Nov. 30, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:01
3141 Inconvenient Facts About Global Warming | Alex Epstein and Stefan Molyneux
As the Paris Climate Summit occurs on a world stage, 150 world leaders have gathered to ramp up the hysteria around climate change. Prince Charles warned that "we are becoming the architects of our own destruction" demanding immediate action - in the form of increased government power - to halt global warming. Stefan Molyneux and Alex Epstein (author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels) discuss the propaganda around global warming and aim to separate the facts from fiction.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-epsteinFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.fdrurl.com/donate
Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio back for round two with Alex Epstein.
He's the president and founder of the Center for Industrial Progress.
And he is the author of a book titled that may shock you.
No, it's not the prequel to Fifty Shades of Grey.
It is the moral case for fossil fuels.
He's an expert on energy and industrial policy.
You can go to industrialprogress.com and alexepstein.com for more on his information.
Thanks so much, Alex.
Great to chat with you again.
Hey, good to be here.
All right.
So...
Global warming, climate change, global cooling, acid rain.
We're going to solve it all today.
And I just sort of wanted to start off by you and I both have a history with objectivism.
And one of the great concepts in objectivism is this idea of the package deal.
That if people can get you to agree to one thing, they can smuggle in a whole bunch of other stuff that you've never even considered and then say, well, you must agree with it.
All.
And I find with global warming, we'll call it global warming.
I know that some people calling it climate change now, but that just seems climate is an analogy for change anyway, so it seems kind of redundant.
But when people talk about global warming, There seems to be these series of dominoes that go down.
Do you accept that CO2 is something that can add to the heat in the atmosphere or trap heat?
There are greenhouses.
I think we all accept that that is the case.
And if you accept that that is the case, then it must be mostly driven by human industrial activity.
It must be entirely catastrophic.
And the only thing that can possibly save us is granting massive new powers to governments.
And it seems to me that that's kind of a series of dominoes that we should resist the natural falling down off because they don't follow one after the other.
I mean, I'm sure in your conversations you run up against this package deal before.
How do you respond to that?
Yeah, I think it's helpful just with, and I'll explain later if you want, why I think global warming is a much better term than climate change.
I think climate change is particularly manipulative.
But even if you just take global warming, I'll just say, can you recognize that there would be a difference between mild global warming, which people have generally desired over history, And runaway global warming, which means that there's this out-of-control temperature increase that then leads to all these other consequences.
And usually people will say yes.
And then I'll say, well, why do you use the term equivocally?
Which is, you know, equivocation and package deal are very similar kinds of ideas.
You're using the term Two different ways.
So I was debating somebody at Harvard last week, and I deliberately made this point, you have to distinguish between moderate climate change or catastrophic.
And right after I said that, she just threw around the term climate change in about 15 different degrees of severity, some of which would be not severe at all, and some of which would mean the end of the world.
We should go to nuclear war against China.
No, seriously, they say that degree of severity.
So whether people know the term package deal or not, I think it's helpful in any conversation to insist on precision.
And the more you insist on precision, the more the whole global warming hysteria breaks down because you're taking something that's not very consequential and you're acting as if it's extreme.
But if you examine it, it's just not all that consequential.
So, as far as the package deal goes, breaking it down is really important.
I mean, there's no question that CO2 is produced by human beings.
There's no question that it has increased over the past, say, 50 or 70 years.
And there's no doubt that it has a warming factor in the atmosphere.
As far as that goes, I mean, anybody who would deny that is having trouble tying their shoelaces and getting out of the door in the morning, so I don't have any particular...
I would say just one thing is that it has a warming influence when in isolation.
So if you isolate it, you can show it.
That doesn't mean that in the broader atmosphere...
It has warming.
And because part of the catastrophic theory is that somehow the mild warming that happens when you isolate it somehow transmogrifies into this catastrophic warming, which you can't rule out out of context.
But for the same reason, you couldn't rule out that that CO2 would somehow be countered by a cooling influence.
So somebody might say, well, there's been a, quote, In warming in the last 18 years, maybe the CO2 ends up being nothing.
So the point is we have to be clear on what we know and what we don't know.
And what we know is that in isolation, it has this mild warming influence, mathematically, which is called logarithmic, which means it's a decelerating influence.
And then in the atmosphere, we have to be open to a lot of different possibilities.
But the base case possibility would be it has a decelerating warming influence in the atmosphere, and that's what it seems to have had.
So decelerating means that it's not linearly dose-dependent, right?
So the more CO2 you add, like for every additional molecule of CO2 you add, you get that much less warming compared to the previous.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
So it's just kind of like after 55 or 60 miles an hour pressing down on your gas pedal, every millimeter you press it down doesn't add the same amount of speed.
Otherwise, you'd take off like a rocket ship at some point.
You get diminishing returns.
So each molecule of CO2 gives you diminishing warming returns.
Right.
Now, a lot of people of course also And when I first got into this stuff, you know, I was curious, just like everybody who's interested in the world and the future and so on, there were a few things that troubled me about the data collection and the methodologies, just very briefly, of course.
The idea that scientists know what the temperature is objectively around the world is one of these things that it kind of seems believable, like you look at the TV and they tell you what the temperature is.
It's actually a lot more slippery than people think that it is when it comes to just gathering temperatures around the world.
A lot of the stations that were set up We're not close to large heat sources in the past.
You know, the urban heat effect.
As cities spread, it has an effect on this.
And of course, a lot of the environment around as a whole has changed.
So even just gathering the data is a challenge.
And I think that the people who are doing the mathematical calculations for the global warming scenarios accept this because they have to apply a bunch of factors to try and take into account The inaccuracy of the data relative to the objectivity of the requirement, right?
You don't want to measure, oh, close to a city it's hot, right?
Yeah, I think it's helpful to just start from a common sense perspective and ask, what are we trying to do here?
What is the problem?
What is the concern that we're allegedly talking about global mean temperature?
Why are we talking about all this stuff just as normal citizens?
And I think it's helpful to frame why there is a concern and what exactly it is, and then including, is there such a thing as a global temperature?
Does that matter to us?
And then how do we measure it?
And then all these kinds of things about how do buildings get in the way of that?
So I would start out by saying this.
Here in my mind is the issue.
Fossil fuels, which is hydrocarbons, so these combinations of hydrogen, carbon, so coal, oil, natural gas, the fuels that power the vast majority of industrial civilization have a byproduct, CO2, that has a certain warming influence on the atmosphere.
That, in my view, is the issue, the object of study.
So you've got on the one hand, you've got the fuels that power our civilization for very good economic reasons.
We're not forced to use them.
We choose to use them because they're the best way of providing energy for billions and billions of people.
They have a warming influence.
They have a byproduct that has a warming influence, at least when taken in isolation.
So great.
So that's the situation.
So then the legitimate kind of concern is...
How significant an influence is that?
Is it negative?
Is it positive?
Is it major?
Is it minor?
And by the way, you should also study the plant growing influence of the CO2 as well, if you're being even-handed and humanistic about it.
The baseline guess, especially if you see how mild an effect CO2 has when isolated, is that there is nothing remotely consequential enough to justify restricting hydrocarbon use.
Because hydrocarbon use is the fundamental of the Industrial Revolution and the civilization that turned our life expectancy from 30 to 75 or 80.
And then if you think about it in just another common sense way, you think about, well, just empirically common sense wise, has our ability to deal with climate Has it diminished since we started using hydrocarbons, or has it increased?
And in a common sense way, right now I'm in a cold place, Chevy Chase, Maryland, which is where my parents are.
I'm here for Thanksgiving.
I normally live in Laguna Beach, which is generally a warm place.
But in either of those locations, I can see, wow, this industrial civilization makes either of these climates livable.
It makes Alaska livable.
It makes swampy Florida livable.
It makes Texas livable.
We have mastered every climate imaginable.
Due to this fossil fuel powered civilization.
So your base case is, not only are these fossil fuels essential for life, but they're essential for dealing with any climate.
And without this caliber of energy, without this kind of civilization, every climate is dangerous.
So this is just a common sense thing that anybody has access to.
And yet our entire discussion of this defies all common sense.
Because when we talk about climate, We don't talk about the safety of human beings or the obvious fact that we've mastered it and are safer than ever.
We talk about this one thing, this CO2, and then we make up these doomsday scenarios and we've been doing it for 35 years and none of them have been coming true.
And yet we keep imagining that changing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from 0.03% to 0.04% must be this Armageddon.
And so I submit If we're just looking at it from a common sense basis, there's something else motivating this besides an objective concern for human life.
So I'm happy to talk about, is there such a thing as global temperature?
How do we measure it?
But the whole debate is skewed against any kind of common sense concern For human life.
And one clue as to what's actually driving it is that the people driving this concern are people with a concern for eliminating human life, which would be the Green Movement, who for decades and decades and decades have been advocates of fundamentally what they call population control, which means forcible population reduction in the name of unaltered nature.
So our kind of basic assumption would be maybe it's not that the CO2 is so damaging to humans.
And maybe it's not that fossil fuels aren't so good, because they obviously are good.
Maybe it's that they just think it's wrong for us to change the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, because it's wrong to change anything.
That would be the assumption.
This goes way back to a fundamental delusion of urban dwellers, which is that nature It's beautiful.
You want to go out and hug it.
You canoe through it.
And, you know, maybe you've got to swat a few bugs, but it's pristine.
I mean, it's all the way back to, like, the Garden of Eden, the Rousseauian noble savage, this idea that we have fallen from our oneness with nature and...
I don't know.
I mean, I grew up in a city, obviously, and when you go on to visit nature for camping, it's lovely.
I mean, it's beautiful.
But if you got to stay, well, you're in a whole different world of hurt.
And I actually I think one of the things that conditioned my environmental Thoughts was the fact that after high school I worked for a year in the bush I was I was in a tent all the way through the Canadian winter.
I was gold panning I was prospecting I was saving money up to go to college and you know If you spend a lot of time in nature you really really learn to love civilization and and I think people who bungee in And they go like whitewater rafting and then they go to the arondacks or whatever.
They go do these hikes.
They have this idea that nature is some beautiful, pure, wonderful thing.
But nature, kind of sociopath, it'll kill you as soon as it'll look at you.
It'll stuff bugs up your nose.
It'll make your head melt.
You know, animals will jump out and claw you to death.
Bugs will...
Give you illnesses all over the place.
I mean, nature is a great place to visit and it's easy to sentimentalize it when it's far away from your lived daily experience and when you have technology shielding you from the effects of nature.
But ever since we've sort of got out of the Middle Ages, like in the Middle Ages, there was no sentimentality about nature.
There was no green movement in the Middle Ages.
The Middle Ages was an entire desperate desire like watching a ferret trying to get out of an aquarium.
The Middle Ages was this incredibly desperate desire to get as far away from nature as humanly possible, which is why when there was an industrial revolution and people were like, are you kidding?
I can get off the farm and go and live in soot?
I'm there because the farm is horrible and nature is horrible.
Famine, plague, pestilence, death at every turn.
Throughout the Middle Ages, like 5-10% of the European population on average would starve to death.
It was god-awful.
Sorry, end of rant.
I just sort of wanted to point out that there is this sentimentality.
You know, when Al Gore lives in a 12,000 square foot house using the electricity consumption of a small town, nature is a pretty cool place.
But boy, if you've got to go out and spend a lot of time there, it kind of makes you itchy and ill.
Yeah, I think that's 100% on point.
And that makes it even more bizarre from a human perspective.
And I'm going to keep emphasizing this because my contention is that the green movement is not concerned with human well-being.
They're concerned with minimizing human impact, which means minimizing human presence.
And so this goes to, if you study nature from a human perspective, your number one concern is to change it.
And even with climate, you want to change climate.
If you could, you would prevent, you should, you should prevent Superstorm Sandy.
And on a local level, we engage in climate change all the time to the benefit of billions of people, right?
We change the climate inside our homes.
We make it when it's cold.
We make it warm.
When it's warm, we make it cold.
We're constantly engaged in this kind of change, and it's fundamentally a virtue.
So it's bizarre that if we have this byproduct that causes some change, our first kind of impulse is, oh, well, let's throw out all the fossil fuels that make our life possible, because we might be changing something, and without even investigating the measurements.
Note that it's not climate catastrophe people are afraid of.
It's climate change, which is the idea, as you indicated, that nature is perfect without us.
And all that we can do is ruin it, and if we ruin it, there has to be this hell narrative where the climate gods are somehow going to punish us for putting more CO2 in the atmosphere, even though, by the way, we have only 1 20th the CO2 in the atmosphere that the planet used to have when plant life was at its greatest thriving point.
So it's all about human beings shouldn't be able to change anything, and somehow if we do, we're going to hell.
Right.
Now, I mean, the question of...
Is it beneficial is something that can barely ever be talked about.
I'm so completely heretical.
It's like, I love Satan!
And CO2 can be good for the planet.
And of course, it's plant food.
And agricultural productivity is necessary for people to not die of starvation.
So the fact that there's more CO2 or more plant food, you know, we put fertilizer into the ground.
Even if it's just cow poop, you know, we put fertilizer in the ground to grow more crops.
CO2 could actually be beneficial.
I've certainly heard some good arguments that plants were starving to death prior to the Industrial Revolution, were actually doing better.
But to me, all of that is somewhat irrelevant because one of the things, again, going back to the numbers, and I don't mean sort of the dinky, combed-over numbers of the climate change industry, The numbers that you've pointed out that I really want to get front and center in front of my audience, which is climate deaths.
And of course, if there's some epidemic, how do you know there's an epidemic?
Because a lot more people are dying.
Bubonic plague?
Why yes, a third of the European population has just dropped dead, so damn those Byzantine rats, right?
But when it comes to climate deaths, I think the numbers that you've put forward on Stossel's show and other places are startling and I really think can't be repeated often enough.
Right.
So this gets to the issue of, are we evaluating things by reference to human life?
Because if we are, I mentioned just the common sense observation that we've made climate safer, then you can say, well, do we have data backing it up?
Because on the one side, I just say common sense would have us assume fossil fuels have helped make climate safer.
And on the other side, we have 35 years of catastrophic predictions, including, by the way, John Holdren, number one Scientists in, what did you call it, the climate change industry?
I mean, to call it industry is a little bit flattering to it, but the climate change monopoly, right, because that's what it is, the government science is a monopoly.
John Holdren predicted in 1985, this got him, by the way, to the highest scientific position in the land, that there would be one billion climate-related deaths from famine alone by the year 2020.
So less than five years away, what has happened?
Well, in terms of famine and malnutrition, those have gone down by 40% in that period.
And if we look at common sense, why?
A huge amount of it is fossil fuel-powered agriculture and, by the way, genetic modification of crops and all sorts of other things that are considered non-green and therefore bad.
Okay, so Holdren was exactly wrong about that, right?
We've talked in the past.
We don't even really have a term For how wrong these guys are.
Because their predictions are the opposite of the truth.
They're not just false.
They're opposite.
It's like you could bet.
I'm working on the word catastrophrack, but I'm not sure it's going to take off.
I'll just put it out there.
It doesn't roll off the tongue well enough.
But yeah, it's complete disaster opposite of everything that could be true and useful and valid.
We'd create something on Reddit, except they prohibit climate change denial, so you're not allowed to talk on it.
So anyway, let's look at, though, not just famine, because that's gone way down, but every form of climate-related death.
Now, if you notice, the New York Times never tells you, in general, how much worse it's getting.
They never aggregate the deaths.
But if somebody dies, then, well, of course, it's because your parents drive an SUV. But why don't we be objective and look at overall climate-related deaths?
What we find is that the rate of climate-related death per person, so that means your chances of dying from a climate-related thing since major CO2 emissions began about 80 years ago, is down 98%.
98%.
Now, I'll just give you a concrete example.
If you take the 30s, so the 30s are the first decade that we have any kind of decent data on, and if you read anecdotally about things like the Dust Bowl, you might realize that actually the heat-related things were a lot worse back then than they were now, probably because it was actually warmer until they tampered with all the temperature records, but also because they didn't have the technology to cope with it.
So in the 30s, You have individual years where climate-related deaths are around 3 million, 3 million globally, in a population one-third the size of ours.
So adjusted for population, 10 million.
In 2013, which is the last piece of data we collected from the International Disaster Database for the Moral Case for Fossil Fields, which came out a year ago in 2014, You had 23,000 climate-related deaths.
So you go from 10 million to 23,000.
So not only is this not a massive new problem, it is a massive new solution that high-energy civilization has solved the problem of climate.
So one aspect of my book is not just that we haven't created a catastrophe, it's that we've overcome a catastrophe, because the natural climate is a catastrophe.
Natural climate change is a catastrophe.
That's why people made up all these gods to pray to, And the P is because weather used to be this deadly thing.
Now that we've mastered it, we have all these new dogmatists who pretend that it's this huge thing, and it's not because they're actually afraid of it being too cold outside, or even the sea levels rising by a millimeter more than they did 100 years ago.
They believe that industrial civilization is bad, and this is just the latest of 100 rationalizations for them to attack capitalism and industry.
Yeah, I mean, plus, of course, with the Dust Bowl, you get the denuding of America's forest to print incredibly depressing John Steinbeck novels that make it feel like a hyper-literate elephant is slowly choking the life out of you.
And this is important because these are human lives.
You know, I mean, it's very easy to abstract.
You said 10 million human lives.
What that basically means, of course, is that if climate control technology had not increased or our energy consumption of that had not increased...
Since the 1930s, there would be 10 million bodies in the ground that aren't there now, give or take, right?
That is a lot of human lives, and you wouldn't want it to be you.
Just from climate.
You wouldn't want it to be you, and you wouldn't want it to be your children, and you wouldn't want it to be your friends and your family and your neighbors.
That's 10 million people.
That is...
A staggering amount of human life and human opportunity and this is where it's really hard to get people to understand that this basically Pascal's wager and Pascal's wager that is I think at the root of why people take this stuff seriously in that the catastrophes that are projected are so extreme that it's like well okay Maybe there's only a 1% chance of the world ending,
but that's going to get my attention, which is the old Pascal's wager that, you know, if hell is bad enough and heaven is great enough, you might as well just believe because, boy, you know, if you're wrong, you have a really bad afterlife.
And if you're right, you've just given up some start church Sunday mornings and, you know, had some conversations with some boring people and sung some fairly decent hymns.
So Pascal's wager seems to be in this sort of modern religiosity, just keep amping up the catastrophes.
To the point where people say, well, boy, those negative effects are so bad that we better do something.
And it creates this sort of fight or flight mechanism in people that seems to shut down their reasoning and critical faculties.
I think that it's not partly by design, but it's just kind of how we inherit this mess to some degree.
So then, but if you look at the perspective you just took, and by implication the perspective I took, notice how we have a very different view, even if you take a Pascal's Wager type thing, because what you looked at is you said, oh my gosh, if we don't do this, if we don't use fossil fuels, if we don't transform nature, we're going to have these 10 million deaths.
And by the way, that's just for this tiny climate issue, which is a tiny issue in the scheme of things in modern civilization.
The real thing is people are going to starve.
Right?
Because they don't have modern fossil-fueled civilization.
Paul Ehrlich, who's one of the leading prophets of doom, who's still considered a prestigious scientist despite being wrong about reverse, you know, just reverse right about every single thing, right?
He had the book The Population Bomb in 1968, where at the time of 3.5 billion people in the world, he said hundreds of millions or billions will starve.
It's only thanks to the modern revolution, which they call the Green Revolution, which has nothing to do with the Green Movement.
It has to do with agricultural technology.
Including natural gas-based fertilizer and diesel-based farm equipment that allows you to feed billions.
But as soon as you starve those of energy, which includes if you increase the price of that energy, you quote-unquote keep it in the ground, you're going to put people in the ground 100% at far more than 10 million.
So when you and I look at the situation, we're terrified of not using fossil fuels.
And so what that goes to is that people need to be educated about how bad nature is Without modification, without transformation by human beings.
That's why I'm terrified of us not having the energy and technology to deal with climate.
I'm not terrified of modifications in climate unless you could show me that there is some unprecedented Armageddon-type thing.
But that's precisely what they can't show.
They can't even make a mild temperature increase prediction and be right about it, let alone this runaway nonsense.
So the only thing to be afraid of is the people who are trying to get us to get rid of fossil fuels and make us afraid to Yeah, I mean, this urgency, you know, when you are supported by these giant cumulus clouds of investments in energy and energy transmission and so on, again, it's easy to forget.
But I would sort of challenge anyone who is against fossil fuels, you know, let's say you're at home and you cut your thumb really badly and you're bleeding like a stuck pig.
Would you walk to the hospital?
Well, of course you wouldn't walk to the hospital.
You'd call and get good old fossil fuel ambulance to come and take you there as fast as humanly possible so that you didn't end up with some serious injury or bleeding out.
And that level of urgency that you would have for the consumption of fossil fuels is what literally billions of people around the world need.
You are asking people who have cut their thumb and are bleeding out to walk to the hospital because carbon dioxide is bad.
And you would never do that.
You'd be like, first thing, get me that good old oil in the tank combustion engine to get me to the hospital.
It is his life and death for millions and millions, hundreds of millions, billions of people around the world.
It is literally that life and death.
And to ask them to forego fossil fuels is like...
Taking the chance of bleeding out so you can walk to the hospital instead of taking an ambulance.
That level of urgency is important for people to understand.
It's very easy for us.
You can cut back and so on, but it's life and death for these people.
Yeah, I mean, every decline in productivity is life and death for everybody, including the people in a relatively prosperous country.
But I love that way of framing it, because you think about it on the other side.
So basically, what you're doing is you're doing a risk reversal, right?
Because people think all the risk is on the side of using fossil fuels, and you're showing, oh, the real risk is not using fossil fuels.
So imagine the guy has his thumb on one hand, and on the other hand, Michael Mann has a hockey stick graph.
And you're like, where'd you get the, you know, I'm bleeding out.
I really need a good reason.
He's like, well, I'm not going to show you my data, right?
I'm not going to share my data, because that's my private data, even though it's fine.
And he's like, but look, I made up a graph about the future, and it's going to go, and supposedly the Middle Ages wasn't warmer, and it's all been the same.
You're like, that sounds kind of like BS. I'm going to go fix my thumb.
You have a really high burden of proof for me not to fix my thumb.
So that's what we need to do.
We need to hold them to a very high burden of proof, where instead of saying, hey, 97% of us agree on some unspecified thing for some unspecified reason, give me proof that this is a major danger that justifies taking away one ounce of gasoline from a human being who needs it.
Right, right.
Now let's go a little bit into...
I hesitate to use the word science.
I mean, I'm a huge fan of the scientific method.
I think, you know, scientific method, philosophy, and the free market are like the three great golden gods that Western civilization brought to the planet.
And so, you know, I worship at the altar of science to mix my metaphors ridiculously.
And it seems to me that when you are basing computer models on data that is pre-manipulated, that has an atrocious record, Of accuracy, you're not doing science.
Like when I was an entrepreneur, I used to write computer modeling for figuring out how industrial facilities could best reduce their pollution.
And you go through a bunch of scenarios and a bunch of options and so on.
That's not science.
That's modeling.
And modeling is very different from science.
And particularly when the models deviate so wildly from the actual data, at least as close to the actual data as you can get, the idea that you would not be skeptical of that, that is anti-scientific to me.
Because, you know, whenever you say, well, I'm skeptical about some of the methodology, I'm skeptical about some of the data, I'm skeptical about, you know, it seems like they've got the conclusion first and they work to achieve it.
Somehow that's supposed to be anti-scientific.
And that's why, of course, denier has replaced the word skeptic.
A skeptic is good.
Denier, of course, is bad.
And the idea that you should never ever be skeptical of pretty shaky data put through incredibly complex models that have wide divergences from the actual recorded information, that is the whole point of science is to be skeptical about that.
That's why we have science, because we're skeptical of those kinds of things.
I might think of it a little bit differently in the sense that the whole focus on skeptic, let alone denier, treats a certain establishment that is a political establishment, namely the catastrophist school of thought on CO2 emissions, which has all sorts of fallacies to it.
It treats that as the default and then asks people, are you skeptical of it?
Do you deny it?
But the way we should think of science is, I think, a helpful distinction is between what's been demonstrated and what is speculated.
And there's nothing inherently wrong with speculation.
Often the way science progresses is you have certain things that are demonstrated and then certain things that are speculated, and then you investigate more and more and more.
And maybe some of the things that are speculative, you're able to demonstrate.
But it's a life and death distinction to know which is which.
And so I think that's the key thing, not necessarily modeled versus not.
So for my own little life experience modeling, what I used to do is I used to model different network I used to work for a company that did that.
And because those are such deterministic systems, you can do a really, really good job of monitoring, of modeling what's going to happen with, say, Ethernet.
Just if you understand how Ethernet works, it has a certain protocol, the electrons work certain ways, you can do that.
So in a sense, that is scientific.
But what would not be scientific, or what you'd have to admit is speculative, is if you had some, you know, you're trying to predict, oh, what's going to happen with the Internet in eight years or something like that?
And you don't really have a way of predicting that, but you're saying, well, this is exactly how the packets will flow.
That would be speculative, and you would have to admit it.
And so every scientist is obligated to explain to people, what do we know?
What don't we know?
What are we speculating?
Why are we speculating it?
And if we have a track record of speculating certain things and having confidence, how did it go when we speculated?
And the whole modern field of, I would say, public climate science, which is different from the private practitioners, but what is announced to the public and what we're told to make laws based on, has a track record of predicting runaway global warming and it completely failing.
Now they also, we've seen lately, have a track record of a lot of other things like manipulating data.
If you look at the, you know, just data from the government, for some reason the data keeps getting skewed so that it's warmer and warmer more recently.
And colder and colder in the past, including, you know, you wouldn't even know there's a Dust Bowl anymore, right?
You wouldn't even know that, you don't know that there's a medieval warm period despite people talking about this.
But in any case, the key thing is they have to tell us the difference between what's demonstrated and what's speculated.
And that goes to your first comment, which is that science is fundamentally a method.
It's a body of knowledge discovered by a certain method.
And so to say that we are demanding that people follow the method is not to be a science denier, it is to be a science affirmer.
And they are science violators if they don't follow the method, period.
Right, right.
I also have some concern always when a particular scientific issue gets politicized.
And of course, the politics of global warming could be an entire show unto itself.
Something like E equals MC squared, you know, the inverse square law, gases expand when heated.
I mean, these are not politicized issues fundamentally, and that's why.
And they're very empirically measurable and have been.
And one of the great glories Of Einstein was the fact that he put forward theories as well as methodologies for disproving those theories.
You know, is light going to bend around the sun when there's an eclipse?
Can you measure that, you know?
So this kind of approach is fantastic, objective and reproducible and has these methodologies that are independent of the practitioners, which is great.
My concern always becomes when, even if we accept, and I've made this case on the show before, so I'll keep it very brief, but Alex, even if we were to accept catastrophic, anthropogenic, global warming, imminent doom and disaster, Well, then clearly we would want to reduce consumption.
I mean, that would be, you know, reduce our consumption.
Now, when I look at, say, U.S. national debt, which is somewhere north of, hovering around $20 trillion at the moment, well, that's $20 trillion of excessive use in the present that's going to have to be paid for by deficiencies of use in the future.
And to me, it would be a great argument if people believed in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, which had a political solution.
It'd be like, okay, well, let's just ban the national debt.
Because if you ban the national debt, you are immediately going to crush consumption down because, you know, if you go out and put $1,000 on your credit card, that's $1,000 you're consuming now.
That is bad for the environment, even if we assume that all of this consumption is bad for the environment.
So just let's eliminate fiat currency.
Let's eliminate the Federal Reserve.
Let's eliminate government debt.
And then all of this artificial consumption that's being driven by debt will immediately fall and eliminate.
But that would be the reduction.
Of political power.
And that to me, never, I've made this case for years, it never has ever come up.
And this would be a perfectly rational, reduction in power, immediate impact solution to catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.
But it's never talked about.
You never hear people say, well, we need a reduction in government power.
Government, of course, the biggest polluters around the world.
So surely if we reduce the size and power of government, then we reduce the impact of pollution in a very direct and measurable way.
But that would be politicians taking this information and using it to reduce their own power base.
I don't really think that's the job when you're a politician is to continually expand power.
And that's sort of one of my concerns as well, that it goes through all of these dominoes.
And the last one is more fascism, more government control, more taxation, more regulation.
It's like, why does it always seem to lead to this particular sinkhole?
Wow, so there is about four interesting issues, and I'm not smart enough to retain four, so I think I'll do two.
Pick one.
I want to challenge the terminology, the environment.
At the beginning, we talked about package deals, what Ayn Rand calls intellectual package deals, which is taking two fundamentally different things and lumping them together in the same category so that if you like one, you're going to like the other, even if it's toxic.
The environment lumps together the environment from a human perspective, so our environment, nature as it impacts us, with the non-human environment, nature that has nothing to do with us.
So then we think, oh, we want a good environment, therefore the environment means pollution, but it also means, let's say, the prairie chicken, which is shutting down businesses throughout the country because it's allegedly the environment.
But the point is, no, we care about the pollution part of it because it impacts us.
Who cares, right?
There's gonna be a million kinds of prairie chickens.
They'll go in and out of existence without us.
There's no reason to care unless someone can show us it's some eco-apocalypse if we don't do it.
So if you take environment from a human perspective, the wealthier you are, the better your environment is.
So one consequence of having to pay down this debt of, you know, reaping what we sow in terms of debt is we'd probably have a worse environment because we would have to restrict our use of wealth because we had consumed it in advance.
So actually, things would get worse.
And generally, this is why wealthy countries have better environments than poor countries.
And in general, I think also, we think of human impacts on environment as somehow anti the environment.
But that's like saying, well, a beaver building a dam, that's anti the environment.
The environment, right?
I think of it differently.
I think of it as, you know, if the Martian looks at the people, including all the plastic bags that we're supposedly manufacturing, he'll say, wow, those people build the best nests.
That's way better than the kangaroo pouch.
Good for them.
Good damn.
It's all nature, unless you're what I'm...
So right now, the view of environment and nature is, well, everything everyone else does is great.
Everything the human race does is bad.
So I call this human racism.
It's the prejudice against the human species.
That's a deep problem.
So that's point one.
Oh, point two.
That would be my last one.
The issue of government, I want to take another perspective on this.
And you, by the way, had a great YouTube video that I don't remember the exact title of, but I think it's why I changed my mind on climate change.
And you gave a very long scenario, long in a good way, scenario about what would happen if you did the equivalent with some kind of economic index and if you monopolized it.
So people, I'm sure, can check that out just from that description.
What I'll say is that, in general, we know that a coercive monopoly, emphasize coercive, has all sorts of negative impacts, right?
So if you just had one coercive energy company, right, and let's imagine it was an oil company, you know, one company and that's all it does.
Let's say there's something going wrong in that oil company, the oil company's public representation Is bad.
And you're an energy expert.
There's only one place for you to work.
Your life's work only works if you work in this one oil company.
So whether it's a spill that's not being disclosed or this kind of fantasy about Exxon somehow, quote, knew about the catastrophic global warming that didn't exist, so I don't know how you know about that.
But whatever it is, imagine the worst case scenario.
And imagine you're an employee, an energy employee at that one company.
You have nowhere else to go.
Think of how much courage it takes to stand up To throw away your whole livelihood to go against that monopoly.
Now imagine that, well, the oil company is kind of telling the truth, but they're exaggerating a lot, and you don't really think about the consequences, but do you really want to risk your job, and your kid is going to college, and all the cocktail parties, do you want to be alienated?
And if it's just you, what is it going to accomplish?
But this is what happens in the world, right?
So instead of oil company, Substitute scientific establishment, National Science Foundation, NOAA, all of these things, what happens is the statements that they make publicly aren't patently false.
They're usually these package deals.
Oh, we're causing warming, therefore we have to pass Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan.
And you're not clear on whether it's mild warm or catastrophic warming.
And if you're one of the scientists in this monopoly, it's hard to speak out and say, no, this exaggeration is scientific malpractice.
And that's why only a handful speak up.
And I have a podcast called Power.
When I interview people who are outside, who are now retired, they'll say, I would not speak up if this were my career.
They'll say that outright.
I mean, think about what an admission that is, partially about themselves, but more about the system.
So if you believe that coercive monopolies are destructive, what happens when you have a monopoly on science?
Another good reference is the State Science Institute from Atlas Shrugged.
Not a fantasy.
That's how it works.
Right.
Do you think that there will be a time, I mean, the sort of collective delusions that mankind seems to go through where voices of reason are like dust in the wind, man?
I mean, do you think that there is going to be a time where the divergence between speculation and measurable empirical results is going to be so great that the edifice might show some significant weakening?
Or do you think that may be occurring now?
Yeah, I think it's occurring now.
I think there are two things that are happening.
One is People, first of all, the transition from global warming as a term, which sort of at least resembles something that you can talk about because it's a general increase in the warming of the atmosphere.
It's an increase in the temperature of the atmosphere on average.
People can get that.
But then climate change is the most useless term if you want to actually understand anything because there's no climate non-change.
So it fails the basic concept test of having a contrast to it.
So what it is, it's meant to just completely screw everybody's thinking and people just see, oh, well, you know, when it snows, they say, oh, that's weather, not climate.
You can just kind of see that, and people are more aware of the prediction.
So I think on the one hand, The conduct of the people is becoming more and more hysterical as against the predictions.
And it's kind of like the population bomb.
You get a couple decades away, everyone was expected to starve.
Paul Ehrlich said England would be just a bunch of isolated islands of starving people.
It didn't happen.
So that's one thing.
The other thing that I think is happening, and I think this is partially the perspective that's been helpful in the moral case for fossil fuels, Is that people have started viewing climate impact as a byproduct of fossil fuels.
So they look at the big picture more.
They look at both the positives and the negatives.
And that's why every talk I give at every school, I say, look, before we investigate the particulars of this, will you all agree that with every issue we have to look carefully at both the positives and negatives of all the alternatives?
Like, those are the table stakes, right?
And that we're going to look at them from the perspective of human life.
So if you don't want to look at the big picture, I can't help you.
And if you don't want to look at human life, you should disagree with me.
But if you want to look at the big picture and you want to look at human life, I'm your guy.
Let's go.
Let's investigate the data.
And that perspective, I'm telling you, even at these crazy schools like Harvard and Wellesley, people can internalize that methodology.
And what they start to see is, hey, wait a second.
Why don't my professors talk at all about the unique positives of fossil fuels?
Even if they were outweighed by the negatives, why don't they talk about them?
And especially you start to learn, hey, wait, basically every piece of farm equipment in the world is powered by diesel.
We're talking about keeping it in the ground.
Maybe shouldn't we be worried about that?
You start to see that the methodology doesn't follow this very common sense thing.
So I think it's the combination of the big picture methodology that most people accept when it's made explicit.
That's why it's really important to have philosophical programs like this, because we make the methodology.
Explicit.
Plus the obvious exaggeration of the negatives.
And what people are seeing is there is a prejudice.
There's some prejudice driving this.
And then if you can identify it as, oh, that going green that you're taught is so great, well, that means minimizing human impact.
And it looks like these people just want to minimize the impact of every Good form of energy.
Because by the way, they're also against nuclear and they're against hydro.
People see, oh wow, this isn't about human life.
This is about reducing human life.
So I think in my experience persuading people, that's very effective.
And I know for sure you can win over more if you get a one-on-one chance.
With agreeing on this issue for long enough, you'll win.
So I think it's just a matter of, you know, you've got a great listenership, people thinking about the methodology.
And I think that I've seen it already, like in Wall Street Journal and other places mimicking it, and I mean that in the best possible way.
So I think that the philosophical approach is going to make this whole thing look like the Luddite junk that it is.
Well, I also think there is blowback.
Sort of whenever I approach an intellectual topic that I feel emotionally charged about, I always try and figure out why.
Why am I emotionally charged about it?
And when you were, you know, I got these PTSD flashbacks where you were talking about the predictions about England, right?
That England was going to be this, you know, Mad Max Thunderdome of starvation and cannibalism and so on.
Well, I grew up in England and I was born in the late 60s, mid 60s, and I grew up and this stuff was everywhere.
Population growth, starvation, new ice age, well now new heat age or whatever.
And I think when, you know, the whole point of growing up is just going through a whole series of increasingly irritating transitions of realizing how badly you were lied to and for what terrible reasons you were lied to.
Because when I was a kid, I mean, the nuclear war thing was floating around, but this environmental catastrophism was huge in the 70s, all the way out of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, all the way through Paul Irwig, sorry, Ehrlich should be named like an Atlas Shrugged villain.
But this stuff has significant impact on the quality of children's lives in particular.
You know, you go to kids and ask them what they're scared of.
It's climate change.
It's the, you know, they believe, you know, they don't have...
The understanding or the sophistication or the independence to sort of analyze, you know, the old statement that it's hard to get someone to understand something when this old economic being depends on him not understanding something.
And kids' impact, the impact of this stuff on kids' lives is very significant.
And it can lead to things like lifelong depression, like alienation, like a feeling of why bother?
I mean, I remember that when I was a kid, you know, hey, you got a really difficult calculus test coming up.
It's like, Yeah, but calculus isn't going to help me when I'm hunting down my fellow man for food on the former wastelands of the British Isles and so on.
And I joke about it.
No, but at the time, there was a lot of nihilism and a lot of cynicism and a lot of forget the future.
You know, the 70s was a lot about that.
And I mean, some of it was just the general hedonism of the 70s, but some of it was due to this no future thing.
And I really want to caution people that when they push this narrative and particularly this narrative drips down You know, like water off a stalagmite, it drips down to children and it has a huge impact on how children view their future, their level of enthusiasm and happiness and willingness to plan and execute on long-term plans in their whole life.
The cost of happiness among children for this kind of stuff is to me one of the, you know, you're driving this tank and there's stuff stuck in the tracks and it's the hopes and dreams of hundreds of millions of children around the world.
And I'm surprised the degree to which Just care and concern for the children of the world is not making us push back a little bit more against some of the stuff because it's talked about as certain.
It's talked about to children through the media, through books, through speeches, as certain, as imminent, as no future.
And the longer it goes without a solution, the more catastrophic the outcome becomes.
There is going to be a blowback because if kids grow up and find out they've lied to about this, which casts a significant shadow on childhood, I think, like me, they're going to be a little bit pissed off, and rightly so.
Yeah, to the extent that they realize that they were really deprived of something.
One thing that I find particularly upsetting about the Green Movement is the low level of moral aspiration that it has created.
I was at Whole Foods yesterday.
It was one of the few places it was open on Thanksgiving for food.
And you see these, and they wouldn't give me plastic bags, and I needed to walk a mile, which I guess I was supposedly doing the green thing, but of course a paper bag is going to break if it has any significant thing, so I had to get one of these stupid reusable bags.
And I think that for a lot of people today, getting one of these bacteria traps is considered a major moral milestone in their week, right?
I mean, seriously, people judge- I turned off a light.
No, but people judge themselves by how they sort their trash.
You know, it all gets burned in China anyway.
But that's kind of not the point.
But we have such a low level of moral aspiration.
And one thing I love about Ayn Rand is that she has a high level of moral aspiration, and she ties moral aspiration to what you create in your life.
You find meaning in how you make the world better, not in some esoteric way, but how you actually mold the world around you.
To make it better for your life and the life of everyone you deal with and trade with.
And I think that people are—so environmentalism, in the way you mentioned, absolutely is so destructive.
But in just—in making our ambition so low—and as a helpful note to any parents out there, because I often get the question, why are you writing a children's book?
And the answer is, I have no idea.
But there are already materials available that I think are useful.
And the key points to get, I think, if you want your kid to be inoculated on these issues and even have a good start, is A, they have to know the history of the planet.
They have to know the history of nature in relation to man.
So they have to know that, historically, nature was really hostile to human beings.
They need details, and they need to know how dynamic, how ever-changing nature is.
I don't think anyone learns about ice ages anymore, but those are kind of important kinds of things, you know?
So nature is this dynamic and dangerous system.
That's kind of one lesson.
And then how much man overcame it in just very recent history.
And I think if you get those two things, it gives you a much more rational perspective and a much more appreciative perspective of what we're doing, because what they're taught is nature was perfect, Until about 300 years ago, and then we ruined it, and therefore nature is going to punish us.
And that history will just refute that, or at least will make it seem highly unlikely.
Now, it being Thanksgiving, I have noticed, of course, because you're with your family, that your eyeballs are slowly turning into well-buttered, rotating pieces of turkey.
So I think it's important to release you to get on the general cannibalistic feast, known as Thanksgiving in the United States.
I'm glad that we're not in England, where, of course, we'd be hunting each other.
I'm much nicer to have this kind of civilized conversation.
A great pleasure to chat with you.
Remember, of course, people, please go to industrialprogress.com, alexepstein.com.
And The Power Hour was the name of your podcast, right?
And you get that on iTunes and other places?
It's on iTunes, yes.
Thank you.
And it's also on industrialprogress.com.
And I just want to say thank you for doing your show.
I like listening to it a lot.
I think, in general, the world needs a lot more philosophy.
And I don't mean...
Fundamentally subjectivist, fascist philosophy, which is most of what we get in our universities.
I hope people keep thinking about all of these issues in a philosophical way, and I think they'll find that that just makes a lot more sense of things, and it helps you persuade a lot more people.
And everybody should read Atlas Shrugged.
I don't say that often.
I am actually slightly more partial to the Fountainhead, but everyone should read Atlas Shrugged, and in particular, Robert Stadler as a character.
Obviously, that's not all scientists in the government, but it's a very good cautionary tale that is underappreciated in the modern world.
So thanks again, Alex.
Great pleasure, and I'm sure we'll talk again soon.
