Sept. 29, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:13:03
3086 Why You Should Love Fossil Fuel | Alex Epstein and Stefan Molyneux
You’ve heard that our addiction to fossil fuels is destroying our planet and our lives. Yet by many measures, human well-being has been getting better and better. Alex Epstein (author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels) explains why humanity’s use of fossil fuels is actually a healthy, moral choice.Alex Epstein is the President and Founder of the Center for Industrial Progress, the author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and an expert on energy and industrial policy. Center for Industrial Progress is a for-profit think-tank seeking to bring about a new industrial revolution. For more from Alex and CIP, please check out: industrialprogress.com and alexepstein.comTo purchase The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and get source notes, go to: moralcaseforfossilfuels.com or http://www.fdrurl.com/alex-epstein
Hi everybody, it's Yvonne Molyne from Peter Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
I'm very pleased to have Alex Epstein on the show.
He's the president and founder of the Center for Industrial Progress, author of The Moral Case.
Get ready.
It's shocking.
The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.
He's an expert on energy and industrial policy and you can check out his work at industrialprogress.com and of course alexepstein.com.
Thank you so much for taking the time today.
Oh, I'm looking forward to this one.
So, I guess my first question, which is probably the question that is popping into the minds of the listeners and the watchers of this show, is exactly where your deep-seated hatred of the planet came from, that you would do something as vicious and vile and unmanly as defend fossil fuels.
I mean, it's like you just want to pour ash into the mouths of babies.
Where do you think this came from?
No, it's sort of a loaded question, I think.
In what way?
Unmanly, though.
I've never gotten that load put on the question, because many of the environmentalists tend to be more effeminate, trying to impress hippie women.
Unfortunately, when they go to the protest, they're very disappointed in what they find, but that's a whole other story.
Yeah, so really it comes from, I mean, obviously you're familiar with Ayn Rand to say the absolute least.
I'd say a very deep love of human achievement and human life that I've always had.
And then Ayn Rand really being the first person to...
Explain what that means.
And part of to love human beings means to love their capacity to transform the planet around them and make it better.
So you talk about hatred of planet.
Well, it's love of the planet's potential, but it is a certain sort of hatred.
It's a hatred of life when we don't transform the planet, the kind of life where we strive to minimize our impact, because that kind of life is death.
And some of the facts that are in your book, I mean, I've been floating around the environmental arena for many years and I was a chief technology officer in a software company that dealt with environmental issues for quite some time.
And again, some of the facts, I feel like my whole life is just a progress towards finding out the lies that have been kept from me.
So the reality is, if I understand this correctly, 86% of the world's energy is produced by fossil fuels, right?
Natural oil and natural gas, of course, and coal.
And this Dickensian nightmare of, you know, this sort of sooty city and people expiring slowly, coughing out weak little belchy gases of horrifying stuff is largely has been bypassed by some significant improvements in the technology of cleaning up fossil fuels.
And there isn't really a magic substitute that we have at the moment that we can use as a backup should we decide to follow the environmentalists' prescriptions and curb this use of fossil fuels enormously, like some say by a factor of 95%.
I think the difference between today's reality and the Dickensian nightmare is indicative of a certain aspect of energy technology that people don't think about when they think about alternatives.
There's this intrinsicist view that a technology is either dirty or clean.
Coal is clean.
Coal is dirty.
Solar is clean.
But if you look at it, all of these are just processes of transforming materials that involve certain byproducts.
And the better you get at transforming the materials, the cleaner that is having fewer hazards to human life you can be.
I was mentioning before the show, I think some of my neighbors are installing solar panels, which is helping drive up our prices to nationwide highs.
If you look at the mining process for the materials of those, that is far from a, quote, clean process, because it involves things like hydrofluoric acid, and you're getting what's called rare earth, which doesn't mean it's rare in the earth.
It means it's low concentration, which means you have to separate lots of metals.
Which can be a very, quote, dirty and hazardous process.
But imagine you got really good at that and you could do it totally safely with no problem at all.
That's theoretically possible.
Now, interestingly, we're much, much better at burning coal rather cleanly, oil rather cleanly, than we are at doing rare earth metals.
But you could theoretically get to a point with coal where 100% of the process was totally clean, and you get to a point with solar where lots and lots of people died.
So there's this idea of, let's switch to clean energy.
It's an anti-technology perspective.
It's like, oh, the sun is clean, coal is dirty.
No, they're all potentially really good, or they're all potentially really bad, so why not use the technology that's the most efficient?
And there is this weird distortion field of moral preening around these issues.
I remember seeing an interview with an economist and he was pointing out that electric cars are really bad for the environment because, of course, they have to get a whole bunch of really dangerous crap out of the earth in really dangerous and environmentally consuming ways.
Ship it across oceans and it's all, you know, really bad.
And then the guy said, well, what kind of car do you drive?
And he's like, well, I drive an electric car because, you know, you just can't pull into a faculty parking lot in a catalytic converted car anymore.
So there's this weird kind of moral preening around it, like wind is good, sun is good, and coal is bad.
And anybody who tries to bring facts, like I watched your debate.
Oh, gosh, what was his name?
I wrote it down.
Yeah, Bill McKibben.
And we'll link to that debate below.
Of course, I do suggest having, you know, perhaps a young Thai fellow massaging people's temples as you watch this debate, and we'll get into that in a bit.
But there is this moral preening, like if you question this stuff, if you bring any inconvenient truths, I dare say, to the debate, somehow you're in the bed of the coal companies and you hate the planet and you wish for Everyone to die and you hate fish or whatever it is, right?
And I find that really escalates things to the point where it becomes more of a religious conflict than a debate about the facts.
Yeah, it has that quality in there.
The aspect I mentioned of just treating a technology or a material as intrinsically good, like the sun is intrinsically good.
What does that mean?
It can kill you.
Most people don't know this, but coal ultimately comes from the sun.
It's stored plant energy for millions and millions of It's become a very, very religious issue.
And if you just take the whole presentation of the climate issue, which should really be viewed as a side effect issue, is this side effect significant enough so that it justifies restricting or trying to get off This technology, which has all of these incredibly unique positive effects.
It's just sort of a clinical type of question that you would examine dispassionately.
You'd look at the evidence.
You'd look at what you know, what you don't know.
You'd, of course, recognize that fossil fuels have amazing benefits, even if they had these negatives.
You would be very upset if it turned out that they had these negatives.
And you don't notice any of this in the debate.
What you notice is someone like Bill or anyone else Is it's just fossil fuels are evil, like categorically.
Getting off them is categorically good.
Having any impact on climate is categorically evil.
So it's like all these commandments, instead of thinking scientifically about a moral issue, which means to have a clear standard by which you're measuring things, identifying the key principles to get there and then looking at the relevant facts.
It's just a completely illogical debate, and that's actually what motivated me.
To get into it was that you have this incredibly momentous human and scientific issue, and it's being conducted in an irrational and religious way.
Now, I'd like to start off just to put things in context with a tiny bit of a rant.
So if you feel like, you know, stretching out, getting a little comfortable, there's now maybe the day, there's the time to do it.
Okay.
So when I was born in 1966, and...
There was all of this talk when I was a little kid.
And it filtered down.
You know, it wasn't like I was up watching Johnny Carson.
But Paul Ehrlich, who you mentioned in your book, Johnny Carson had him on The Tonight Show like a dozen times and all that.
So in the early 1970s, he said, and you quote him here, you said, By the year 2000, the United Kingdom will simply be a small group of impoverished islands inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.
And I heard this as a kid, and it really meant something to me.
Like, it was like, we're doomed.
Oh, they said we're going to run out of oil by 1980.
There's going to be worldwide starvation.
You know, within five, six, seven, eight years, depending on, you know, there was the late great planet Earth.
There was huge amounts of the two terrors, right?
I mean, of my childhood were nuclear war, of course, and unbelievable environmental catastrophes.
And that had a significant impact on my quality of life as a child and on my motivation.
Why bother?
Okay, there's a math test, but given that math isn't going to help me not starve to death when the skies darken and all the plants die, What's the point?
Like, it had a significant impact on the quality of my happiness as a child, on motivation, on long-term planning.
Did that apply to, I mean, I think it's such a, I mean, that's so sad and I know it happens.
How did, I'm just curious, how did it affect your classmates?
Was it similar or were you unique in taking it so seriously?
No, no, there was a fair amount of nihilism that floated around, like end times, despair, futility, right?
Because back then it was global cooling or peak oil or, you know, there was a wide variety of things that were just supposed to kill us.
This is before the acid rain, the ozone holes and all, like these successive waves of environmental catastrophes.
And I really, like, I tell you this, like to be completely open and emotional, I hate these guys.
With the passion of a thousand white-hot sons.
And not because they care about the environment, but because when they say, and this showed up in your debate with this fellow, when they say, here are all of the imminent catastrophes, They have never, to my knowledge, circled back and say, how did we get it so disastrously wrong before?
Like this Paul Ehrlich fellow, he's one of the most respected, still unbelievably wrong, unbelievably dangerous, unbelievably illicit.
Incorrect, to put it as nicely as humanly possible, and lowered the quality of life and happiness and opportunity and enthusiasm and joy of hundreds of millions of people, including children, by creating absolute catastrophe scenarios that not only didn't come true, didn't even half come true, but the exact opposite has occurred.
Now, I've been in business for a long time.
You've been in business.
So when you make a disastrous prediction...
Like you say, oh, we're going to sell 100 million units.
And you not only don't sell 100 million units or 50 million units, but you sell minus 100 million, whatever that might mean, right?
You would have a postmortem.
You'd go back and you'd say, okay, what happened that we all thought this was a great idea?
We all thought this was correct.
We allocated hundreds of billions of dollars to this.
And none of these disasters came true.
That to me would be a good place or a good point for people to have a little bit of goddamn humility and say, we were incredibly wrong.
We were worse than wrong.
We created panic, fear, terror, and got hold of massive amounts of government money which weren't available for other people.
And we're complete opposite of the truth.
There's more oil now than there was before.
People are better fed now than they were when the population was much lower.
The environment is cleaner.
Like, I had Bjorn Lomborg, the skeptical environmentalist, on the show a couple of years ago.
The environment is cleaner.
Everyone's doing better.
They were worse than wrong.
They terrified the living crap out of everyone, and they were worse than wrong.
And where is the circle back to say, okay, we made all these predictions in the past.
we were completely 180 degrees wrong.
What processes, what methodologies have they reviewed and changed as the result of all of these prior disasters?
No, Paul Ehrlich is still teaching.
He's still the most decorated and ennobled environmentalist around the world.
It's shocking to me at a big picture viewpoint.
And that's what's frustrating that they don't start off by saying, okay, we get that we have been incredibly wrong in the past.
But here's the processes we fixed.
Here's what we fixed.
And now they're still completely wrong.
There's not one single global warming model that I know of that can even predict the past, let alone the future.
So this lack of humility, to me science is about, I have a hypothesis, I'm going to test it against the data.
If it doesn't match the data, I must humbly withdraw the hypothesis and figure out what I got wrong.
They don't.
All they do is double down and increase the fear-mongering and double down and increase the fear-mongering, thus lowering the quality of life.
Significantly.
So that's sort of my big rant.
Where is the humility?
Where is the actual science which says, we got things completely wrong, but here's what we fixed to make it right now?
Well, I think it's really important that people know this, because part of what interested me about this issue is when I went back, so I was born in 1980, so I wasn't exposed to some of these things.
When I was growing up, it was overpopulation.
And then the whole acid, rain, ozone, and then, of course, global warming.
But the overpopulation really scared me, because it has a certain intuitive logic As do all of these if you don't understand how the world works.
But certainly if you don't understand how we create resources, it's just, well, there's a certain amount of stuff on the ground and we're going to start gobbling it up and there's more of us and we're going to run.
And you have that.
But what really struck me is once I learned sort of how the world actually works, how our actual relationship to our environment is overwhelmingly positive, it's overwhelmingly we improve things about it, not we create problems.
And then when we create problems, we can also improve those or I read a newsletter called Access to Energy by Peter Beckman, who is this amazing thinker who wrote from 1973 to 1993.
He unfortunately died quite early.
And it was just fascinating to read back then to look at both the technologies being proposed and the catastrophes being forecast, and they were the exact same thing.
And I thought, why didn't anyone tell me about this?
So you were there and you thought, why didn't anyone go back?
But nobody told me about this.
Wouldn't this be relevant when I'm being asked to consider a theory to know the track record of its exponents?
And that's why the first chapter of Moral Case is called The Secret History of Fossil Fuels.
And it's all about how every prediction that people of my generation or even younger here has been made for 35 plus years.
And what I think that does is that casts at least a little bit of doubt On the sort of arbitrary, on-high certainty that you get about these doomsday scenarios and about these claims that everything about your life has to change in this coerced way.
And so I just found that so eye-opening.
And from people reading the book, one of the pieces of feedback I get is, holy crap, how are these guys so wrong?
And one thing I'm very happy about is I've seen some news reporters start to ask them these guys questions.
Like they're starting to bring up their old quotes instead of just these softball.
Like an example of softball is on The Guardian today.
It says, top scientist, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.
And it's talking about Paul Ehrlich.
And then it says, Ehrlich acknowledges that many of his claims did not quite pan out.
Not quite pan out.
Not quite pan out.
I mean, you have to laugh but cry because, as you say, these are all prescriptions for coercion.
And I think the point you're making that I don't even make enough is what it does to a human being psychologically.
I mean, you lose that potential enjoyment of life forever.
You hear about these cases where a family killed itself because of fear of climate change.
But there's this lower level, I think, depression, lack of ambition, certainly pervasive guilt I mean, how guilty do you have to be where your greatest pride in life becomes how you sort your trash?
I mean, it's a real problem in how we think about our lives.
Well, and if you look at the confidence of the baby boomers, in the post-war period there wasn't any of this environmental fear-mongering.
And then you look at sort of Gen Xs and Millennials and so on, and they are a diminished species.
They really, like, they're shrunken, they're cautious, they're tentative, they're apparent, like, ah, but anyway, so where did all the priests go when religion began to fall aside?
Well, instead of saying...
Give me money or you'll go to hell.
They now say, give us money or the world will become hell.
You don't even have to die to go there.
And it just seems to me like a terrifying shakedown.
Again, this is not to say there's no environmental issues.
We can't do better.
Of course we can.
But, oh man, I mean, this lack of humility and this lack of ability to admit error, to me, is foundational to a seriously disturbed personality.
Just saying all the prior conclusions and projections were entirely incorrect.
There's not even a word.
Like, to say how bad, like, if I really fail a test, I don't get minus 100.
But these guys, they weren't even not going north fast enough.
They were going the exact opposite direction.
This refusal to turn around and say, what went wrong?
What do we need to change so it gets better?
But simply spewing out more and more of these wild predictions where they just don't pan out even in the present.
Anyway, I must stay calm.
I think we see this a lot.
Knowing philosophy is so helpful because you can see the power of a fundamental unquestioned assumption, which is what they have.
So one, I don't use this in the book, but I've subsequently called the perfect planet premise, which is that the planet absent human beings is perfect.
And there's a couple of aspects.
One is obviously that's not concerned with our life.
But two, it's this idea that Mother Nature is really our fragile mother, and we just have to be afraid of disrupting things.
But if only we stand still, we'll be nurtured, right?
We'll get to suckle on her, and we'll be nurtured.
Now, this is bizarre, historically.
I mean, if you look at the nature of life, it's bizarre.
And I think you have something like Mother Nature is a homicidal...
Sociopathic.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Mother Nature will strangle you in your sleep if you don't have antibiotics.
That's a brilliant one.
I would recommend that.
Mother Nature is completely horrible.
You know, Mother Nature is like a bunny boiling Glenn Close at the end of Fatal Attraction.
Like, you've got to lock your doors and keep her at bay because, I mean, she'll kill you as soon as look at you.
Yeah, but you see, you have this kind of premise, I think, and you combine that with the deep psychology of envy, which I think drives a lot of this kind of thing.
And they always have an interpretation, like any dogmatist.
No matter how much they're contradicted, it's an exact—you're right, we don't have an exact term for this degree of epistemological failure.
But it's so bad, and yet, like anyone, they don't check their premises.
They're not willing to re-examine these assumptions, so they just assume, like, if you look at Ehrlich, it's just always, well, I was a little too early.
That's it.
Right.
He's got this.
That's his view.
Holdren was questioned about it, which I was really happy to see.
It was either by Fox News or The Daily Caller, but someone who had read my book brought this up to him.
And he said, oh, I just said it was a possibility.
This is a billion climate-related deaths by 2020.
That was interesting because I don't remember him saying a possibility that malnutrition would go down by 40% in the period.
That's two billion lives.
Doesn't that matter even a little bit, that we wouldn't have done that, that we wouldn't have natural gas fertilizer as much as we do?
We wouldn't have diesel-powered farmers?
He doesn't care.
I mean, he does not care about I mean, that's too weak.
You know, superior human beings, productive human beings, because this is a whole movement that is against productivity.
It's against anyone who is big and successful at actually improving man's lot on Earth, and their whole claim to fame is inaction.
We're not going to make a footprint.
We're going to destroy those who make a footprint.
So it's a completely nihilistic movement.
Well, and also, humanity It thrives on energy.
And you've got obviously lots of details about this, but I just want to frame it for people who haven't had the opportunity, and we'll obviously put the links to your book below.
But we have so many people in the world because we use fossil fuels.
The structure that everyone is living in, it's not houses.
The structure that everyone's living in is consumption of fossil fuels.
Without that, we don't have what you call machine calories, the food for food.
We don't have the ability for one guy with a combine harvester to produce 500,000 loaves of bread a day.
We all live in the caves sheltered from nature called fossil fuels.
And anybody who says, let's reduce...
Our consumption of fossil fuels is not telling you the truth.
What they're saying is, let's condemn millions, hundreds of millions, and probably billions of people to starvation and death.
It's not fossil fuels that we're talking about.
It literally is human life.
Reduction in energy consumption means that we say all of these excess people, these useless breeders, or whatever they'd be called, all of these human beings must die In order for me to fulfill my environmental objectives.
I just want them to be upfront.
A few of them are.
But they're kind of marginalized.
Like, they always talk about reducing the use of fossil fuels, but the reality is the excess population that is made possible by fossil fuels must be reduced by the billions.
Billions of people must die.
That seems to me a kind of, it's not a footnote in a business plan, you know?
It's not like a tight, well, okay, there is that effect.
It's like, shouldn't that be front and center?
I want billions of people to die, so that X. Let's at least get the honesty of that first part up front, but it never seems to be said.
Yeah, and with each of these, they have a rationalization.
This is part of the reason to write a whole book on it, is that really to systematically cover both the truth, but also their rationalization.
So the rationalization you hear most often, I've been seeing it, and I saw it in a commercial yesterday on my Roku, where they had this thing on the screen, and I tried to capture it, because it said, where do you prefer to get your energy?
Solar, wind, fossil fuels.
I'm like, oh, fossil fuels.
Let me get my camera.
But it was in the other room.
But of course, that wasn't even an option.
It was a rhetorical question.
And so the idea is, well, let's get our energy from the sun, from the wind.
And that's a solution.
Now, there are a couple of interesting things to note, even if you don't know the technological shortcomings.
Even if you don't know the economic history, you should be a little bit suspicious that they're just focused on solar and wind, because you're probably familiar with, say, hydroelectric power, which uses flowing water, which doesn't emit—it's not oxidized, right?
There's no CO2 being emitted.
And you might know that nuclear power has nothing to do with emitting CO2. So isn't it odd that when there's this alleged global catastrophe, what they talk about is solar and wind?
And you might be aware That solar and wind have been around for a long time.
I mean, windmills have been around.
Over a hundred years.
Did you say the first 1875 was the first patent for solar power?
Is that right?
Yeah, and electric cars have been around longer than gasoline powered cars.
So it's good to know the history.
Of course, windmills, you know, is the power of the Middle Ages.
So, you know, you know these things and you kind of have a sense that they have low market penetration, although you might hear some mythology about Germany.
So you might think, well, why is it that we're not using these nuclear things?
And why aren't we building more dams?
And then you might see that these same green people who are allegedly in favor of, you know, solar and wind and against, you know, quote, against global warming, they're the ones against the dams.
They're against the nuclear power plant.
So even without investigating the specifics of solar, it seems weird to That they're against these two incredibly successful technologies that would help limit this alleged negative outcome.
And so what that gets to, and it turns out that those are just horrific for generating energy because they're not, quote, renewables.
They're unreliables.
You can't rely on them to produce anything.
And so they can't ever really add net energy to the grid.
And so that's why Germany is building out record amounts of coal capacity as it builds out record amounts of solar and wind capacity.
Those aren't unrelated events.
One is a parasite and one is a host.
So ultimately, your point stands.
Deep lack of concern for our lives and for the lives of billions of people.
And I think at the core it's that this is not a movement that is designed to think about the requirements of human life and act in accordance with them.
It's one that places the rest of the planet above us and therefore you get the result that in their ideal scenario there are fewer of us.
Yeah, and you know, they are genocidal, and I absolutely put that forward without any hesitation.
I know it's a loaded phrase, but they are genocidal in that following their policies will result in the deaths of hundreds of millions, if not billions of people.
Whether it's prematurely or straight up, right?
Because they just can't get enough food.
It would result in massive political destabilizations.
I mean, the Arab Spring kicked off when the price of wheat went up, you know, 150 or 200 percent in Egypt in 2009, 2010.
So we've got massive political instability, the deaths of hundreds of millions or billions of people.
It is a genocidal proposition.
Now, they could say, yes, but I'm willing to sacrifice a billion people in order to save the whatever, right?
Like some spark kind of crap philosophy.
The what?
What is above humans?
Well, no, no, it's not that.
They'd say, well, we're all going to die, you see, Alex, we're all going to die if we don't sacrifice a billion people.
And then you get this, you know, the needs of the wheny.
They never specify, I mean, the process is less specific than like hell narratives.
I mean, there's like, what is actually going to happen?
The water is actually going to go up like a thousand feet in 10.
I mean, it's just this, you know, it's this day after tomorrow type things.
But there's no, you know, with the, there's a really good post on Twitter today where someone said, you know, the sea level has gone up 400 feet in the last 20,000 years.
Obama thinks the last two inches are your fault.
But we're talking about two inches.
In chapter four of the book, I have the charts that actually show what's happening with the sea levels.
I mean, there is no human-based motivation that holds up to scrutiny.
It's just this deep belief, I think, that...
I mean, this goes, I think, to the core of it, which is And I'm really happy that the point that people have most responded to in the book is a point I learned from Ayn Rand, which is called standard of value, which is by what's your moral measure?
How do you know what's good and bad?
And if you don't specify that and you're drawing a moral conclusion, then you just have no basis for what you're specifying.
And there are different kinds of standards of value.
There's individual ethical standards of value.
But here I'm talking about sort of our standard of value with respect to our relationship with nature.
And there's fundamentally two.
There's the humanist, which says that our focus is human well-being.
So short-term and long-term.
And you can talk about different variants of that.
But it's are you fundamentally concerned with human beings?
We're something else.
And I think one of the revelations that people have is that unwittingly, it's not just that these lunatics are concerned with something else, it's unwittingly our thought processes are corrupt.
I'll just give one quick example that I love about being green.
So we're taught to be green, which means what?
To minimize our impact on nature.
And that sounds kind of okay until you start to apply it.
So let's ask a question.
So if we're being green and we had the decision today to take the patch of dirt and trees that Later became New York City.
And we could give thumbs up or thumbs down.
What are we gonna say?
What's the green course of action?
No New York City.
Does anyone believe that Greenpeace would have approved Or Bill McKibben or any of Paul would have approved New York City.
There is no chance whatsoever.
So what they are is they're the ultimate conservatives.
They're cashing in on the fact that other enterprising people with the opposite, I should say enterprising people, not other enterprising people, with the opposite philosophy actually created things and they're not.
And take the same with children.
What is the worst thing to do according to this philosophy?
Well, it has to be to have a child.
And the Sierra Club even tells women, when you talk about guilt, They tell women that if you have a child, you will increase your carbon legacy by six-fold.
You can take any positive human action, and you're going to find that it relates to transforming our environment to meeting our needs.
Transforming is a form of impact.
So if impact is bad, human life is bad, and we should either live like animals—nasty, brutish, and short, repetitive— Or we should cease to live at all.
So it's the whole philosophy that we regard as an ideal in terms of our relationship with nature is corrupt.
And that's ultimately, that's why it's the moral case for philosophy.
It's challenging the very moral premise that this whole debate is based on.
Oh, yeah.
If you've been to a dentist, you've interfered with nature because nature loves to breed little guys in your teeth.
It takes antibiotics.
Well, that was a natural infection you got.
Clearly, I mean, this is all just nonsense, right?
Do you like shelter?
Well, you're interfering with the wind's capacity to blow your ass around.
Okay, so let's go to...
And I don't want to pick on Bill McKibben.
I don't know him from Adam other than having seen your debate.
But there is this general paradox that I can't unravel for the life of me.
Maybe you can sort of help me and the listeners out.
So when you point out, as you do in the debate, that billions of people are probably going to die if we reduce the only stable and reliable and predictable and cost-efficient form of energy generation that we have, the fossil fuels, billions of people are going to die.
And he says, no, because magic technology will allow us to not use that stuff.
Don't you love technology?
Do you not know any engineers?
Engineers are totally working on this stuff.
And like a cat coughing up a hairball, they're going to cough up some wonderful energy substitute for all this stuff.
Okay, so let's say that you can just make up stuff like that.
Like, if I invoke magic, I win this debate.
Well, I think anyone could say that, you know?
Elves believe in me, and elves are always right, so sorry, you're wrong, right?
So if he's going to invoke magic technology to win the debate, then why on earth do you need a movement?
Like, why would you need any kind of movement if technology is going to make wind and solar so fantastic and so cheap?
That you don't need fossil fuels anymore.
Like, for instance, people rarely use rotary dial phones anymore.
I don't know, they don't like getting dizzy when they dial or something like that, right?
But people don't use rotary dial phones anymore.
You know what we didn't need?
A huge movement to get people to ditch rotary dial telephones and switch to cell phones.
We didn't need a giant movement.
You know, it's going to be really tough for us to do this as a society, but you can donate to my group and we'll help people shift from rotary dial phones to cell phones.
That happened on its own because people prefer cell phones to rotary dial phones.
So when you say, well, look, billions of people are going to die, and then he says, well, magic technology will save us, then why on earth would you need any kind of movement?
To me, it's completely incomprehensible.
If there isn't this technology and you need a huge amount of government intervention, and that's what you said, you know, force people to give up these, you have to ban them to make it illegal.
So he completely weaseled out of that.
He should say, yeah, there's no technology because the free market would have people move to that technology.
If you could just point your armpit at the sun and power your house for a year, then you wouldn't need any of these fossil fuels.
And, you know, should it really be that hard to compete with something you have to dig around in the ground with some giant flexible straw to suck out the juice of the old forests, you know, with a giant suction pad?
I mean, wind and solar are free energy in terms of them moving around the world.
Why is this magic technology that is supposed to make everything better?
There's a weasel element, but he does have an answer.
They always have an answer.
It just isn't a good answer, but it has a certain kind of plausibility.
You're right, what he's implying, and they often equivocate, so Al Gore is sort of a cleaner example because he's been more public about this.
Al Gore will talk about how, and he gave this speech in I think 2008 saying that we should abolish all, it was 2008, we should abolish all fossil fuel electricity, this is a serious proposition, in the United States by 2018.
This was his proposal.
It should be illegal.
And no nuclear, either.
And no hydro, as far as anything.
Yeah, nothing like that, right?
No, no, no.
So nothing that actually has been demonstrated to have merit.
Instead, we must harness the power of dragons!
I don't know.
Right, right.
But he said in that speech, because he made a specific claim, he said, we have renewable sources that can give us the equivalent of $1 a gallon gasoline.
This is just a complete lie.
But nevertheless, what he's doing sometimes is on one hand he's saying, oh, this will be even cheaper than what you're used to.
And so you say, great.
But then the real thing that they do, and Bill did do this in the debate subtly, what they'll say is, well, actually, it's not that we're going to make solar and wind as cheap as the fossil fuels you've come to know and at least use, if not love.
It's that it turns out that because of quote-unquote externalities and because we're going to be, which in this form means You're going to make the planet uninhabitable in X number of years if we sort of go back with that figure.
Well, it turns out that fossil fuels are ten times more expensive than you think.
So the idea is it turns out every form of energy is expensive.
Therefore, if you're forced to use solar and wind and have to pay five times or whatever more for energy, that's fine, that you actually got a discount.
Now, in reality, what does that mean?
That would mean a tragedy, because that would mean that inexpensive energy was impossible on a global scale, if it were actually true that fossil fuels had these, quote, hidden costs.
Now, I repeatedly pointed out to Bill that this wasn't true, and that in fact, in the area of climate, if you look at that, there's hidden benefits, because fossil fuels' primary climate impact is to make us safe from the naturally dangerous climate.
And what I found most interesting about that debate, and every debate I've had, I've debated Greenpeace, I always bring up the issue of you have been predicting for three plus decades that our climate is going to become incredibly dangerous to human life, which is what I care about.
And yet if you look at the data, it's becoming progressively safe for human life because the temperature hasn't changed that much.
We've had a minor impact.
But what we've had a huge impact on is the durability of our civilization.
And so shouldn't that be the focus going forward?
And certainly we shouldn't be making energy more expensive because certainly people in the third world are not going to be safer from climate with expensive energy.
And they never answer that point.
I just remember Bill said, oh, Alex only cited one statistic.
That's what he said.
That's the statistic.
That's like, oh, is life expectancy just one statistic?
So they won't grapple with the fact of climate-related deaths.
And that's another thing from the book that I've gotten a lot of feedback on that people now use a lot more, like John Stossel started using it a lot.
Because it's so devastating.
They said, we're all going to die.
And many more of us lived from not just in general, but with respect to the very thing that we're supposed to sacrifice our standard of living to, namely the livability Of the climate, which again implies they're not concerned with human life.
They're concerned with not changing anything, not impacting.
So they think it's bad for us to change the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from 0.03% to 0.04%, not because it's going to hurt us so much, but because they just think that they have on a tablet, thou shalt not change the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
I think you may be, maybe because you're in the field and you probably don't want to make as many enemies as I'm willing to, but I don't think it's fair to say that they don't want to change the planet, but that they don't want brown people to change the planet.
Like, because they're changing the planet.
I mean, Al Gore has, what, a 40,000-foot mansion or something that uses the same amount of electricity as a medium-sized village?
I mean, so they're perfectly willing to use resources.
You know, this guy probably flew out to the debate.
He's got a nicely tailored shirt and all that.
So they're...
It's other people aren't supposed to change the planet.
I have to change the planet.
It's like the old Leonardo DiCaprio.
And I hate to bring a movie star up because it's not exactly the most intellectually rigorous person.
But he's like, you know, we've got to lower our carbon footprint.
Meanwhile, he flew back and forth in a private jet from Los Angeles to New York six times over a three month period to negotiate a film deal.
Because, you know, that's really important stuff.
You know, he's not inventing a cure for cancer.
He's got to negotiate it.
So he's like, it's other people who must continually make the sacrifices.
And mostly it's people in developing nations who don't have the luxury of the kind of oversensitive, hysterical Victorian conscience that people have about environmental impacts.
It's other people overseas.
It's poor people.
It's not themselves.
Because, again, I've done a whole show on this, the number of environmentalists who have massive carbon footprints themselves.
So they don't have any principle around not disturbing nature.
It's just some weird, it's over there, I can assuage my conscience, and other people I don't know in foreign countries will bear the brunt of my oversensitive conscience.
Well, so you're absolutely right about the nature of these people, and many of them, although not all of them, are incredibly inconsistent in practice in terms of that kind of impacting nature.
I don't want to impact nature, but this is how I live.
But for me, the most important thing is that the premise that they're operating on That it's wrong to impact nature does logically lead to the opposition of energy, because energy is our capacity to do work, which means to impact nature.
So that to me is, I want to challenge, I don't really care about their hypocrisy to a certain extent, but this is how I think about Al Gore.
I don't care that Al Gore has a mansion.
I don't resent him for that.
I resent that he wants to prevent me from having a house.
That's the problem, but it's his premise that prevents me from having the house.
That's how he succeeds.
Now with them in particular, you know, Bill, I forget if he said it at my event or at others, but he'll say openly, you know, I'm a hypocrite.
He'll say I'm a hypocrite, but I'll say that the implicit premise is, well, What we're doing will somehow magically lead to a world in which we don't have impact.
But we have to have a massive impact to have no impact.
So that's the idea.
But what really is going on, which you indicated with Leo, is What we're doing is important.
What I'm doing with my footprint is important.
What you're doing, Alex, Stefan, anyone else, that is not important.
And that, I think, just displays how much contempt They have for people, and certainly what you mentioned, brown people, really what strikes me is they just have a disregard.
It's not on their radar unless they make up some apocalypse scenario like they're all going to get drowned.
Oh, then they suddenly care.
But if they have trouble putting food on the table, who cares, right?
It's always like this mental throwaway.
It's this trivial thing.
I mean, it reminds me of Atlas Shrugged.
Oh, you'll do something.
They'll make it work somehow, but it's not on their mind.
Their focus is, let's destroy everything.
I mean, this is what the left always says.
Let's destroy everything.
Oh, and somehow it'll all work out.
And like, oh, I like solar panels.
That's considered a morally acceptable position to try to destroy everything that works and everyone who works, and then just make up something that doesn't work at all.
As your quote unquote substitute, which of course, you know, just like you can't survive on imaginary food, so you can't survive on imaginary energy.
Alright, so let's turn to Germany.
And this myth of 50% of Germany's power is produced by solar and wind.
Now, of course, I don't want to explain your book to you.
You'd be much better explaining your book to the audience.
But how many grains of salt do we need to shove up our orifices in order to accept that statistic?
Well, not to make this a show about Bill McKibben, but he gave the best example of this I've ever seen.
And I had to cut most of it out of the book, because to be honest about it, it would have been too mean.
But I'll be a little bit mean here.
I feel like we've got that energy where Bill has been discredited a certain amount.
But there's an interview in, I quote the interview, I forget, I think it's in December 2012, so maybe the month after I debated, but it's a December, this is the important part, where he talks about Germany, and I don't have it in front of me, I know he uses a curse word or two, but he talks about Germany getting 50% of their energy from solar.
Okay, so 50% of their energy from solar.
Okay, so let's Let's break this down and see how many lies are embedded in this.
So first of all, he doesn't mean he's confusing energy with electricity.
So electricity is only half of the energy use in Germany because there's heating and then there's also fuel.
So even if it was 50% of electricity, he was confusing electricity with energy.
So what he meant was 50% was actually 25%.
Okay, that's a fairly big lie, right?
You've doubled something, but we see it's trivial in comparison to the rest of the lies.
Now, it also turned out that he was combining solar and wind.
So let's just theoretically have that another time.
But it also turns out he wasn't, and this is the most important part, he was not describing a continuous on-demand stream of power at 12.5% or anything else.
It was completely unreliable power that at certain points combined could approach 50%, but at most points was way less and sometimes was next to nothing.
Now one of the times, this goes to December, Now, if you think about where Germany is, it's odd that this is in December, and he talks about it.
It turns out that, well, in December, if you look at the graph in the book, they have next to no energy from solar and wind, so there weren't even those spikes in December.
So why is Bill saying this in December?
Well, because he's been repeating this.
He got the claim in June, and he's been repeating it since June, not realizing that the amount of sun has changed in Germany.
Yeah, Germany, for those who've never been, and my mother was born in Germany, I visited when I was young.
Germany, not known for sunbathing in December.
I think that's all, you know, just do some photos, you know, look up some Google photos of Germany.
You know, it's a wonderful Christmas tree card cover.
It's just not a great place for solar power.
Yeah.
The key distortion is that they are falsely equating a momentary burst from an unreliable source of electricity with an on-demand, always available source.
Let's take this video call we're doing.
We need this on demand.
It's not just when the sun is shining, where I am, and where you are.
This is the way I put it.
Are you willing to hook up your mother's respirator to a solar panel?
I'll give you any size solar panel you want.
Is anyone willing to do this?
Or a windmill, if you want something that sometimes works during the night, which obviously solar doesn't.
So sometimes the opponents of fossil fuels will acknowledge, yeah, of course the sun doesn't shine all the time, the wind doesn't blow all the time, but that's no big deal.
Yes, it is.
To me, it's like the equivalent of taking a wind turbine generator, strapping it to the van of the storm chasers and saying, look, wind power is fantastic.
It works all the time.
It's like, no, if you're chasing it.
Anyway, sorry.
Go ahead.
Yeah, so the analogy I have, which I think about is, I think of, because Apple's always lying about it.
I have this article called, Apple Commits Energy Accounting Fraud, because they have all these ways of claiming, oh, we're 100% solar, which is incredibly dishonest.
But you think about this.
It's like, if you have a company like Apple, and Apple decides, let's bring in some unreliables, but you're not talking about power sources.
You're talking about intellectual power sources, that is, human beings.
And so you bring in a bunch of bums off the street and drug addicts and that kind of thing.
And you give them some kind of work.
And it turns out, on average, they come in 30% of the time.
And you have no idea when they're going to come out of the time, when they're going to come in.
But at the end of the year, you can say, well, they slice this many sheets of paper or whatever they're capable of doing.
Would you then say, oh, well, if we can do that, then we can have bums run the entire company?
No, it's that they're parasites.
You can afford a certain amount of unreliables, particularly if you're very productive.
You can afford, as in you won't die immediately.
But they're still unreliable.
They're not desirable.
They're the worst part of the system.
Now imagine you are trying to help another country by sending productive people with know-how, and you sent the bums over there.
That is going to be a complete mess.
They are going to be in bad shape.
And there's a story from the book about this place in Kenya where the doctor is relegated to having a solar panel.
He has to choose between the lights and the refrigerator.
And I just remember I saw that in a documentary and it really just struck me.
Stop using, for many reasons, including this one, stop using the term renewables.
Talk about reliables versus unreliables.
And if someone says, we're going to replace all of our reliables with unreliables, ask them how that is going to happen.
And also, by the way, you can't make a windmill with a windmill.
So the unreliables can't even make unreliables.
Okay, now I think another thing that's important for people to remember is once you take magic out of the equation, life gets a lot more challenging and interesting and exciting, I would say.
But the grid at the moment, like a lot of people, you know, if you...
You live in an old house and you've got your hair dryer and your computer and a bunch of stuff running.
Well, you're going to blow your fuse, right?
Because your electricity system can only handle a certain amount of wattage and amperage and so on, right?
Now, the existing power grid has been built on...
And, you know, correct me where I go astray.
This is just my own...
The power grid has been built on constant electricity supply, largely from fossil fuels.
Now, if you're going to suddenly switch it to, like, tiny, tiny, huge, tiny, tiny, huge, tiny, tiny, huge...
Won't you have to redesign significant aspects of your power grid to handle massive power followed by very little power?
Isn't that a very expensive thing to do?
Right now you point out that Germany has to bleed off the excess power it occasionally gets on very sunny and windy days and dump them on other markets sometimes at a loss because their electrical system can't handle this kind of variability.
I'd agree with that to a point, but I don't know what kind of electrical system could.
I mean, if you look at just the ability—I mean, there's two aspects.
There's the ability to sort of transmit—well, a couple—but there's the ability to transmit, let's just say, to—the way electricity works I don't think most people get, which is it's not stored most of the time.
You use it as soon as it's generated.
So the way the grid works so beautifully is that you have these operators, and the technologies they have are amazing.
But with these controllable sources, not the unreliables, but the reliables, you can constantly match supply to demand.
If you want to put on a huge electric crane, they can do that because they can scale it up.
But one side of it is...
I mean, the demand side is somewhat unpredictable.
It's generally predictable.
The supply side, you can predict, or at least it's reliable.
It's what's called dispatchable.
But imagine on the supply side, you have absolutely no idea what's coming.
Well, then actually what they start to do, their, quote, evolution, is what they call the smart grid, which means the ability to shut down demand.
So if you have a really important project and you have an electric crane and they don't have enough sun, too bad for the electric crane and everybody...
There's no way to evolve.
We have a capacity to deal with the junk energy.
That's another way of thinking of it.
The junk energy, as much as it can be dealt with, with any grid, it's just not a good thing to put on a grid.
The only thing you could do, theoretically, is you could put insane amounts of storage.
So if you had an unlimited capacity to store electricity, you could theoretically overbuild solar panels and windmills many times over so that when the sun did shine and the wind did blow, it would be like three times more, five times more than you ever needed, and you'd store it in this massive capacitor, massive battery.
What it turns out is, well, first of all, what you have to notice is that this is a huge resource cost Plopped on top of your existing ones.
So there's a real burden of proof for why you would want an unreliable source in this massive storage thing.
It turns out storage is unbelievably expensive and difficult to do.
And this is why, you know, on our phones, the batteries are expensive.
Certainly at Tesla, if you need a replacement battery, last time I checked, it's 30 grand or something like that.
I mean, this is why, quote unquote, electric cars, really battery cars.
Are so expensive.
So it's just the resource efficiency of using an unreliable with storage with a grid It's so big that there is not one grid in the world that uses anything remotely like this.
And so when people say, oh, in 15 years, in 30 years, we can be all like this, it's again, they are not really concerned with the human beings involved.
Because one question that you could ask someone like Bill, which I didn't ask in the debate, is, well, what if you're wrong?
Like, given that you're making technological predictions, isn't there some chance that you're wrong?
So what will you do?
Will you say, well, we need to use fossil fuels, or will you still say it's evil to use fossil fuels even if billions die?
And of course, it's not going to be wrong.
Once he's dug himself that deep into the apocalyptic bunker, the hysteria is so high.
And some of that hysteria, I shouldn't say that, that's framing the debate a little bit.
But some of the information that it seems that I get from these guys is partly the result of overpopulation.
They say, oh, well, you know, agricultural yields are down.
It's like, well, yeah, because you're going into less valuable markets.
Arable land because there's more people and so more flooding more damage yes because there's more people so they're going into more low-lying areas where the risk of flooding is like the fact that there's more people means that the best stuff's already taken and you have to take lower quality stuff because you can't keep piling people vertically I guess except in the aforementioned Manhattan but of course the best that what the best is is not is not a is not a fixed thing or at least what the capacity of a given piece of land is is not a fixed thing and I
think it's important to just view You know, the mind for what it is, which is a means of improving nature.
And so it's kind of like if you take in the book Capitalism, George Reisman had this example of iron.
And he talks about, yes, of course, the first iron you get is by definition going to be the easiest.
Because you were able to get it.
But that's not around anymore.
That's not really a problem.
We're way more efficient at producing iron than we used to be.
And the first oil well was 69 and a half feet in Titusville, Pennsylvania.
We're way better at getting stuff now from 10,000 feet out of seemingly impermeable Seemingly impermeable rock.
So all of these things, they're all rationalizations for why we need to scale back, why people need to suffer, why we can't really pursue our happiness.
We really have to sacrifice to their goal.
But reality doesn't cooperate because if human beings pursuing happiness freely are just amazing at creating more value from the world around them over time, not less.
Well, and they seem to misunderstand exactly what the price mechanism does in terms of giving signals to resource consumption.
There's an old argument from an economist that I read that said, you know, if you're in a giant room full of peanuts in shells, right?
You're going to get the peanuts, you're going to eat the peanuts and so on.
Well, you know, for a while you're eating lots of peanuts, right?
And after a while, the peanuts get harder and harder to find.
But you're never going to run out of peanuts.
Like this idea that just, window oil.
Ah, I can't stop my car.
That's not how the market works.
Should oil become progressively harder to find, there'll be a soft landing where the price of it will gradually increase, which will stimulate demand for alternatives and so on.
We're really good at transitioning.
This isn't like a super tanker that has to reverse itself in one foot, right?
The market signal will provide The market provides price signals which allow people to redeploy resources in a pretty graduated and positive manner.
This lack of, we're just going to run out of food.
No, when the food gets expensive, people have fewer kids, they change different crops and so on.
We're very adaptable.
I mean, we're the most adaptable species, as far as I know.
We're the only species that can live in the Arctic, the Antarctic, and everywhere else in between.
We are nothing if not adaptable.
And this Malthusian idea that, well, you know, there's fewer resources, so we just die.
That's not how any species in the world works, let alone human beings.
Oh, and don't have kids, because how do you know your kid isn't going to be the one who figures out how to make, like, solar helmets to power the planet?
You know, your kid could be the one who solves the entire issue, so have more kids, because that is more, not resource consumption, but opportunities for resource maximization through intelligence.
I have to say, solar helmets to power the planet is the worst energy idea I could imagine.
I've got a million more where those came from, Alex.
I consider that a challenge to come up with worse ones now.
No, I'm just thinking about...
Anyway, I was just thinking through the mechanics about that.
No, no, because you have nice hair.
So for you, a solar helmet would be like a net reduction in sexual market value.
For me, it's just another way to not get tomato-headed sunburns and freckles.
I'm still on the market, so I can't afford junk energy.
All right.
On my head.
But the price system is a fascinating point, in part because it's such a basic point, right?
It's pretty clear.
It's not the hardest thing to understand how a price system works and how it evolves and the kinds of signals it sends us.
What's interesting is they say, well, because it might become more expensive to produce this and the price would go up, because of this process, which, as you say, is a soft landing and can spur all sorts of innovation, what is their solution?
Their solution is a mass, immediate, unexpected ban, which the price system will respond to if they let it, although they'll probably mess it up like they did in the 70s.
But even if it did, let's say the price of oil went up by five times.
Even though you would maximize the economy of that by prices adjusting, that would be an insane inconvenience to people.
Oil is the most valuable material in civilization, and yet they talk about Can you imagine if they banned 50% of oil, let alone 80, 95%, what that would do?
Mass starvation.
Mass starvation.
A good question to ask, which I was debating this guy, Bruce Nillis, who's a senior director of Sierra Club.
And I wish I had thought to ask this question, but someone from the audience did.
He said, okay, Bruce, let's be concrete about this.
Under your plan, how much would a gallon of gasoline cost?
And Bruce said, well...
You know, I don't really want to put a number on it.
And I said, well, Bruce, I'd really like a number.
And he said, no, I wouldn't put a number on it because I'm in favor of some sort of capital.
But the reason he didn't want to do it is because nobody wanted to hear $200 a gallon.
That would have made...
That debate didn't go well for him, but that would have been a lot worse.
And we're not talking about fewer road trips.
We're not talking about, I have to cancel my birdwatching outing.
We're talking about, because you can't have agricultural productivity without cheap energy.
You can't have agricultural distribution without cheap energy.
We're talking about mass starvation.
People on $2 a day not being able to afford a $5 loaf of bread.
That is the reality.
It's not just Fuel is life.
Energy is life itself.
You had this great quote in the debate where you said, when you talk about cutting fossil fuels by 95%, what you're really talking about is cutting food.
By 95% or some equivalent thereof.
Why don't you say what it really is, which is cutting food, cutting shelter, cutting energy that goes to incubators for prematurely born babies?
And you say a mother's respirator or someone.
Why don't they talk about the real thing?
It's not as abstract as energy.
It's food in your mouth.
It's medicine in your body.
I would add though, this goes to one of your themes and also one of my themes, the pursuit of happiness is not some optional thing.
You even talk about road trips, right?
But I've had great road trips.
I mean, those are part of what make life meaningful.
And one narrative I don't like that some conservatives have done once they have discovered that, oh, energy is important, coal is important.
Their only focus is the third world.
Now, it's legitimate to say that the environmentalist's overwhelming target is the third world because that is the people who are most destroyed by them and will be most destroyed by them.
But ultimately, I want to think of it like with computers.
Hey, we found this amazing way to use more energy.
I would like life to be like the internet, where I could go anywhere I wanted very quickly.
In his book, Earth, Bill McKibben gives the opposite.
What he says is, in my vision of things, because of, well, he says peak oil at the time.
This is 2010, of course.
It was wrong the next year.
No apologies.
But he says, and because of climate shock or whatever he calls it, he says, well, the kind of trip you'll be taking from now on is the kind that you take with a click of a button.
So he said the internet.
Now, in a previous book, he said that the internet wasn't worth saving and that computers were too much.
So he always has a different view of how you should be able to use your scraps.
But my ideal, and we're going to come out with a political platform about this soon, Is energy abundance?
We need to be thinking about, wow, how can we have so much energy in our lives on demand that we can do things like desalinate seawater, have more places irrigate deserts, just have all these possibilities in front of us, be able to fly faster than the Concorde could fly.
Energy is so much a part of human aspiration because we're thinking about new things to do, and it really upsets me that so much of human aspiration, or at least what pretends to be aspiration, is to do less.
There's a Chevron ad a couple years ago that said, I pledge or I promise to use less energy.
To me, that is a crime.
Now, I want to use less energy for a given task to be efficient, but that's in the name of having more overall resources.
If my grandkids aren't using more energy than I am, then I will have failed them, or we as a society will have failed them, just as this is an example I have in the book.
In the late 70s and early 80s, the leading thinkers on energy, particularly a guy named Amory Lovins, who's still Guess what?
A prestigious thought leader, because the more wrong you are, the more prestige you maintain.
He said that we needed to stop using—this was a common narrative, because Ayn Rand talks about it in her book, The New Left—we need to stop using this newfangled, overused form of energy called electricity.
And they're like, why do you need electricity so much?
What?
You need an electric toothbrush?
I mean, come on.
Can't you just do it by hand?
This is such a luxury.
They didn't quite anticipate this little use of electricity that we're making use of right now.
And imagine what they're not anticipating in the future, where their idea is, we've already used more energy than we ever should.
Let's scale back.
And that gives the lie to this unlimited solar wind.
They know full well.
This energy is not going to produce anything near what we would want.
And so then they try to sell us on this aspiration of, yeah, let's use the natural quote-unquote energy, and let's hunker down as a society.
Oh, and I find it vicious and vile the degree to which other people should cease existing because of my moral hypersensitivities.
Okay, so let's talk solutions for a couple of minutes now.
And I'm going to throw out a couple of my own.
Obviously, you're developing a political platform.
You can take whatever value.
You probably thought of all of these yourself.
But yeah, let's end subsidies to fossil fuels.
Absolutely, of course we should end subsidies to fossil fuels.
Because subsidies are the initiation of force and forcible transfer of wealth and distort the whole economic process.
Yes, end subsidies and remove restrictions on people being able to build...
Safe nuclear power plants and hydroelectric dams and so on.
Let's get the government out of the business of trying to manage energy.
Let's stop subsidizing various supposedly green companies.
Just get the government out of the business, let the market take care of it.
One thing that I've mentioned on this show before that environmentalists, shockingly, given that they come from the left, seem to be rather slow to take me up on, is let's make sure that we don't ever go into debt as a society.
I don't mean privately, I mean in terms of government, right?
So I think the national debt of the United States is somewhere north of $18 trillion.
That is $18 trillion of consumption that has occurred now.
That shouldn't have occurred because debt is the consumption in the present at the expense of the future.
And so if you have some balance, budget, magic, or whatever it is, right, then you should not be able to overconsume in the present.
That's $18 trillion.
That's, you know, more than the entire GDP of the United States is just banked in terms of debt.
And if you stop having national debts around the world, you will stop preying upon Mother Nature in the way that they like and In an excessive way.
End of fiat currency, end of government control of the currency because of course this allows them to keep interest rates artificially low, stimulates demand.
Look at the housing crisis, 40% drop in prices, 10% of US housing stock is now vacant.
Think of the amount of energy wasted, tragic energy wastage that was used in getting all those materials out of the ground, assembling all those houses, building all those roads, the sewage, the electrical system, and they're just sitting empty.
Well, this is the result of fiat currency, government manipulation, and so on.
Get the government out of the currency business so they can't sell bonds.
Bonds allow them to build a whole bunch of junk now that they shouldn't build, right?
The entire road system under Eisenhower was built using debt that people are still paying for.
If you didn't have the interstate highway system, you'd have a whole different kind of society, much less car-dependent and so on.
So the degree to which every single time these guys are like, environment, therefore more government.
It's like, no, no, no.
More government is what is destroying what you treasure most about the environment.
But that's such an obvious thing to me that it can only be ideology that blinds people to the blindingly obvious.
Well, I don't think they treasure it.
I mean, I think it's giving them so much credit they don't deserve to act like they treasure it.
And by extension, that we don't.
I mean, that's often the implication.
Like, I would bet I spend a lot more time in nature than most quote-unquote environmentalists.
I mean, I love the ocean.
I go to the ocean three times a day.
So this whole perspective, when I go back to the issue of humanism versus being green, which is really ultimately anti-humanism, it's not that they love nature so much.
It's that they are so opposed to man and to human productivity.
So with the examples you gave, I like those policies for sure.
But what would have happened?
So you would have had unnecessary transformation of nature.
You would have prevented it.
Which you don't want because that's consumption.
That's extinguishing wealth.
But what you would have had without the whole green movement is massively more, certainly more than $18 trillion, massively more wealth created.
Now it would take different forms.
So the car example I think is an important example both for looking at this piece of the issue as well as just the safety thing.
I mean I think it's impossible that under a truly free society we'd have anywhere near the car fatalities.
That we have today.
I mean, in terms of that as a source, you can imagine a private—I mean, this is—many people like myself will probably object to my view that roads should be private, but I mean, if you think about it logically, or even thinking in terms of roads, who knows what kind of automated satellite system—I mean, I ride Uber all the time.
I would take...
I do not want to drive a car.
I mean, maybe for fun on a track.
But who knows what would happen?
I mean, you'd probably have satellite-controlled vehicles.
We have no idea because the government has been involved.
But I think it's ultimately...
We're looking at it from a human perspective.
We want to avoid human inefficiency.
We don't want to see beautiful things destroyed.
When I go on the beach and see litter, it...
Really upsets me.
But that's from a human perspective.
The movement that's opposing development, development as such, including fossil fuels, including nuclear, including hydro, is not concerned with human well-being, including our enjoyment of nature.
I give them no credit that they would be happy with anything that didn't involve human beings' status diminishing precipitously.
And that always requires increased government.
Maybe we can chat again against global warming, which is a big topic, but this idea that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming By definition, necessitates massive increases in government power.
Boy, there's so many hurdles you'd have to get over before that's true, but it's just taken...
It's like they're working back.
More government power.
What do we need to say to get more government power?
And that seems to be where this consistent common thread seems to be.
To expand the power of the state, we need to get people to believe what?
Well, without giving up the huge amounts of money to the state and surrendering liberties to the state...
They're all going to die.
And that's just, you know, that's again like the priest.
Give me lots of money or burn it in hell forever.
They're really working.
The give me the money, give me power seems to be the axiom and everything kind of tails off of that.
And that's because anytime you suggest things that...
That can very plausibly say, even if you, accepting your premises, this is what you care about in the environment, less government power is the solution.
I mean, there are a few people out there working very hard who care about the environment in the way that a lot of environmentalists do who suggest smaller government power, less government power.
But man, it really seems to be, you know...
You know, it's the old watermelon argument that green is the new red, you know, that Marxism is just red on the inside.
It's just covered itself with green because Marxism proved so economically disastrous that now they need to create not the promise of a better world, but the promise of a disaster unless we surrender ourselves to the power of the state.
And I find that so irresponsible and so destructive that words barely contain my disgust with it.
If you truly believe that we should minimize our impact on nature, that is not, as a principle, as what we should really not, which is different from the humanist idea, which is we should maximize our positive impact and minimize our negative impact.
So the anti-impact standard of value is ultimately saying we should just live less.
If you believe that, well, guess what?
If you leave me free, I'm not doing that.
Right?
And most people won't.
So where does that leave you?
That leaves you with the state.
So it's inherently status.
The anti-humanist position is a status position, not caring about environment.
I think we both do a lot.
That's part of, I mean, it's where you live.
It's not like saying, oh, I'm a humanist, but I don't care about my house or my office.
It's bizarre.
This whole idea, oh, you're an environmentalist, as against what?
It's the wrong kind of—it's the wrong way of thinking about it.
So, yeah, I just—I think it's important to frame it as the humanist issue.
And so from one perspective, anti-humanism is— It leads to statism.
But the other perspective, and these are reciprocal, so logically that morality leads to statism.
But at the same time, if you look at the statists historically, and this is documented, I mentioned the book The New Left by Ayn Rand, which is good in this respect among others because it documents it at the time.
What happened is the old left, so statists, Their view was, for human well-being, for the sake of humanism, and particularly with regard to industrial productivity and progress, we need a massive state.
It'll somehow wither away in some magical way.
We need a massive state.
Capitalism is going to fail, and it's unsustainable, blah, blah, blah.
And then what happened?
Well, capitalism turned out to be the means of maximizing human well-being.
So what happened?
Well, they had a decision to make.
They could either say, we care about human well-being first and foremost, we care about industrial productivity, Or they can say, no, we don't really care about that.
We cared about power.
We cared about having power over the individual, and we are somehow against the free individual.
So then their justification began, oh, the free individual is going to despoil the countryside, which is such a sort of a stupid kind of view, but they ran out of stuff.
So that's why they got all this catastrophe.
So the way I think of it is the left went from taking the Marxist religion And then that sort of openly failed.
And then they basically took primitive religion, which is nature worship, and said, we're going to apply that in a modern context, call it science with a capital S, and say that, oh, if you don't follow us, if you don't obey us, you know, the world is going to...
So there's this, the morality leads to the statism, but also this statism promoted the morality.
And one thing you talk about is the monopoly quote-unquote educational system, which is essential to this whole thing, because I was in government schools through college, and even the colleges are funded by government.
And I heard only one narrative on this, and this kind of thing shouldn't even be in schools.
Why are you teaching an eight-year-old that the world is going to end because of overpopulation, when she can't even understand resources?
So it's such an establishment, and I think, to not be depressing about it, the nice weapon we have is the internet, because we can go directly to people You know, which I know that your show has done a great job at.
It did to lots and lots of people.
And that is the weapon.
And one thing I've done is I've distributed 1,500 copies of the book for free to college students, to high school students, to teachers, and hopefully we'll do tens of thousands more.
Because lots of people are open, and this is an era where I think we're going to destroy that educational monopoly through freedom.
And it's a really cool era, I think, of, in many ways, freedom The sectors of the economy that they quote-unquote mistakenly left free are going to overcome some of the others.
Well, I appreciate that.
That's a great note to end on.
I know you've got a plane to catch, so we'll wrap it up here just to remind people.
Obviously, some of this is going to be quite surprising to people, but get a hold of the book, The Moral Case of Fossil Fuels.
This is what it looks like, everyone.
The Moral Case of Fossil Fuels.
The fact that it's not embedded in coal is very disappointing to me.
So industrialprogress.com, alexepstein.com, and watch his debates as well.
Very, very instructive.
And of course, take everything with a grain of salt, go do the research yourself, but it's a great resource to give you something different than the kind of stuff you've probably already seen.
So a great chat.
Can I just say one thing, Stefan?
Yeah, please.
Okay.
So if they go to Moral, I know we're giving you too many websites, but they go to moralcaseforfossilfuels.com, We have all the data on the website.
So you can check it all out.
So go to the primary sources.
One thing I'm proud of with the book is I do not do this scam tactic of when I believe something, I just quote, unquote, expert who agrees with me.
There's none of that in the entire book.
It's all primary sources.
So it's my logic and my interpretation and facts.
So you can get all the facts on the website.
So for sure, challenge the heck out of it, but we've given you the material to do so.
And it only took, I think, 16 or 17 Freedom of Information Acts for Alex to do that.
So that, of course, is, I guess, a fair amount of integrity.
So this is Stefan Molling from Freedom Main Radio.
Thanks a lot, Alex.
I'm sure we'll talk again and appreciate the work that you're doing to bring some challenging data to the eyes of the world.
