Ezra Levant welcomes Alex Epstein, who reframes "climate change" as "climate danger," exposing how fossil fuels—despite demonization—enable human survival through tech like air conditioning and irrigation, slashing disaster deaths by 98%. Epstein’s books The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Future argue that energy poverty, not carbon, is the real crisis, while policies prioritize Western comfort over global progress. Epstein’s free tools (energytalkingpoints.com, "Alex AI") and candidates’ adoption of his data-driven arguments signal a shift against junk science, yet net-zero goals remain elusive amid rising grid failures and geopolitical vulnerabilities. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, as you know, more than a decade ago, I wrote a book called Ethical Oil, The Case for Canada's Oil Sands.
And the idea of putting the word ethics and oil together was a shock to people who had always demonized oil.
The thesis that I had was that the values that the progressive left claims to hold, environmental responsibility, peace, the treatment of workers, human rights, if we actually value those things, we should prefer ethical oil from democratic countries like Canada and the United States to conflict oil from OPEC nations.
Now, that was basically saying if we have to have oil, we should get it from the best places possible.
Another way of saying that is every barrel of oil produced, say, in the Alberta oil sands, is one fewer barrels of oil bought from a Saudi dictatorship, an Iranian theocracy, or Russia, which uses its oil profits to invade its neighbors.
Well, here we are a decade later, and all those things are worse.
But the front line of this battle is not really foreign affairs.
I think that what's happened over the last decade in particular is the climate alarmism.
And I think you see that in the form of climate depression and climate grief amongst young people who have been so terrorized by this climate alarmism, that the front line for that battle is actually domestically.
It's not, hey, which countries should we buy our oil from?
It's should we even use oil?
Should we even use energy?
And are people actually a problem?
You'll remember this clip of Bill Gates saying that we have to get rid of at least a billion people.
He said that.
Look at the clip.
So let's look at each one of these and see how we can get this down to zero.
Probably one of these numbers is going to have to get pretty near to zero.
That's back from high school algebra.
But let's take a look.
First, we've got population.
The world today has 6.8 billion people.
That's headed up to about 9 billion.
Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.
Climate Livability Goals00:15:38
But there we see an increase of about 1.3.
That's the logical extension of the idea that people are the problem and the planet is some pristine thing that can't be touched.
And I think that the greatest communicator of a pro-human approach that says fossil fuels isn't just the lesser evil, but it's a positive good.
The greatest communicator I've ever met for that thesis.
In fact, I've often joked that his book is the book I really wish I wrote, is my friend Alex Epstein, who tirelessly says we don't need to be on the defensive about energy.
It's the best thing that ever happened to the world.
And so for the rest of the show, I'm delighted to talk with Alex Epstein, who joins us now.
Alex, great to see you again.
Likewise.
Well, that's a super generous introduction.
So I hope to live up to it.
Well, I know you will.
I just, you know, I want to start with your Twitter thread that you made a few weeks ago.
And you just have ways of framing things that I haven't heard before.
And when you say them, a light switch goes on.
I think there's something powerful to vocabulary because we have sort of a gut feeling, but if we don't know how to express it, we're sort of incoherent.
Let me read a couple of the tweets, and then I'd love you just to expand on that for our viewers.
You said, question.
What should government do to address climate change?
That's a pretty neutral question.
And I think it's asked.
It seems neutral.
It's very non-neutral, but it seems neutral.
And let me ask you, read your answer, and then I'd love you just to take it away.
And I'll be hanging on your every word and show all our viewers.
Your answer was climate change is the wrong target.
We want to reduce climate danger.
And the proven way to do that is master climate danger by letting us use all forms of cost-effective energy, including fossil fuels.
I'm just going to read one more tweet, and then I'm going to ask you to take it away.
You say, asking how governments should, quote, address climate change assumes that us impacting climate must be a bad thing, but it's only bad if it endangers us by creating challenges we can't master.
And so far, our climate mastery has far outpaced any new climate challenges.
What do you mean by climate mastery?
It's one of these things where people don't talk about it, but it's just an incredibly common sense thing.
So one question I like to ask people who think, you know, we've ruined the climate is, would you rather live in the climate today or the climate 100 years ago?
Like, would you rather, if you want to be safe from climate, would you rather be in the 1920s or the 2020s?
I mean, what's your answer, Ezra?
Well, I mean, I know the answer because I study these things.
I know that we've mastered the climate with air conditioning in the summer, with heating in the winter, with, you know, building up protection for floods, dams.
So I think I know the answer, but I know it in my own vocabulary.
I want to hear it in your vocabulary because the way you talk about it, I think it's like a light switch goes on.
So I think, I mean, I agree with you, obviously, but I think anyone, I want to just bring it back to common sense, and then I want to give some language around it.
But the common sense is, yeah, obviously I want to live in the climate now versus the climate in the past because our level of mastery now is so much greater than it was back then, and particularly even more so in poorer parts of the world, that whatever has changed in the climate for the negative, it totally outweighs that.
And you can see this with the data that I share frequently is we have a 98% decline in the rate of what's called climate-related disaster deaths.
So these are deaths from storms and floods and temperature extremes and wildfires.
If you just think about it, then what does this really show?
What it shows is that the livability of the climate, and in particular, the safety of the climate, is a product of two things.
One is what's the actual state of the global climate system and then the local climate you happen to live in.
But then the other thing is, what's your level of mastery of it?
And that's what determines the climate livability.
And we have to factor in both.
And my point is, well, what we really want is we want a livable and safe climate, right?
Nobody should want, hey, I want the climate that existed in 1850 just because that came before the Industrial Revolution.
Like, why would you deify the climate of 1850 versus any other?
What you want is a livable climate.
But what we've seen from history is the number one key to a livable climate is mastery.
And the United States is a perfect example of this because the United States has an incredibly diverse set of climates.
You can take, we have an Arctic area with Alaska, and we have like humid, swampy Florida, and we have scorching Texas, and we have, you know, a lot of Arizona, which is totally unlivable, close to that before air conditioning.
And now we can live to 80 in every single state.
But just think of that, whatever the climate conditions, including the weather conditions, we can thrive.
We can, as I like to say, we can flourish.
And so what that shows is that the real thing that matters to climate livability is climate mastery.
Now, what does this have to do with fossil fuels?
Well, one thing is if we have a high level of mastery, you just generally shouldn't be afraid of new climate challenges unless they're a total difference of kind.
So the fact that we're so obsessed with climate change doesn't really make any sense because it's one of the things we're better at dealing with.
I mean, we've supposedly had so much climate change over the last hundred years, and yet we're safer that we're much safer than ever from climate.
So one thing is to just reassure people and stop terrorizing kids.
But then the other thing is, if you look at what causes the mastery, it's hugely the fossil fuels we're blaming for causing the climate change.
So it's the fossil fuels are powering the irrigation systems that help make drought 1-100 the threat it used to be.
The fossil fuels are powering all the machines that build the sturdy buildings and power the storm warning systems and the evacuation systems that make us safe from storms.
Of course, they're powering the heating and air conditioning.
So it's, it's so odd because actually fossil fuels are making climate far more livable when you look at it from a human livability perspective, and yet they're demonized as climate villains.
So it's exactly everyone's wrong, right?
Everyone thinks either fossil fuels are terrible for the climate or they're not so bad.
But it's actually they're the best thing that's ever happened to the livability of climate.
I think what you're saying, if I, and again, I don't want to nitpick, but it's sort of interesting you phrase it.
Would I rather live in the climate today or 100 years ago or 100 years from now?
The answer really isn't based on the climate itself, because it's going to be pretty similar.
It's our technology.
So there was nothing particularly wrong with the climate 100 years ago or 500 years ago.
It's that we didn't have the tools to deal with it.
So what you're really saying is human ingenuity is the difference.
And although, I mean, let me read another one of your tweets because it's interesting.
You said it's an irrefutable but little known fact that as the world has warmed one degree Celsius, humans have become safer than ever from climate danger.
The rate of climate-related disaster deaths, and you mentioned that, has fallen 98%.
So you acknowledge that the earth has very slowly, very gradually warmed.
But you're saying as it's warmed, our ability to deal with warmth, droughts, whatever has improved greatly.
It's not the climate change is a snail's pace, but our technological change is at a breakneck pace.
Right.
I mean, the way I put it is, right, the climate, the climate mastery far outpaces any new climate challenges.
And part of the reason I put it as climate challenges, which is a bit of a new phraseology for me, is that actually things in climate aren't really negative unless you can't master them.
So you take something like, okay, well, the world gets warmer in certain kinds of ways, but then you can benefit from that.
I mean, look at the migration in the United States.
I mean, people moving to Texas and Florida, like they don't mind that in many, many ways.
I mean, people are going from New York to Florida.
That's a much more dramatic climate change than any catastrophist projects for the Earth, right?
They're making it involuntarily.
And even you take something like a storm, like the same storm that would have destroyed your home and ruined your life 200 years ago could be the romantic setting for an evening with one's wife or partner now.
So it's like our mastery really determines how livable climate is.
And here's something that will trigger people, including, I think, many conservatives, but in the future, we're going to figure out how to master climate on wider scales.
So we're going to figure out how do we neutralize hurricanes.
And people are probably going to figure out.
I mean, people are already like feeding clouds to alleviate drought, which I think is a really good thing.
But people are going to, we already have a lot of ways we know of cooling the earth and warming the earth in different kinds of ways.
And in general, and that raises some interesting policy questions, but in general, people are going to want a climate that's more livable.
I live in Southern California.
They make us pay a fortune to live here and we have to deal with Gabonusa.
I think in the future, freer places are going to try to replicate a California-esque climate.
And that's part of the project of climate mastery.
And it's part of why it's insane for the world to be obsessed with relatively small changes in temperature when we should be obsessed with increasing our mastery over the earth.
You know, Philip McAlier, I think, is the one who, maybe it's you, maybe I'm confusing my climate contrarians, but he points out that if you look at where life is most abundant on earth, both human life and plant and animal life, it's actually in the warmer parts, in the tropics.
There's no 20 million person cities north of the Arctic Circle.
They're all in the tropics.
And the burgeoning, you know, fritters and bugs and plants are in the equator, not in Antarctic or the Arctic.
So the idea that warmth or heat is sometimes dangerous, I suppose, you mentioned the Arizona desert.
Sure, that could be dangerous, but air conditioning fits that.
I think of Al Gore where the planet is boiling.
It's on fire.
Like they, I really think they've resorted to almost like science fiction terminology to scare us.
I think they've done a number on it.
I'm honest.
I think there's a whole generation of kids who are growing up just the way our generation was maybe afraid of nuclear mutually assured destruction.
And I think there was a basis for that fear.
Don't get me wrong.
I think that we've conditioned an entire era of schoolchildren to be terrified of the planet warming a fraction of a degree.
I mean, boiling fires.
I think we've done a number on our own kids.
I agree.
And I would think of that as it's sort of the second point.
So the first point about climate is mastery is what matters most.
And that should make us suspicious of this movement.
You know, the people claim to care about the livability of climate, that they ignore mastery.
They don't seem to care about mastery when that makes all the difference.
They say, I'm so concerned about the poor world.
Let's have them use less energy.
So somehow the climate will be nicer to them first.
Let's get them energy so they can protect themselves as well as we can.
So there's this one element of ignoring mastery.
But then the other thing that should be suspicious is what you're raising, which is the demonizing of warmth.
I don't know if it's thermophobia or whatever.
Maybe there's a term for it.
But yeah, if you just think from a human perspective, and I'm stressing that for a reason, because I think it's ultimately an anti-human philosophy that causes people to ignore mastery and to be to have a fear of any and hatred of any kind of human change, including warmth.
If you just look at it common sense, and somebody had told you, somebody had told people in 1920, hey, you know what?
In 100 years, the global climate system is going to be about a degree Celsius warmers, about two degrees Fahrenheit for Americans.
And that warming is going to be mostly concentrated in older regions of the Earth.
And it's going to be more at night and it's going to be more in the winter.
What would they say?
And you're going to have a lot more CO2 for plants.
Like, are they really going to think, oh, my God, how could we live through that?
Like, they'd probably think, well, that might actually be good.
There's going to be a lot of benefits to that.
A lot fewer cold-related deaths.
And it turns out many times more people die from cold than from heat now, let alone back then.
So you would just think like it's either no big deal or it could even be better.
And so, what you get is people are acting like mastery doesn't exist.
And they're acting like warmth is a catastrophe when it's kind of obviously not, particularly with mastery, but even on its own, it's pretty obviously not.
And so there's this question of what is behind this.
And I talk about this a lot in my book, Fossil Future.
And what's behind it is ultimately that people at best are not looking at climate from a pro-human perspective.
Because from a pro-human perspective, the project of using fossil fuels to master climate and creating some warming as a side effect isn't an incredibly pro-climate project from a human perspective.
And so ultimately, it's that they're looking at it from an impact is evil perspective, or what I call it, the anti-impact framework.
So it's the view that it's wrong for us to impact nature.
And our number one goal should be to eliminate our impact on nature.
And if you view climate that way, you think our number one goal for climate shouldn't be make it livable.
No, no, no.
Our number one goal should just be to not impact it.
Then from that perspective, who cares if we can master it?
That's not the goal.
The goal is just to not impact it.
And then if you believe the goal is to not impact climate, then everything we've done to climate is evil.
And even though we're 50 times safer from death than we were 100 years ago, we made it worse.
So it's all about the moral standard.
Is your standard advancing human flourishing on earth, in which case we've made the climate better?
Or is it eliminating human impact on earth, in which case we've made the climate worse?
You know, I can't help but think as you're talking that, you know, you and I have grown up in North America.
So we probably had air conditioning for decades.
I mean, I remember when it was still sort of an option in a car, a basic car to get air conditioning.
Now it's pretty standard.
I think air conditioning, just the climate solutions, climate mastery is completely ubiquitous.
And it really always has been.
I'm not saying there aren't some people who can't afford an air conditioner in hot places.
But I guess what I'm saying is I feel like the places that have had the greatest change in their ability to master the climate are not California or Canada, but India, China, places that have gone from zero to, let's say, people who have come so far compared to us.
Yes, we're wealthier than ever, but we had a good starting point, let's say 50 years ago.
Global Warming Fear-Mongering00:09:36
I guess what I'm saying is, I think that global warming fear-mongering is a luxury good, primarily in the West that has benefited from climate mastery.
I think of Greta Tunberg as the absolute epitome of that.
Someone who hasn't had a tough day in their entire life, someone who lives in a northern country who benefits from climate mastery every day.
She can afford to have a school strike, even though she's in her 20s now.
She can afford to pout about energy because she's not someone in India, China, Indonesia, Africa trying to rise up.
I think the global warming mindset is a luxury good for spoiled Westerners.
What do you think?
I think it's an element of that.
There's an element of that.
I mean, if you look at somebody like Greta, I mean, I think there has to be some empathy as well because people are so that they're given so much catastrophe in their upbringing.
So it's weird because they're taught that the best earth ever to live on is the worst earth ever.
And there, you know, Greta becomes less innocent by the day because she's now an adult.
But you just think, yeah, people have this legitimate fear and they have this legit, I mean, it's not actually based on anything, but it's real fear, particularly for the younger people.
I think the older people, not nearly as much.
It's real fear.
And they just think it's a transgression.
They really think it's immoral to impact the earth and, in particular, impact the climate.
But yeah, it is in fact, it's true, it's a luxury.
And you can see this with the actual emphasis that people place on climate change.
You know, you would think that, hey, in African nations, regular people would be so concerned about climate change that it allegedly hurts them the most.
And, in a sense, any negative thing, any negative element of climate change will, of course, hurt the poor the most, because everything negative hurts the poor the most, because to be poor means to have less mastery.
That's ultimately what it is.
To have fewer resources, that means you have fewer capabilities, which means you have less mastery.
But in practice, people in those nations, they want things like education food shelter, etc.
A friend of mine um, that i've had some influence over, a guy named Jasper Machogu people can find on twitter.
He has a pretty entertaining uh twitter account and he'll what he does is, you know, because he's grown up in a manual labor world in Kenya.
Like he'll just show videos of like hey, this is what we do every day.
And he has a really good motto, which is just stop toil.
So not just stop oil, just stop toil.
And the key is you stop toil via fossil fuels which allow you to use more machines, and he's actually been like bringing electricity and stuff and water to communities.
But like he has, I think, the attitude that many do, particularly that many would if they understood the issue better, which is like, why are you talking about small changes in temperature when we're focused on eating and education and all of these other things and sanitation and healthcare that require a lot more energy.
So it's, it's.
It is, in that sense, very much a luxury belief, but it's.
It's not simply a luxury like if you own a maybach or something like that.
You're not doing that at the expense of other people, right?
You're actually there are probably poorer people who are employed to make the maybach, and maybe you have somebody drive the maybach for you.
But this is a luxury belief that harms the people who are worse off, right?
Especially the idea of buying a carbon offset.
We're basically buying an indulgence.
You're basically saying, I, I deeply believe that carbon dioxide is evil, but i'm going to pay to buy my way out of it morally and someone else can pay the price, I?
I think there's some colonialism, some imperialism, some snobbery there.
Hey, let me ask you a question about the world's most interesting man.
I I think you know just saying those words.
I think we all know it's Elon Musk.
He's a scientist, he's a, he's a public intellectual of sorts.
He's a serial capitalist builder, and I first heard of him in relation to Tesla, and Tesla had big government grants.
And the question is, if you're running on electricity in California, does that mean you're actually running on coal?
So I was a skeptic and and I still am somewhat skeptical of electric cars.
But despite that skepticism, i've become enamored with the man, And I mean, whatever carbon he saves on Tesla, he more than emits with his rocket ships, which are the most carbon-intensive machines ever created in history.
I see in Elon Musk what's sometimes called a techno-optimist, someone who says there's problems out there for sure, but we can use our brains to overcome them.
He wants to do so much as even to settle Mars.
I think.
what you're talking about could be called techno-optimism, am I right?
That technology will allow us to master a cold or a hot world.
In fact, technology could even master an unlivable place like Mars.
Technology would do it.
Is that an accurate way to describe your set of beliefs?
It's an aspect of it.
I mean, it's no, describing as optimism is a little bit, that can make it seem wishful, whereas I think it's just very objective to recognize like the power of human mastery.
I mean, yeah, of course, you can imagine a meteor hits us or something like this that before we're prepared for it or something like that.
But in general, just we are very good.
I mean, what you think about what a good environment is, it's something with a lot of resources and very few threats.
Like at a high level, that's what a good environment is.
And we have the ability to create resources and we have the ability to neutralize threats.
Like we've created oil as a resource.
Oil was not naturally a resource.
It was naturally useless.
We made it a resource.
Same thing with coal, same thing with natural gas, same thing with aluminum, same thing with uranium, same thing with thorium.
So we can increasingly take the raw material, the raw material of the universe and make it into usable resource, including doing things like desalinate water, et cetera.
And then we can neutralize more and more kinds of threats, as climate mastery has shown us.
So if you understand those dynamics and you're not afraid of running out of stuff and you're not afraid of nature punishing us on some scale that we can't deal with, or even just if you don't even, I don't think of it as punishment, but people, whether they think of punishment or accident or whatever, then why would you not be optimistic?
The only thing you need to understand is that the mechanism by which resource creation and threat neutralization function is the human mind being unleashed in a free society where it's free to think and act to both create resources and neutralize threats.
Like if you get that, your optimism is all around, it's almost determined, not that determinism is right specifically, not that an exact outcome is determined, but in general, if you have a free society that respects property rights, yeah, then you're going to have more resources, fewer threats, fast innovation.
It's going to get better and better.
There will be new problems, but you'll solve them.
And so I think, yeah, that's in that sense, I think Elon and I are aligned.
I think he used to be much less aligned if you look at his public posture.
His public posture used to be pretty crazy with climate because he basically would at the same time say, hey, I believe we can master climate enough to terraform Mars.
So on the one hand, we can make Mars livable, but then he'd say, you know what?
Like a couple degrees of climate change is a catastrophe.
Like if you look at the speech he gave when he introduced the power wall, it was just the earth on fire.
It was all of that fire and brimstone imagery.
And since then, he's gotten a lot better.
He's become more pro-fossil fuel, but he's also with climate stuff.
He hasn't quite embraced climate mastery and its implications enough.
But he'll say, like, yeah, this is, you know, this is a long-term thing.
Don't worry that much.
Maybe we'll deal with it by 2060.
So that's that he's he's improved a lot.
And I'd say he's become more consistent.
It's possible that where we diverge the most is where he has a more near-term financial interest, to say the other thing.
I mean, he's not a perfect man, but he certainly is a conversation starter.
And I think recently he really came out strong for nuclear power, if I'm remembering correctly.
I mean, he.
Well, I mean, he's been so weak on it for so long.
Okay.
And I mean, he's been like mildly.
So the thing with nuclear is like you can think of it as the nuclear industry has basically been enslaved, worse than enslaved, actually, because they've just been unallowed to function.
Nuclear, we had such a promising industry.
Canada is a bit better than the U.S., but in the US, you know, we had a really promising industry that was competitive with coal in the late 60s, early 70s.
And we basically just destroyed it.
And it should have actually gotten a lot cheaper since then.
And it just became unimaginably expensive, unimaginably delayed because of all these irrational regulations by ultimately an anti-technology government, or particularly what's called the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
So when you have that level of destruction of a profound value, anyone who knows anything should just be like very loudly saying, this is evil, what we're doing to nuclear.
We need to unleash it.
And Elon has never done anything resembling that.
He's gotten a little better, but he's like historically, he'll just say, yeah, I think solar has almost all the potential.
And like nuclear, he wouldn't even talk about it.
Now he talked about it.
War On Carbon00:07:17
And I think his, I don't know what their relationship status is, but Grimes has talked about it a bit.
But my view is like, it's not enough to say nuclear is okay.
You need to be for the liberation of nuclear.
All right.
Well, I'll keep my eye on that.
I mean, he, I think he's evolving.
We can see that because he shares his thoughts in real time every day.
Hey, I have a question for you.
You know, the demonization of carbon, which is one of the most common elements out there, has always been perplexing.
I mean, it's on the periodic table of the elements.
How can you go to war against one of the most common elements in which really everything we do?
Carbon dioxide, carbohydrates, we're made of carbon.
I find it bizarre, and I was reminded how bizarre it was when I was interviewing Kurt Wilders, the Dutch politician, and he talked about the war on nitrogen that's being waged in the Netherlands.
And it was shocking to hear that because we never hear that.
And it reminded me of how kooky our war on carbon is.
But in some ways, they're related.
I mean, Netherlands is actually one of the world's most productive food exporters, even though it's a relatively small country.
And they're going to war against nitrogen for environmental reasons.
And it really is so similar to the war against carbon for energy reasons.
And between the war on carbon and the war on nitrogen and how both make the cost of energy higher and the cost of food higher, I thought there's a real similarity there.
It's sort of an anti-people agenda in both cases.
I mean, if you want a happy people, have cheap, plentiful food and energy.
I mean, that's really half the battle.
What's going on there?
Are those a common front against people?
What's motivating what I think is sort of an anti-people agenda there?
I do think it's anti-human.
And I think how you get there is you look at there are two very conspicuous things about being anti-carbon and anti-nitrogen.
One is they're overly focused, to say the least, on negative side effects, whether it's of fossil fuel use or of fertilizer.
So they're not looking at the enormous life or death benefits of those things.
That's one thing is they're just focusing and fixating on negative side effects.
The other thing is they're using the ultimate non-scientific oversimplification.
If you're concerned about certain levels of CO2, then say, okay, I'm concerned about rising CO2 levels.
But just to be anti-carbon, a basic element that is the basis of all life, like, how is that scientific?
And the same thing with nitrogen, this incredibly common element in our atmosphere that, again, we need to live.
So I think what it captures is that these are two forms of being irrational, of just fixating on negative side effects and of using totally non-scientific terminology.
I think it's ultimately because what they're really against is what they would call the unnatural.
But what they call the unnatural is really just the man-made.
So what that, because that's what they mean.
They think of humans as unnatural.
And what we, everything we do and we make is unnatural.
And unnatural is bad.
And I think we're the best part of nature.
That's why we can do things like potentially colonize Mars.
And, you know, this is how like the ancient Greeks thought, like they had the ode to man, how great man is compared to the others.
We're certainly the most capable species.
But if you have this view that we're unnatural and therefore bad, then you just have this visceral leading opposition to any kind of impact that we have.
And you just fixate on that because that's all you care about.
And it relates to, is your goal to eliminate human impact on Earth or is it to advance human flourishing on Earth?
If it's the first, then yeah, you just hate anything we create.
So if we introduce a new form of carbon or additional carbon dioxide, that's bad.
If we introduce nitrogen in different forms, that's bad.
And that's all you can think about.
It doesn't matter the benefits.
It doesn't matter the effect on human life.
It's just wrong.
You violated the commandment, thou shalt not impact nature.
But if your goal is advancing human flourishing on earth, the way in which we're introducing carbon and nitrogen, that is part of a huge net benefit.
And if you have any concerns about it, you address it in the context of the net benefit.
You say, oh, maybe there's a way to do it more efficiently, but you don't want to deprive people of it.
And you certainly don't try to ban practical energy or practical fertilizer.
We're talking with Alex Epstein.
His first book was The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, which I really loved.
And more recently, he came out with Fossil Future, why global human flourishing requires more oil, coal and natural gas, not less.
Hey, Alex, let me ask you one last question.
And if I think of how environmental politics was first sort of a radical thing, and then it was just sort of a partisan thing.
And now it's so ubiquitous.
I think most of the people pushing the global warming fearmongering, they don't even realize they're doing something political.
And they're shocked when they find people who disagree.
It's become so normalized and the indoctrination is so total.
And I'm thinking in particular of schools.
Give me some reason for hope that we can emerge from this junk science driven anti-human ideology.
Is there something out there?
Is there some place in the world?
Is there some idea?
Is there some proof that despite the enormous odds, our side is winning or at least has some hope?
Yeah, I have a lot of optimism.
And again, I don't, I never try to have it as just a hope thing.
But just if I look at some dynamics going on.
So one dynamic that's not the most important, but is important is that as the anti-fossil fuel policies have led to very marked declines in different aspects of life.
So in the United States, really wrecking the reliability of our grid, which people are noticing, what people noticed with opposition to oil and gas domestically and trading with allies, they saw the vulnerability that we had with Russia, particularly that Germany had with Russia.
So people are starting to see, wow, these anti-fossil fuel policies that we were promised would have no cost to them.
Will we benefit?
They really do have cost.
And maybe that's because fossil fuels have a lot of benefits that are unique at this point in history and that we're being deprived of.
And I've never seen people in the 17 years I've been on this issue more open to positive ideas about fossil fuels because they're seeing what happens when you consistently oppose them.
Although I shouldn't even say consistently, because we've only been, we've only gone, you know, 1% in the net zero direction.
We haven't done anywhere near net zero anywhere, and it's still causing problems.
So one is there's the crisis has the only silver lining of it's an educational opportunity that's waking people up.
And then the second thing is I would say, and this is something I've been part of, is we now have much better arguments available to us than we did when I started 17 years ago.
And one of, you know, I've done this in my books, particularly the recent one, Fossil Future.
Creating Scalable Solutions00:01:58
But in particular, I've created a vehicle, Energy Talking Points, which everyone can access for free at energytalkingpoints.com that basically gives you all the answers to every single energy, environmental, and climate question that could ever come up.
And then we also have an AI now, which people can find on the App Store can search like Alex GPT.
It's called technically called Alex AI.
And that now answers every question as me.
And it's already really good.
It's going to get a lot better.
But the goal is like what I've tried to do is I've tried to pioneer better ways of explaining things and then make them very scalable so they're universally accessible.
And now we've been seeing, you know, dozens and dozens of politicians using these points and the U.S. presidential candidates talking about 98% decline in climate-related disaster deaths, just like I am.
That's because we've taken the knowledge of how to frame things and how to explain things and made it scalable for the masses.
And that means every ally, of course, you included Ezra, will have an easier time telling the truth and their followers can tell the truth.
So I think I've created kind of a scalable solution to going against this behemoth because you obviously can't out-advertise them.
They're just so massive.
They've taken over the institutions, but you can empower anyone who's aligned to become much more effective.
And that's been my focus.
Got it.
And that website's energytalkingpoints.com.
Yes.
And then if people want to subscribe to the newsletter, they can go to alexepstein.substack.com.
That's the Energy Talking Points newsletter.
Great.
Well, listen, it's great to catch up with you.
I always follow your Twitter account.
I mean, I love the places you're getting into these days.
And you've been on this issue for longer than most.
The latest book by our guest is called Fossil Future.
And I've read both Fossil Future and the Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.