Alex Epstein on the Climate Movement's Real Agenda 28:03

Alex Epstein is the author of two bestsellers, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Future, Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal and Natural Gas, Not Less. He's also the president of the Center for Industrial Progress. He's a widely appreciated speaker throughout North America. Alex, thank you for finding time for us today. Thank you, Mike.

I was wondering, what did it feel like to have such a big target on your back when you dared, you know, going back, I guess, six, seven years and saying, wait a second, there's a moral case for fossil fuels and more, you know, the fossil fuel future that, you know, that I take that the big crime you committed was you said, let's have a fuller discussion of fossil fuels. Let's have a fuller discussion that talks about those cons that we're worried about, but also talks about the benefits.

Well, the target on my back has never really been an issue for me. I mean, in my view, if somebody has a criticism of me and it doesn't make any sense, then it's like a four-year-old criticizing me for not believing in Santa Claus. And if they have a criticism of me that makes sense, then I take that seriously and learn from it. But the target thing hasn't been an issue. Actually, the thing that's been more of an issue is I've been at this for 16 years, and it's taken a long time for people to really be interested in this issue.

And by this issue, I mean fossil fuels as a whole. The whole focus has been, hey, what are the negatives of fossil fuels? Let's get rid of them as quickly as possible and not talking about the positives. I think finally now in the past few years, people are waking up and saying, wait, as you said,

let's have a fuller picture discussion. If we're talking about potentially getting rid of fossil fuels, let's factor in the benefits. And when you do that, you realize getting rid of fossil fuels is the last thing you want to do. We actually need more of them for the foreseeable future.

Well, did the energy crisis last year in Europe, you know, that obviously produced these record high prices and fears about freezing in the winter, you know, all the other ramifications of that. Has that changed the debate? I mean, because you sort of think you didn't have to explain you kind of need energy now, guys. You know, I just wondered if that had any kind of fundamental shift.

I don't know if it's at the level of a fundamental shift, but it's definitely a shift. So I don't believe that crises by themselves educate the public and move them in the right direction, in part because the people who cause the crisis often have a distorted interpretation of it. So even if you look at what happened in Europe, it's

pretty obvious that when you restrict the supply of fossil fuels, you restrict transportation, you restrict relationships with free countries who could give you fossil fuels, including us, you ban fracking, all this stuff.

And, but you still need fossil fuels because unreliable solar and wind can't actually replace them. Then you become dangerously dependent on unfree regimes such as Russia. This is, I think clearly what happened, but the kind of solar and wind crowd said, no, no, no, no. We should have just done more solar and wind. That would have somehow saved us. And,

there's no foundation to this at all because when solar and wind are in short supply, you need nearly 100% backup. And so you need a lot of natural gas, no matter how much solar and wind you have. And so if you cut off your supply of natural gas, you're just going to have problems. But I do think,

It's enough common sense that the anti-fossil fuel movement caused the disastrous shortage of fossil fuels that people are more open to the truth than ever. And it's more urgent because people are suffering the consequences of lack of energy. And that's where I felt like there's a great opportunity for people who've been right about this issue to educate the public. So I've certainly seen a big uptake in my own ideas and my own thinking. Fossil Future came out in May of last year, and that was good timing in the sense of people are really...

aware of, hey, we have shortages of fossil fuels. Maybe we're trying to move off them too quickly. And then I point out, well, we haven't even moved off of them at all. We've just slowed the growth and that's been a disaster. So maybe it would be, as I've said, the apocalypse if you actually tried to eliminate them by 2050.

Well, I look at the about face in Germany also, you know, I mean, it's one of those, we have a big file called, you can't make this stuff up. And one has to be that the Germans, you know, turn about face and all of a sudden become the major coal importer, you know, and there's many other examples, but, you know, Germany was sort of the poster child for the green revolution. They spent so much money on it, et cetera, and then end up having to import coal because of

such fundamental things as you've just outlined. But for me, it was always, you didn't know the sun didn't shine every day. You didn't know. In Germany. Yeah. In Germany, no less. I'm in California and we have problems with solar, but in Germany. Yeah. Without any preparation though. I mean, while they still scale out the nuclear plants, you know, at some fundamental level though. And as you said, just forced reliance on Russia as an example.

So I just, one thing that might put this into perspective for people is my analysis of the whole kind of energy transition movement and green energy movement is not that it's actually an attempt to produce a superior type of energy.

I think there are many reasons not to think that it is. And one is it hasn't embraced nuclear. It's rejected nuclear. It's stunted the development of nuclear. It also has a lot of hostility toward hydro and very revealing as a lot of hostility toward mining, which in enormous quantities, we might talk about unprecedented quantities is necessary for even these hypothetical solar and wind and battery.

So my view is this is actually, I talk about this in chapter three of Fossil Future, it's an anti-human impact movement. It's a movement driven by the belief that it's wrong for us to impact nature. And today, above all, it's wrong for us to impact the climate in any way. And we should just eliminate our impact at all costs.

And they don't really care about energy. And in fact, there's a hostility toward energy because if you think of what energy does, it powers machines that allow us to have a lot of impact. So the leaders of the green movement actually don't like energy and are on the record saying we don't want infinite energy because that would, quote, ruin the planet, even though it would make human life amazing. And when you look at it as it's not a cleaner energy movement, right?

It is an anti-human impact movement. It makes sense of all their positions. And it also makes sense of why their energy ideas are retarded.

Right. Because they don't, they're, they're not real energy ideas that they want to compete in the market. It's that they are energy. They're just fake rationalizations for let us get rid of fossil fuels. It's basically, if you let us get rid of fossil fuels, if you shut down the coal plants and the gas plants, and even the nuclear plants, which again is absurd, and you shut down the pipelines, you don't build anything, everything will be fine because we can magically make it work with solar and wind.

But it's just a stupid, fake reassurance. It's not a real attempt. If they were really interested in energy, they'd embrace nuclear hydro and they would actually want to compete. They'd actually have real ideas they were willing to compete and test with, not get rid of what works and then have this fake solution that we're totally dependent on.

Let's stay on nuclear for a moment there because, as you say, I think it expresses well the fundamental difference that you've approached this issue. What's the purpose of energy? Why are we doing all of this stuff? And I think you're absolutely right. It certainly exposes that it's not about clean energy. It's not about emissions because, obviously, you choose nuclear. I mean, I know you go down in the books about look at the different sources we're choosing. And is this the first time in history we've chosen a source

that is less reliable, more expensive, and far more just problematic. It's not the most effective, efficient source of energy.

Well, so yeah, with solar and wind versus nuclear, and generally you have this very strong tendency throughout history to go to more dense forms of energy versus less dense, and then more naturally stored forms of energy. This is something that gets overlooked, but all the major forms of energy we use today that are cost effective, so fossil fuels and nuclear and hydro, they have this characteristic of nature stores the energy for you, and then you refine it and release it.

That saves you the trouble of storing the energy yourself, which turns out to be incredibly expensive. I've run the numbers on Elon Musk's best battery prices. To back up one day's worth of world energy is $190 trillion. So that's twice global GDP. So...

Storing energy ourselves, we are not very good at doing cheaply. So natural storage is a huge issue. So you look at nuclear is naturally stored, naturally concentrated, even much more so than fossil fuels. That was the logical direction to go in once we started to harness it. But instead, the green movement, because it's deeply hostile to all human impact,

including new forms of impact like splitting the atom. Plus, they didn't like the prospect of cheap energy for everyone. They basically criminalized nuclear. And nuclear has been stagnating for decades and decades and decades. That's something I'm trying to reverse. But it does, because nuclear has not reached its potential at all,

We cannot at all replace fossil fuels with it in significant quantities for a long time. So I'm doing my best to liberate nuclear. But the idea that if you think nuclear is going to replace fossil fuels very soon, that is a disconnect from reality.

And let's come back to your approach and the structure that you've used, the framework you've used. And let's talk a little bit about the obviously a very opposite view when you talk about the goal is to have humanity flourish. Because again, we've seen many examples that's not the case.

I'm still getting over, and it's what, how many years later, three years later, the Glasgow Agreement that basically said Western nations wouldn't finance fossil fuels in Africa, which basically then said, hey, you guys stay in poverty, energy poverty and poverty are the same thing, your lifestyle, your life, living conditions. So let's talk more about human flourishing and what you mean by that and where fossil fuels fit into that scenario.

Sure. And the context of talking about human flourishing is when we're talking about energy or anything else, there's a question of what is our goal? What goal does a good policy achieve versus a bad policy does the opposite? And when we're talking about energy in particular and global energy, what's the ultimate thing we're after? And

I think what it is, is it's if you're talking about global issues, it's human flourishing or advancing human flourishing. So as many people as possible have the opportunity to flourish, which means long, healthy, opportunity filled lives. And that may sound like common sense. Doesn't everyone want that? But in practice, everyone doesn't want that because the goal we have with energy today is mainly it being non-carbon.

or non-CO2. That's the leading goal in energy is net zero. It's even the leading goal in global politics, not just energy. But notice the focus is not on how do we have global empowerment? How do we give low cost, reliable energy to as many people as possible or make it available to as many people as possible? It's how can we eliminate our impact on climate?

And if that's your goal, then you're not going to have much energy given energy economics. And so my view is you factor in the climate issue insofar as there's an issue, but it's an aspect of human flourishing. So you want the policy that's best for human flourishing. And then insofar as we have negative climate impacts, we can factor that in. But you also have to factor in all the benefits you get from fossil fuels, including, I talk about a lot, your ability to neutralize any climate negatives with things like irrigation and sturdy buildings and heating and air conditioning.

etc. And when you do that, it's really clear we need more fossil fuels. But I just want to point out most people are not thinking about unwittingly, I think, but they're not thinking about energy in pro-human terms. And just to give an example, most people don't think at all about the 3 billion people who use less electricity than a typical American refrigerator. They think a lot more about whether a polar bear has to move from one piece of ice to another.

Like that shows that we're not focused on advancing human flourishing. We're focused on eliminating our climate impact at all costs.

I think that sums up well, though, this distinction, because as you say, we look at policies and in Canada, I say we're the leading virtue signalers in the world, you know, when it comes to climate. But we do, we assess all policy as or activity, I should say, activity of humans as what's the impact on the climate as opposed to the impact on humanity. I think that's...

A key distinction, of course, you pioneered, but one that is so important to bring to our attention is which is it? Is the climate more important than human welfare? And obviously, some people have chosen the climate. Well, and the way you put it is important because notice they're putting it as the climate.

So I would put it as climate livability as an aspect of human flourishing, right? We want a relationship with our atmospheric surroundings where we can derive as many benefits from it and have as few harms from it. But when they talk about the climate,

It has a religious quality of it's this superior thing that we should sacrifice to. And that's the way it's discussed. Like we need to preserve the climate. You just think concretely, the climate is just, you know, our atmospheric surroundings and it can be very deadly. And why would we think of it as we want to keep it exactly the same? Ideally, I was just in, I live in California, but I was just in Austin, Texas.

which is always hot this time of year. It's October. And the people in Austin would love to be able to make it cooler in October. And I think in the future, right now we do it through aerosols.

air conditioning, which is pretty good. But I think in the future, people will want to do and be able to do more macro things like, hey, can we cool it down? We shouldn't be worshiping the climate as this perfect thing that we inherited. We should think of it as this is something we want to have as good as possible, have as good a relationship with as possible. And

Number one thing is you cannot be safe from climate without a whole lot of energy. That's why as we've used much more energy, the rate of death from climate disasters like storms and floods and drought has gone down by a factor of 50 because if you have a lot of energy, you can take the naturally dangerous climate.

and any hypothetical climate and make it safe. If you don't have energy, then any climate is going to kill you. And Canadians should know this. The obsession in Canada with global warming, when Canada would be one of the most direct beneficiaries of warming, really shows it's this religious opposition to impact. It's not at all a concern about human life.

Well, and again, for our context is 1.5% of the emissions, global emissions are coming out of Canada. And again, I'm just, I can't get over in reading actually the moral case for fossil fuels and then fossil future. Just,

Again, you really start to appreciate that the focus has not been on people or well-being. I'm sensitive to what happened. I lived in India for quite a while, and I'm sensitive to how they're ignored. And Prime Minister Modi said that himself.

you know, when you go to, it was in Glasgow, you know, said, I'm not signing this thing, you know, and you see that they appreciate this direct link between fossil, sorry, energy availability to their population and standard of living. And they're not going to let that go, but,

in opposition to the West, where that's not a primary concern in any way. It has never shown any indication it's a primary concern. And again, that comes back to the premise and the structure that you use. Let me talk a little bit about the cons of using energy. So you're not saying there's no

climate change or global warming, whatever way the latest phrase is. If we were talking, whatever, 40 years ago, we said climate cooling, you know, but you're not in opposition to that. You're just saying, let's weigh the measure of tackling that with, you know, the benefits. Well, and also, yeah, I mean, for sure, anything, you should always be looking at benefits and side effects and weighing them carefully. But there are two crucial considerations beyond what I've already said and what you just said, which is you need to obviously look at the benefits of

You need to, when you're looking at climate side effects in particular, you need to be open to negative and positive ones, which is quite rare. It's usually assumed that they can only be negative. That's a religious view. That's just the belief that all our impact is bad. You have to be clinical. No, no, no. If we make it warmer in a given region, sometimes that'll be net good. Sometimes it'll be net bad. And if you look at it, far more people die from cold than from heat. Even in India, more people die of cold than of heat.

And then warming in all the models and in history tends to be more in colder places. So there's actually a lot of things to think that warming has some benefits. Greening has very significant benefits from more CO2. And then you also look at adverse things like more heat waves in certain regions and sea level rises and how significant are those and does it affect storms? So I'm just saying one thing is you need to be very clinical and not have this anti-human bias that everything is bad, let alone catastrophic.

The other thing you need to factor in is that one of the key benefits of fossil fuels is what I call climate mastery, the ability to neutralize climate danger. This is very important because if we add any additional climate danger to nature through our impacts, like more heat waves or sea level rises, we have to recognize the same fossil fuels that hypothetically add that danger also add a huge measure of safety.

Because they allow us to neutralize climate danger. So drought is a really good example of fossil fuels increase the incidence of drought in some region. They also dramatically increase the incidence of irrigation and the incidence of crop transport. And that phenomenon is a big reason why drought related deaths are down by a factor of 100%.

over the past 100 years. So fossil fuels, you think of them like a prescription drug, you weigh benefits and side effects, except fossil fuels have this magical thing where their benefits can actually cure their side effects. And that is very unusual among technologies.

Let me come back to the sources of information because that's another one. I'll read some, uh, the media has certainly been one sided in this and that's been a huge problem for me from the get go, uh, that it's just presented the one side and that's where you came in and it was a lonely voice for sure. You know, at first. And, uh,

I'm just, the public is under the gun here. Where do you get quality sources? And then I guess, because I know that you present a ton of research, which I appreciated in the book. You know, that was a real highlight for me. I want to be able to check it out. I'll think for myself, et cetera. What do we do with the problem of, I think, a lot of erroneous sources out there? Well,

The easiest thing I can say is look at our stuff because we go through a lot of effort. I mean, hell, arguably to be accurate. So I have a website in particular called energytalkingpoints.com that is designed to give you very succinct points on every imaginable issue. And all of that is referenced just like everything in Fossil Future is referenced.

And a lot of books have just fake references. They'll just reference, hey, here's a PDF where somebody who agrees with me said the same thing that I do. We never do that, right? I mean, this is primary source stuff, very, very careful references. So I'd say we do that. It's hard. I have a team, fortunately, and one researcher in particular whom I have check out everything. It's really hard, even with sources that I tend to agree with,

to trust them because so much of presenting quote unquote research today is really just to persuade people of a preexisting narrative that you have. So sometimes I'll see people say like, oh, you know, they'll spread something on, oh, volcanoes have had just as much impact on climate as humans. And that's not true.

Or humans haven't, you know, we only contribute a tiny percent of the CO2 to the atmosphere. That's misleading. We've contributed, you know, it's gone from 0.03% to 0.04%. So we've increased it about 50%. And let alone the other side, which is just a total train wreck of just total distortions. And then they call it, and then of course, then they censor things or suppress things that they don't like.

So it's really hard to do. I would just say in general, look at how they source things. Do they actually use primary sources? Check out people's sources once in a while.

And then one thing is at least check out people's thinking. So are they actually being even handed? Are they actually looking at positives and negatives of things? Or do they just only talk about one or the other? That's an easy way to... I have a lot of ways of discrediting sources that I talk about in Fossil Future. It's hard to find ones that are credible.

Yeah. Tell me the website again. We're going to put it up on the energy talking points.com. Yeah. Energy talking points.com. We'll put it up on our sites too. And our social media, because I think I found it a very effective in the way you say, it's just a bullet point, but I love the references. As I say, I loved it in the book. I just think, you know, give me, show some respect.

you know, show some respect to me in the broader audience by giving me some facts, letting me do some thinking also. So I thought that was a, a huge strong point in a world that sort of a wash with all sorts of, as you say, the conclusions already drawn. Now I'll give you some evidence, you know, or even fudge the evidence a little bit. So it's really tough. You know, I wish it's self-serving to say, but I wish we had energy talking points and that kind of level of thing in other fields, but,

Because I just, I tend to not trust things that I hear in any kind of, even with news because it's distorted and

It's just, yeah, people have this idea that the goal is to just, it's often political. And I don't have a political party, but their party to win. We need to win. Versus my view is my views should come from the facts and from values that I can clearly state and thinking methods I can clearly state. And then those will change.

If facts change or if somebody refutes me. So, for example, if somebody in five years comes up with a form of nuclear energy that I just thought was impossible to scale as quickly as they've been able to do it, and they've been able to do it such that they can really quickly scale.

You know, they could somehow really quickly replace fossil fuels around the world. I mean, to my knowledge, this is impossible. But if that happens, then you can believe I will be on that bandwagon and doing as much as I can to promote that versus just trying to shoot holes in it because I'm pro fossil fuels. I don't fossil fuels are just a means to an end. Right. Fossil fuels are a means to an end of human beings being empowered. Right.

And then flourishing and my own work and reputation is just based on, I think, being truthful and thinking about things in a rational and pro-human way. So I think the more you have that attitude that your job is to convey the truth, given your values, then you can actually be accurate versus my goals for Republicans to win or something like this or for the fossil fuel industry.

When I've told them straight up, like, I love the fossil fuel industry, but somebody asked, like, what's going to happen to our jobs? And my view is, well, if somebody comes up with a better product, I absolutely want you to lose your job. But that's not happening. So we actually need more of them. But it's not out of sentiment. It's just that's the fact.

Now, I know I want to respect your time because I know you've got another appointment. So let me just finish with this. If you could sort of wave your magic wand and you've been alluding to many of this. But what are the biggest what when I say what's the biggest myth out there in this whole sort of challenge, the climate debate? What does something come to mind or one or two things come to mind? Well, I guess I would say from the books, I mean, I don't want to hear from the books. It's we can live without fossil fuels immediately. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would.

I would just have to do it at the highest level. And by the way, on energytalkingpoints.com, this should be up. If not, it's up on my sub stack, which is alexepstein.substack.com. We have a set of messages about net zero, but it's sort of a comprehensive thing. I highly recommend that because that sort of gives every myth. But at the highest level, I think that the myth is...

is that fossil fuels are making the world a worse and worse place to live, above all by causing climate catastrophe. And the truth is they're making the world a better and better place to live, including through climate mastery. So people just have a totally distorted view of the world as a whole and fossil fuels' role in it, including their role in the state of climate change.

And ultimately, I think it's because the leaders of the anti-fossil fuel movement don't evaluate the earth, to go back to our recurring theme, in human terms. They're not looking at the earth really from the perspective of how good an environment is this for human flourishing and what a fossil fuel has done there. Because if you look at it from that perspective, fossil fuels have made the world a much better place for human flourishing, including for climate livability. They look at it from the perspective of

how much impact have we had? And impact is bad. And so they see a world where we've had a lot of impact, including some climate impact. And they say that's a terrible world because their standard isn't human flourishing. It's eliminating human impact. But my standard is advancing human flourishing. So I say, hey, the world has been made great by fossil fuels. It's getting better and better. And let's keep doing that until and unless we have a better way of getting the energy because the energy is the most important thing.

Just quickly, the other side, because you mentioned net zero, it's fascinating to see the British prime minister sort of back off that now because finally someone's talking about the cost of it. You realize how much it's going to cost you. And I think that's the first crack, you know,

I'm sure every one of them had to come to that conclusion, but it's the first public crack in that sort of net zero. It's a little bit of a – I mean my view is net zero should not be discussed by civilized people. If you look at those talking points on alexupstein.substack.com, because it really – as I said, reducing even the growth of fossil fuels.

has caused global energy crisis, and you're talking about eliminating them in 27 years, that is, I believe, net zero if implemented fully, which will not happen. But if implemented fully, which everyone is saying it should happen, would be the most destructive act in human history in terms of number of lives ended prematurely and amount

of suffering. I mean, 8 billion people depend on fertilizer from natural gas and diesel-fueled agriculture. We have no near-term replacement for either one. So you're talking about starving the world literally.

So it's good that Rishi is backtracking a little bit, but they shouldn't even be discussing net zero. And in that article, I give the alternative of energy freedom, including the only way to address emissions rationally and humanely and practically is by innovating truly cost competitive alternatives. That should be all the focus in terms of emissions.

So how to get nuclear cheaper, how to liberate it, how to get geothermal cheaper. Is there a way to combine solar and wind cheaply with other things? Those are the kinds of things to do, not make a commitment to get rid of the fossil fuels that 8 billion people need to live.

You know, and plus the 6,000 other products that are made, you know, with a petroleum base and all of these things haven't been addressed, which I think is, you know, a huge shortcoming. But the book is called Fossil Future, Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal and Natural Gas, Not Less, alexepstein.substack.com. And as I say...

The work you do, I think, is fascinating. And I think it's so, you know, it's been a lonely job. I'm hoping there's going to be, you know, there's room for practicality and your distinctions that you make within the research, I think, are absolutely essential. And I appreciate that you take time to share them with us. And thank you. And I'll just say it's a little lonely, but it's a fun job. So I encourage everyone else to join me in doing the job. And there's a lot of rewards to it, even though you'll get some criticism. Thanks, Alex. Thank you.