Aug. 5, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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[MUSIC PLAYING] | |
| There's an idea out there that 97% of climate scientists agree that man-made climate change is real. | ||
| I did a little digging on this 97% and surprise, surprise, depending on what websites you go to and what sources you trust, the answer actually isn't so clear. | ||
| What is clear for sure, however, is that the overwhelming amount of climate scientists, the very experts in this field, do agree that the climate is changing and it has something to do with what humans are putting into our atmosphere. | ||
| atmosphere. Whether or not the exact number is really 97 percent or 86 percent or 75 percent | ||
| is largely irrelevant. The point is that the vast amount of people who study this for a living | ||
| believe it to be true. We haven't discussed a ton on climate change since we've started | ||
| the Rubin Report, but I've said several times on the show that since I'm not a scientist, | ||
| I have to go on what the majority of scientists say. | ||
| Thus, I accept man-made climate change as fact. | ||
| I'm basing my belief on the best information that I have in front of me. | ||
| You don't just get to pick and choose when you believe in science. | ||
| It either is fact or it is not. | ||
| So, if the vast amount of scientists that are professionals in this industry believe something to be true, then I have to base my opinion on that, rather than just guessing, or hoping, or picking the random scientists that see the world the way I want it to be. | ||
| At the same time, we should always be skeptical of who funds what scientific study, if there are political aims behind the research, and especially if there's money to be made by claiming something is fact when the truth remains more elusive. | ||
| A simple example of this, of course, is that if a tobacco company funded studies on smoking and human health, we'd all be a bit more leery of it than a truly independent study done for purely research purposes. | ||
| So with all this in mind, I do believe from all the people I've talked to, such as Dr. Michael Mann, the creator of the hockey stick theory, or my own science guru, Cara Santa Maria, as well as the information in front of me, that man-made climate change is real. | ||
| I also believe that the national conversation around climate change is mostly idiotic, usually vacillating between people who think we're on the brink of a catastrophic, climactic disaster and those who hide their head in the sand to the realities of the changing environment. | ||
| Like most things, and I always say this, right, the answer is probably somewhere in between, and that's where we have to start having these important conversations. | ||
| My guest this week is the president for the Center for Industrial Progress, Alex Epstein. | ||
| The Center is a non-profit think tank which believes in creating a new industrial revolution through technology to improve the planet. | ||
| Alex's book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, lays out the argument that fossil fuels have not only been an incredibly positive and important piece for the advancement of mankind, but even now, in 2016, they are still the best source of energy For humans to make the most of this world. | ||
| His book also tackles many of the myths surrounding fossil fuels, and even has me challenging many of my own assumptions of how much fossil fuels are truly affecting the environment, and if we've demonized an energy source that still has a lot of great potential to help mankind. | ||
| Now, before I continue, and before people start freaking out, let me stop those of you who are going to say, ah, Rubin's a climate change denier for even talking to this guy. | ||
| No, that really is not the case, but who I am is someone who is willing to have the provocative and complex conversation that surrounds it. | ||
| You guys know that I've made this show about the battle of ideas, and Alex's ideas are considered basically heretical in some elite circles. | ||
| He's had a public spat with Al Gore, and he's been subpoenaed in a lawsuit that the Justice Department has brought against ExxonMobil, even though he himself has done nothing wrong other than share his ideas. | ||
| In a truly free society, we must allow all ideas to flourish, because sunlight is the best disinfectant. | ||
| If Alex's ideas are bad, the only way we can truly refute them is by proving them to be so, not by banning the discussion altogether. | ||
| This is why the Twitter ban of Milo Yiannopoulos a couple weeks ago was so awful, Even if it was within Twitter's right to do so. | ||
| Surely Milo's ideas weren't the worst of all the ideas on Twitter, but he had gained influence that they couldn't control, so they shut him down while Nazi sympathizers and ISIS supporters remained there freely. | ||
| You think Milo's ideas are bad? | ||
| Yeah, well then use your voice on social media to call him out on it. | ||
| You think Alex's ideas are bad? | ||
| Well then write a book refuting them. | ||
| The risk we face is that banning those who we disagree with and suing those who say something we don't like will eventually become the norm. | ||
| This is why I think the new battle in front of us is about authoritarians versus libertarians. | ||
| People who want to tell you how to think versus people who want you to think on your own. | ||
| I think you guys know which side I'm on, and if you're listening to this, I think you're | ||
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unidentified
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right there with me. | |
| My guest this week is an activist and author and president and founder of the Center for | ||
| Industrial Progress, Alex Epstein. | ||
| Welcome to the show. | ||
| Hi, good to be here. | ||
| Now, I have a feeling that I'm gonna be in a lot of trouble just for having this book on the table, just for putting this book that you've written right in between us. | ||
| People are gonna be angry right off the bat. | ||
| No, they're gonna be, by the end of this interview, they'll be converts. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| We're gonna convert people? | ||
| They'll see the method of thinking just makes so much sense. | ||
| Yeah, all right, well, I'm glad that we're starting with that little piece of information right there, because first off, a lot of people have recommended that I have you on the show, people that like you and people that don't like you, just because we do conversation here. | ||
| So, I've said before that my policy on climate change is basically, I'm not a scientist, so I have to sort of believe what the scientists tell me, what the majority of scientists tell me. | ||
| I mentioned that to you before in the green room for a second, and you weren't sold on that concept, really. | ||
| Yeah, that strikes me as really bizarre. | ||
| So let's apply that to eugenics. | ||
| So let's say we're in the early 1900s, you have a lot of public declared scientific consensus that the gene pool is being diluted, that we need to sterilize people, that there's what I call global dumbing, right, because all the dumb people are sleeping with each other and procreating, and it's this societal catastrophe, the gene pool is going to degrade, and so we need the inferiors to stop procreating, we need to sterilize them, or in the case of Europe, Well, it's very clear to me that we have dumbed down things significantly, because I'm pretty sure we're in idiocracy at this point. | ||
| and you say, "Oh, well, I'm not a scientist. | ||
| "I should obey." | ||
| So why wouldn't you do that? | ||
| Or would you? | ||
| Well, it's very clear to me that we have dumbed down things significantly | ||
| 'cause I'm pretty sure we're in idiocracy at this point. | ||
| But-- | ||
| So we didn't sterilize enough? | ||
| No, so no, I'm gonna get in a lot of trouble for that. | ||
| So no, I see your point, and that's what we're going to do here. | ||
| So okay, so first off, the book is called The Moral Case for Fossil Fuel. | ||
| So let's do a little Fossil Fuel 101, because I was watching a couple of your videos on YouTube, and you had a great video where you're standing in New York City, and all of these, I guess, green activists are walking through, and you have a sign, and it says, I love fossil fuels. | ||
| And they're just yelling slogans at you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Forgetting who's right or wrong for a second. | ||
| Like, they're just yelling things, and I think part of what you were trying to show them was that they didn't even know what they were saying, really. | ||
| So I thought if we just define some terms to start, that would be good. | ||
| So, what are fossil fuels? | ||
| Yes, I think if you had asked them, and I do this in universities often, I'll do a poll and I'll say, okay, who here believes that fossil fuels are an unnecessary evil? | ||
| Which means we can get rid of them quickly, and we should. | ||
| You know, they're this addiction, we need to get rid of them quickly. | ||
| And half the room will raise their hands. | ||
| And I say, "Okay, who believes that they're a necessary evil, that is, they're really | ||
| bad but we're stuck with them for some amount of time?" | ||
| The other half raises their hand. | ||
| And I say, "Who believes they're a superior good, like we use them because overall they're | ||
| the best for human life?" | ||
| And I raise my hand. | ||
| And if anyone's read my book, they raise their hand probably. | ||
| Or at least some of them do. | ||
| And then I say, "Okay, great. | ||
| I got a harder question. | ||
| Who here can tell me what fossil fuels are?" | ||
| Nobody raises their hand. | ||
| Suddenly nobody gets it. | ||
| But it's a good lesson, and people actually take the lesson, despite being a quote, idiocracy. | ||
| And this is at very high level schools. | ||
| This isn't like Pocatello Tech or whatever. | ||
| They might even know more. | ||
| But I remember doing this at Wellesley, and I think the video is online, and you can see. | ||
| And I make the point, well, isn't a precondition of having an opinion of whether something is good or bad, isn't a precondition that we know what it is? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I appreciate the question. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I can tell you how I like to define fossil fuels. | ||
| Yeah, well, I think most people, I think, when they think fossil fuels, I picture that little cartoon in Jurassic Park when they're explaining how they got the dinosaur DNA, but they're showing you, you know, dinosaur decomposing, sort of, and then suddenly it turned to oil, and then we pull that oil out. | ||
| Like, that's, I think, what most people, in the most simplistic way, think it's something like that. | ||
| But I'm gonna let you unpack it a little bit more. | ||
| I think they just think it's just, just, filth. It's just like dirt and filth and it's just you have | ||
| this dirty thing and then you just blow it into smoke and everything looks like | ||
| China and we really need to stop using it. That's pretty much the visual. | ||
| Now tell me what it really is. | ||
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I'd put it this way. | |
| Fossil fuels are, and I'll break this down, but it's a high energy hydrocarbon derived from ancient life. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So it's a high energy hydrocarbon derived from ancient life. | ||
| So hydrocarbon is one of the key concepts. | ||
| So it's a combination primarily of hydrogen and carbon atoms. | ||
| And we, you can probably guess this from the whole CO2 controversy, basically You have different kinds of these. | ||
| So you have natural gas, which has a high ratio of hydrogen to carbon. | ||
| That's why when you burn it, it emits the least CO2. | ||
| And then coal has the highest ratio of carbon to hydrogen. | ||
| That's why it emits the most CO2 when you burn it. | ||
| To burn something is to oxidize it, to combine it with oxygen. | ||
| So whenever you burn a hydrocarbon, you get H2O and CO2, plus whatever else is attached | ||
| to the hydrocarbon. | ||
| It turns out that this chemical structure stores an enormous, enormous amount of energy. | ||
| And it also turns out that the ancient plant life or ancient life that this comes from, | ||
| it's different kinds of life. | ||
| It turns out there was so much of that that we have almost unfathomable amounts of this | ||
| stuff. | ||
| So my best estimates that I've seen are really dozens more than we've used in the entire | ||
| history of industrial civilization. | ||
| So what this gives us from an energy perspective is an extremely concentrated and plentiful source of energy that starting about 300 years ago we developed the technology to harness. | ||
| Before that it was useless, but once we developed the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, oil refining, modern natural gas technology, this became by far the dominant method of producing energy around the world. | ||
| All right, so let's pause there for a second. | ||
| So basically, this former life, so it's former plant life, animal life, it's all the stuff that had lived on Earth for millions of years. | ||
| Yeah, like plankton. | ||
| It depends, like coal has, you know, coal is more sort of terrestrial, other things are more underwater. | ||
| But it's, and I mean, technically, it doesn't strictly need to be from life, and there are many theories that some of it at least isn't. | ||
| Take like Saturn, right? | ||
| Saturn's rings are made of natural gas. | ||
| They're made of methane. | ||
| So it's something that occurs in a non-biological form, but for many reasons we think most of it is biological, and that has some implications for how long it lasts, right, over time. | ||
| But the idea that we're running out of it quickly has gone out of fashion recently, just because we keep discovering new technology. | ||
| So the base amount of the material underground is staggering, and it might be far more staggering than we think. | ||
| Yeah, I guess I never thought of that so specifically because I feel like years ago, maybe 10 years ago, people were always saying, well, we're going to run out of this, we're going to run out of this. | ||
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Right. | |
| But now it seems like we're finding gas fields all over the place. | ||
| Aren't they finding crazy new gas fields in the Mediterranean right now and all over the Middle East? | ||
| Isn't that happening right as we speak? | ||
| Two things that can happen. | ||
| One is you can find a stock of more raw material, which is always happening. | ||
| But the other, and often more consequential, is that you can find a way to use existing raw material that was previously unusable. | ||
| So the whole shale energy revolution, which people oversimplify as fracking, that's an example of that. | ||
| That's where you have this material called shale, which had oil and gas in it, but it was locked in too tightly to get out. | ||
| You have this modern combination of technologies that unlocked it. | ||
| And just as an example, in the book Atlas Shrugged, which is my favorite book, One of the heroes, Ellis Wyatt, discovers a method for getting oil out of shale. | ||
| And 50 years later, this actually happened. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, we're going to get to some objectivism in Ayn Rand, but that must have been particularly rewarding for you. | ||
| But that just shows how we often know of the raw material, but we can't make it a resource until we have sufficient human ingenuity. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Uh, now fracking, I want to talk about it a little bit quick and then we'll get back to this. | ||
| So fracking, whenever someone says fracking, first off I think of Battlestar Galactica, but then I think of Mr. Burns' slant oil drilling. | ||
| Did you ever see that, Simpsons, when he does the slant oil drilling to, because he creates an oil refinery over here and it's slanted so that he can do things and it ends up going under Bart's school and all that. | ||
| It's the Who Shot Mr. Burns episode, it's great. | ||
| Great episode. | ||
| So they went after oil, not just nuclear. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So they did go, yeah, oh, so then you couldn't be happy with that at all. | ||
| You probably really don't like Lisa Simpson. | ||
| I would say she's probably not high. | ||
| I never did. | ||
| You know, The Simpsons came out, I was the exact same age as Bart, because I'm born in 1980, and it came out in 89, and he was nine, and I was nine, and since I've outgrown him. | ||
| But Lisa, I never liked, even when I was a liberal, kind of politically as a kid, never. | ||
| But Mr. Burns, how do you feel about Mr. Burns? | ||
| Well, he was never likable. | ||
| He was very funny. | ||
| Yeah, so you're not for the three-eyed fish, you'd say. | ||
| Well, that's a whole interesting distortion, which I think reveals that the modern, what they call the environmental movement, which I would call the anti-human or regressive movement, is really an equal opportunity destroyer and attacker of every practical form of energy, because there's no man-made CO2 issue with nuclear, and yet they viciously attack it, which I think just shows that they'll find a reason to attack any form of energy that actually works. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Maybe we can discuss that. | ||
| Okay, yeah, so let's pause on that. | ||
| So fracking, so I feel like people have no idea what fracking is. | ||
| And I did, obviously, some research before I sat down with you. | ||
| And, you know, you see all these videos of people turning on water and water bursts into flames! | ||
| Generally, I would think that that's not so great. | ||
| So, sell me on fracking. | ||
| Isn't that kind of like a funny way of approaching things? | ||
| Just that, like, there are some pictures of people with water bursting on flames. | ||
| It seems like an odd thing. | ||
| Water cracking into fire. | ||
| Is bad. | ||
| I mean, this kind of goes with the issue of, like, when you hear climate change, you just sort of ask the scientists what they think. | ||
| With everything, we need to look at the full context of the technology, both very carefully, both at its potential positives and its potential negatives. | ||
| So, even if someone could show me that fracking is leading to a lot more people's faucets on water, which is completely bizarre, but even if that were true, I would want to know the whole context of what's the benefit of this. | ||
| So, for example, oil and gas are the two fundamentals, or two of three fundamentals, of modern agriculture. | ||
| Oil is the only thing that powers modern agricultural machinery, primarily in the form of diesel. | ||
| So there's just no fuel that has that kind of versatility, that kind of portability. | ||
| And natural gas makes modern fertilizer. | ||
| So billions of people's lives depend on that. | ||
| So, fracking, or more accurately, shale energy technology, that's enabling billions of people | ||
| to live who would otherwise starve. | ||
| So in my moral philosophy, I take that into account when I think of something. | ||
| I don't just look for the negative. | ||
| So, the principle is we need to look at the full context, and often attackers just look at the negative context. | ||
| Now, you do need to look at the negative part of the context, and when you investigate that, I mean, what you just find, which anyone who studies water knows, is that the number one contaminant of water, including with methane, which is natural gas, is Mother Nature. | ||
| So if you look at the U.S. Geological Survey, something like 20 percent of just regular | ||
| water wells are naturally contaminated. | ||
| So this is why, for centuries, you have records of people lighting their water on fire. | ||
| So one thing that gas land brought to the fore is because Josh Fox was against natural | ||
| gas, and that brought a premium to anyone who could show natural gas in their water | ||
| and blame it on fracking. | ||
| But that doesn't mean that there was causation. | ||
| Now, theoretically, there could be, but it's very rare. | ||
| And this is very much a solvable problem. | ||
| I mean, if I turn on my water right now in San Francisco and it, like, lights on fire, that's not, like, the end of the—it's not even it lights on fire, right? | ||
| It's if I strike a match to it. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| It's not that flame is coming out of the faucet. | ||
| It's not like the whole building burned down or there's nothing like this. | ||
| You have to have a very proactive attitude where you want the technologies to be as good as possible. | ||
| And one conspicuous attribute of the anti-humans is they always want the technologies they're against to be bad. | ||
| You really feel viscerally that they want catastrophic climate change to be true. | ||
| And I asked this question on Twitter, nobody has ever contradicted me. | ||
| How many catastrophists do you know who would be happy if they found out they were wrong? | ||
| 'Cause they're gleeful every storm and every bad weather event that they attribute to CO2 | ||
| and SUVs and that kind of thing. | ||
| There's a real glee. | ||
| And sometimes I'll tell them like a counterfact, like hey, you know that actually | ||
| the rate of people dying from climate is going way down, we're actually way safer. | ||
| And they immediately scream at me. | ||
| I say, wait a second, shouldn't you be happy that there's a possibility? | ||
| But they're not happy people in general, but they're not happy about the potential of progress. | ||
| All right, so there's a lot there. | ||
| So let's pause with that. | ||
| So how did you get involved in this? | ||
| Because I can see how passionate it is for you. | ||
| And obviously, you've staked out a position that is not politically popular. | ||
| So like, when you go to this rally in New York City, it's not fun being yelled at people and told you're evil. | ||
| And people are saying, you're a sellout! | ||
| They don't know anything about you, you know what I mean? | ||
| So how did you even get involved and interested in this in the first place? | ||
| Well, I mean, being politically popular, I think, is a pretty poor goal to have. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I'm really, so my background was, I was like a total math science kid until I was 14 or 15 years old. | ||
| Like, no interest in politics, no interest in writing. | ||
| I thought those people were the biggest losers. | ||
| Like, what I do, in terms of primarily being a philosopher and talking about things, like, as a kid, I thought there was no worse thing that you could do. | ||
| with your life. | ||
| If you were to be good, what you had to do is you had to be an athlete, | ||
| a businessman, or like a scientist/engineer. | ||
| When I was 14 years old, like kind of the peak of my scientific career, | ||
| I won the national Mars Rover Design Contest. | ||
| And so that was totally my direction. | ||
| I remember having a conversation with some friends and they were arguing liberal and conservative. | ||
| They said, "What are you?" | ||
| And I said, "What's a liberal? | ||
| "What's a conservative?" | ||
| You know, which most people at 14 know that. | ||
| And they started making fun of me. | ||
| And I said, "You know what? | ||
| "I'm tired of all you idiots "like yelling at each other and nothing." | ||
| I hated it because it was so illogical and people were just yelling. | ||
| There was no common ground. | ||
| I said, "You know what? | ||
| "I'm gonna think logically about this "just like I do about engineering." | ||
| And sort of since then, I've just been fascinated with the question of | ||
| What are the fundamental things that actually lead human beings to success? | ||
| What are what I call now the fundamental principles of human progress? | ||
| And I went through being a liberal, a conservative, a libertarian, and as you mentioned, discovering Ayn Rand when I was 18 had a really big impact on me. | ||
| I really cared about that issue and it really bothered me that people couldn't have intelligent discussions and that there was no common frame of reference. | ||
| So a lot of my career, really all my career, has been A, trying to figure out what leads to progress, and B, how to persuade other people. | ||
| So when I see the anti-human movement, as I call it, I think that movement contradicts every fundamental principle of progress. | ||
| I think it contradicts human flourishing. | ||
| I think it contradicts individual freedom. | ||
| I think it contradicts critical thinking. | ||
| I think it contradicts our nature as transformers of nature. | ||
| So I really hate it, and I hated it since I was 18. | ||
| And I've loved ability. | ||
| And I only got into energy, like, nine years later. | ||
| But I really oppose the anti-human movement. | ||
| So it's about fossil fuels, but it's about every form of making life better. | ||
| And I think fossil fuels is one of many things that's really good that the Greens have misrepresented as poisonous. | ||
| Right, so we'll get to the Greens in a second, but I'd imagine that a certain amount of people watching this are going to say, all right, so he's into fossil fuels and he's into Ayn Rand, and they're going to say, well, Ayn Rand, it was somehow selfish. | ||
| I mean, that's when I've talked to Yaron Brook, when I talked to Mark Pellegrino and a few other people, that that seems to be the main critique, that there's a selfishness And when I had John Fugelsang, who's a far lefty on, | ||
| you know, that's what he was attacking. | ||
| He got him on the week after I had you wrote it. | ||
| It was like, we did one, and then we did the complete opposite. | ||
| And I think they'll try to link the objectivism idea to, well, you just want to use everything now while you can, | ||
| and you're not going to leave anything for anyone else. | ||
| Now, I'm pretty sure you're going to say that's not the case, | ||
| but I'll leave it there. | ||
| I'd be surprised if they made that connection from what I've said so far. | ||
| So what I've said so far is related to Ayn Rand in terms of thinking about things in the full context, which I think is a very important principle, and certainly one that I learned a lot about from her. | ||
| But that should go toward this idea of being integrated in our thinking and long range about our thinking, so I can't take anything I said | ||
| so far as short range, but in terms of selfish, I mean, what does selfish mean? | ||
| This is another issue where we need clarity. | ||
| So to me, selfish means that I act for my own interest, but I think the proper interpretation | ||
| and the moral interpretation of that is that I do that in harmony with everyone else doing so. | ||
| But even if I didn't, I mean, if the climate is actually just ruining everyone's life right now, | ||
| that's not selfish for me. - It's not selfish. | ||
| So there's this idea of the harmony of human interests, and that would apply here, so that's why we need | ||
| to explore something like CO2, because if CO2 is really making the world into an inferno, | ||
| whether you're an egoist or an altruist, lots of people are going to. | ||
| Yeah, for the record, I don't believe the premise that I led that to. | ||
| But I know that that's one of the critiques that I hear a lot because I know that if you live in a way that's for yourself, well, living a good life for yourself means not destroying the environment because you have to live in the environment. | ||
| It means helping other people in your community because you've got to live with these other people. | ||
| I don't view that as selfish, but I know that that's one of the critiques, so that's why I wanted to throw it out there. | ||
| Hopefully, but we'll see what happens. | ||
| Alright, so basically you're saying that we have this stuff, it's here, it is not only good, but it has created more good than pretty much anything else. | ||
| That in the last 300 years, we have more public health, we have more ability to do things and transform societies, and that there's just nothing to compare to that. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's important, though, that it's primarily a future-looking perspective. | ||
| So I hear both the opponents and the supporters of fossil fuels often talk about this as if this is an issue in the past where it's just a history lesson, right? | ||
| Like, oh, fossil fuels brought us here, therefore we have to use them. | ||
| And then the opponents say, sometimes they say, Epstein, oh, you're just showing that fossil fuels were useful in the past but not useful in the present. | ||
| I think if people read my book, That's not at all true. | ||
| It's important to understand the past history of energy for a couple of reasons. | ||
| One, which I talk about in chapter one of the book, The Secret History of Fossil Fuels, is that all the catastrophist predictions made today are actually very old predictions. | ||
| They're several decades old. | ||
| They have been tested. | ||
| They've failed. | ||
| And so we have a lot of material for analysis. | ||
| But even more important in terms of energy, if we look at the relationship between energy use and every aspect of human life, we see this very dramatic positive correlation. | ||
| And what that points to is what is energy and why it's important. | ||
| So I mentioned fossil fuels as a potential source of energy, this high-energy hydrocarbon. | ||
| But the fundamental behind that is what is energy? | ||
| So energy is really our ability to use machines to improve our lives. | ||
| And what we see is the more access to that we have, the better we can make everything. | ||
| And I mean everything, everything, everything. | ||
| So I go to a lot of trouble to show that. | ||
| So, you know, from agriculture I mentioned, so I literally say the oil industry solved world hunger. | ||
| And people think it's a joke, but it's really true. | ||
| Because basically we could farm more and create more food for more people. | ||
| I mean, basically, you and I as human beings, we might work out, but we're very weak, right? | ||
| We're not Superman. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, if we had Superman, we wouldn't need oil, because Superman, his real skill is not rescuing Lois Lane. | ||
| His real skill is industrialization, right? | ||
| If I had Superman, I would just say, like, you know, get all the ore out of the mines and, like, that's his superpower is power. | ||
| For the record, I just watched that Batman-Superman thing and I don't even know what his skill is at this point. | ||
| That thing was such a freaking mess. | ||
| I was tempted to watch it, but I heard it was... You want to get dumb? | ||
| You want to work on an intellectual level? | ||
| If you need like three hours of like dumbing your brain? | ||
| I fly a lot, so my usual remedy is to watch the, 'cause I have this temptation to go to the theater, | ||
| so I just say, "I'll wait three months, "I'll watch the first five minutes and I'll hate it, | ||
| "and then I'll never have to deal with it." | ||
| I would put money on it. | ||
| Okay, so we have, anyway, basically, what oil allows us to do is to be like Superman. | ||
| We can multiply, or any form of energy, but we can multiply the amount of energy, | ||
| the amount of power we have, by 100 times or more. | ||
| And that enables 1% of us to be farmers instead of nearly 100% in the past. | ||
| So it's just this amazing thing. | ||
| But one other example that just, to show you the breadth of it, is medical research. | ||
| Because often I'll say, look at these insane correlations between energy use and life expectancy. | ||
| And they'll say, oh, that has nothing to do with energy. | ||
| It's just medical research. | ||
| And I said, well, how did those researchers get time to do that research? | ||
| Because they certainly don't have any time when they're on the farm. | ||
| So basically, the more physical labor we can do through machines, | ||
| the more time we can spend doing mental labor, including both of us have mental labor careers, right? | ||
| So we need to be very appreciative of energy. | ||
| But so to go back to your question, what I'm saying about fossil fuels is not merely they were | ||
| a good source of energy and we should sort of be grateful and give them a gold | ||
| watch or something like that. | ||
| What I'm saying is if you look at the way... | ||
| ways of generating energy now by the standard of what's cheap, plentiful, reliable, and | ||
| scalable to billions of people, no industry comes close to what the fossil fuel industry | ||
| can do. | ||
| And so in terms of our moral calculations for what we want to do over the next several | ||
| decades, that has to be factored into the big picture along with these potential negatives | ||
| that we can talk about. | ||
| So I'm guessing that some people would hear that and say, OK, if even if I take all of that as true, why not at the same time, if there is some risk related to CO2 emissions and, you know, greenhouse effect and all that stuff, why not just at this moment just start a massive transition to green? | ||
| We can talk about green, but it would be a stronger argument if it were alternatives, and then we can talk about why the greens are anti-nuclear and anti-hydro, which are the only decent non-CO2 alternatives. | ||
| Right, okay, so let's do that then. | ||
| So they'd hear what you said, that okay, I buy all of that. | ||
| That being said, if it's still putting out some bad stuff into the atmosphere, and we're not sure exactly what that's going to do, and even if we cut our emissions in the United States, that India and China are still going through what we went through 50 years ago, and they're going to keep putting that stuff out. | ||
| Why not just make that transition anyway? | ||
| So there's a couple issues here, but one is thinking in the full context means being really clear about magnitude. | ||
| So one is what is the magnitude of superiority of what the fossil fuel industry is doing versus the others? | ||
| And then what is the magnitude of the downsides? | ||
| So let's say hypothetically, so Al Gore gave the speech in 2008. | ||
| Al Gore, my You're your buddy. | ||
| We'll get to that. | ||
| But he said we should outlaw, by the year 2018, all what he calls non-renewable sources of power. | ||
| So basically, he wanted solar, wind, and some geothermal. | ||
| And he claimed we could do this, and he claimed, I know of renewable sources that can generate energy for the equivalent of less than a dollar a gallon of gasoline. | ||
| Now, I've asked what this is. | ||
| He still has not named this source. | ||
| But he was willing to outlaw all of American energy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| In order to do it. | ||
| And at the same time, he would claim that we're decades away from 20-foot sea level | ||
| rises, which would be a very, very negative thing, you know, very, very hard to adjust | ||
| to. | ||
| So that's kind of one scenario of magnitudes where fossil fuel industry actually has no | ||
| magnitude of superiority in terms of generating energy, and it has an incredible damage, right, | ||
| an incredible downside. | ||
| But what if it was true that, say, we had a minor amount of warming and that the fossil | ||
| fuel industry was just way, it was generations ahead of everyone else. | ||
| In terms of a transition, I think the implication would be—and I think this is the implication no matter what—is that you would want a free market transition. | ||
| So you'd want to look at what are other technologies and are there any things we can do to liberate them. | ||
| And I think the number one thing you could observe is that the environmentalists since the 70s have made nuclear power drastically more expensive, many times more expensive. | ||
| Yeah, wait, let's pause there for a sec. | ||
| going down over time, which is the natural progression as human ingenuity | ||
| is applied, the cost has gone up many fold, even though nuclear is provably the | ||
| safest form of power ever devised. | ||
| Yeah, wait, let's pause there for a sec. So they made the cost go up because they forced what you would, I think, | ||
| argue are unnecessary regulations? | ||
| Yes, essentially, with everything in life you have to do, you have to have a certain threshold. | ||
| So basically, their threshold of safety is what they would call infinite. | ||
| So let's say nuclear is 100 times safer than any form of power. | ||
| I don't know the exact numbers, but that's not implausible, right? | ||
| They'll say basically, no, it has to be a million times safer. | ||
| And so, you know, at a certain point, you can make anything infinitely expensive by having an unlimited number of employees, an unlimited amount of containment or an unlimited amount of time, which is perhaps the most damaging thing. | ||
| So you have a nuclear reactor used to be able to build these things in a couple of years. | ||
| Now you can basically not build them. | ||
| Your chances of building them are certainly less than one half. | ||
| And it takes over 20 years. | ||
| So, because, in effect, because of the regulations that they've helped push through through governments, they've forced the price to go up because you need more people, you need more research, you need more capital. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, if you just think about, like, if somebody says, hey, Dave, I need some money, like, you just came into all this money through Patreon, you know, you're really successful now. | ||
| Help us finance, we've got a new plant and at minimum it's going to be ready in 20 years, but it may never be approved. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| Are you going to do that? | ||
| I mean, there's no way you want to touch that. | ||
| And then what happens is because of that, they have to get subsidies and special loans. | ||
| And then the Greens say, see, look, you can't compete on the free market, but it's like, you know, bashing in Michael, it's like the Tonya Harding approach, right? | ||
| It's like Nancy Kerrigan, see Nancy Kerrigan, you can't. | ||
| You can't compete on the free skating market. | ||
| No, but you're not allowed to bash the person's leg. | ||
| So my point is that a real alternative energy policy is just a free market. | ||
| So that's what you get. | ||
| And you had much more of that in the 70s than you do today. | ||
| So I think it's very revealing that they're not for that. | ||
| But my own evaluation of the negatives of fossil fuels, particularly with CO2, is that they're much, much less than people think. | ||
| And therefore, I think it's a good thing that we're continuing to expand it. | ||
| And I think it would be very good if we could continue to expand other things, but whatever | ||
| is competitive on the free market. | ||
| We shouldn't force people to use junk because that just increases the price. | ||
| But I think there's a lot of different exciting things. | ||
| But I think they're generally the opposite of green energy, which you raised before. | ||
| And so there's a question of why are the greens obsessed with what I call the unreliables, | ||
| with solar and wind? | ||
| They can't reliably produce electricity. | ||
| Why is that their number one focus instead of nuclear and hydro? | ||
| I think anyone who's sympathetic to them needs to ask that and really ask is the issue CO2 or is it something else? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, on the nuclear front, would you say the threshold, like, so, for example, what happened in Japan about, what, it was about four years ago now, and they've been saying that this reactor has been leaking into the Pacific and, you know, you hear people say, well, now this stuff is eventually going to make its way over to the west coast of the United States and radiation and all that stuff. | ||
| Would you say that that, well, first off, do you agree that that is true? | ||
| Well, this is all a threshold issue. | ||
| There's this idea that no amount of radiation is safe, but we're experiencing radiation right now. | ||
| I'm getting some from the potassium inside your body right now. | ||
| If you go to Colorado, you'll get more radiation. | ||
| I don't know how off-color people can be, but the best The best nuclear line ever from Edward Teller, which just, Edward Teller is this brilliant physicist who helped invent the H-bomb, and he, I think, never got a Nobel Prize because he was extremely anti-communist. | ||
| But he had this, he was trying to explain to people that you shouldn't be afraid of a nuclear power plant. | ||
| He basically said if you live right next to a nuclear power plant, you get slightly more radiation than you do by sleeping next to your wife. | ||
| He said, what's the lesson from this? | ||
| Well, sleeping with one woman is safe, but sleeping with more than one is very, very dangerous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| People have no concept that it's all about the threshold. | ||
| So the question would be, is there anything resembling a dangerous threshold? | ||
| And you don't have any deaths at all. | ||
| You don't have radiation sickness. | ||
| What you do have is scares where people do die because of forced evacuations. | ||
| This happened in Three Mile Island as well. | ||
| Nobody died. | ||
| There was no threat of death from radiation, but you have these elderly populations, you | ||
| have them scared, and it's because there's this demonization. | ||
| And I think there's a big parallel between the demonization of man-made CO2 and the demonization | ||
| of man-made radiation. | ||
| And what I would argue is that the anti-human movement demonizes everything man-made, and | ||
| we expect it to be bad even before we investigate that it's bad. | ||
| So we expect any change of climate to be bad before we truly investigate it. | ||
| Okay, so the anti-human movement. | ||
| I like that phrase in general. | ||
| It's got very dystopian something there. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| So basically, it seems to me that there's an element to these types of people that think that everything's about us, sort of, that I think you maybe don't. | ||
| Can you elaborate on that? | ||
| That they think that there's something sort of empowering in a way. | ||
| If you think that we are controlling—that through our actions, we're controlling the environment, in a way, it's a very—it's really focused on you. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That by—you know, I live in West Hollywood, where we don't have plastic bags anymore, and at Trader Joe's, I have to pay 10 cents for a paper bag, which I usually do, but they prefer that you bring your own bag. | ||
| And I always think, like, it's nice that we're doing this, and I try to bring my bag when I can. | ||
| But like, I always think it's more like we're just sort of doing this to sort of feel good about ourselves, really, because no matter what we do here, especially on that very local level, as I said before, China and India are going through their industrial revolution now. | ||
| They're going to, no matter what we do that makes us feel good here, they're going to keep doing all of that stuff. | ||
| So in some ways, it's sort of just, it's like a combination of sort of lack of science and keeping things about yourself. | ||
| Did I get anywhere on there? | ||
| It's interesting, because this is often the conservative criticism, which I think is generally wrong. | ||
| I think it's much more a hell narrative. | ||
| I think if you look at the idea of a hell and what causes you to go to hell, I think that's much more of a parallel. | ||
| Because if you think of what causes you to go to hell, you violate a certain commandment. | ||
| And the commandment is not necessarily a scientific thing. | ||
| It's just that this is what was commanded, and if you go against it, then there's going to be a negative consequence. | ||
| So this is a gays cause earthquakes kind of thing? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That kind of thing, which you don't buy into? | ||
| No, I don't even know that I've ever heard it. | ||
| Well, you know, Pat Robertson will get it every time there's an earthquake. | ||
| You know, Pat Robertson will say, well, these gays are having sex. | ||
| These days it's all fracking. | ||
| Okay, now he's into fracking instead of the gays. | ||
| Gays out, now it's fracking. | ||
| Fracking is a hypothetically plausible causal relation. | ||
| Can you imagine a gay fracking? | ||
| Then he'd really... | ||
| I can actually. | ||
| That would be something. | ||
| I can. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, so we're going to this idea, what's the idea? | ||
| That it's somehow a view of it's all about us. | ||
| But so let's look at it from a different direction. | ||
| If you look at industrialization is all about us. | ||
| In the sense of we are taking a planet and what we're saying about the planet is this planet is imperfect. | ||
| It's not nearly safe enough in its natural state and it doesn't have nearly as much stuff that we can use, right? | ||
| So what we're going to do is we're going to transform the heck out of it by using our minds to create these machines and then create energy that can feed these machines and make ourselves hundreds of times more powerful. | ||
| and the planet is gonna look completely different because of what we do. | ||
| So I call this human progress, and I think this is fantastic. | ||
| But if you look at the greens or the anti-humans, they don't think this is fantastic. | ||
| They don't think, oh, it's all about us. | ||
| Isn't this so great? | ||
| What they're always worried about is the ecology or the ecosystem or Gaia, you know, | ||
| having some revenge on us. | ||
| But the focus is not really our power. | ||
| It's actually our stupidity. | ||
| It's our hubris. | ||
| They think, oh, you think you can just change everything and be okay. | ||
| You think that you can split the atom and play God, and it's gonna be fine, but it's not. | ||
| You're going to get punished. | ||
| And that's why they always have this divine retribution, except it's not divine. | ||
| It's the ecology. | ||
| But no matter what happens, every decade they have a new form in which the ecosystem is going to exact retribution for our industrial sins. | ||
| It always changes. | ||
| So there's no change in the dynamic. | ||
| There's just a change in the specific as each dynamic gets refuted. | ||
| Yeah, that's really interesting. | ||
| So basically, I think that they would generally argue that someone like you is anti-science because they would say, OK, all these climate scientists say this. | ||
| He's saying the reverse. | ||
| But what you're saying is actually they're anti-science because, yeah, we split the atom and then they go, but some bad shit's going to happen because of it. | ||
| But you would say, well, that's what human progress is. | ||
| Yeah, some some shit's going to happen. | ||
| And we'll have to and that's we'll figure that out. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, so that that really is the most scientific. | ||
| Yeah, so I'd say, I mean, fundamentally, to put it in Ayn Rand terms, I think they're anti-mind. | ||
| So, one way of looking at this is, I mentioned that there's this idea that man-made CO2 is bad, man-made radiation is bad, but, you know, man-made industrialization is bad. | ||
| So, basically, everything man-made is considered bad. | ||
| So, you know, now, at this moment in time, plastic bags are considered less natural than paper. | ||
| If you go into Whole Foods, right, it's all about natural, local. | ||
| As little technology went into this product as possible, right? | ||
| That's what green ultimately boils down to. | ||
| Think about what is the ideal green earth? | ||
| The ideal green anything is what the world would look like if human beings had never existed. | ||
| That is their ideal, right? | ||
| What's the ideal form of food? | ||
| the kind of food that would exist if human beings had never existed. | ||
| What's the ideal amount of CO2 in the atmosphere? | ||
| The amount of CO2 that would exist if human beings had never existed. | ||
| What's the amount of radiation if human beings had never existed? | ||
| So they have this very deep premise. | ||
| So what is the man-made? | ||
| The man-made is simply the form of change in nature that exists created by a human mind. | ||
| That's the only difference, right? | ||
| Change is inherent in nature. | ||
| That's why climate change is this kind of inane term, right? | ||
| But everything changes things. | ||
| Everything is transforming things in nature. | ||
| But the man-made, the only difference is that it's driven by a mind. | ||
| So if you're anti-man-made, you're anti-mind-made and you're anti-mind. | ||
| So then you might ask, why do they appeal to science all the time? | ||
| Why do they try to take the high ground on science? | ||
| And the answer is 'cause science has a lot of prestige. | ||
| And if you wanna put over bad ideas, invoke science. | ||
| But notice they're against all the practical products of science, at least the core one, | ||
| the core leaders of the movement are. | ||
| They're using them all the time, though. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Well, they're using all the things that science has given us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Well, the way I think of it is this, like, would the Green Movement, if it could go back in time, would the Green Movement have approved turning a patch of dirt and trees into New York City? | ||
| Would they? | ||
| Would Greenpeace have a thumbs up to New York City? | ||
| I guess at best it would have been a lot slower. | ||
| No chance. | ||
| No chance. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Central Park would be a lot bigger. | ||
| So basically, their philosophy would have prevented everything that we know from existing. | ||
| But they are parasites on that. | ||
| And then they, you know, so they're hypocrites. | ||
| But this is the way that all bad ideas work, is basically the people promoting the bad ideas want people to contradict them to a certain amount, because if you followed all the bad ideas, everyone would die. | ||
| So what they want is people to contradict them so they can feed off of them. | ||
| I mean, this is right out of Atlas Shrugged. | ||
| But then they can keep them guilty. | ||
| So what they want for the industrialists, like if you look at the oil companies or any companies, | ||
| what they want is for the oil companies, they don't want the oil companies not to work. | ||
| They want the oil companies to work and be super guilty and give them money and tell them that they're great | ||
| for being what? | ||
| For being nothing, for accomplishing nothing, for producing nothing. | ||
| So it's basically people with a very deep resentment of productive human beings who wanna feel important | ||
| and environmentalism or anti-humanism gave them this perfect vehicle. | ||
| But if we call it anti-humanism, they're gonna be a lot less confident | ||
| and there'll be fewer of them. | ||
| Yeah, it's funny because as you're saying that, it makes me think of what I've been saying lately | ||
| about just pundits on television. | ||
| They've never made anything. | ||
| They've never done anything that's created anything, but they somehow know how to do everything all the time. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| They always know that, oh, if we save $200 billion to do this, with this tax cut, and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And it's like, well, you've never done anything. | ||
| You just keep saying things, but you've never actually created. | ||
| It's a lot easier to do that than actually create, right? | ||
| And I think psychologically. | ||
| I haven't studied this, but this is plausible to me. | ||
| I've heard different studies that there's just a deep inferiority complex among intellectuals who just don't really feel productive in a certain way. | ||
| Now, I don't experience this myself. | ||
| I mean, I think it's useful to learn how to do certain kinds of physical things, but I also am an intellectual who worships the physical creators, so I give them justice, and I know who's buttering my bread. | ||
| So to speak. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, I know when I talk to somebody from industry that they are making possible my way of life. | ||
| And for instance, the universities are the opposite. | ||
| Because modern universities, I mean, we have way too many people going to college, I think. | ||
| But however many people we would like to go to college is way more than the number that would go to college if we were non-industrialized. | ||
| And yet the universities have incredible contempt for industry. | ||
| And I think it's just a very disturbing thing that you have all these talking heads, all these mindless students often, and they have no appreciation. | ||
| So let's say even the fossil fuel companies were screwing up way more than I think. | ||
| I mean, I don't even put it that way. | ||
| I think they're doing a great job in general. | ||
| But you should still have a lot of appreciation for what they're accomplishing, and you should still realize that you're paying them Uh, to do that. | ||
| So we have this idea where the non-producers can demand this impossible perfection of the producers and look down on them, even though you're doing nothing, which is like the Teddy Roosevelt, you know, the Teddy Roosevelt quote about the man in the arena, like he, Teddy Roosevelt's really into sports and stuff. | ||
| So he talks about how the man in the arena is the one who's admirable, even though everyone else side, he said, it's not the critic who counts. | ||
| I think that's important. | ||
| Right, so when you're watching a basketball game and they always know every... | ||
| Oh, it's just like, "Oh, LeBron!" | ||
| The play-by-play guy always... | ||
| "What's going on with LeBron? | ||
| I mean, come on, I can't play basketball." | ||
| He's human. | ||
| I think that has something to do with it. | ||
| Okay, so all that said, when something like the Exxon Valdez happens or the BP oil spill | ||
| in the Gulf, when these things happen, now I get it. | ||
| Nothing's a perfect system, so these things are going to happen. | ||
| But for someone like you, when you see the BP oil spill and you see all of the birds and the otters and all this stuff covered in all this oil and know that, you know, I just remember those days where they had online, you could just watch that pipe, that burst pipe just spewing all this stuff into the ocean. | ||
| How do you feel about that? | ||
| Well, it's a negative, but there's always this issue of magnitude. | ||
| And I always look, particularly if I know that we have a tendency to be biased against one industry, I'm always suspicious of these, like, why is the oil spill considered the worst thing in the world? | ||
| So to me, 11 people died on that. | ||
| That was the tragedy of it. | ||
| I mean, the thing exploded. | ||
| Right, so the guy's on the ring. | ||
| Extinguished, right? | ||
| I mean, they never get to do anything again. | ||
| And their families, you know, lives are just, I mean, that's the thing. | ||
| If you look at what, I mean, oil is, to use a green term, like an organic substance. | ||
| I mean, it's just ancient kind of life and lots of things in the ocean like it. | ||
| And then certain kinds of animals don't like it. | ||
| So, and of course, they'll only point to the bird, you know, so if it's on a bird, it'll choke the bird. | ||
| And that's not, you know, that's not something that I relish. | ||
| But in terms of the things that happen to human beings, and oil spill is pretty low on the list. | ||
| So what I think it shows is this idea, again, of the man-made. | ||
| If we accidentally put oil somewhere, it's bad. | ||
| But you know, there are two Exxon Valdez's coming out of the Gulf of Mexico naturally all the time | ||
| in the form of oil seeps. | ||
| So if you look at the tar sands, that's just one giant oil spill by nature in Canada. | ||
| in Canada, so I think we always have to watch out for this bias against the man-made, | ||
| So I think we always have to watch out for this bias against the man-made, | ||
| bias against the human. | ||
| the bias against the human. | ||
| I think the sort of better examples are, I mean with solar and wind, there's an example | ||
| I think the sort of better examples are, I mean, with solar and wind, | ||
| there's an example I talk about in the book where when you're mining for those elements, | ||
| I talk about in the book where when you're mining for those elements, for the kinds of | ||
| for the kinds of metals that you use in solar panels and particularly windmills, | ||
| metals that you use in solar panels and particularly windmills, people die a lot because they happen | ||
| in places like China and they're in very dangerous situations because you're dealing with legitimately | ||
| threatening amounts of radioactivity and nobody cares about that. | ||
| So I always look at what are the actual threats and non-threats of every form of energy and | ||
| what I try to do in I think chapter two of the book is go through them in a pretty fair | ||
| way. | ||
| Because it's not like I started out being pro-fossil fuels. | ||
| It's something that I came to. | ||
| I mean, as a kid, I thought something like solar, and then I was never anti-nuclear, really, although the Simpsons scared me a little bit. | ||
| But I just kind of always figured, oh, well, solar is the greatest thing. | ||
| But then once I looked at the equation, I thought, well, it's not nearly, and why are the enviros so focused on this when they could be focused on nuclear? | ||
| But I mean, so I think the kind of most You know, the things that are more of a concern are like you say smog in China, right? | ||
| Because to me that's something where that's clearly a very unpleasant and in some cases unhealthy thing. | ||
| Right, so it's literally affecting someone's life on that day-to-day basis. | ||
| Right, so to me that's much more of a concern than an oil spill. | ||
| So then what, in a case like that, that you're acknowledging that it's a legitimate concern, what do you do? | ||
| I guess you now find industry that cleans it up, right? | ||
| I mean, that's the next level. | ||
| I mean, it depends on the context. | ||
| So I like to look back in time and just think, I like to look at the 1800s as just sort of a reference point. | ||
| Because if you look at that time, they had much worse smog than China does today. | ||
| I mean, much worse. | ||
| And so the question is, did they have a Green movement that said, "This is ruining everything. | ||
| We hate it"? | ||
| No. | ||
| They had—there's a letter that I mentioned, which says basically they're worried about | ||
| running out of coal because they don't really understand the geology of it and how much | ||
| of it there is. | ||
| And they say, basically, this would be like losing a limb. | ||
| It would be that bad. | ||
| And again, this is something that has all the smoke. | ||
| And so from our perspective, we think, oh, this is so bad. | ||
| It's so dirty. | ||
| But why do they value it so much? | ||
| Why don't they even focus on that? | ||
| Because the value of energy to empower them, to improve their lives, to actually be fed, to actually be warm, that takes precedence over everything else. | ||
| And so then the point is that whenever you're defining a threshold of pollution that you need to legislate regarding, you need to have the context of what's overall beneficial for human life and what your alternatives are. | ||
| Now fortunately today, we don't have to accept that threshold of smog and smoke, right? | ||
| Because we have all sorts of alternatives and we have technology. | ||
| So I think in the case of China, it's a midway case where they could—because it's a dictatorship, | ||
| because they don't respect individual rights in many ways, what they did is they built | ||
| a lot of coal plants. | ||
| But it's not primarily coal plants. | ||
| It's actually other things that use coal that are just burning it in a very open way. | ||
| But they did this very haphazardly because they had this national goal of industrialization | ||
| without focusing on the purpose of industrialization, which is human flourishing. | ||
| So I think if China and India had much better governments that focus on individual rights, | ||
| they would have much less. | ||
| But that doesn't—that's not to say they would have the same standards that we do, | ||
| because they don't have the same level of wealth that we do. | ||
| So it's contextual, based on the state of economic and technological development. | ||
| And one great philosopher friend of mine, while I was writing the book, he gave me this great analogy about—you could say the same thing about human health. | ||
| So there's a point that I think is really important, that people are afraid of coal plants. | ||
| You know what I'm afraid of? | ||
| You. | ||
| I'm afraid of humans, because humans are way dirtier than our machines, which again shows that we're against man-made things, because we're afraid of machine waste, but not human waste. | ||
| Human waste, and particularly the air we breathe out, is biological. | ||
| And biological is much more dangerous than non-biological. | ||
| So if I get sick, it's going to be from someone in this room. | ||
| And that's how you're going to get sick and die, most likely. | ||
| So why do we allow ourselves this kind of pollution, right? | ||
| Well, because at the moment, it's not technologically preventable in any economic way, but it's much more dangerous than what the coal plants are doing. | ||
| I haven't seen anything to contradict that. | ||
| But in the future, let's say he said, well, what if you had buildings where you had affordable technology that could filter all these diseases? | ||
| Then you might say, you know, you're required to do this, right? | ||
| Or you're required to disclose if your building doesn't have this. | ||
| So what is considered a dangerous thing in the future could be considered a normal thing. | ||
| Uh, in the present. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay, so I want to spend basically the rest of the time we have here discussing the real underlying issue to all this, which is very much related to everything I do on this show about free speech and the role of government and all this stuff. | ||
| So you mentioned Al Gore before, and, uh, you know, one of my things with Al Gore is that, you know, he's, I saw the movie, uh, An Inconvenient Truth. | ||
| I really liked it at that, when did that come out? | ||
|
unidentified
|
2006. | |
| 2006. | ||
| Okay, really, really liked it at the time. | ||
| I thought it woke up some things in me that maybe I hadn't thought of before. | ||
| Fast forward to what, about three years ago, Al Gore decided to sell Current TV to the government of Qatar so they could put Al Jazeera on here. | ||
| The government of Qatar does tons of stuff with fossil fuels. | ||
| And he basically created the producers. | ||
| He created a failed network and profited on it for $500 million. | ||
| I mean, he did the producers. | ||
| So you're the first one to point this out? | ||
| I've been saying it for a while. | ||
| But he's basically Max Bialstock. | ||
| He created the He created a failed network, and then ultimately, | ||
| he walked away with a ton of money. | ||
| And the reason he was able to create the network was 'cause he was the vice president, | ||
| had all the connections and telecoms and all that stuff. | ||
| It's not easy to get on cable channels and all that. | ||
| But basically, he created a shitty product that he walked away with a ton of money, | ||
| and at the same time, he took a massive check from the government of Qatar, who does a ton, | ||
| obviously, with fossil fuels, that he's always railing against. | ||
| So I'm putting that out there, that I have no, I suspect something's not quite right | ||
| with what this guy is doing in the scheme of this thing. | ||
| But can you lay out a perhaps more enlightened case than that he's just doing the producers? | ||
| 'Cause I sense that you don't really like him. | ||
| A case about what? | ||
| Well, so basically the federal government right now, it sounds like, is starting to attack think tanks, right? | ||
| That they're attacking think tanks that do the very work that you do. | ||
| Now, I would argue that, because I believe in free speech, that a think tank should be allowed to think. | ||
| And I don't like governmental control over thought. | ||
| Even if I completely disagreed with whatever the premise of the think tank was. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But this is happening right now. | ||
| So first of all, I guess, is that directly related to Al Gore somehow? | ||
| Because he's not part of the government anymore. | ||
| Right, but he is a figurehead. | ||
| I mean he, I don't even know what the legality of this, but when they announced this, so I guess we should give people a little bit. | ||
| More context. | ||
| So what's happened is over the years, what I call the climate catastrophes, and I just want to quickly, we haven't talked much about the climate issue specifically, just in terms of my view and other people's view, there's not this idea of climate believers and climate deniers. | ||
| It's a really dumb kind of alternative. | ||
| But there are different assessments of the magnitude of the warming influence of CO2. | ||
| So we put X amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, so let's say 130 parts per million, or 0.013% since the beginning of the | ||
| Industrial Revolution. | ||
| And the question is, how much does that affect climate in terms of primarily warming, than | ||
| anything that comes from warming? | ||
| And then how much can it be anticipated to affect in the future as we put another 0.01%, | ||
| another 0.01%, another 0.01%. | ||
| And so basically, and we could go into the details, but we don't have time, some people | ||
| think that that's a very mild and manageable warming. | ||
| And they point to things like the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere in terms of the geology of the globe is at almost record lows. | ||
| Temperatures are at almost record lows. | ||
| So in terms of the history of the planet, when we had 20 times more CO2, it was a very fertile time. | ||
| CO2 was plant food. | ||
| So what they argue is that CO2, and I argue, has a warming effect, but it's what's called | ||
| the decelerating or logarithmic effect. | ||
| Now that's actually not controversial, but then the other side says, well, even though | ||
| it's a decelerating effect in the lab, in the atmosphere, there are these other dynamics | ||
| that make it into this accelerating or very dramatic thing, and that's why we can expect | ||
| runaway warming. | ||
| So the decelerating meaning that at some point, even though you're putting this stuff out, it eventually starts sort of, I guess, regulating itself? | ||
| It's just like a function like diminishing returns. | ||
| I mean, you think about like when you press the pedal on your gas, right? | ||
| So at a certain point, every little push, it goes faster to like 55 and after that goes slower, right? | ||
| Otherwise, you just take off like a rocket and could go forever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's the same kind of thing. | ||
| Every molecule of CO2 warms less than last. | ||
| So this is an uncontroversial scientific fact, which, by the way, is part of why you need to learn a little bit about the science. | ||
| You just have to ask people. | ||
| The key thing is what's demonstrated and what's speculated. | ||
| So this phenomenon of CO2 is demonstrated, but again, there's this other set of theories, which I think are very speculative, certainly not proven, but have to do with catastrophic warming. | ||
| But other people are allowed to have those theories. | ||
| I don't want to suppress the theories. | ||
| I think upon examination, they're very dubious. | ||
| And whatever they are, you have to look at them in the context of the benefits of fossil fuels. | ||
| So you always have to look at the big picture, no matter what. | ||
| But basically, what I call the—so I'm calling them the catastrophists. | ||
| So it's not—that's why I call them the catastrophists. | ||
| So it's not a non-believer. | ||
| I just believe in mild. | ||
| OK. | ||
| So that's just the distinction. | ||
| So basically, what the catastrophists have had is what they consider failure. | ||
| Now, I consider them enormously successful. | ||
| Well, on their own terms, because I think they've indoctrinated the whole world and passed a lot of bad policies. | ||
| But on their terms, they have not shut down the fossil fuel industry. | ||
| I mean, they want to shut down 80 percent of it in the next 30 years, the next 35 years. | ||
| They're not accomplishing that. | ||
| They tried to pass cap-and-trade. | ||
| So what they've done over the past several years, their basic premise is, well, the reason we haven't done this is because people are idiots, and there must be some villain who's causing this. | ||
| So, of course, who's the villain? | ||
| Big oil, who's allegedly forcing us to buy oil, when in fact we basically asked them to produce the oil, right? | ||
| But so what they did, they had this thing called the divestment movement, which is basically sell all of your oil stock and that'll demonize them and everyone will hate them and then they'll vote against them. | ||
| So that hasn't worked so well so far. | ||
| So now what they have is the government actually prosecuting, I would argue persecuting, the companies. | ||
| So different attorneys general, so you know, each state has an attorney general. | ||
| And what they're doing, they're going after the biggest and allegedly baddest, ExxonMobil. | ||
| And the attorney generals are saying, basically, Exxon, you over the years have not expressed what we believe are the proper climate catastrophist views. | ||
| And in fact, you have funded people who don't have those views. | ||
| So if you just said that, you'd think, oh, well, you're allowed to do that, right? | ||
| This is America, you're free. | ||
| But what they've done is they've called it fraud, right? | ||
| They said, you've defrauded. | ||
| For many reasons, it's not fraud. | ||
| And the basic thing is for it to be fraud, you have to misrepresent specific facts. | ||
| Fraud is not expressing a wrong opinion or even a wrong opinion that serves you. | ||
| Companies do that all the time. | ||
| It's misrepresenting specific facts that you have specific access to. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's intention, really. | ||
| Well, but it's a specific thing, like you have to misrepresent, so let's say Exxon's selling a certain kind of gasoline, and they misrepresent the contents of that, that's fraud. | ||
| But they didn't misrepresent the fact that gasoline emits CO2 when you burn it. | ||
| Everybody knows that, and the experts on that were... | ||
| mostly government scientists. So Exxon didn't have an ability to defraud anyone. It had an ability | ||
| to express opinions and to fund people or be affiliated with people who express different | ||
| opinions. So what happened then is the government subpoenaed Exxon, different people subpoenaed | ||
| Exxon, but they also started going after think tanks that they suspected might be connected with | ||
| Exxon. And several Wednesdays ago, they came after me, or at least I was named in a subpoena, | ||
| which means the government has any right at once to records of any emails between anyone at my | ||
| company and anyone at Exxon. | ||
| So that, in my view, is a complete violation of my rights. | ||
| And in my case, it's interesting because I don't run a non-profit. | ||
| I don't run a company that accepts donations. | ||
| I'm a for-profit company. | ||
| I sell books. | ||
| I sell lectures. | ||
| So there's no plausibility that Exxon is sort of paying me to do something, and they went after me. | ||
| So why did they go after me? | ||
| Because I have a prominent book called The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. | ||
| So what they're saying to me is, Alex, because you expressed an opinion we disagree with, we are going to invade. | ||
| No, they're not legislating, they're prosecuting. | ||
| of that. So how are they actually coming at like what are they trying to do to | ||
| you as a for-profit business? Well I get what they can try to do with Exxon, | ||
| right? They can ultimately legislate things that would allow Exxon to not do | ||
| business the way it seems good. No, they're not legislating, they're prosecuting. | ||
| They can throw people in jail. Right, okay, so I understand that but what can they do to you? | ||
| Well, so with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, at least for a while, they | ||
| were going after that organization. | ||
| So they're going after that organization as a party to it, because if Exxon is committing fraud, then the people who help it can be considered a party to that fraud. | ||
| But you see that the core issue—I just think my case brings out that the core issue is expressing an opinion that the government disagrees with. | ||
| So I mean, it just goes against just a fundamental principle of progress is free speech, because | ||
| we can't make progress without having the freedom to discuss ideas and debate ideas | ||
| and have intellectual clarity. | ||
| And so for this to happen is really horrible. | ||
| And I think I'm in a position where, because I was only named on the subpoena, I wasn't | ||
| subpoenaed, now I could be in the future. | ||
| But right now, I have a lot of latitude to speak out. | ||
| I have 100 percent ownership of my company. | ||
| I don't have shareholders. | ||
| I don't have donors. | ||
| So I'm not accountable to anybody. | ||
| So I have an ability to be very vocal about this issue now. | ||
| And I'm taking advantage of it, hopefully to preempt them from doing something more | ||
| in the future. | ||
| I saw they did some attack recently, and I wasn't named in it. | ||
| I don't know if that was a coincidence or not. | ||
| But I defend—I just want to make clear—I defend Exxon's right to express its opinion. | ||
| I actually think it's been—it's given way more money to climate catastrophists than it has to, I would say, climate thinkers, which I would call myself. | ||
| I think, in general, they've been way too sympathetic. | ||
| They just came out in favor of a tax on CO2. | ||
| They've been promoting that. | ||
| So I think their policies are wrong, in the wrong direction. | ||
| But they can say anything they want, and certainly— I mean, do you think they've given too much away out of guilt, sort of, or whatever, what you would say the anti-humanists have sort of guilted them into doing more than you would argue they should have done, because you don't, well, obviously you don't see it. | ||
| Well, they should have done none. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, they should have done none, but particularly given the balance of funding already, I mean, you're talking orders of magnitude different amounts of funding for the catastrophists versus any kind of advocate of fossil fuels. | ||
| But they gave $100 million to Stanford's climate program. | ||
| $100 million. | ||
| For every calculation I've seen, that's way more than they've given to anyone else. | ||
| So this, you know, these think tanks, these non-profits, I mean, I really admire a lot of them. | ||
| I met a lot of the people. | ||
| I think they're really sincere. | ||
| And they have a hell of a time getting funding from any of these companies. | ||
| I think the company should give them, I don't need money, I have a different kind of business, | ||
| but I think they should be giving a lot more money to fund opposition research. | ||
| And that's a fundamental thing in a free society. | ||
| And one key function of industry is to, if the industry is being attacked, it should fund opposition research. | ||
| I mean, it's even like—now, so if you even take the tobacco industry, the tobacco industry should fund research. | ||
| What it shouldn't do is misrepresent and lie about the research or fund fraud. | ||
| But, you know, if somebody—let's say somebody was exaggerating—I don't know anything about tobacco, really, and I never smoked. | ||
| But, like, let's say somebody was exaggerating by a factor of four the damages of tobacco, and you wanted to do research. | ||
| That would be legitimate. | ||
| My point is, in a free society, you should be able to talk about anything you want. | ||
| This isn't a marginal case. | ||
| This is a completely normal thing for people to be able to talk about, and it's really scary that That people think, OK, this is on the Democratic proposed platform. | ||
| All Hillary Clinton has to do is sign. | ||
| And this is part of their platform. | ||
| And what kind of stupid platform is it to tell the executive branch to go out? | ||
| The platform's supposed to be legislative, so it's just bizarre. | ||
| But they're telling the executive branch to go after specific companies. | ||
| That's their platform. | ||
| Yeah, that's a whole other topic, what's going on with politics. | ||
| Well, it's the regressives. | ||
| It's the regressives. | ||
| Wow, I almost got through a show without saying regressives. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| I guess what's happening here is that there's sort of a bigger cultural thing here. | ||
| We're talking about this through the lens of fossil fuels and all that stuff. | ||
| Well, there's just a sort of bigger thing, which is what I've really made this show about, which is just about free speech. | ||
| And that's why I keep talking about it so much, because I think people don't realize, again, regardless of what you think about climate change and fossil fuels and everything else that you've said here, that the real linchpin here is the free speech stuff. | ||
| And I keep saying that I don't fear the government coming lately. | ||
| I fear that we're taking away from ourselves. | ||
| But you're laying out a pretty good case on the government side. | ||
| So that's even more alarming. | ||
| They're related. | ||
| I mean, I imagine you're talking about like these, what are they, comfort zones? | ||
| The safe spaces and the trigger warnings and self-censorship that we're doing relentlessly. | ||
| I mean, I graduated Duke in 2002. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it was, I mean, it was bad then, but it wasn't, I mean, I actually almost got kicked out of Duke for... | ||
| Yelling at a guest environmentalist speaker. | ||
| But in general, there weren't even those terms. | ||
| So this idea of thought control, I think there's a relationship, even sort of private thought control that's not directly coercive, but where you basically make everybody afraid to say anything about any controversial topic. | ||
| My guess is that makes people very comfortable with government thought control. | ||
| That's interesting, that's interesting. | ||
| All right, so we gotta wrap up, but what would be, give me your one minute, sort of, if you wanted, people that have heard this and that have said, all right, I never bought into any of this stuff, but I like some of what this guy has said. | ||
| What's the one minute push that you can give them to explore this a little bit more, beyond buy my book, which I'm gonna talk about when I say goodbye? | ||
| Yes, I usually bring up more, so I'll say this. | ||
| Whenever we look at any issue in life, we're implicitly or explicitly saying, this is good because I define good this way. | ||
| We always have an implicit definition of good, whether we're talking about climate or fossil fuels or free speech or whatever. | ||
| And so my what I call my standard of value is always I want to maximize human flourishing. | ||
| And I think in our culture today, the standard of value we're taught, particularly with environmental issues, is we want to minimize human impact on the planet. | ||
| So I want people to think, whenever they run into these issues, ask themselves, is this thinker on the premise of maximum human flourishing, or are they on the premise of minimum human impact? | ||
| And I think when you look at things, whether it's organic food, or GMO, or climate, you'll see a lot of that minimum impact as the ideal. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that completely contradicts maximizing human well-being. | ||
| So if you want to maximize flourishing, you want to minimize negative impacts, but you want to maximize positive impacts, I think that's a great filter to look at life through. | ||
| Yeah, that's a perfect closing, but I should mention that you said to me right before we started that one of my former guests, Michael Mann, who's a climate scientist, I think at Penn State, am I right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That he's blocked you on Twitter. | ||
| Which I guess goes to a little bit of just how contentious this whole thing is, because— Elon Musk, too. | ||
| Elon Musk has blocked you, too? | ||
| I mean, what was interesting about Michael Mann—I'd say when—watch Michael Mann speak. | ||
| I encourage anyone to watch any of his lectures. | ||
| I haven't seen your interview, but I've seen his lectures. | ||
| Look at the precision or non-precision about the issue of what is demonstrated versus what is speculated, because what they tend to do is they'll say something trivial like CO2 warms, which everyone agrees with, and then they'll jump into therefore it's catastrophic. | ||
| So just look at, is Michael Mann really respecting your mind? | ||
| Is he really explaining things with the degree of precision that would be necessary for you to really understand the topic? | ||
| I'm not asking you to take a position, I'm just saying. | ||
| People should think about that. | ||
| And one indication is how they deal with debate. | ||
| Now, people can, I don't block people, other people, they can have their policy. | ||
| But Michael Mann wrote a post that said, Alex Epstein is the Koch brothers' attack dog. | ||
| Which wouldn't be a negative thing in my view. | ||
| But it was bizarre. | ||
| I mean, it's not true. | ||
| I mean, nobody's funding me at all. | ||
| And he just made it up. | ||
| He just completely made it up. | ||
| The idea was, he didn't engage in my argument. | ||
| And then I said something to the effect of, This is a lie. | ||
| What is your evidence? | ||
| And then he blocked me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what you see there is that when people—so there are two types of, I think, having the moral high ground. | ||
| One is when you have a real confidence, and that's when you're willing to explain your views to people. | ||
| And the other is where you have a certain societal status, where it's not really earned, but it's considered—you dominate the politically correct version. | ||
| You have the political correctness at this point in time in society. | ||
| And when people have that kind of pseudo-moral authority, they do all sorts of irrational | ||
| things. | ||
| So when somebody acts like they have the moral high ground, I think seeing if they're really | ||
| a debater or whether they just want to dictate to you that's—or ignore you, that's a really | ||
| I think it's a good, you know, one of the reasons why people really value this show is, you know, you're not an unconfident guy, although, you know, you're interviewing people. | ||
| But it's, you know, there's a certain confidence in being willing to discuss things with anyone, and there's a certain, it's very revelatory when people are not willing to discuss things. | ||
| And their number one talking point is, there's nothing to discuss. | ||
| Right, well, I always find it funny. | ||
| It's that I never felt, I've never in my life felt the need to be right all the time. | ||
| And everyone I feel in the public space always wants to prove how right they are. | ||
| So I'm completely fine having this conversation. | ||
| And maybe I would look back now on my interview with Michael Mann and sort of look through a bit of a lens of what you've just said there. | ||
| And maybe if I have him on again, I would push him on some of those things. | ||
| All right, well, that's the conversation I want to have, and that's why we did it. | ||
| So, you guys can get Alex's book, it's The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, and check out industrialprogress.com. | ||
| The link for the book is right down below. |
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