 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Our guest today is Alex Epstein, president and founder of the Center for Industrial Progress and author of the new book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. Alex, you describe your book as a secret history of fossil fuels. What do you mean by that? Well, it's actually chapter one is the secret history of fossil fuels and I want to begin the book by questioning the idea that all of the leading experts or at least the people media present to us as the leading experts are actually in that position because they have demonstrated superior ability and in particular a superior ability to make accurate predictions about the future because you hear about 97% of climate scientists agree with X and we can talk about what they agree with and whether that's a valid kind of summary. But people like Paul Erlich and Bill McKibbin and James Hansen, there's the assumption that well, if they're at the top of the pyramid, at least as reported by media, they must be accurate and there's this implication that maybe we should be intimidated by them and defer to them. And I don't think you should ever do that but it's particularly important to ask, hey, what is their track record? What's the track record more broadly of this idea that fossil fuel use is going to lead us to an unlivable planet? And this usually has three components that it will lead to catastrophic resource depletion, that it will lead to catastrophic pollution and that of course it will lead to, of course to them, it will lead to catastrophic climate change. And what's interesting and what the secret history of fossil fuel is, is that these predictions pretty much in the exact same form have been made for the last 30 to 40 years by many of the same people and have not only been a little bit wrong but have been exactly opposite to the truth. And in the following sense, if you look at our resource situation, if you look at our pollution situation, if you look at the actual livability of our climate, how many people die from storms and heat waves and droughts and floods today versus the past, every single one of those has gotten way, way better and it can be very strongly connected to the use of machines powered by cheap, plentiful, reliable energy from fossil fuel. So that indicates something is very wrong with the way we think and I found that an effective way to open to at least challenge the framework that the people who are telling us everything today and posing as experts actually deserve the deference that they get. And I like your book because the way its focus is different. It's not focused on why climate change is a myth or things like this. It's focused on the other side which you almost never hear. There are big things you get from fossil fuels that you have to balance this against and all we do is talk about we seem to think that there are no costs to all the proposals that are out there for limiting fossil fuel use. Yeah, and I think ultimately what it is is it's trying to look at the issue of fossil fuels in context which I don't think is very well done in most discussions on either side. So I analogize it to thinking about taking a prescription drug. So you take a prescription drug, it has certain effects. It has an effectiveness as the FDA would call it for all the FDA's problems. And then it has certain risks and side effects and to decide whether to take it you have to look at all of those. Imagine if you just looked at the side effects but you didn't look at the efficacy of it you would make very very bad decisions. Or if you only looked at the efficacy but you didn't look at the side effects. So you need to look at both and you need to look at them with precision and you need to have a clear goal which in the context of a drug is your health and I think in the context of fossil fuels or anything else should be human well-being. And one thing I argue in the book is that our discussion is very much not driven by a focus on the big picture and it's also not oriented toward human well-being and that's a controversial claim but I think if we examine in more depth we see that a lot of the thought leaders on the environmental side are not optimizing for human well-being. They're optimizing for minimizing human impact on the planet and I argue that that is not a pro-human goal at all. Well there are certainly some people who think that the proper approach to dealing with the environment is that we all should kind of live as the Amish do or you know radically reduce all of our usage of anything energy related. A lot of people are arguing for simply alternatives so they're saying things like you know yes we need the energy and it's good that we have the energy and it's good that we have these machines powered by the energy but there are these non-fossil fuel alternatives like solar and wind and hydroelectric and whatever else that would give us that without the environmental costs of fossil fuels. Well so you know it's important the aspect that I mentioned before in terms of looking at risks and benefits with precision I think a lot of the environmental cost arguments are not doing that whatsoever. They're also not looking at many of the environmental benefits of energy including fossil fuels but I think that the main thing there is that what does it mean to say that I'm proposing alternatives. It's like saying I'm proposing alternative phones to the iPhone okay are you building one or are you making one up or are you saying you should have the freedom to build one and what we should be doing I think as citizens assuming we're not actually building them is pretty much shut up about which alternatives are best and simply say we want a society where people are free to build different things and not sort of prejudice ourselves and say oh it needs to come from the sun or it needs to come from the wind or we'll only use something if we think we can use it for the next billion years which I think is a ridiculous kind of concept that we don't say that about a phone. I only want the phone if we can all the materials will last for the next billion years you say I want the best phone. Same thing with energy you should say that about energy. So the people who say oh I'm in favor of these alternatives what they're usually in favor of is wildly impractical alternatives and alternative if you use the term alternative energy it's really an alternative to what actually works on the market. It's usually uneconomic energy and solar and wind I discuss a lot in chapter two of the book looking at the different energy technologies and what state they're in. I mean solar and wind have had the same problems forever which is just that they're very dilute so you have to spend a lot of resources concentrating them and even more importantly they're intermittent so you have to spend a lot of resources trying to store them so you can deliver them reliably and that's why there's not one free-standing solar plant or wind plant in the world and why even in a place like Germany they're providing 6% of the energy total and none of it reliably. What do you mean by free-standing in that sense that doesn't rely on fossil fuels? Yeah like we think of a power plant as this independent thing where you can plug a hospital into and that could really run a grid and so there's no solar grid, there's no wind grid. So on a large level leaving aside something like using solar for a small heating system or to run a small battery or to heat a pool or something like that where you can deal with the intermenstery or you're willing to pay more in the case of solar and the battery if you want to live a low energy off-grid lifestyle there's no grid run by solar so it's really accurate to say there's actually no such thing as solar electricity, there's solar coal, there's solar hydro, there's solar oil and so far as oil is used for electricity which isn't that much, there's solar gas. Same thing with wind and I think it's just really remarkable and dishonest the extent to which the intermittency problem is ignored and in much of our energy discussion you for instance the rating of in megawatts or in kilowatts of the facilities the idea that you will rate like a nuclear power plant and a wind farm except with a nuclear power plant you rate it like let's say it's a gigawatt that means it can actually produce a gigawatt and the wind farm if it was a gigawatt it was a ton for a wind farm that means that if the wind is blowing perfectly which is almost never happening it's a gigawatt. And what are the numbers look like in terms of how much of our energy is supplied by solar versus fossil fuels versus wind on an international level or a national level? You know you're looking at numbers differ but you're looking around 2% but it's an expensive 2% so I don't think, let's put it this way if all the solar panels and windmills disappeared from the face of the earth tomorrow you could very much argue it would be an economic benefit and it certainly would not be hard to replace if you took away the hydroelectric dams or the nuclear power plants and certainly the fossil fuels it would be a huge, huge loss and I think that really shows that these core technologies hydro, nuclear and particularly fossil fuels they're doing the real work and the others are as Peter Beckman once called them rich men's toys. And what would you say to the argument if someone's listened to this which probably is not the case but maybe a very big devotee of these technologies By the way how weird is that like you're a devotee of solar why do you care? I mean if you work in the industry that you're a devotee in the sense of you're attempting to solve a problem but even there if I was working in solar I'd admit look we're pretty much junk compared to the things that are actually leading the way so the reason I interjected there is because the devoteeism if that's the word for it that is ideological and it's ultimately religious it comes from the idea that the ideal is to live in harmony with nature and that somehow using the sun and the wind is a more natural way of being so if you look at Apple's website and they have this complete lie which I've written about on Medium.com about how other servers are powered just by quote-unquote renewables but they say when you download something from the iTunes store the energy comes from nature and you can just see it's this natureism or nature worship of course they ignore that they combine an unbelievable amount to get the raw materials for these resource intensive processes to quote get your energy from nature but nevertheless that's the ideal and so we have it work again they're not optimizing for maximizing human well-being they're trying to minimize human impact and that's their quote excitement that we might have a form of energy that doesn't actually do very much to the earth but isn't there something to be said for that if you would rather build something with less impact versus building something with more impact if those are the only two variables Impact on what? Yes, so let's say it will choose something impact on air quality and let's say everything else is equal you would rather so we're just going to hold everything constant it would be better to build something with less impact on air quality than more Right but then on the standard of maximizing human well-being then it would maximize human well-being because you'd have all aspects constant and then one is optimized so that's an easy thing but it's interesting I think whether people are thinking because this is a point that came up this morning and the Kato talk on the Hill which I believe will be available online when people listen to this podcast one of the key points that really struck me early on and got me interested in energy was the idea that all forms of energy are not created equal and really energy shouldn't be thought of as a material it's not like the sun or the wind or coal energy is a process it's taking a whole bunch of elements and combining them together and seeing can I get out of this can I use few enough resources here everything combined so that the output is cheap, reliable and most difficult perhaps scalable and when I studied the history of oil it was fascinating that you had at least six major competitors to oil before oil became dominant but none of them could do the job of lighting up the countryside oil was the first cheap, reliable scalable solution and the fossil fuel industry is still the leader today because they keep developing more and more technology and there's so much fossil fuel matter in the earth so solar and wind have incredibly inefficient processes so part of it is this dogma or this way of thinking let's oh would we like the sun to power it or would we like coal to power it but that's not the question is would we like the sun plus all these other mined materials with all that expense or would we like coal and I'd say I like coal with the process this sounds then like the problems with these alternatives are often the tech just doesn't isn't there to make them work as well as fossil fuels which means that presumably it's possible that there would be non-fossil fuel alternatives that if we simply had enough technological growth we could get to and they'd work and there's an argument you hear a lot that part of the reason that say solar is inefficient doesn't work very well wind doesn't work very well is because the fossil fuel industry which has obviously an incentive to maintain its position in the industry just because of the financial rewards that come with it works against that it funds studies that show the alternatives don't work or it has congressmen in their pockets it's basically keeping it down so there's a number of varieties I think the most popular one is not as much sort of the there withholding patents and this kind of thing but rather the subsidies argument that you hear if you actually look at all what they'll call the externalities these costs that are we're destroying the planet but it's not accounted for and the price that you pay so if you added them all up it turns out solar and wind would be cheaper the first thing to say about that is if that were true that would be really bad because if energy if the best priced energy was actually solar we'd have to be really really poor because what they're saying is not that solar can actually be super cheap they're just saying oil should be super expensive and inefficient like solar so that's a bad sign and if you- So that's something we should lament and say this is sad? Yeah no they never lament which is very revealing they just lament the loss of by far your cheapest most reliable most scalable source of energy they're sort of gleeful at it which is another indication that they're not trying to maximize human well-being they're trying to minimize impact and ultimately my belief is and I explain why toward the end of the book really the objection toward energy is not to put it in software terms is not the bugs it's not the pollution or the difficulty of finding new resources it's actually the feature energy is a means of impacting nature for human benefits so if you believe that our goal should be to minimize impact to be green how could you be in favor of having lots and lots and lots of energy and I give the example in the late 80s when people thought that nuclear fusion might be practical and this this was the holy grail in terms of cheap reliable scalable energy on it you know that was cleaner than anything imaginable and a lot of the thought leaders like Emory Lovens and Paul Erlich and Jeremy Rifkin I think you know they said this would be the worst thing and Erlich called it he said it would be like giving an idiot child a machine gun for us to have so much cheap clean reliable energy and the idea is he thinks of our human activity powered by energy as like a machine gun right he thinks because nature preserving nature from us is the goal he doesn't want to improve the planet for human beings and he wants to save it from human beings and that seems like a very common thing another feature of oil is growth consumption what was called consumption usually huge people use that word they're using it pejoratively oh do you think we should just be consuming is that where we're going to go just consuming and consuming until the earth is dried up and Paul Erlich says one of the people who says yes this is something we should avoid is bad he's almost saying in a way and the consumption is bad which seems like a religious type of you almost as you mentioned well I've started calling the underlying view here which is something that unites both the climate catastrophism and pollution catastrophism and resource catastrophism I call it the perfect planet premise so this is the idea that nature gave us a perfect planet and it gave us the resources that we need and it gave us the friendly environment we need and pretty much every time we take an action every time we make a footprint we're jeopardizing you know the delicate balance of that perfect planet now this would have been a laughable if not tragic idea for anyone who lived say 300 years ago when they lived in the undisturbed planet and lived till 30 and you know had kids die at childbirth and had a horrific climate in the sense of they couldn't cope with it so that a drought comes and some of your population gets wiped out you know climate is not perfect nothing about nature is perfect by the standard of human well-being climate is naturally variable it's always changing it's volatile can change violently and it's vicious it can do all sorts of things to deprive us of the temperatures that we need or the water that we need and you know can certainly attack us with all sorts of storms so to get that to then the resource point resources the perfect planet gives us all the resources that we need unless we're greedy unless we consume because once we consume those resources they'll be gone but then I asked the question who has more resources us or the caveman because we've been consuming so many resources right we've been gobbling them up it sure looks like we have a lot more resources than he does this gets to the point which you know I ran makes well George recent makes well Julian Simon makes well that I'll put it in my own words resources are created the earth there's a difference between raw materials and resources earth is just one big ball of raw materials and energy and it's enormous potential but to make it usable resources requires human ingenuity and so the ultimate resource assignment would put it is the mind and so the thing we have to worry about is not running out of oil it's running out of freedom to use our mind to create new resources whether it's more oil resources in the case of something like the shell revolution or new nuclear resources you know which I think will ultimately be the most promising thing down the road should the call it the good of the planet or for lack of a better term so the quality of the environment pristine you know undisturbed landscapes or animal species whatever should that enter into our moral calculus whose environment humans beavers animals the animals so every non-human I'm saying should we should those things if we're choosing trade-offs so fossil fuels have these trade-offs because they produce some externalities other means of energy have other trade-offs and other sorts of externalities should we care at all is there ever a point where we would say like it's not right to say destroy this river this entire area or wipe out this species should we think about that sort of stuff one is partially the legal framework by which you deal with these things so that's all just really quickly on that I don't like I think externality thinking in economics applied to politics is almost completely invalid and very harmful to thinking about it in part it's based on the premise in part that prices are supposed to be our perfect measures of value which directly contradicts the fundamental of modern economics which is the marginal theory of prices so if you think about like when you pay $3 a gallon for an oil product are you getting $3 of value out of it well only one person really is the marginal buyer who's buying for $3 let's say he buys the oil in the form of Barbie doll and pays $3 and it wouldn't even be worth $3 in one cent but of course on the rest of the scale all the rest of us were willing to pay more than $3 that's how the price system works and let's say it was the prescription drug that saved my life I might be willing to pay $100,000 for the gallon that produced that are you taking your wife to the hospital so this is called the consumer surplus in economics but it's very important because if you're trying to measure the value of different things and you're talking about oh there are these hidden costs but there's in by the nature of how prices work there are always hidden benefits the thing is always worth more than you pay for it and that dynamic is dramatically different depending on the product so the more fundamental the product to human life like energy the more dramatic the consumer surplus so if you start talking about oh the hidden if anyone starts talking about oh the hidden costs without the hidden benefits they are thinking about it horribly so that's I think that's an ill why it's an illogical way of calculating sort of general economic good but then legally I think it's also a problem I mean if you murder me do we call that an externality I mean you could put a price why would you put a price on it it's a rights violation if I start a hog farm next to someone's house and ruin his life is that I mean maybe you can put a tort on and put a cost on it we think of it as a rights violation so I think in general pollution we should put into a rights violation framework and we should have thresholds of things like emissions that are based on the current technology so for instance in the 1800's you'd have a much like higher level of air pollution or air contamination that you'd accept because you coal was essential and you didn't have much of a means of limiting it whereas today we should never accept those kinds of standards because we don't have to we have the technology so I talk about this a bit in chapter 7 of the book but I just wanted to say that about externalities and because my own philosophical framework is an individualistic one it's not that oh I think you can use you too can use fossil fuels and I don't think it's okay for you guys to use fossil fuels and benefit your life and extend it by 40 years in exchange for me dying like that's that's not the point at all and this also helps so the property rights individualistic framework also helps clarify the rest of nature so I don't believe that the rest of nature has intrinsic value any given part of it but it has specific value to specific human beings so we just think about a garden or something like that there's in your house when you have a house or a piece of property you don't just randomly build stuff on it to say oh I impacted things right this is not how we think you're maximizing its value you're maximizing your well-being which means that maybe the natural beauty of it is a big value you know we pay a lot of money for these kinds of things and that's that's terrific like you know I love going to the beach in Orange County and unfortunately I don't any own any beach run property in part because all these climate catastrophes are hypocrites and won't sell it to me at a discount which they should if the sea levels are actually going to rise dramatically but nevertheless I love going to the beach and if someone said hey let's just let's just build a I don't know I mean I don't know what they would try to build on the beach but you know let's make it inaccessible to you so you can enjoy the ocean I'd have a big problem with that now I think it should be privately owned I think you'd solve it that way there's a value but it's always a value to human beings there's no such being as the planet the planet is just a rock that has a bunch of species and you have to decide whose species perspective are you going to look at environment from and so human versus non-human is a big distinction and so I care about the human environment from a value perspective you know and I don't care about the mosquito environment although there might be some circumstance I wanted to preserve the mosquito and surely there are circumstances in which I want to exterminate it and even if you wanted to look at it it's an interesting point because you could say okay let's bears like just choose anything let's maximize the value of bears in order to keep bears alive you'd have to impact the environment in some way right they'd have to eat they'd have to impact it in some way so they're going to have some impact on anything to keep anything alive it's going to have some sort of impact let me ask this I think let me try to ask the question a different way because I think it gets to the motivation for a lot of people who are opposed to the use of fossil fuels or at least would like to invest more in trying to discover alternatives of their money or mine either way either way either way those are not equal yeah I agree but or at least think that we ought to so they would implore you to invest some of your money with a gun yes whatever but the so imagine a situation where you have a you've bought a chunk of land and there are there's some sort of animal species on that chunk of land and there's some sort of like you know it's maybe it's a piece of like the Grand Canyon so it's some piece of kind of like uniquely beautiful nature is on that land and you would take pleasure in killing every member of the animal species that's on your land you just gain some sort of hedonistic joy in the action of it well it's different if it's for sport or for food or for nihilism sure but the point is if or you decide you want to this chunk of the Grand Canyon you want to somehow demolish it fill it in something like that okay so you're not you're not violating anyone's rights it's your property you know you're not limiting anyone else's access to it because it was already yours it wasn't theirs but would there be any grounds for morally judging that as a blame worthy or wrong act oh yeah well I mean there's property rights and morality are certainly very related and you know that's a whole interesting issue of moral and political philosophy but I mean think about it more broadly there are many moral judgments you can make at least I think you can make about how a person uses his property I mean just or you know other things associated for example you watch somebody how they treat their kids and there are lines in terms of if they openly beat their kids then you know you can report them to the police but if what if it's just you know they're yelling at them or they're saying things that you think are psychologically harmful or even they're you're sending them to a school that you think will brainwash them and they're these things are incredibly tragic that we do to human beings never you know let alone animals or flower beds or whatever and in particular any kind of act of nihilism which is just destruction for the sake of destruction which you see people who abuse animals you know it's a very disturbing kind of thing or people I mean what would be their motivation if it was just some really beautiful part of Grand Canyon now fortunately if it's really beautiful it would be priced very high so the person's nihilism he'd have to pay a lot of money you know to enforce it and be pretty rare but just to take something that either you acknowledge is beautiful or other people do and just destroy it for its own sake that's fortunately pretty rare I think the motivation I'm worried about is the people who you know to go back to your bear point the people who it's not really that they care about any particular species or all you can't care about all species but that the only criterion of moral action is that your impact not benefit a human being so as long as it's for the sake of any other species as long as it's the you know the rainforest or the polar bear whatever nobody can judge you but if you say no I want to prioritize a human being it's you're not being green and you're not being green but that means that being green is evil if that's what it means if it means a non-impact and it's this it's a morality you know I in Rand I think would call it like sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice it's a nihilism about human being so this in the same way that you'd be nihilistic in just you know you know just maiming a dog or something like that it's you're just saying all I care about is that human beings sacrifice for what? I don't care it could be a polar bear could be a mosquito it could be the tundra it could be anwar like any kind of wasteland or you know from from ugly to beautiful as long as a human being is sacrificing and not making another footprint on earth I'm happy and that's that I call human racism you you like every race on the planet allegedly except for the human race that's a good segue back into into the one big part of your book being the how much fossil fuel use has benefited humanity yes and so how much has it benefited humanity this goes to an earlier point that was raised about just you know the benefits of fossil fuels are overwhelmingly the benefits of energy so the core benefit of fossil fuels is that it produces cheap reliable energy on a scale you know that no other form of energy has been able to do and that's part of why we don't want to be partisan about it like you know I say I love fossil fuel just like energy but it's really I love energy but I respect how difficult it is to produce it on that scale and so I respect what the fossil fuel industry does you know when it's doing that if it does something bad then of course I don't respect that but if we look at then what has been the impact of being the one industry that can produce this kind of energy on this scale it's really the question of what is the value of energy and a big theme of the book is that this is not appreciated at all and one of my motivations for writing it and for getting into the field is that I didn't appreciate energy at all before I started studying the history of it and the way I like to think of it is this you know just like our body needs calories to function and to do work so our machines need calories to function to do work so energy is really machine calories technically it's the capacity to do work but it's really the capacity of our machines to do work now we as human beings are very very weak in terms of the amount of physical work we can do to improve our lives and this is one of the core explanations as to why human beings historically did not live at a level that we would consider acceptable you know life expectancy of 30 huge infant mortality rates inability to cope with climate all of these starvation shortages all kinds of afflictions because the average human being we use about as much energy as a 100 watt light bulb which is just not our bodies in our bodies because ultimately everything goes back to some sort of physical work and that's simply not enough to really sustain our population in the way that we would like to so what we do is we have this ingenious invention of hey let's create these things called machines but instead of us you know we can only take in so many calories and use them you know then we just sort of gain weight like has been happening on this you know radio tour of mine because I'm not exercising as much and then I'm you know taking in calories but I'm not becoming like incredibly powerful from the lobster grilled cheese sandwich I just had but what we can do the nice thing about machines is they to have no limit at least in the aggregate of how many calories they can use the more machine calories we can produce the more machines we can produce along with them the more work that can be done and I use the stat in the book it's around the average American uses about you know 96 human equivalents worth of machines so it's like I have 96 human beings doing work for me just based on my energy expenditures and other expenditures which is which is just amazing and we just look at wherever in life we use machines whether it's to manufacture pharmaceuticals or to do modern farming or to for a family to go to a wedding or even for me to just come in Cato and for the temperature to be comfortable and have all this amazing equipment how to get manufacturing every single thing is enhanced by machines and every machine is running on machine food and as soon as that dries up as soon as it becomes unaffordable or scarce all this stuff doesn't it's like a blackout so in a real way the environmentalist movement by opposing fossil fuels is a blackout movement what about the argument that gets raised by the environmentalist movement that that's all great and it's wonderful that we have these machines that they're being powered but we're running out of the stuff that we're you know the peak oil argument or whatever and so if we aren't putting our energy into these other alternatives no matter how inefficient right now we're gonna hit a wall well you know first of all whenever anyone begins a sentence like that like oh it's great and all about the one innovation that doubled the human life expectancy of the very suspicious of the kind of mode and it shows that in terms of the balance of things the benefits to human beings don't seem to carry much emotional resonance and then they'll start weeping over a polar bear for nine minutes it's a really good point it's like oh that's great at all you've doubled human life so that you've fed billions of people you have infant mortality that we have lights that we have computers that we can go on internet but what about running out of the stuff I think that's partly though because the environmentalist movement is largely so it's in the fairly rich west right and so they're not when they're thinking about these machines and the uses of energy my guess is that what they have in mind is what we'll call like the more frillous uses like you're powering up your TV or you're running you know these these things that we could all live without they're not they're not thinking about the hospitals and the life-saving machines and the stuff that allows us to farm much more efficiently and whatever yeah and those run together though because it's kind of like if somebody says hey Alex you know what I think you wasted 40% of your money last year so I'm going to take away that money next year and it'll just be fine I would say okay well you're welcome to give me some advice and give me your judgment but I would like that money still and now I can use it better because money is a fundamental form of opportunity energy is also a fundamental form of opportunity so I want to I want more opportunity use machines to improve my life so I agree that those the quite kind of luxuries are the stand-in but I think that's a lot of corruption by the intellectuals and they they definitely don't get or don't want to get or don't care about the core value to human life so which question so what about running out yes so running out yeah the other thing that's just it's always interesting how questions are phrased and how how questions intersect or integrate or disintegrate or contradict one another because with this one think about it one set of whole worries is we have way too much of the stuff so we're going to destroy environment with pollution and with catastrophic climate change and the other hand we don't have enough so fossil fuels are bad because there's too many of them and fossil fuels are bad because there's too few of them so this kind of implies that you could argue there's some consistency there but it implies that there's some sort of more meta level aversion to what's going on and with the so with the alternatives issue it's in a sense it's almost too dumb an argument to even know where to begin because in just an economic sense what happens when we start running on anything it's not like fossil fuels are unique in this way you know with different things they can become more expensive to produce or you know whatever it becomes more scarce you know just like in in speaking let's say this book goes really really well and I'm you know people want Alex Epstein to speak and you know the bureau Lee Bureau like who represents me know they start jacking up the price and then for some people they can't afford it anymore and okay what do they do well they go they go fine they hear you guys in the podcast and they say well actually I think you're just as good or maybe even better so we'll start jacking up your rate and then you get to like what happens it's called it's called substitution right when you when when you know demand rises relative to supply the price goes up and you have substitution this is how any kind of thing works and that's the point at which it's rational and you have futures markets which anticipate these dynamics but basically you should always use the best thing and when it's no longer the best thing and as futures markets indicate that it's not the best thing you start using other things but the real you notice how eager they are to believe oh we're going to run out of it because it's really the perfect planet premise they just think oh we can't have that many resource or we can't have that much ability to get more of it and they're very sort of skeptic they're very unmoved by the fact that these predictions have been coming wrong for really 200 years now so that's sort of the basic supply and demand thing which I think you know that's sort of the core answer in terms of the policy is what I call progressive energy so we just keep using the best form and that will continue to evolve just like cell phones do and fossil fuels are likely going to be that for the vast majority of people for you know many decades to come and we certainly have the supplies to do that we just need the freedom in the book you write about how you think that the fears of global warming are somewhat exaggerated but well they're exaggerated by some many people but it seems like even if they aren't let's just say we were just going to say I will take everything that you have and say you're right I won't even argue against your global warming premise and they're still a moral case for fossil fuels it seems interesting to me I always say that there are about 3 billion people on this planet who don't have enough energy at all and energy equals wealth as you point out essentially and if we're carrying about people who don't yet exist and trying to make energy more expensive for 3 billion people who really need to live a satisfying life or would like to then we're doing something very immoral to them in the name of unknown and distant possibly catastrophes and so it's still even if they're correct there's still a fundamental moral case for fossil fuels well I take a little bit of issue with that in the sense of I don't like statements such as even if they're correct because a lot of the methodology here is all about precision and a lot of nuance so it's oh are you correct about global warming but what do you mean the catastrophic theory is correct but even what that means right because we're talking about a guaranteed energy catastrophe if we start restricting it and I think there's already an energy catastrophe for 3 billion people so you need to be specific and what I what I find from the data and from my own just thinking about it is that when we talk about you know even a climate catastrophe it's very difficult to even make one up and the reason is because technology is such a powerful force for mitigating climate and climate is so inherently dangerous so people wonder how could it be that in the last 80 years climate related deaths have gone down by 80% and last year supposedly the worst year ever for climate you know it's so dangerous so many wildfires whatever they say had under 30,000 climate related deaths worldwide even that includes the non industrialized world and in the 30s you had years where it's over 3 million 3 million compared to 30,000 and where you had one third of less than one third of our population you know since more like 10 million compared how can that possibly happen and the answer is the perfect planet premise is just so wrong again climate is naturally variable, volatile, and vicious and the task with climate is not to try to not impact it it's to try to fight it to try to survive it to try to master it yeah that's why one of the chapters is called climate mastery and as we get better technology we can just continue to master it more and more so the fossil fuel industry is part of not the only part of but I think a truly heroic and untold story of climate mastery which I'm tempted to write a book on just the history of you know man's dependence on climate and being at the mercy of climate and how that's improved and in fact Indergo Clonie of Cato has written some really good stuff on that so I just say that with all these things the main point to drive home is we want the method of focusing on human well-being and focusing on the big picture and that means a lot of precision on both sides so I don't like saying like oh I'll grant you global warming or even catastrophism I want to know exactly what you're saying now if you mean 100 foot sea level rise in a year that the problem is that's like a world war three and four and five combined but though that's not even predicted by the climate prediction models that can't predict climate what we're supposed to bow to this climate mastery I'm wondering if you could just kind of give us some examples of what that looks like in practice like what are the things between the 1930s and now that we have been able to do that have caused this these deaths to drop so dramatically oh yeah there's so there's so many good ones I mean my favorite one is I just think of thunderstorms like just a normal thunderstorm and you can have the exact Sam and in part because there's a scene in one of my favorite books about this and and as I was writing the book I reread the scene and many listeners probably familiar with Atlas Shrugged if you're not definitely take a look at it but you know two of the heroes of the book are talking and they're having this very romantic evening you know at least what's supposed to be a romantic evening at this guy Hank Reardon's house and it's just this fear storm outside and one of the characters named Francisco said it says it's you know it's a really bad night to be an animal tonight it's a really good night to be a human because and this is the idea that outside the weather nature is attacking every living being it's you know it's the winds are fierce and yet we're in here with beautiful gowns and enjoying fine China and all this kind of thing and it's the kind of evening where you can imagine you know a man proposing to his girlfriend and they'll remember this romantic thunderstorm then you you go back 300 years before we have any kind of mastery and this could kill a whole family right it's it could be like the worst moment of your life or the best one of your life depending on your degree of mastery you can take the same thing with agriculture. Indergo Clonny again has some great stuff on this where you know in the past we talk about drought and drought is really you know drought is really not having as much water as you want and that's a problem that technology is gradually eliminating because in the past just nature doesn't give you that the reason why that you know they talk so much about this is a bumper crop this is a bad crop nature doesn't give you what you need all the time or even most of the time so if you have one too bad years you can start eating your stock seed it can everything go bad and now we just we can irrigate right we can we can purify water hopefully we'll be able to desalinate water we we can do so much and the the principle is we need to not be saving the planet from human beings we need to improve it for human beings because it's not a perfect planet it's a perfectable planet but it's not a perfect planet and that's yeah everything irrigation if you dig the bit if you're irrigating let's just say straight with canals you dig the ditch with some sort of industrial machine some sort of construction machine that runs on fossil fuels as opposed to digging it with your shovels everything is moving people around getting them out of the way with cars right so earthquake or maybe a tsunami alert happens and you get them out of the way there's so many different ways to avoid the kind of damage you have to death you're talking about and just take as since we're here talking about ideas I think it's worth pointing out that one of the greatest benefits of having cheap plentiful reliable energy on a large scale is that you can have more and more people devoted to thinking and discovery of new knowledge so things like being able to better predict the weather are crucial now unfortunately that can be distorted to the point where we have these very bad climate predictions telling us that we should get rid of the energy source that allowed us to predict the weather in the first place but nevertheless you know from any field that has advanced intellectually that is a product of the fossil fuel industry and they should be given their measure of credit for it but isn't it true that you know despite all this discussion of these models and everything isn't it true you hear all the time that 97% of scientists believe in catastrophic man-made global warming problems? Yeah so there are a couple and this anyway is interested check out again the Kato talk that I'm sure be at Kato.org because we discussed 97% maybe for 15 minutes or I used it as a case study in the ways in which we're taught to think illogically about fossil fuels and kind of the first question if you're 97% agree with anything first question is what exactly do they agree to? I really need to know that clearly and then how do I know they agree and then why do they agree? I need explanations of all those things and usually with 97% none of those three things are forthcoming. I think there's probably flat earthers maybe who are more than 3% of the population so you maybe couldn't even find 97% of people who think that the earth is round. So you sort of dig into this and it's really fascinating because the original claim which comes from a couple of journal articles is 97% believe that the warming over the last 150 years of 0.8 degrees Celsius or 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit is mostly caused by human activity so over 50%. Mostly being over 50% caused. So you're talking like 0.4 degrees 0.65 degrees Fahrenheit. So what's interesting though is that that is used it's used not to simply make that claim about temperature agnostic because that claim by itself has no moral significance you don't know if it's even good to be warmer or not and you certainly don't know if that magnitude is alarming although the fact that you cannot even physically discern it yourself without complex instruments sort of indicates that in particular since you have the trend in tapering off recently not accelerating what's interesting is that is never used just as a sort of clinical observation to add as one piece of the puzzle it is used for politicians to say 97% of scientists agree with climate catastrophe and really it's used to say 97% of scientists agree with my particular policies. So a good object lesson which I discuss in chapter 4 of the book and which you can also look up online is John Beach Indonesia where he famously said the science is leaping out at us like a 3D movie and make no mistake this is absolutely certain and then he starts out talking about how most of it most of the warming he doesn't say how much but you know most of it he doesn't say how much total warming there is most of it comes from man made causes and then by the end of the same paragraph he's gone from 97% say the warming is mostly caused by 97% agree that it's incredibly massive danger so my background is in philosophy this is a straight fallacy called equivocation using the same word in this case 97% or same two words to mean two different things to manipulate somebody so it is a really really revealing and bad example of the horrific state of logic in these discussions so what we actually need is for experts to tell us precisely what they know and what they don't know and then explain their reasoning for both and if that were the and then contribute that to the broader discussion so climate scientists can tell us objectively look what do we know what speculation what's maybe probabilistic but then economists can contribute right and and physicists can contribute and biologists can contribute about biological issues and this is kind of what the UN claims to be doing but it does not differentiate to say the least it does not differentiate between fact and speculation and so what you have is these scientific organizations being using these incredible equivocations in the case of organizations like the American physical society which represents physicists for God's sake you know they're making political prescriptions but how could you make a political prescription about fossil fuels if you don't know about the relative value of its energy what the hell does a physicist know about energy economics so he could for all he knows he could be sentencing four billion people to death through energy catastrophe because he thinks it's a problem that it's a little bit warmer so it's it's the 97% of science and then on top of that the 97% as I talk about again in chapter four isn't even true and the studies that do that are are say that they're based on more than 50% but they include studies that say any percent so that's another equivocation and that's saying most but most can mean over 50% or over 0% so the whole one point I want to make is the whole state of climate communication is a complete illogical racket and you do not need to be a climate scientist to know that it is incredibly morally corrupt and that it needs to be completely redone and many of these people need to be jettisoned from the cultural discussion well it seems like everyone's either being called a denier or an affirmer so the 97% is exactly do you're either affirming 97% or you're denying and there's no nuance between the two but the only thing that's being denied is energy as in they want to deny billions of people of energy that's a proper use of the term you don't use deny for for issues that are being debated like your your moral case for fossil fuels denier like okay that's a little bit a little bit biasing the discussion there I'd say so if you were given the opportunity to be say in charge of U.S. energy policy or had the ability to change the narrative of the way we talk about these things how should we be approaching questions of how we get our energy today how we would get our energy in the future well I mean I think I have had the opportunity I mean you know penguin gave me the opportunity to write the book and I did my best to frame everything and Pat Michaels and I were talking about this today I think that the idea of he who frames wins I mean you want to frame things the side that frames the issues will win and I think ultimately if both sides are trying their best to frame it the side with the most logic can frame it the best I'd say the moral case is a way of framing it that's laser focused on human well-being not minimizing human impact it's laser focused on the big picture it's laser focused on precision and it's laser focused on using experts authorities but as advisors advisors and explainers and so I'm really happy with the opportunity and I'm happy to get the opportunity to be on podcasts like this and you know I don't know that I don't think of myself as oh I want to run the department of energy I'm interested in changing the way people think about energy so just the opportunity to be here and talk to you guys is that's honestly what excites me and you know I hope that people check out the book and you can check out chapter one for free at moralcaseforfossilfuels.com and that's the secret history of fossil fuels so you can see if do I like this framework but I hope from this interview people will at least get there's something really off with the way we talk about these issues and we could probably be using a better method and I think if we do use a better method we'll have a much higher estimate of fossil fuels but in any case if we use a better method we'll come to a lot better answers than we are right now. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions or comments about today's episode you can find us on twitter at free thoughts pod that's free thoughts pod free thoughts is a project of libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute and is produced by Evan Banks to learn more you can find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org