So we need to embrace our impact fundamentally as good for human flourishing.
We want to avoid anti-human impacts, human harming impacts.
But in general, we should think of our impact as something that makes the earth, you know, a much more wonderful, beautiful place.
You know, and that thinking that you've just described there, and you did talk about that in the moral case for fossil fuels.
It is so new to people who are just in the conventional wisdom on global warming and finding climate action and all this, these buzzwords.
I bet they have never even heard of those ideas.
You mentioned that it's a quasi-religion environmentalism.
And I think that's obvious.
I think as Americans and people all around the world have fallen away from religion, both in practice and in belief, well, other things have filled that void.
You know, people have to believe in something.
Go ahead.
Well, I would say it's a void of philosophy.
So I'm not religious and I'm totally happy.
I don't believe in anti-humanism.
I think the anti-humanism is kind of a bizarre thing.
And I don't think it's a secular thing.
I think it's a religious thing.
I mean, the view of Earth as a delicate nurture, this is just a primitive view, period.
You know, worshiping the sun god and the rain gods and this guy.
I mean, it's really, it's really embarrassing that this poses a science that you just think, oh, like the climate, thinking of the climate.
Oh, the climate is so wonderful.
Like we talk about it as this wonderful thing that we can only ruin.
And yet it's this incredibly dynamic and dangerous phenomenon that's hugely variable, that's changed a ton over history, and that has been a menace until we figured out how to master it.
So I do think what I do think is true about the argument you said is people need philosophy.
So you could think of religion as a category of philosophy.
They need a set, among other things, of values that tell them, hey, here's what to do, including, hey, here's where you can find purpose in life and that kind of thing.
So I wouldn't put it as they need a religion, but yeah, they do need philosophy.
A belief system.
Yeah, this religion is like a big regression because it's like an anti-human religion.
So it's not scientific, but it poses us.
So it's not scientific.
It's anti-human, but it poses a scientific.
So that's why I think it's particularly insidious.
Yeah, it's an interesting point because there are some people who say, I'm not religious, but I'm a humanist.
But what you're saying is that this religion, or even I would call it a superstition, I would say environmental extremism is more a superstition than anything, but you're right.
It is primitive.
It's if we sacrifice a virgin on the pyramid and cut out her heart, will that appease the gods and make it rain?
But it really is that way.
If you punish yourself, if you inflict pain on yourself and live a poor lifestyle, will that and by the way, nature and climate are good, but there is an evil force in nature called carbon.
It's one of the naturally occurring elements, but apparently it's the bad guy.
I mean, it really is a pagan, primitive worldview.
And I can see that resonates through history.
I mean, even in religion, the great flood, you know, there are these natural disasters there.
Polarizing Climate Narratives00:09:23
And I think that the way climate change is sold, and with prophets like Greta Tunberg, and a child shall lead them.
And she doesn't even, I mean, occasionally she throws to the odd fact, but it's no, I am, I mean, she's young.
She's not a child anymore.
She's an adult now.
But when she was 16 and 17, she looked like she was 12.
There's something about her, like she just looks five years younger than she is.
So there was something miraculous about this child who would lead them.
And you must obey the child because she's pure, unlike the adults who were behind the curtain, like the Wizard of Oz.
And if you dared criticize this wonder, this golden child, well, you just hate kids.
But there's so many themes that the anti-human environmentalist left plays on.
They've done a masterful job.
And let me ask you this.
I mean, your case for fossil fuels, it's intellectual, it's great arguments, great ways of looking at things.
How does it fight against pure emotionalism, like pictures of the dying polar bear or Greta saying, how dare you do this to me and my generation?
How do you fight against pure raw emotion?
How do you do that without coming across as a out of touch?
Well, you're just an old man with white man with your old white man arguments, where your feelings.
How do you overcome that?
Well, I think if you notice, Greta's a perfect example in both the how dare you and kind of the polar bear thing are themselves based on the anti-impact framework because it's the idea, hey, it's wrong.
How dare you impact the climate?
That's an evil thing and we shouldn't do that.
And then the idea of the polar bears are often, it's partially their sympathy for the polar bears, but it also conveys, hey, like we've destroyed the Arctic and that's going to destroy the Earth and the sea levels are going to rise, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And I think the key is there's nothing inherently more emotional about that than what I call the human flourishing framework.
In fact, I would argue it is less emotionally resonant to make up these fables and to focus on polar bears.
Like if you look right now from a human flourishing perspective, positively, you can talk about how fossil fuels have made the world miraculously good and preserved billions of lives that would otherwise end prematurely.
And that also give us the opportunity to enjoy and preserve the best parts of nature, including, you know, we've drastically increased the polar bear population.
That has some harms to certain populations, so we have to be careful about it.
But in general, you can have very positive emotions with how energy and human impact can make the world amazing.
And then you can also have negatives in terms of, like, I would flip it on Greta and her handlers and whoever's behind the scenes and say, hey, look, you've caused a global energy crisis.
We're now in Europe, people are afraid of winter like it's Game of Thrones.
Like this is, there's nothing inherently more emotional about impact is bad than human flourishing is good and harming human flourishing is bad.
And in fact, the most powerful arguments the anti-impact people have are false arguments that following them will benefit human flourishing and using energy, particularly fossil fuels, will harm human flourishing.
So I think it's a matter of making sure that we make emotionally resonant arguments conveying the truth.
Yeah.
Hey, let me ask you about something because I, you know, taking on their well-worn, I mean, they have phrases that have been repeated so often, they don't even sound like they're political anymore.
It's like, you know, we just know now, don't litter.
Like that doesn't even feel ideological.
It's just politeness.
It's a manner.
It's a custom.
It's so commonplace.
I don't, you know, and it's sort of hard to believe that maybe 50 years ago, that wasn't the way.
But is that the example?
Because I can think of other things.
I mean, just sorry to interrupt, but there's, so there's the expressions, but I think even more insidious are the terms that people use.
And you mentioned industry.
And like, I love the energy industry, the fossil fuel industry.
But one vice they have is they just passively accept terms that are generated by their enemies.
So we could go into any number of them or none of them, but like sustainability, renewable, ESG, like these things were just when your enemy puts out new ideas, you should be suspicious that those are manipulative ideas.
And all the three I mentioned certainly are.
Oh, yeah.
And they think that if they grant the premise, they can just sort of fight a slow retreat.
But once you've granted the premise that, for example, Patrick Moore, the co-founder of Greenpeace, who has come out as pro-nuclear energy, for example, and he's, we've done some events with him, a very interesting guy.
He head-on challenges this phobia that this naturally occurring element called carbon is evil.
In fact, he says carbon dioxide is good for a greening earth.
What's your take on like to take on something so bluntly like that?
Some people, you know, the scales will fall from their eyes and they'll say, yes, I never thought of it that way.
Other people will say, you're crazy.
How do you challenge something like carbon emissions are bad?
Carbon dioxide are bad.
What's your carbon footprint?
Buy a carbon offset.
It's so ubiquitous, it's like don't litter.
Of course, don't litter.
How do you, a professional persuader, challenge something that is as crazy as saying to someone, oh, go ahead and litter?
Like they're probably hearing it in the same way.
You're mad.
Is this a joke?
Is this, you know, are you pulling a prank on me?
How do you say something so contrary to the prevailing winds and move people?
I love this question.
I think it's there is a certain interest you can generate by saying something that's directly contrary.
And look at both my book titles, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, Fossil Future, you know, which contradicts the idea that fossil fuels are becoming a thing of the past and certainly should be becoming a thing of the past.
So you can do that to intrigue people, as long as it just doesn't sound insane.
Like, you know, it doesn't sound like, oh, you're advocating a Holocaust or something like that, right?
That would be, obviously, wouldn't advocate a Holocaust, but it's just like, you need to be, I mean, if it's something like, I mean, generally, most things that are true, you can put over in an intriguing way.
So I don't want to think about things that are false and talk about how to put them over in an intriguing way.
But the key is, if you say something like, hey, I think CO2 is good or has a lot of good to it, I think the main way to persuade people is actually to step back and focus on the methodology of how we think about it.
And so the example I gave before, which I use a lot, is, hey, we need to consider the benefits and side effects, or another way to think of it is the positives and negatives.
So if we just take CO2, if I'm talking to someone, I was saying, hey, like, I have a couple of ideas about how to think about CO2.
Would you agree with it?
And then one is we need to look at both positive and negative impacts of CO2 with precision.
Would you agree with that?
So, yes, we can look at how it might cause more heat waves and how that's detrimental, but we also have to look at how warming can save lives from cold-related deaths.
And we also need to look at how more CO2 can fertilize the earth.
And most people say, yeah, I agree to do that.
And so notice, like once they agree, because I've given them a method that's very common sense and really impossible to argue with, then they'll start thinking about it in the right way.
And then they'll be open to the controversial conclusion.
But I start with an uncontroversial method that inevitably leads to the controversial conclusion.
And then the other thing I add to that always is, well, we also have to look at the energy that comes with the CO2, right?
We can't just look at the negatives and positives of the CO2.
We need to look at the benefits of the energy and also any negatives if there are any, which fundamentally I don't think there are, but the energy that comes with it.
And so then when you do that, it's pretty obvious.
Actually, we need more fossil fuels and we need to emit more CO2 for the foreseeable future.
But it's such an uncontroversial way of thinking.
So that's really the secret.
The uncontroversial method, like if you have a true controversial conclusion, then establish an uncontroversial method to get people to think about it in the right way.
You know, I'm thinking about your two book titles, Fossil Future.
Again, you're implying there is one and the moral case for fossil fuel.
And I mean, I suppose that's what I did with ethical oil, which is like those two words people were shocked by.
They were angry.
You know, the professional anti-war were angry at ethical oil.
They didn't like to hear the word, which is why I loved it so much.
And it did get people to say, but then there was an argument that you had.
I mean, there was an argument that you had.
And one thing, you know, sort of you mentioned, well, you didn't put it this way, but I would think of it: ethical oil is a lot about the process of producing oil.
And, you know, this is a process.
Yeah.
And so my argument is fundamentally about the product, but saying this is a good product.
It's not, and ultimately you need both.
Seeing Ethical Oil Spread00:15:25
But the thing you run into if you only talk about the process is people can say, oh, well, I have the most efficient cigarette factory.
Like none of my employees smoke making the cigarettes.
Or like we have the most ethical mafia family.
Like we do hits and none of us do drugs and this, like we account for all the money and this kind of thing.
But you do need both.
And the way I think of it is you need the, number one, is the value of the product, but then it is important to look at the process.
And certainly the kinds of issues you were raising and an early person to raise are very, very morally relevant in terms of things like our security.
And I think they are very, very, you know, even more relevant today or just as relevant as ever today.
And I think they resonate with a lot of people.
So I've been in the last few years, particularly in, I have a website, energytalkingpoints.com, that's very focused on the best points for current events.
I've been focusing on that a lot more myself because it is really, really crucial and it is resonant with a lot of people.
You know, it's funny.
I wrote my book about a decade ago, and I know you've been plugging away for about the same amount of time.
And here we are in a real energy crisis.
And it's amazing, Russia invading Ukraine.
And you can't punish Russia because to punish Russia, if you're Germany, are you going to cut yourself off from a third of your energy?
I mean, you've got to be careful Russia doesn't put sanctions on you.
And I think that's a reason why so many OPEC countries were able to subsidize terrorist groups.
Like Qatar was a major sponsor of ISIS.
And I think the answer was: because what are you going to do?
You need to buy their oil and gas no matter what.
And in the West, you had your Greta Tunbergs, you had your Al Gores, you had your, in this country, David Suzuki.
In the UK, they banned fracking.
You had all these dilettantes in the West that shut down fossil fuel energy while the bad guys in Russia and OPEC kept going.
And now we have a real energy crisis.
And as you said, in the UK, they can't afford it.
They're chopping down trees for firewood now.
It's madness.
Let me ask you this, other than to remark about how we've lost 10 or 20 years because the West has believed the Gretas of the world.
But has there been an awakening by ordinary people to say, what the heck were we listening to them for?
We can't run this.
I'm in Edmonton today.
It's minus 33 degrees.
There's not a lot of electric cars going around.
Like just to just, it's so cold here.
I don't know if electric vehicles do well when it is this cold.
Certainly not on important vehicles like a fire truck or something like that.
So let me ask you this: when it's bloody cold like it is here today, and when you have energy shortages as you're seeing in Western Europe, and when you have high prices because of a war, does any of this flip people over on these issues?
Does it allow you to crack their hard shell and get them to look at these things again?
Or do they just come up with a new rationalization or do they just ignore it and pretend it's not happening?
I think you can think of it as it's a big persuasive opportunity, but it's not guaranteed because you do see these wake-up calls.
And the way to think of a crisis is it's always in one way or another, a failure of the establishment.
So you think of, say, 9-11. or the financial crisis of 2008.
In both cases, people say, hey, the establishment clearly did something wrong because we're really, really unhappy about this thing that happened.
And it's a crucial thing who is implicated by the crisis and who is vindicated by the crisis, right?
And that is, that's why if people go to energy talkingpoints.com, I have a lot of stuff, half a dozen, probably more pieces on the energy crisis, because I think it's crucial that the right people are implicated.
But what you notice is the people who actually caused the crisis are totally denying responsibility for it.
So one recent thing is the International Energy Agency, which at this point, like they should not have energy in their title, which should be the International Anti-Energy Agency.
You know, they've been publicly advocating for stopping new oil and gas development in 2021.
Think about that.
This is the International Energy Agency, and they publicly advocated for this in 2021, when now in 2022, we obviously need more oil and gas.
And we obviously did back then.
And they're not admitting any responsibility at all.
They just put out these, they just put out a glowing report on like renewables are amazing and they're the future, even though they're failing all over the place.
And even though their supply chains are a total disaster because people are trying to have all these crash programs that make no sense at all in terms of how rapidly you're doing them, and particularly when you have an anti-development environment that they're contributing to where it's super hard to mine and manufacture things.
So there's such, and you can take the Biden administration saying, hey, we have nothing to do with this.
I doubt Trudeau is taking a lot of responsibility, the little that I know about him.
So it's very important, though, to say, hey, look, this is very clear.
The energy crisis is a lack of fossil fuel crisis, and it's fundamentally caused by the anti-fossil fuel movement that has systemically opposed fossil fuel investment, fossil fuel production, fossil fuel refining, fossil fuel transportation.
It's obvious.
This is what they said they were doing.
And they got the result of less fossil fuel, but their promise that solar and wind would magically replace fossil fuels came false.
And that's why they're all begging to dictators now.
So it was just, it's just very important that people get that.
And then also that we have a positive alternative.
So this is one reason I'm happy it took me so long to do fossil future, because it came out this year.
And it's really perfect timing for people to be, because people are more open to, wait, maybe we do need a fossil future because the people said we needed to rapidly eliminate fossil fuels.
They're clearly somehow involved in this crisis, even though they're denying it.
Yeah.
You know, even as I was asking that question, I was thinking the answers.
I've heard the answers.
They say, oh, these high prices suddenly make alternative energy more competitive.
So very high gas prices prove solar is the way.
Solar and wind are now cheaper than natural gas.
And then you have pure denialism.
Like various European leaders, including the Chancellor of Germany, said to Canada, which has a huge reserve of shale gas, of natural gas, please send us some LNG.
And Trudeau literally said, I don't think there's a business case for it.
That's what he said.
He's a well-known businessman and entrepreneur, of course.
So Germany signed a massive deal with Qatar.
You know, it's so I guess the answer is they'll come up with any excuse to stay on their agenda.
But they're pretty weak excuses that the one about, oh, renewables are now competitive.
I called this the Tanya Harding case against fossil fuels.
It's like, oh, well, you know, I kneecapped my opponent, and so now I'm more competitive.
Like, okay, but it's your fault that fossil fuels have gone up in price.
And even then, we still need fossil fuels.
People are still desperate to pay today's prices for fossil fuels.
So it should make people appreciate the industry more.
And I do think these anti-fossil fuel arguments are a lot harder to make now, but we can't assume that people will just see the truth on their own.
We need to be very aggressive about saying, hey, here's what's responsible.
Here's the alternative.
Now, in your last chapter, you say something which I'm going to ask you about because I'm not, I need help with it.
You three words: why I'm optimistic.
You know, I'm glad you are.
As I get older and I realize that all my efforts sometimes are, are they in vain?
Have we moved the needle at all?
Maybe we don't know what would have happened had we not been advocating the way we have.
Maybe, maybe we avoided some disaster.
Maybe we had success we didn't know.
But, you know, I think in my country of Canada, my home province of Alberta has driven away so many massive oil sands companies, killed mighty projects, and those companies just go to the bad actors in the world, whether it's a former Soviet republic or the Middle East or Venezuela.
So I suppose energy is coming out of the ground, and that's a positive.
But, you know, when I wrote ethical oil versus now, the oil patch, you know, I'm not going to say it's gutted because it's still operating, but an enormous no pipelines have been built.
There were five pipeline proposals.
All were killed.
Billions of dollars of projects that were on track were canceled and moved elsewhere.
Now, you say you're optimistic.
Give me some of that.
Well, Canada is a particular tragedy.
So let's just acknowledge how sad that situation is for Canada and around the world.
I mean, think about, imagine just a totally different set of events where everyone acknowledges, hey, this oil sands thing is amazing, right?
We have this huge natural like oil seep.
We know where it is.
We have great technology for harnessing it.
The technology is improving.
And Canada can help empower the world with it.
I mean, imagine how much better we'd be off right now as a world in terms of just the availability of oil.
And then, of course, if Canada had built any or all of these pipeline projects.
So it is a tragedy there.
I mean, Europe is a tragedy in a different way, although I tend to be much more.
I like Canada much more than I like Europe for various reasons.
But Canada, it's kind of like the US, but even more extreme.
It takes bad European ideas as the vanguard, even though why do we take Europe's ideas again?
Like what track record of success have they had in the last hundred years that should make us worship Europe as the source of great ideas and abandon our own ideas for that?
Okay, so why am I optimistic though?
I think it's fundamentally because I have I'm seeing like I'm on the inside of changing people's thinking about energy from this anti-human, primitive religious way to a pro-human, truly scientific and proper way.
And what I'm seeing with my own work is I'm seeing it, the growth really start to happen as I get better and the arguments get better.
So I had moral case for fossil fuels, which is a certain level.
I think fossil future is a much higher level.
Then I also have created energytalkingpoints.com, which is really crucial because it helps elected officials, influencers, and citizens have the best arguments on every issue for free at their disposal.
And what I'm noticing is you're seeing a spread of new people starting to make these kinds of arguments.
Now, it's still like small, relatively speaking, but like think about the people now making these arguments.
Taking credit for everybody, but there is this kind of movement, and I have had a significant role in the movement.
So you take like Bjorn Lomborg, Michael Schellenberger, Steve Kuhnen, Mark Mills.
And you're starting to see there's a new player called Doomberg, which is really, really popular on Substack now.
You're seeing the financial world.
There's a lot of like financial people commenting on it, Bitcoin people commenting on it.
People in electricity are getting better.
Like more and more people are learning these humanistic arguments.
And then you're starting even some industry people, like Chris Wright of Liberty Oil Field Services, Adam Anderson of a company called Inavex spit up to the north face.
You're seeing these things that weren't happening at all.
And 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I was almost a lone voice, and you're seeing it grow.
And then you're seeing the other side has no answer at all.
Their answer is to smear us.
You know, the Washington Post had this bizarre thing where they tried to cancel me because they claimed that I didn't care about poor people.
So I made an argument they couldn't refute about how poor people need fossil fuels.
And their genius response was to argue Alex Epstein doesn't really care about poor people.
Well, that is not true.
And it's not a valid counter argument if somebody makes an irrefutable argument.
So you're seeing like they're using character assassination, all these really weak things, and they just don't have an answer.
They're still on such a primitive level.
They still think it's, you know, the year 2000 and they can just get rid of you by calling you a climate change denier and not actually have to think about our climate impacts in the context of the benefits, as well as think about our climate impacts in an even-handed and precise way.
So I'm just seeing this energy humanist phenomenon grow.
And then with the energy crisis, we have more openness than ever.
So I just encourage your viewers and listeners, like take advantage of the resources that I and others have created.
Particularly, make sure you take advantage of energytalkingpoints.com because it's just so much easier for you than it was for me 10 years ago.
And that was my goal: to make it easier.
And the openness to this issue is far greater than it has been during my intellectual lifetime.
Because when you have a crisis, it's different.
Like in the 70s, people were really open to pro-energy policies.
You know, the U.S. Democrats in the late 70s were obsessed with coal and nuclear, and they would have dreamed for today's American energy situation.
Now they hate it, unfortunately.
Their air is hate it.
But when you have an energy crisis, it really does open people's minds.
And so there's a lot to take advantage of.
And we have the resources to really persuade a lot of people.
Let me just ask you one last question.
I really appreciate how much time you're giving us today.
You say you've debated a lot of people, and I know you have, and I know you appear on TV a lot, which is a great way to talk to so many people.
I think I gave at least 100 speeches in support of my book, Ethical Oil, in Canada, US, even Europe, but only three debates.
And maybe it's me, maybe it's a personality thing, or maybe I don't know.
But I think this applies to others who are skeptics of the global warming movement.
The other side doesn't like to debate.
And I wonder if you can explain how do you get the other side to debate you when they're not used to it, when they probably would call you a denier or try and cancel you, as you say, you know, they tried to do.
I find this applies to all political fields these days.
I find that the left doesn't, they believe in deplatforming rather than getting on the platform and sharing it with you.
Maybe I'm just expressing my own personal experience, but how do you debate?
And do you debate people who are on your level?
Or do you have to pick a really lowly person who's looking for some celebrity airtime?
Because I don't see the other side in this argument willing to engage.
Say, well, you mentioned the Holocaust earlier.
They would think it's tantamount to debating a Holocaust denier.
They use that word denier.
How do you get the other side to debate you?
Well, so one thing is, insofar as their argument is, I won't debate a climate change denier.
Debating Net Zero Commitments00:03:48
I mean, I have a very clear answer to that, which is, I believe we impact climate.
I just do not believe it's a catastrophe that justifies it, that justifies denying 8 billion people the fossil fuels they need to flourish.
So I have a pretty like that, I can get rid of that argument pretty quickly.
So it's pretty implausible.
Some people have refused to debate me because of that.
But more broadly, what they try to do is they try to present it as a purely scientific debate.
So there's one prominent person that I won't name who says I won't debate him because he's not a scientist.
But fossil fuels, that's an interdisciplinary issue.
And actually, the most important aspect of it is definitely not climate science.
It's energy and energy economics.
So as an expert on those things, I'm certainly qualified to have a debate.
And I certainly know a lot more about climate science than almost any of these climate scientists knows about energy.
So they have these superficial things.
Yeah, they most don't want to do it.
And it doesn't happen that often, but I'm sort of very publicly aggressive about doing it.
And I have gotten some prominent people.
So earlier this year, I got one of the most prominent catastrophists willing to do is this guy, Andrew Dessler, out of Texas AM.
And I have a lot of issues with this guy, but he is willing to get on stage and debate people.
He debated Steve Koonin, I think twice this year, and he debated me.
And then we did a kind of debate show on Michaela Peterson's show, although that was we were on at different times.
There's a guy, the last one I had at UT Austin was a professor named John Doggett, and he was the only one at the school who was willing to debate me, but he didn't really debate me because we were debating on should the world go net zero.
And he acknowledged at the end, Alex is right.
If we did net zero, it would be the apocalypse.
So his view was like, hey, we should aspire to it somehow.
We should somehow like slowly move in this direction.
But nobody, here's the thing.
Everyone says net zero by 2050 is the goal.
Nobody's willing to debate that.
That's what I'm arguing.
I'm arguing, let's debate the proposition that every company almost, every prominent company, all these academics, the thing, all these governments, the thing everyone is committing to, will any of you debate it?
And basically, none of them will.
And when they get on the stage, like this happened with General Wesley Clark, whom I admire in a lot of ways, but I debated him.
And he agreed on the call in advance: yeah, I think we should be net zero.
In fact, I think we should be net carbon negative by 2050.
Once you get on the stage, no.
It's just like, I think, hey, I think we should explore alternatives.
That's not what the UN says.
They didn't say explore alternatives.
They said get rid of net CO2 emissions by 2050.
So it's not easy, but I do, I am pretty aggressive about it.
And I do, I do have, this makes people so mad, but I published criteria for debating because what will happen is random people, some of whom have no basic command of the English language, will say, hey, Alex, like I'll debate you.
And if I was just a debater, I would enjoy sort of like crushing these people randomly.
But because I'm primarily a writer and a researcher and a thinker, I don't have unlimited time to debate random people.
So I just, I have a very simple thing.
I said, either somebody can, if you can find an audience of 100,000 people or more who are willing to see this online, I will debate anyone.
Because that's like, if you can do that, I'm willing to do it.
I don't care who you are.
Or I said, if somebody wants to host an event with me and pay me my speaking fee, sure, I'll do it too.
And then the response was, oh, Alex is demanding that you pay him to debate, even though I definitely did not say that.
I just said that's one thing that I'll do.
But if anyone can get an audience of 100,000 people or more, then I will have that.
And they want to actually have a debate, then I'm happy to have a debate.
But that is a very small universe, which is why I only get about two debates a year.
Well, I'd love to see it.
And hopefully, you'll continue to have those debates and they'll get a lot of viewership.
Debates And Dollars00:00:55
Great to catch up with you.
The books are Fossil Future, which of course follows in the footsteps of the moral case for fossil fuels.
I should tell you, oh, yeah, and we'll have the link under this video that people.
Well, I mean, even just the summary of the book on your Substack page is very in-depth.
I should tell you that at the office, I have an I Love Fossil Fuels coffee mug that I drink out of every day, Alex.
Great to see you.
I wish you all the best in 2023.
I think you were doing good, not for the industry, but for humanity and for the benefit of all people.
And I thank you for it.
And as always, I learn a lot from talking with you.
Thanks, my friend.
Thanks, Ezra.
I hope to see you soon.
Right on.
There you have it, Alex Epstein.
You can get his books at the links below.
That's our show for today.
Until next time, on behalf of all of us at Rebel, and I'm in our Western Outpost today.