 This is Code Red. The nation and the world are imperiled. That's not hyperbole. That is a fact. Today's discussion of climate and energy policies is dominated by two overarching claims. First, that fossil fuels are causing catastrophic climate change that threatens the very existence of the planet. And second, that renewable forms of energy, particularly wind and solar, can easily replace oil, gas and coal. In his new book, Fossil Future, Alex Epstein argues that neither of these statements is accurate. He notes that the number of people around the globe dying from climate-related events has plummeted by 98% over the past century, and that wind and solar comprise just 3% of current global energy use. An immediate shift to renewables, he argues, would consign billions to poverty or death to stave off the impact of man-made climate change, the consequences of which have often been exaggerated and with which humans are equipped to deal. Epstein, who's the founder and president of the Center for Industrial Progress, tells reason about how he fought back against a hit piece in the Washington Post by using social media to tell his side of the story, and why he believes human flourishing requires more oil, coal and natural gas, not less. Alex Epstein, thanks for talking to reason. My pleasure. So let's start with an elevator pitch for Fossil Future, while why global human flourishing requires more oil, coal and natural gas, not less. What's the elevator pitch? The elevator pitch is that fossil fuels, if you look carefully at both the benefits and the side effects, most people just look at side effects and tend to exaggerate them. But if you look at both the benefits and the side effects, fossil fuels clearly have made the world a far better place to live. And I believe the evidence is that continuing to use them and using more of them will make the world a much better place to live. And I would just add one thing now in the last six months that I think people are realizing is that trying to rapidly restrict fossil fuels, as we've seen in Europe, really makes the world a much worse place to live. Yeah. I mean, for the first time in a very long time, fuel costs have become a kind of public policy question, right? And particularly in Europe, but also in the United States because of inflation and just jacked through the roof, energy prices. One of the things that you stress throughout the book is when you get outside of the wealthy West or the wealthy developed world, people are still really reliant on fossil fuels, partly because they're compact, partly because they're portable, and partly because they can be used to do all sorts of different types of things that when people are talking about wind and solar, they're really talking about electricity generation of a particular kind. Can you just dial in a little bit on, at times, I would almost accuse you of rhapsodizing about the fungibility of fossil fuels. Talk a bit about that. Why is that so important? So there are a bunch of different elements. Let me just make sure. So there's the element of the versatility. Is that the thing that... So that's the element that they can power every type of machine that we're used to. And so within that, I mean, first of all, the West is overwhelmingly fossil fueled. So actually, the real distinction is that the West is overwhelmingly fossil fueled, and most of the world wants to be fossil fueled. Most of the world is very poor in terms of wealth and not coincidentally in terms of energy because energy allows you to use machines, and that's the only way to produce a lot of wealth. And so really, we just have a deficit in general. But then when you look at specific areas, you see that all forms of energy are not the same. We often tend to equate energy with electricity. So you hear California generated x% of energy from solar and wind, and it'll often be actually electricity. So around the world, electricity is only 20% of the world's energy use. Now, some of that can definitely increase cost effectively. But there are many uses of fossil fuels not for electricity that are because fossil fuels are by far the most cost effective or the only cost effective way to do it. So why are we using kerosene or jet fuel to power planes? It's because fossil fuels, particularly oil in this case, oil has a unique energy density. It's a very high concentration of energy in this very stable liquid. And that's why all the planes are powered by these fossil fuels. We could talk about hypothetical replacements called sustainable aviation fuels. But even there, it's not electricity. If you had a battery, it wouldn't work. And you see a very similar thing with cargo ships, which make the world economy run. Those very not coincidentally are run on oil. Now, we could also talk in the future, maybe nuclear, but it's instructive that nuclear has that compactness even more. It's a little trickier to harness, but it has that. So yeah, this variable of versatility is hugely ignored when we talk about replacing fossil fuels. And it leads to things like if you look at some of these plans, they'll say, oh, yeah, we'll replace the planes with hydrogen planes in the next 30 years. And like, we don't have hydrogen plants. Right. Yeah, part of when reading your book and looking at that or that aspect of it, it reminded me of the emphasis in Michael Schellenberger's Apocalypse Never about how kind of the history of energy has been to go from more and more kind of diffuse, looser sources of energy, things like woods and twigs and grass to more and more dense things like nuclear power, plutonium or coal, gas, oil, things like that. You stress throughout the book that need to do a full cost-benefit analysis of different energy regimes and that this tends to never happen because analysts and media use either explicitly or implicitly what you call an anti-impact framework. What is that? And how does that skew the discussion? And what should we be on the lookout for when we're talking about this question of like, okay, how do we replace energy with something that's different than fossil fuel? So just to give context to the anti-impact framework, the observations that lead to this need to have an explanation is we tend to ignore the benefits of fossil fuels and then what I call catastrophize the side effects. In chapters one and two, I try to document this very thoroughly, but just a quick example is with agriculture. We tend to ignore, like I give the example of Michael Mann, one of the world's thought leaders on these issues. And he has a whole book on climate and energy. And he doesn't once mention the fact that agriculture is totally dependent on fossil fuels. And fossil fuels are really feeding 8 billion people via diesel-powered equipment and via natural gas-derived fertilizer. So my view is this is just an intellectual crime. That's the same as if you're evaluating a polio vaccine and you don't talk about the fact that it stops polio and you just talk about negative side effects. And so part of what I'm trying to get at is why do our leaders do this, particularly the ones who know better? And my answer is they can't be fully pro-human if they are ignoring these huge human benefits of fossil fuels. And so one alternative explanation I offer, which I think is true for the leaders, not so much the followers, is that they don't really think of the benefits to human life as benefits because their focus is eliminating human impact on Earth. And if your focus is eliminating human impact on Earth, you have a hostility toward energy in general because it leads to this high-impact industrial civilization. And you're going to have an over-hostility toward things like side effects. So my argument with CO2 is CO2 impacts climate. But the idea that it's world-ending is not at all justifiable from a human perspective. But if your goal is to eliminate our impact and you think the perfect world is the one that we haven't impacted at all, it is a tragedy. It is a catastrophe because you think impact is evil. And then the other element of what I call this anti-impact framework. So number one is human impact is evil and our goal should be to eliminate it. And number two, and this makes it seem practical, is that it's inevitably self-destructive. So it's wrong for us to put more CO2 in the atmosphere. And if we keep doing it, nature is going to punish us. And you see a lot of this with the global warming stuff. It's not just this is going to be a challenge, making the world more tropical. We'll have to adapt. It's the world is going to end. And so I do consider it very much a primitive and anti-human religion because it really has this one commandment, thou shalt not impact nature. And then if you violate the commandment, the God punishes you and puts you in hell, which is really global warming slash climate change. I want to get to those questions about whether or not our fossil fuels are causing catastrophic climate change. And then I want to talk about your sense of can they, the belief that fossil fuels are rapidly replaceable or can rapidly replace renewable, be replaced by renewables. So let's start with these questions of catastrophic climate change. Because this is what comes up time and time again a few years ago after, I guess it was in 2018, when the IPCC came out with a report that was then interpreted widely by politicians, activists in the press as saying, and perhaps most famously in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's declaration, which Joe Biden said during the 2020 campaign and other people, but that we have 12 years to end fossil fuels or to get rid of carbon being emitted into the planet, otherwise we're finished. What is the reality? Are they causing catastrophic climate change? And if they are not, what kinds of impacts are they having? So I guess just first, is fossil fuel causing catastrophic climate change? No. So far, so I find it helpful to start with what's the state so far? What's the present and what's the recent past? And then if we can get agreement on that, then we can trust people, then we can talk about predictions of future. But the absolute fact is that so far, fossil fuels have made the world unnaturally safe from climate. I think that's undeniable. It's never discussed. Okay. Yeah. I like the way you say like, this is just a given. This is a bombshell, right? This is going to help solve the problem. It's a bombshell. And it was a bombshell when I learned it. I mean, it's even more true now. And I learned it in 2007. It's one of the things that motivated me to talk about this because I had been so misled. But we can quantify climate danger. And the most important thing is how many people are dying from climate-related disasters. And we can look, we have decent data 100 years back. And what we can see is that the death rate from these things, so storms, flood, extreme heat, extreme cold, wildfire has gone down by a rate of 98%. Now you would think, of course, it's gotten much worse, which is what I thought, even though I was suspicious of the environmental movement. I thought, for sure, it's at least gotten worse. But it's gotten way better. And when you start to think about it, it makes sense because what we're talking about in terms of a side effect is one degree of warming Celsius over 100 plus years. And human beings are incredibly adaptable. And by the way, far more people die of cold than of heat. So if you just think about it clinically, and you don't have this hatred of human impact, it's not that scary for the overall temperatures to rise by an average of one degree. But at the same time, what has happened in terms of our ability to adapt to, or as I call it, master climate, that has, there's been a revolution. So we can now make ourselves warm when it's freezing cold. We can make ourselves cool when it's really hot. We can do irrigation, which is maybe the most underrated thing, because that helps with drought related death, which is historically the worst climate related killer. And on and on and on, you can point to all kinds of ways in which amazing machines make us incredibly safe from climate. And those machines are powered by fossil fuels, which provide 80% of the world's energy. And as we'll talk about in comparison to the alternatives for very good reasons, we're not just using them because of bias, we're using them because they are actually very, they're more cost effective than the alternative. So the fact is that fossil fuels have taken a naturally dangerous climate and made it unnaturally safe. And anyone who's making predictions about the future needs to start there. And it's very notable that our whole establishment acts like fossil fuels have already made climate a disaster, which to me proves that again, their goal, which means their goal is not, let's put it this way, how you measure good and bad ultimately is determined by what is your goal. And I think their goal with respect to the world is not to advance human life or as I call it, human flourishing on earth. Because if that's your goal, we're far better, the climate livability is far better. But if your goal is to eliminate human impact on earth, and you just think man made climate change is intrinsically immoral because it violates your primitive anti human religion, then you think it's a catastrophe. So the only justification for claiming catastrophe today, when we have unprecedented livability, is this anti human anti impact perspective. I could see somebody disagreeing with you and saying, but what is actually happening is that there's more intense weather related events, weather related dislocations and things like that. And sure, we can burn a lot more gas or a lot more, we can use a lot more energy in order to kind of put a band-aid on what's going on. But eventually, I mean, two things. One is that eventually we're not going to be able to actually keep people from dying from weather related events. And two, the climate is going to, this is the hockey stick stuff that Michael Mann and other people have talked about that. It starts out small, but if you double small amounts consistently, suddenly we're boiling, the seas are boiling. So start with that. I mean, is there a reason to believe that we are merely putting a band-aid on things like dislocation, drought, other types of things that are caused by climate change, which is caused by human activity? Is there a reason to take that seriously? So I'll give some specific scientific facts, but I want to start with just a common sense perspective. Once you don't have this perspective, the human impact is bad. Because my view, just so everyone knows, is that this view that human impact is intrinsically immoral and inevitably self-destructive is destroying everyone's thinking about energy and making them blind to the obvious. So you could see if you agree with that, but that is my premise. And so you think about this. Notice the assumption that rising CO2 levels, so we've gone from 0.03 to 0.04% of the atmosphere of CO2. So the idea is we're going to go to 0.05%, 0.06%. And notice everything is going to get worse. So that should be a red flag immediately, that we have a change in a complex system and everything is going to get worse. So storms are going to get worse, but also there's going to be much more drought. So we have much more precipitation, but much less precipitation where we want it. So you could think that's, okay, maybe that can happen, but it should be suspicious that everything is going to get worse. The most plausible thing that'll get worse with warming is sea levels. Because sea levels, you have a state of affairs where you have built around a certain sea level. And if they were rising quickly enough, then that would be a challenge. At the same time, you need to recognize we have 100 million people who already live below sea level at high tide. So we are extremely good at dealing with sea levels. And if you look at what's happened so far, it's one foot a century, which is way slower than our ancestors. And the extreme projections are three feet a century, which is very much manageable and I think very speculative, but it's nowhere near a catastrophe. Also, if you look at the history of the earth, we know that CO2 levels have been 15 times higher than they are today. We know temperatures have been much, much higher than they are today, that those don't correlate. So this idea that... When was that, though? I mean, hundreds of millions of years ago. Okay. I mean, but when humans were, I mean, but was the planet, would it have been habitable for humans? Oh, it's 100% habitable by humans. Yeah. Sorry. I should say this because it's, human beings are a tropical species, right? It's unnatural for us to live outside the deep tropics. We have to invent technology in order to deal with even like the cold, just a little bit away from the equator. So really... And the other thing we kind of know from history and from the models is that warming tends to occur more in colder regions. So when the globe warms, it's not truly global. It's more concentrated, particularly, we think now, in the more northern latitude. So really what this means is that rising CO2, you can expect to lead slowly to a more tropical planet. That's just what the history would tell you. And you can be concerned, oh, that's going to be disruptive because the sea levels were here and we're used to this and we're used to that. But the idea of catastrophe should be absurd and the idea, or certainly apocalypse. And we have to remember that fossil fuels enable us to master the climate and they enable us to do all kinds of other things like grow food in the first place. So if you notice, if you look at the projections of the future, they almost always ignore the climate mastery and other benefits of fossil fuels to the point where they'll say like Michael Mann, they're going to make agriculture worse, but he's not concerned about what happens if you rapidly eliminate fossil fuels that are currently feeding 8 billion people. And if you want to know the consequences of that, look at now we're talking about starvation. We have fuel shortages. We have fertilizer shortages, skyrocketing prices. This is affecting the poor world the most. And this is because we've been engaged in this fossil fuel benefit denial that I'm pointing out repeatedly in fossil future and elsewhere. And there's no reason to believe that climate change or rising temperatures or extreme concentrations of greenhouse gases will reach a tipping point, that's a bad metaphor, but will reach a point where they just start to really get out of hand in a really big way. I mean, we're coming out of a COVID pandemic where it took people a while to understand the fact that diseases can, you know, they can multiply geometrically as opposed to, you know, just in terms of simple addition. Yes, this is the opposite. This is the opposite of how greenhouse gases and many other phenomena in nature work. And this is what I'm saying here. And most of what I say is not sort of challenging the mainstream science on this. What I'm doing is I'm interpreting it without this bias against human impact in the full context of the benefits that come along with these impacts. So as I talk about in chapter nine of the book, you know, if the trajectory of the greenhouse effect of CO2 was like what it is at the early stages of a pandemic, that would be really scary, right? Because it's, you know, it looks like it's, you can call it a super linear function. It doesn't just go like this. It goes like this. And you don't want that happening with the temperature. But as I indicated, we've had earth with 15 times more CO2 and their thing didn't burn up. So we know it's not this kind of effect. And if you look at the science, it's regarded universally as a logarithmic effect, which means a decelerating effect. So it looks like this. So you can think of it as every new molecule of CO2 warms, but it warms less than the last. So it has, you get diminishing returns heat-wise on every new molecule of CO2. All of the talk of tipping points, and that is a term that is used by certain, at least, activists. What that involves is it involves some change. It's not the greenhouse effect itself. It involves some kind of feedback. So, for example, they'll say, well, it's going to lead to permafrost being released in the Arctic, and that's going to lead to this. But when you look into all of these, they're either extremely speculative or they tend to get misinterpreted. So one study I looked at with the permafrost is they said it'll in effect be over the next 300 years the equivalent of 10 more years of our emissions. So that's something, but it's not the end of the world. And why would we expect it to be the end of the world? Given that, again, we've had far more CO2. The planet didn't end. It was a more tropical place. So you need to think about this in a measured way, and not this, we're evil. God is going to punish us way. Where do you think that's coming from? I mean, when you talk about that in your writing and just now, there did seem to be in the modern environmentalist movement, perhaps starting in the 70s and certainly in the 80s, there were a number of people or groups that started to advance this idea that humans are arrogant and hubristic. And if they center everything about their outcome, they're destroying Mother Earth, Gaia, whatever. And I can remember reading, and I know reason read some stories critiquing this sort of thing, where environmentalists would talk about humans almost as a virus or a cancer on the planet. Like we were the disease, ultimately. And because of that, we were a parasite that was taking over the planet. That sort of rhetoric has definitely vanished, at least explicitly. But could you talk a little bit about the deeper roots of it? Yeah, I think so. I know very few people who say, who are like, the real problem is we need many fewer humans. So that's true. That's vanish. Yeah, it's like the zero population growth, the idea that there are too many people and possibly too many people moving to the US. That's still around, but it's definitely not foregrounded or the idea that humans are the disease. But where did that original philosophical or rhetorical thrust come from? So there's at least two big origins. So one is in primitive religions, you have this idea that I call the delicate nurture assumption, which is that nature exists in this delicate balance that nurtures us. So I think of it as it's stable, it's sufficient and safe, but our impact ruins it. And you can understand why primitive religions would have this view, because they don't understand cause and effect in science. So they assume some consciousness is controlling everything, and they want control. So they're like, oh, if I dance, there'll be rain. So you kind of get that. But it doesn't have the hostility. So it has this view that our impact can be dangerous and we need to manage it, but it doesn't have the hostility. The hostility you definitely see in people like Russo. So you kind of see people who are the benefits of industrialization or at least more prosperity, like they have this myth of a better time when we're in harmony with nature. And in their defense also, perhaps in the thick of the industrial revolution where there was within a few decades, radical changes in very local climates, soot, things like that, yeah, that could be like, wow, we're really fucking up the planet. Yeah, and I think it's more of the view. I mean, there are a lot of people who are like, oh, I have a country home, and I'm like, why can't everything be like this? And they don't really appreciate it. Because a lot of people are choosing them to live in the cities, and they don't maybe have the same attitude that we would have because they know what it's like. There's no question. And I'm sorry to step on your toes here, but I think this is true of every ideology, but environmentalism, perhaps more than others. People of means generally come up with a vision that they think is beautiful and should be shared by everyone. And then when they find out, you know, like I actually like living in a basement apartment in a city where there's a lot of garbage on the street, relatively speaking to your country house, and that, you know, they feel a need to control that rather than to kind of abide it. Yeah, I mean, in general, these coercive movements, they don't like what people actually want. They have their view of, oh, this is what the people want this. And it's what my vision is, and it involves me being very important and me having control. And why don't the people want this? This is the whole history. But I would say, if we're talking about, so this is actually relevant, I'm talking about collectivists and status in general, but I think that this is a point I got from Miranda, I definitely agree with them, is that this whole anti-human environmental movement really emerged in the late 60s and the early 70s. But it's, that strain was there, but it got promoted very widely by the political left because they found that attacking capitalism on environmental grounds was very, very effective. And I think this in part was a failure of the pro-capitalism side to own the issue of environment. That's one thing I try to do in fossil future and elsewhere, is say, hey, if you want a livable human environment, you need freedom. You need fossil fuels. The natural environment is not a livable human environment, including clean water. You don't have abundant clean water in natural environment, nor abundant nor clean air because you need to burn something to keep warm in most places. And that's going to be water, animal, dung, unless you have modern fuels. So there is really a concerted effort to put over what I consider this anti-human environmental philosophy and all of the concrete scares that go along with it, really starting in the 80s, the 70s, 80s, and it penetrates the educational system, which means it penetrates the media. And I think that's why you have the whole world obsessed with how do we eliminate the impact of our CO2 emissions and the expectation that the world is going to end in a world where, as hopefully we'll talk about, billions of people are lacking energy, billions of people are poor, where it's pretty obvious that from that perspective we need a lot more fossil fuel. And yet we're trying to figure out how do we get rid of fossil fuel, even though that's 80% of the energy in the world that does have energy and most of the world doesn't have energy. Before we move off this point, let me ask you a question about, in the late 60s and early 70s, when the kind of modern green movement, the modern environmental movement was created. Earth Day comes around and things like that. I'm old enough to actually remember the famous crying Indian public service ad. And there was garbage everywhere. And of course, garbage on the street is not the same thing as CO2 or the air pollution being a problem. But air pollution was a problem when people would fly into places like Los Angeles or Houston, you would kind of descend through a haze of all sorts of things. All of those places now have much, much better air quality, even though we produce far, far more energy. We have a third or 50% more people in these places. There is so much more activity going on. Everything is better. What was the role though of government regulation in helping to clean those things up? Because I think as good libertarians, we are always slow to acknowledge any possible good coming out of a kind of top-down coercive structure. But with things like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and various kinds of environmental rules and laws, did they have a positive effect on day-to-day living conditions? And if so, why does it seem that capitalists are always the people who are saying, no, any regulation will absolutely destroy all aspects of prosperity. So we can't do that. And then later they come back and say, hey, look, everything's getting better. But can you talk a little bit about that? It's a kind of weird two-step on our side of the equation, I think. Yeah. Well, so let me talk about how I think our side of the equation should view it versus how it's viewed. I think one of the criticisms of libertarianism, which has a broad kind of conception, but what's the objectivist criticism? And part of it is a hostility toward government as such versus a hostility toward government violating its proper functions. And part of this view, which I share, is that government is a crucial ally in liberty, but it needs to be delimited. And that's hard to do. And unfortunately, ours has gone in the wrong direction, but we definitely need governments. And so part of that is the government is supposed to protect against rights violations. And you can absolutely consider certain kinds of pollution, rights violations. The most obvious is a kind of tort situation where you're just dumping stuff on your neighbor's property. But it's also totally valid at a given state of technology to say, hey, for human beings to survive and flourish, we don't need to admit this much soot in the atmosphere. And so we're going to say you're not allowed to do that. Now, you can't say that at every stage. So it's very contextual in history. So for example, imagine a pro-freedom government in the time of the caveman, we can't say don't use fire because it has harmful smoke, even though the smoke is harmful in and of itself because it's a byproduct of something that is crucial to living. But over time, what happens is you get cleaner and cleaner ways to generate energy that are quite low cost, sometimes even superior. So in some cases, say natural gas, not all, but it's superior to coal. In that case, it's totally legitimate to say, hey, we're going to have standards that say you can't admit so much because it's unnecessary. And it is harmful. But I think it's very important to think from a libertarian or pro-freedom perspective, think in terms of rights and rights violations and how does the government define different kinds of rights versus the overarching term of regulation, which just means anything the government feels like doing. And so we don't want to call, we don't want to give a positive view of rights protection as regulation because then that justifies all of this preemptive or preventative stuff where the government is treating us as guilty until proven innocent. And that's really what the essence of regulations or controls are today, is that they are treating us as guilty until proven innocent. And the same thing, by the way, just as a quick comment with Coven, this is one of the issues that I had with how it was discussed. Like I thought it was legit and I still do is for the government to say, if you are a demonstrable danger to your neighbors, we can say you can quarantine. That's different from saying you might be a danger and therefore we can force you to quarantine with no evidence. And one thing I said, which I really think proved to be true is like innocent until proven guilty is a very underrated principle in American law. And you get so far just by following that principle. So with the air pollution, the Clean Air Act is kind of a mess in that there are some good elements and some bad elements, and it's being used in really bad ways today, including with CO2, which it wasn't intended to do. But in general, what you see as a progression where people become wealthier, they want cleaner air, they develop better technology, and they properly pass laws. And so that's that's something that pro-freedom people should totally get behind versus just resisting at every stage because there was clearly a point where that level of pollution was not necessary given and it was reasonably preventable. And so to resist that, then it concedes to the other side that you don't care about a good environment. And that's a terrible thing to concede. Kind of related to that, I would say people broadly speaking, let's call it the pro-market side, tended to be pretty slow to agree with the idea that human activity was having an effect on the climate. And as a result, in a way, I think you could say those people still perform a meaningful function by kind of dragging down a race to some kind of unproven goal that is kind of like a French Revolution style thing. We need to radically change everything overnight. Otherwise, something disastrous is going to happen. But it does lead to a credibility question, doesn't it? If people who are broadly speaking, you know, pro-market are constantly saying, no, global warming is a communist plot. Global warming is BS. It's a means of social control. Simply, there's no science. There's no science. And then, well, there is science and I believe in the science, but it's not as bad as they say. What is a better way, again, on a kind of pro-market, on a kind of pro-human, pro-market side, what is a better way to actually kind of engage with ongoing inquiry and ongoing new information that actually changes the way we should be talking about things? I think it's really important issue. So I think the way from both sides, the fossil fuel issue has been framed and I would give myself credit for helping reframe it in a handful of other people like Schellenberger and Lomborg. The way it has been framed, I talk about this in chapter 11 of the book, which is about persuading people on these issues, is it's been framed as either you believe that fossil fuels impact climate and therefore they're bad or you do believe they don't impact climate and therefore they're okay. And I use okay very deliberately because I think before I came along, there was very little focus on the benefits of fossil fuels and the implicit idea behind both sides of this alternative is that impact is bad and it should make us take drastic actions. If you just step back and look at CO2, look, we're putting CO2, it's a warming gas and a fertilizing gas. We're putting more of it in the atmosphere. We should expect impacts. We should expect impacts from a lot of things that we do. I mean, you hear about butterfly effect. I don't know all the science of that, but in general, we are radically transforming the earth to be a much more livable place. We're trying to do that. And there are absolutely going to be side effects and we absolutely need to study those side effects and take them seriously. And we cannot be on the premise that we're only allowed to do things if they have no impact. I think this is another failure of some libertarian thinkers is there's this atomistic view of liberty, which is the idea that you're allowed to take action as long as it has no effect on anyone. And I don't think that's at all the founder's conception of liberty because you're going to have effects on a lot of people in a lot of different ways. And so part of what the law is trying to do is how to define your freedom of action so that you can't affect them in a way that fundamentally impedes their freedom of action. And talking about this more sometime, but it's not like you say, oh, you have a right to do whatever you want, but if one molecule of a negative thing gets in everyone else's air, then you're a slave, which I think people accept that view. And you need to reject that you need to embrace the fact that our actions are going to have impacts and we need to define liberty, recognizing that. I really appreciate in the book in particular, I mean, it's obviously it's about energy policy. It's about climate change. It's about a lot of things, but it is also a book about persuasion. And I was thinking, I can remember a time when you were fond of kind of going to environmental debate or, you know, events and wearing like, you know, I love fossil fuels, types of t-shirts and things like that, which has a place, right? Because it's provocative and everything. But would you say, as you've as you've developed as a thinker and as a writer that you are focusing more on a kind of persuasion rather than kind of expression of core beliefs? Yeah, although I think I've been always interested in that kind of thing. So I've had controversial, I've had very controversial views since I was a teenager. I mean, even before I got into I ran when I was 18, but even before then I was in a liberal environment and I sort of got into conservative and libertarian ideas. And one thing that I had, I don't know why I had it, but I consider a gift is I really wanted other people to agree with me. I didn't get off too much on being different. I just really thought these ideas are right and I wanted other people to agree. And so every time I had a conversation and it didn't go well, I would reflect on it. I really want it to go well versus I think many people who have contrarian ideas, they like being different. And so that leads to just these expressions of, oh, I have this very different view and you guys are wrong. And yeah, then you become an edgelord, right? Where it's like the more people disagree with you, the more correct you feel you are. And then you want to take it even further. I mean, that that is not you. But a lot of people are like that. Yeah. And so my own, I mean, I think I've improved in that way, for sure. So but the I love fossil disease even that's designed to be provocative to get attention. But it's not an argument by itself, but just to give you a sense of fossil future. This was something where I already had a bestselling book on fossil fuels. I had a name, but I had this conviction that I could do much better in terms of persuading people and empowering allies. So I spent three years on a risky thing, which is writing a new book on the same topic. And it was real. The whole thing was, we're at this key moment where I think the whole world is going in the wrong direction. I think now we're getting evidence of that. And it's like, what can I do to try to persuade people? And it's just every sentence is trying to persuade somebody who expects to disagree. And that's like from beginning to end, when I write a book, it's I'm trying to take somebody who expects to disagree and persuade them. And then part of that is I'm trying to take my allies and get them much better at persuading people who expect to disagree. So I'm obsessed with intellectual persuasion, and I'm not at all obsessed with being different. I would love it to get out of this issue and for everyone to agree. I'm very happy doing other things. So I want to switch now to questions about whether or not a fossil fuels are, in fact, easily replaceable or immediately replaceable by renewables. But just to cap this then, because the first part of the argument is of reaching people is to really kind of convince or make a case that climate change is not imminently catastrophic. What's the one or two sentence version of that argument? Well, I would just say that I think there are three issues. So one is I don't think with the overall. So there's the issue of climate catastrophe, fossil fuels are causing climate catastrophe, that they're rapidly replaceable by renewables. But I'd say the third thing, and I focus a lot on this in fossil futures, is just recognizing how beneficial fossil fuels are for the world as a whole. And I think that is really crucial for people to get. And once you get that, you'd see these other, you become afraid of fossil fuels not becoming replaceable. And then we'll talk about the climate. The key things with climate are you first have to recognize that climate that fossil fuels give us an enormous positive ability to master climate that has made us rapidly, radically rather safer from climate. You have to recognize we're safer than ever from climate and fossil fuel machines are a root cause of that. And then also that they have this warming effect, also fertilizing effect from rising CO2. That is a diminishing effect that we can expect to continue warming, but that cannot cause an amount of warming or other climate change that could be catastrophic, let alone an apocalyptic. So we should expect a more empowered world and a more tropical world and will overall be even safer from climate and will be far better off and everything else. All right. Okay. So now let's talk about these. And in that case, you don't really need, there's really a suspicion of, why do you need to replace them if they're that good? And then it casts suspicion on, why are we so intent on getting rid of them immediately? Like, even if you think I'd rather not have this much CO2, this idea of let's have this crash program to get rid of this immediately in a world, this is really important in a world where most people have very little energy. We always have to remember this. I stress this a lot. Most people don't have energy, so when we're talking about replacing fossil fuels, it's not just for us, it's for billions of people who lack energy. And that seems to be happening somewhat or rather we're using, and I guess this is an old conundrum and a tricky one, everything is getting more fuel efficient. Everything is getting more efficient, but also that doesn't lead to less energy being used, does it? Yeah. So there's a bunch of, I talk about this, I think in chapter five, there's a lot of elements of the fallacies here, but the most obvious thing is just that so people lack energy on such a large scale that even us becoming more fuel efficient, even if that didn't lead to other what are called rebound effects, you still need vastly more energy. So that's the one I focus on, but there are other things as well, including we have new ways of using energy. The whole crypto slash Bitcoin space is an example of that, but the modern internet is an example of that. They're building new server farms like crazy and computers haven't effectively unlimited need for energy because we can always find new things to figure out particularly in medical research. And then there's just people who are at a certain level now want to be wealthier and that involves more energy. So you can think of like Al Gore and John Kerry's lifestyle, other people would like some fraction of that. So they're all these energy efficiency is great, but it's part of people improving their lives and pursuing economic efficiency and part of that is yeah, people, they'll use energy more efficiently and they'll also want to use more energy. And that's a very healthy motivation. Most of the people saying they shouldn't do that are using way more energy than the people they're criticizing. Although that leads to a discussion of renewables or sustainable energy sources of saying that are less polluting or non-polluting. So that's kind of a way of having your cake and eating it too. Although I realize a lot of environmentalists really seem to just want less energy to be used. That's kind of a separate issue. They're kind of puritanical or aesthetics and they just, they kind of envision a world where less stuff is going on because that comports with their vision of the one and true heaven and one and only heaven. But then when we get to renewables, this is part of the case for renewables that we could actually have massive unlimited energy and it's not going to do any harm to anybody. But before we get there, let's talk about the state of renewables. I hear this all the time. I have two sons in their 20s. They have gotten a steady diet of this their entire life that solar and wind in particular are cheaper now or they are just as viable as existing sources of energy and all we need is a kind of triumph of the will to switch over to these things. What is wrong about that? Well, what's funny is that you don't usually need a triumph of will if things are really, you don't need a triumph of political will. It just happens automatically. So again, I want to point to things that anyone can observe that cast suspicion on this. So one is that the concentration of solar and wind is very correlated to the amount of government preference given to them. So there are mandates where you say explicitly, you need this much solar and wind. There are subsidies where you give them, you give people extra money for using them and for producing them. And then also the most underrated thing is we have grids that pay the same amount for unreliable, uncontrollable electricity as for reliable, controllable electricity, which is crazy. You would never do that in any other context. So why is it that they need so much favoritism if they're superior? And then the other thing that's just common sense is what does it mean to say something is cheaper when it's not reliable? It's clearly just think about common sense like electricity from the sun, electricity from the wind, absent some amazing storage system, which we don't have. That is not the same at all as electricity that you can control the amount that you have when you want it. So the miracle of electricity is we can have unpredictable or unknown demand, let's say uncontrollable demand and highly controllable supply. That's the miracle of the grid, right, is whatever we do in terms of demand, they can control the supply so that we have our electricity. That is amazing, but controllability is the essence of it. And so what does it mean to say that this uncontrollable thing is cheaper than this controllable thing? And so the basic fallacy that's going on is people are not looking at the total process of producing reliable electricity. And I emphasize reliable electricity. What they're doing is they're saying, hey, these solar panels on their own are cheaper than the coal or something, you know, the coal equivalent. But they're not looking at the full cost because when you look at the full cost, you need to look at the solar panels, the infrastructure, all the new infrastructure, but most importantly, the near 100% backup that's needed because solar and wind can go to near zero at any time. And so in fossil future, I argue once you look at that, these things are costly, and they also don't scale. So even if they were cheaper for 5% of the electricity or 10%, which they're not in most cases, that doesn't mean they can provide 100%. And as we talked about before, electricity is not all energy. So a lot of energy isn't produced, isn't generated using electricity, or isn't provided using electricity. So there's all these all these signs that there is something really, really off. But the main fallacy is what I call partial cost accounting. You're not looking at the full cost of producing reliable electricity, you're just looking at a partial cost. And that's that should be viewed as very manipulative and suspect. In addition to the fact that they want to use force as against as against having some kind of real market. What about, you know, then there's the argument said, okay, yeah, you know, solar, you know, sometimes the wind isn't blowing, you know, the sun sets at various points, but we are about to build either batteries or kind of transmission wires where we're able to get this stuff, you know, to hold it in abeyance until it's actually necessary, or send it out to where it is necessary, even if it's not in the immediate place that it's being produced. Is is that viable? Or is that actually happening? So I think it's important with all these things that all of these things, I'll talk about batteries in the other word in a second, but these things definitely have not been done at all. And we're talking about forcing the whole world to rely on them in 27 and a half years. So this this I want this to be very scary to people. This is really a potential apocalypse, because the whole world depends on energy. We're talking about rapidly eliminating fossil fuels with these schemes that have definitely never been done. Nobody can argue that these schemes have actually happened where we have a whole grid that's solar and wind and either you have this massive battery or you're interconnected. It's also true that these schemes all involve unprecedented amounts of mining and unprecedented amounts of infrastructure development. That's unquestionable. They require far more than has ever occurred on a crash timetable that has never occurred. And both of those things, by the way, doing something totally unprecedented and doing a crash program of unprecedented development, both of those we know add massive amounts of cost to things. So if people are telling you it's cheap, I say that's basically proof that there are fraud. And then the third thing that proves it's a total fraud is all of this is in an anti-development environment that the green movement supports. So think about how hard it is to build a lithium mine in the U.S. or do any kind of mining or lay transmission lines. We have a whole green movement that says it's bad to impact nature and they're going to allow us to engage in a totally unprecedented amount of mining and infrastructure building. So this should just all be viewed as absurd. This is like the most absurd central plan ever that this is going to happen. You're going to do this thing that's never been done, unprecedented amounts of development and an anti-development environment. So I think common sense just says this stuff is all absurd and it's really motivated by a hostility toward energy, a hostility toward human impact, not caring about if it's replaced. Plus, we're having an energy crisis right now where clearly people overestimated the ability of fossil fuels to be replaced because we have shortages of them and it's not because of lack of physical supply. It's not because of lack of technical knowledge. It's because for various reasons, both government force and some private actors, we have prevented fossil fuel investment, prevented production, prevented transportation. So I go into the batteries stuff. I mean, the batteries are like, if you run the numbers, backing up the world for three days, it's $400 trillion. So this is just a crazy thing. The transmission lines thing, again, there's nothing resembling this. You can have very large droughts of sunlight and wind in a lot of different regions. This is just all crackpot stuff. And my argument is it's created by people who don't really care about energy because if you care about energy, your whole focus would be, how do we get more energy from more people as quickly as possible? Not how do we eliminate our number one currently irreplaceable source of energy in the next 27 and a half years and somehow it'll work. I don't think they care about this somehow. I think it's all just hand waving. Could you talk a bit right now in the United States? Obviously, we have historically high or certainly for the past couple of decades, high gas prices, high energy prices in general. What are the policies that, whether it was under Donald Trump or Joe Biden or whoever, what are the policies that have led to this? And are there any benefits to having restricted the production of coal, oil, and gas? I don't think there are any benefits. And I think the cause is the restriction. And so what we had was, and we've had this anti-fossil fuel movement that said, don't invest in fossil fuels. Don't produce them. Don't build the transportation infrastructure. And then we had, and so that was going on. And then we had a pandemic where demand for fossil fuel went down. And so a lot of people celebrated and said, oh, well, we don't need fossil fuel anymore. I mean, you had people predicting oil prices will never go above 30 again and all of these different things. And so that empowered even more the anti-fossil fuel political movement as in addition to what's called the ESG movement, which is a quasi-private quasi-governmental thing that's put environmental social governance movement, which in particular is environmental here, which is saying fossil fuels are environmentally bad. So you should eliminate them. So you have drastic declines of investment in fossil fuel. And everyone's saying, this is great. Solar and wind are going to replace them. But what happened is there wasn't really the ability to replace fossil fuels with solar and wind. So what happened is many nations around the world restricted their own ability to supply them, but they still needed them. So demand increased relative to supply, particularly post-pandemic. And we just didn't have the ability to recover, even though we have the physical resource and we have the technical knowledge. So it's just a very simple issue of supply and demand. We artificially restricted supply on the false promise that it would be replaced by solar and wind supply. And it hasn't happened. And it's really tragic. I mean, it's not reported enough, just in terms of what a fertilizer prices skyrocketing mean. What are all these shortages happening around the world? What does it mean? We're talking about starvation. We should never be talking about starvation globally because we're so good at producing food. But we've inhibited our ability. And I hope that the fact that I hope this is an educational moment. I think it's an educational moment for inflation, but I also hope it's an educational moment for energy where people realize this is really important. And we haven't been thinking about it the right way. And we need to think about it in a new way, including looking at the actual benefits and the unique benefits of fossil fuels. Discuss the ESG movement a little bit. Where did it come from and how widespread is it? Because this is something that, over the past year or two, really has kind of burst into the public consciousness. And it seems to be everywhere. Where did it come from? What are its goals? And what are you most worried about from it? So this is a movement I'm very, very worried about. There's actually some good counter signs at the moment. But it's more broadly part of what's called the stakeholder capitalism movement. And so that movement is basically based on a caricature of profit, which is to say that to pursue profit is to be short-range and kind of narrowly focused, like you don't care about the long term, you just want money now. And you don't care about anyone you deal with, you don't care about people, you're just totally indifferent. You want to screw them and you want to screw up your environment. And there's a total caricature. That's not how profit works. How profit works is you're trying to create value in the long term. And you are thinking about long-term considerations. And you are very aware of different wide-ranging considerations that affect you, such as your communities, obviously the people who work at your company, obviously the physical environment you live in. And what the stakeholder thing says is we need to throw out, because profit is so bad, it just makes you short-range and indifferent, instead you need to pursue the stakeholders. That should be your focus. But stakeholders is like the common good. It's this totally meaningless term. And so what it means is in practice, you just pursue whatever goal whoever is defining stakeholder at the moment does. And so ESG is part of this. It in particular came from the UN, but basically their saying is to be a good company, you have to pursue certain environmental, social and governance norms that we have determined to be, quote unquote, in the interest of stakeholders. And it's like really the UN is going to come up with some, what do they know about business, right? So it's these people who know nothing about business imposing all these norms. I would argue in the social realm, they have a lot of anti-individualist actually racist ideas, but in the environmental realm, certainly there's a lot of hostility toward nuclear, which is very revealing and interesting. And there's huge hostility toward fossil fuels saying to be environmentally responsible is to get rid of fossil fuels rapidly. And so all these companies have been pressured into don't invest in fossil fuels, sometimes even don't ensure fossil fuel like power plants, which is really scary. And it's overtaken corporate America, some with support of government, some, I think, a lot of status seeking people. Maybe the biggest mechanism is a lot of us are invested in index funds for good reasons, funds that reflect the market. And we invest in BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. So they control a staggering percentage of the stocks of big companies. And because of laws and because of other things, they then get to vote those. And they are voting them very much in favor of rapid elimination of fossil fuels. So what they're able to do is impose via corporate pressure things that voters will not vote for. So they have become like real kind of overlords based on this. And it is very scary. Fortunately, there is some pushback. But, man, I've been consulting with people in the energy industry for a while. And a few years ago, everyone went from nobody would talk about ESG to everyone would talk about ESG and was just scrambling to have an ESG policy, the sustainability policy. So I find it really scary that these statuses, like I'm scared of what voters can do, but I'm much more scared of what status seeking corporate people who don't need money but want to be seen as do-gooders. That scares me the most. Well, it's an interesting challenge to a kind of limited, broadly libertarian view that the state is the thing you have to worry about. But when you have the biggest mutual fund companies in the world or big corporate holding companies saying, you know what, because of a few people in that saying, I believe in this and I'm going to push that through all of our holdings, that's a lot to deal with, right? Yeah, there was a big issue, but there are a lot of government controls that are fostering this in different kinds of ways in the administration doing this. But yeah, it is the kind of thing certainly where the fact that you believe in freedom does not mean that everything that happens in the society will just automatically be good. And so there is a responsibility to out-compete people and to boycott people. And I was talking, there's a guy you might have heard of him named Vivek Ramaswamy. He wrote the book called Woke Inc. And I just interviewed him for my podcast Power Hour, which should come out. I mean, this is the week of the 18th. It should come out later this week. And he has just announced they're doing a counter kind of ESG thing. They haven't announced exactly what they're doing, but they're really trying to take on these companies and do some of what these companies do. But instead of encouraging them to follow these UN norms, they're saying, no, pursue excellence, be excellent at whatever you're doing. So to me, that's an exciting kind of pro-freedom approach to countering this stuff. Let's talk about nuclear power, which unlike wind and solar has more of a track record in the history. And you can point to at the very least countries like France, where they get a majority of their electricity, if not their energy from nuclear power with an absolutely incredible safety record. People like Michael Schellenberger believe that nuclear is the future for a wide variety of reasons. It is fascinating now to see people who are climate alarmists who are saying we need to get off of fossil fuels. We need to get rid of carbon by 2050 or by 2030, by 2050, by whatever, otherwise we're cooked, still resisting nuclear. How does nuclear power fit into your fossil future? Because in the book, I mean, you have good things to say about it, but it's also, it's not fossil fuel. So what is your attitude towards nuclear and what kind of role should nuclear power play in an energy abundant future? Yeah, so it's all about an energy abundant future. I don't have a fetish for fossil fuels. I know people will think that, but it's like, no, I don't have that. Yeah, I was thinking that you must have had a pet dinosaur growing up or something like that. My whole background is liberal environment, hostility toward fossil fuels, afraid of climate change, that kind of thing. So nuclear is amazing. You think about fossil fuels, part of what makes them remarkable is they're, I talk about this in chapter five, they're naturally stored, naturally concentrated, naturally abundant source of energy. And you don't really have that in any alternative. Yeah, so where does nuclear energy fit into your energy abundant future? So the number one thing is I like that you say energy abundant future because I don't have some sort of fetish toward fossil fuels. Like if you look at my focus, it's all about global human flourishing. How do you have a world where everyone has an opportunity to flourish and then recognizing that you need energy that's low cost, reliable, versatile, and scalable. And it's all about fossil fuels are amazing because they're the one thing that does that now. And for the foreseeable future, I argue that they're the only thing that can do that. And so the reason and you might think, well, nuclear, nuclear is amazing because that is like fossil fuels, it's concentrated. So it can store a lot of energy in a small space. And in fact, it's even more, it's even more concentrated than fossil fuels. Plus it's stored energy. It's incredibly abundant. It's amazing. And I think that if we had a different world without a green movement 40, 50 years ago, we could have a dominantly nuclear power world. I'm not sure about that, but it's possible. But unfortunately, what happened is nuclear in the 70s showed immense promise. It was way cheaper than it is now. And there was every reason to believe it could be made cheaper. So let's say it took four years to make a nuclear plant from beginning to end. Given technology and improvements, it should have gone down to two years. But what happened instead is it went up to 16 years and it can be stopped at any time. A lot of these nuclear plants can just be stopped in their tracks and billions of dollars go up in smoke. So what I argue has happened is nuclear has been essentially criminalized by the free world, at least much of the free world, including the parts of the world, namely the US, where the most innovation you can expect to occur. Okay, France is good, but they have kind of a government controlled thing. Like what you really need is a free market and nuclear. And I think that should be possible. And I argue for that. And I fight for that. I think harder than anyone. But given the state of where nuclear is today, which is it's declining in a lot of the world, it's criminalized. There is no way shape or form. It is going to be a replacement for fossil fuels for electricity, but let alone all the other forms of energy on this crash time table. So I do think that we should be liberating nuclear as quickly as possible. And the connection is a fossil future. One of the great outcomes of a fossil future is it will turn into a nuclear future. But if you try to get rid of a fossil future, you will not have a nuclear future. You will just have a bad future. And there's things like hydroelectric power, which is another substantial source of energy around the world. What are the natural limitations for hydroelectric? Yeah, so it's worth saying nuclear doesn't have these limitations. I mentioned just in passing, it's abundant. I hope I did. So essentially, there's enough of the raw material for it in various forms where you can use it for centuries really, arguably eons to come. Some people argue billions of years, but that doesn't matter, right? Because technology evolves. You don't need something that lasts millions of years. You just need something that lasts hundreds of years. And who knows how technology will evolve. Whereas hydro, why do we use it in certain... It's great in Washington state. It's not great in Nebraska. So it just depends on the topography. You need large amounts of downward flowing water. So that limits where you can actually have it. So it's an amazing thing, but it is limited by location. It also has the disadvantage of... There are a lot of governmental issues with it because it involves these bodies of water. It can involve displacing a lot of people. And there's legitimate concerns about that. And what we hope is in the future, you know, particularly when we have a nuclear future, you don't need to do that. Even if you have... You might do it in regions where you really want to have the dam to prevent flooding and that kind of thing. And it's where actually it's making life better to have the dam and it generates electricity. But maybe there are other regions where you wouldn't want it except for electricity. And then you could have nuclear. You could have fossil fuels. So it's very revealing. The most revealing thing is that the anti-fossil field movement is very anti-hydro as well. So Sierra Club brags about how many dams they shut down. There's a lot of hostility toward it in Africa, which is particularly cruel because there are a lot of hydro resources there and a lot of poverty. And again, I just keep arguing that the anti-fossil field movement is not really interested in energy. Yeah. Just briefly touch on the global politics of the anti-energy movement or the anti-fossil fuel because there does seem to be... It's not without reservation or exception, but it does seem to be coming mostly from the wealthier north, Western Europe, North America. And it has a lot to say about countries that are in a state of development or a state of absolute poverty either in the global south or in places like China and India. Is that a critique that is worth recognizing? That what this really is about wealthy people who will always be able to heat not just their main residents but their jet planes and their vacation homes all over the world at the expense of poorer people. Well, they're not exactly heating the homes and fueling the jets at the expense of poorer people. What they're really doing is getting approval at cocktail parties at the expense of poorer people, which I would argue is worse. Both are bad, but it's worse. I think the main thing that's worth pointing out is just how important energy is and how cruel it is to deprive anyone of it, but let alone people who have so little opportunity. And you see this in the investment world where it's easiest. It's always easiest to stop something new versus uproot something old. That's why I say there's opposition. You can ban fracking a lot more easily than you can ban drilling as such. It's why nuclear has been so opposed because the anti-impact environmental movement emerged near the beginning of nuclear. So they couldn't get rid of fossil fuels, but they could stop this relatively new thing. And you see this very cruelly with politics and with investment, with the developing world, or what I call the unempowered world, where there's been a focus on let's not have any new coal plants in Africa. A lot of the announcements that you get start off with, let's not do fossil fuel stuff in the poorest places in the world because they can get away with that. But it's so cruel. What we should be telling poorer people is do whatever you can. Whatever can lift you out of poverty, you do that because we talk about a climate crisis, which is ridiculous because we're safer from climate than ever. But people in the world every day are experiencing a life crisis by our standards. If we woke up in most of the world today, we would consider it a catastrophe, almost everyone in the wealthy world. And so you always need to keep in mind, for example, there are 5 billion people making less than $10 a day. The most of the world is in a state that you regard as a crisis. And energy is needed to get them out of that. And it is so cruel to oppose that. And it's exciting to me that we're starting to see more people say this. I think it's another argument that I've popularized that I'm proud of that. And actually, we might talk about the Washington Post. That's what they went after me on non-coincidentally. But I'm getting a lot more allies in those places, you know, particularly in a bunch of parts of Africa and from India, getting new people who are saying, this is totally wrong and explicitly using my arguments, which is really cool. Yeah, let's talk, let's do a little bit of biography here. You were born in 1980 and you grew up in the D.C. area in Chevy Chase, Maryland, which is one of the wealthiest Tonya suburbs in America. What did your parents do? And how did your upbringing, you know, how did it coming out of that milieu affect you, do you think? So, I mean, my mom was a securities lawyer and just recently retired. So she's kind of, she, at one point worked at the SEC for a long time. So this is all a rebellion against your parents for being instruments of the state? No, I didn't think of it. And my dad, well, talking about instruments of the state, so my dad has worked at the Defense Department for almost my entire life. But he works in something called the Office of Net Assessment, which is a pretty well-regarded agency that kind of projects the future of different countries and that kind of thing. The interesting thing about my upbringing is my parents were very, they're friends with a lot of political people and so I was around a lot of political people, but I hated politics and to their credit, my parents didn't force any politics on me. And so I was very, my whole background is math, science, engineering, like that's what I went to one of the top schools in the country for that kind of thing. You went to Duke as an undergrad, right? Well, yeah, yeah. But before there was a school called Montgomery Blair, which is like the top hundred kids in math and science in Montgomery County, Maryland, which is a big county. And so that's where I got exposed to really, really smart kids. And but that was, I'm just saying that because that was my interest. I wasn't at all interested in the humanities, but then I basically decided I'm tired of hearing all these people talk about politics. There must be logical answers. And I just decided I'm going to figure this out after totally spurning it. All I used to care about was being an athlete. And then when I realized I wasn't going to be a professional athlete, I wanted to be a billionaire. I liked practical things. I didn't like ideas. What sports did you play? Well, the problem was there was no sport I was actually good at. So if you look at my essays as a kid, I wanted to be a professional baseball player and I was like a below average baseball player. I did jiu-jitsu now, so I'm decent at that. But yeah, no, this was clearly not going to happen. But the thing is I loved like physical, practical things. And I did not like intellectual things. And it was so hard for me emotionally to decide to become a writer and intellectual, but I just loved it so much. So it's the opposite of, oh, I dreamed of becoming a writer and people like that was my nightmare. What I became. But now I like it because I just I love ideas and I think they're very practical. And you went to Duke. What did you study there? So I started off in computer science and then midway through, I finally came to terms with the fact that I loved ideas. I loved philosophy. So I decided I'm going to become a practical philosopher. And I told my computer science advisor this, and he's like, this is insane. You should do software. You shouldn't do this. I'm like, I'm never programming again. And yeah, I decided just to become a writer and I spent my second half of college just writing as much as I could and learning to speak because it's terrified of speaking in front of people, basically like training myself to become somebody who could make money on the market because I hated academia. I did not want to go to graduate school and philosophy or anything else. So fortunately, it all worked out really well in the end, but it was a very unconventional plan. When did you encounter Ayn Rand? You've mentioned her a couple of times today. Ayn Rand is a big figure. You're affiliated with a couple of Ayn Rand organizations or related organizations. Who is Ayn Rand to you? So I first heard about Ayn Rand when I was 16 and I kind of liked it, but I didn't look into it. And then when I was 18, I met some people at Duke who, by then, even I was pretty good at arguing and they were the only people who could really beat me in arguments, at least by my own beliefs. And so I basically, I mean, then it's pretty, I was trying to avoid studying for physics one day and I read letters of Ayn Rand. That's actually the first thing of hers I read and I read a letter to Barry Goldwater and she made this point that it's wrong to think of yourself as a conservative because the United States is revolutionary. And it was really like, I don't know if she's the board progressive, probably not. But the idea was like, this is a radically different country. So you shouldn't think of believing in this country as conservative. And I just thought, that's an amazing argument. And then I was so fascinated. She just wrote in a way and I just thought, I just thought this person has a different level than the people I like. And I liked some good people. I liked Thomas Sowell. I liked a lot of other people. For me, she was at a different level. I still believe that. So then I just read Atlas Shrugged and then that was, I was in love with that. And like a lot of other people, I read everything, but I think maybe one difference I had is I always believed it was a huge competitive advantage because I really loved her mind and I thought she was very underappreciated. And so I disproportionately studied Objectivist Philosophy and I have no doubt in my mind it's helped me do a lot of what I've done in energy and I've explicitly worked with Objectivist philosophers. Yeah. Do you consider yourself an Objectivist? Is that how you define yourself? I do, but it's, I don't think people know what that means. So it's not that useful thing. What does it mean for you? Here's an opportunity to kind of define it for people. Well, you need to talk about the whole philosophy. And it's someone who's in essential agreement with the philosophy and lives by it. But I think it's, so it's the moral purpose of your life is your own happiness. That's the right purpose for everyone. You need to achieve that being guided by your reasoning mind and that you believe in a world of political freedom is necessary to achieve that. And so part of it is believing that one part of it I don't think people get is the optimism of it. Ayn Rand's view is that she couldn't have come up with her ideas before the industrial revolution because what the industrial revolution really proved is that human beings are productive and that we can have amazing lives individually in harmony with one another. And so she has a conception of self-interest or selfishness, but part of what underlies that is that we can all pursue our own happiness and it can work really, really well. And once you view the world that way, then the idea of sacrificing for everyone else doesn't make too much sense versus if you're in a world of scarcity, then you think, yeah, we all got to sacrifice to each other because if one person pursues their interest, then it's at the expense of others. If you view us as predators or parasites, but if you view us as producers, you have this amazing world where like, I can do what I want. You can do what you want. We allow each other freedom of action. And we live in this abundant world. I still think the world has not at all caught up to this. We still have this very scarcity mindset. Oh, now more than ever, right? Yeah, I love her stuff and yeah. Yeah, the scarcity mindset is radically, I mean, it's really made a comeback even in just the past few years, I think. We're talking about scarcity all the time, whereas at least through a good chunk of the 90s, we were talking about abundance really in a radically different way. Well, also, you notice this is related to this idea of what I call the delicate nurture of you of earth that the earth unimpacted by us is stable, sufficient and safe. So the sufficient is interesting. It's the idea of nature gives us enough resources, but not too much. So if we consume too much, we're going to run out. That's one part of it, but there's also the safe, the idea that it's safe, but if we disrupt it, it's going to become unsafe. And you can see that's really the dominant thread right now is that we're going to anger the climate and the climate is going to punish us with all of this danger versus nature was already super dangerous. We need to develop mastery abilities and the more mastery abilities we have, whatever nature throws at us or whatever we throw at ourselves, we can deal with it really well. And it's kind of a heroic, it's a Promethean enterprise in a way, not that we're being wantonly destructive, but that whatever comes at us, we will figure it out. We will steal fire and create a world where we are as gods. And then part of it is viewing the earth as a place we've made a lot better. And that's a big focus of mine and in my work in fossil future in particular. Chapter four is called Our Unnaturally Liveable Fossil Fueled World. And it's really trying to break this delicate nurture view of the world and really say so much of what you love about the world, including your ability to enjoy nature, is because of these amazing machines that are powered by this amazing fuel. And without that, the world is not a place you would like to live in very much. While you were at Duke, you wrote for a, I guess, usually called a conservative student newspaper. And there was an article in the Washington Post that was originally going to come out in one form in the Washington Post that looked at a bunch of those writings, which, and the way they characterized it was that it was kind of a white supremacist view or first world view that the West is the best. The West is, for kind of crypto-racist reasons, superior to all other cultures in the world, particularly in Africa, you mounted a preemptive campaign against that article. It was tied to your book coming out and about the rising influence you have. So like in a way, this is exactly the type of article you want as your book is coming out, something that is touting your influence, even if it's seeing it in a negative way. You mounted a campaign against that. And kind of, I mean, you put out a couple of hours worth of video material where you kind of went through. You kind of constructed the article based on the fact checking and the interactions that you had had with people. And as a result, the article that came out is still critical of you, but it really is a different story than it would have been. So I know a lot of people in the media were very interested in this. And depending on where they stand on a lot of different things having to do with politics and ideology, but also legacy media versus new media, there are a lot of different responses. But what, you know, first, the articles that were kind of questioned had statements in it like, you know, if you think all cultures are equal, think about living in New York versus Chad. What were you going with in these kinds of stories? Let's talk about that. And then we'll talk about the kind of interaction with media, which I thought is very fascinating and interesting and, you know, a real success on your part. But, you know, what were you getting at as a undergraduate college student talking about this kind of cultural difference? So as I've indicated, I've, you know, been an individualist for a long time, certainly since I was a teenager. And so, you know, a key element of that is believing in freedom. And, but you see believe in individualism, which is that individuals matter the most and that they, you know, they flourish and thrive in free societies. And part of believing in that is believing that this is right in a universal way. That is, it's certainly not tied to a certain geographical region. And it's certainly not tied to a skin color, right? It's the idea about inherent in human beings. This is the right way to live and have societies. And so I've been, I feel, given that view, I feel very fortunate to be born in the United States of America and more broadly in what you can call Western civilization. And it's been a big passion of mine to talk about how more people should adopt these views in different places around the world, you know, regardless of skin color, but in different places around the world tend to have different concentrations of different skin colors than we have here. And so when I talk about something like compare, leave aside, I communicate things differently in college than I do now, but compared New York to being in Chad, the idea is, yes, Chad needs more individualism and freedom. That is absolutely in my view, because I think I want to be, I would want to live there. And I think every human being, if they, at least most, would want that. And so I'm arguing this is a superior idea. And this is the superior idea. And I made this very, very clear. You could look at the most accessible things I wrote in college, we're in the Duke student newspaper called The Chronicle. And I had an article called judging cultures is not racism. And I made 100% clear the difference between culture, which is about ideas and racism, which is about a superficial meaningless characteristic, namely skin color. I don't even like to call it race, because I think that's even misleading. So my views were totally known here. So and those are my views that I do believe that, that these are universal norms for every human being. And I would like to see them spread around the world and absolutely believe some cultures are better than others. And I always use the example if you don't believe that, then you believe that Nazi Germany under Hitler is the same as the United States today. And I don't think that's defensible view. Right. So, you know, you, you realize that the Washington Post was essentially doing a hit piece on you. Well, they sent an outline that called me a racist. Yeah. So which had quotes with me being called racist. So it wasn't a hard thing to realize. So, you know, walk through the steps of, you know, how you, you, you know, you took to this alternative media platform, Twitter, basically, I mean, also YouTube and things like that to get your message out. How did you put that together? And are you happy with the results? So the first thing was, I didn't know what to do when this happened. I woke up on Monday morning having a really good plan for the week. And then, you know, you get a note from your publicist saying, Hey, the Washington Post is doing this piece. And you look at it, they send an outline. And it involves you being called a racist, repeatedly. Like that is not a, and I know a lot about persuasion. The Washington Post, one of the most powerful media institutions in the world, running a piece calling me a racist, which is not only false. It is unbelievably, that's the most damaging thing essentially you can do to somebody. What is that going to mean? What are they going to say after that? Well, they're going to publish this piece. They'll circulate the hell out of it. They'll pressure my publisher to pull the book, even if the publisher doesn't do that, which I don't think they would have. But the retailers can say that, right? You get all sorts of people messaging Amazon, don't do this racist book, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I knew that if I didn't comment, they just say, we reached out to Alex, except I didn't have a comment. So then I'm a racist, right? And if I did comment, they would ignore it or they'd mangle it. And so I thought the only thing I can do is I can do a preemptive public comment, or I tell the whole story. Because if I tell the whole story, including every word that they're going to try to use against me that I wrote in college, some, which I think is none of which is racist at all, but some of is not the way I would say things now, given that I'm almost 42 versus when I was 18 and 19. I'm just going to give the whole story. So it's 100% clear that the story is not Alex Epstein revealed as a racist because Alex Epstein is an individualist. The story is the Washington Post is trying to cancel Alex Epstein and Fossil Future based on false racism accusations. And to tell that story took a little while. So I made this hour long, it's been about eight hours. I went through every word of those things. And I put together this, I think it's kind of a masterpiece. It was like a weird use of my abilities to put together this thing, but it was an hour long and it was really persuasive. And I think everyone who watched it thought this is crazy what's happening. And fortunately, I happen to know a lot of influential people. So I messaged them. And one person is my friend, Michael Shalomberger running now for governor of California. And he saw this and he didn't see the whole thing, but he just saw a little bit of it. And he happened to be going on a little thing called the Joe Rogan experience that day. And so he mentioned that and that helped a lot. And you know, they're talking about the story and so far as they knew it at the time. And a lot of other people like Scott Adams of Dilbert and Persuasion fame spread it. And so then they delayed the piece by a week and then they took, and then it was 90% sanitized. It was still pretty bad. I mean, some people said, some people said, oh, this is great. This actually turned into a puff piece. I don't agree with that at all. But no, there are no mentions of racism. And it wasn't anywhere near the power. All of its cancellation power was destroyed. So the lesson I take is if you're the victim of an unjust cancellation, it's very relevant that I thought I was in the right 100%. You should preemptively publicly comment, and then new media infrastructure of social media enables you to do that in a way that you did not have the option certainly 20 years ago. Yeah. No, I think I would hope, you know, I circulated your work because I thought it was interesting and I also thought it was legitimate. But I would hope that anybody, regardless of the content of this, would look at that equation of what's going on and the way that you respond it and see this is pretty great. This is, it's pretty good when an individual can talk back to a major institution and really have an impact. So for me. And one thing is the institution, one notable thing is, so, and I would advise this when you're doing it, you should always call for what you think is the just action, because if they're trying to cancel me, they're going to say, hey, pull this book, right? So my actions were, I said, and I didn't think they would do them or I thought it's very optimistic. But I said, you should fire this journalist, which I absolutely believe you cannot do this to people. Because again, they're trying to dig up stuff from 20 plus years ago. Like, it's an attempt to destroy me. It's not an attempt to understand me. It's totally an appropriate way to deal with one of the world's leading energy authors coming out with a new book. You're the climate reporter at the Washington Post. And this is not an acceptable way to respond at all. And so I thought that the person should be fired. The post as an institution owed me an apology and that they should commit to reforming. So I think that's part of the power of it. They didn't do any of those things. Right. But it's really important to have an action. And what they did do, which was notable and insane and stupid was they responded by accusing me of online harassment of the author. Yeah. And you look at my sub stack, alecsepstein.substack.com, you scroll down. There are these letters. People wrote such eloquent, thoughtful letters to the Washington Post about this. People who knew me, people like from Africa, people like so many people said this is unjust. The Washington Post, my knowledge, did not respond to one of them. All they did was they publicly smeared all of us by, I think, the managing editor saying, like, you're harassing this person for a story that isn't even out, even though I had an outline with quotes about me being a racist. And nobody found this plausible except the climate journalism community. This to me was the most revealing is you had about 10 prominent climate journalists all say, Maxine Jaws Allow the Post reporter has been subject to baseless attacks. I made a one hour video with all primary sources. They wouldn't even watch it and they called it baseless attacks. So to me, they did me a huge favor by proving that the climate journalist establishment is corrupt, which I painstakingly expose in my book, but they just proved it for me because they can't even report on a simple cut and dried story where a guy gives an hour of evidence and you call it a baseless accusation. You run the Center for Industrial Progress, a for-profit think tank. What do you do there? So the main idea behind calling it that was there needed to be a positive alternative to the green movement. So before that, I worked at the Imran Institute from 2004 to 2011. I got really interested in energy in 2007. And by 2011, I thought there really needs to be a dedicated group that's offering a positive alternative to this idea that we should be eliminating our impact on the world. And so at the time, I liked Industrial Progress. Now I talk more about global human flourishing, but it's essentially a company that's, and maybe it should be called the Center for Energy Progress because we're so focused on energy, but we're really trying to fight for energy clarity, pro-human thinking on energy and energy freedom around the world. You have a small staff and they help with all my stuff. And one of our major projects is called Energy Talking Points, which people can see for free at energytalkingpoints.com. And we actually work with over 100 offices. So in the last two years, I've gotten into politics and I work with over 100 major offices, helping them with messaging. And I think you're starting to see some better messaging from politicians. And I think we'll see some better policies, particularly if Congress turns over in the next couple of years. You get paid by energy companies or you speak at energy companies and things like that. Do you think that undercuts the efficacy of your message at all? So I'm glad you raised this now. I get this question all the time and I realize I've answered it, but I should just put it in writing. So I wrote, if you go to alexepstein.substack.com, there's an article that just has all of the details about this. But the short version of this is I came up with my views and started articulating them when I didn't even know anyone in the industry. And I have been extremely, extremely poor having these ideas. But I've always believed that the fossil fuel industry is good and I wanted a way to work with them. But I wanted a way to work with them where I had total independence. And so my whole career, I've been architecting things that way. So the main way I did this is historically, I would just charge people for speeches and for advice, but they would never fund any of my public project. So that was one way I did that. A few years ago, I decided to change that because I was finding I was doing too much behind the scenes consulting, which I didn't like and didn't find effective. So then I created a vehicle and part this energy talking points thing where people could contribute, but it was a large number of relatively small contributions. And they very explicitly had no editorial control. So I would say if you don't believe I'm sincere and you read my stuff and see me speak, I think most people do. So it doesn't actually come up that much. It's more of a talking point for people who can't refute me. But if you want all the details, look at that article. But yeah, I think I have, I don't know of five people who have more financial independence than I do in this world, in the world of ideas. Do you think the Republican Party, as an institution, is better for energy policy? And are they committed to principles or are they, it's just that right now, for a variety of reasons, they would be, they're the party that you find most amenable to your ideas. So I wish I could work with more parties. Unfortunately, Democrats today, for a bunch of reasons are super hostile to fossil fuels. Like one example that I found disappointing was this build back better legislation that's happily collapsed. But you know, the vast, I mean, I think only one Democrat in the house voted against an eye regard. This is incredibly anti energy. It's very disappointed by some offices that I had talked to who are Democrats who still supported build back better, seemingly without qualms. So right now, I mostly work with Republicans just because they're much more pro energy. And in terms of the principal thing, I think when you deal with elected officials, there's always this tension between like what they think is ideal and what they think will get them elected. And my goal is to always make what's ideal more persuasive than what's not ideal. So I only give, I'm very explicit with everyone I work with, I only share with you pro freedom policies. You can do whatever you want, but I will only share with you pro freedom policies. Same thing with people who contribute. Again, they have no editorial control. I'll tell them like, you can do whatever you want, you're on business. But like I am, if you want something that irrationally favors natural gas in some context where I don't think that's right, that's too bad. I'm not going to do that. And with politicians, so for example, you have some Republicans talking now about different carbon taxes such as an import carbon tax that they call a border fee. And I'll say to them explicitly like, do not do this, I will absolutely not help you with this under any circumstances. And in fact, I will fight you publicly on this. And, you know, they're not paying me, they're just, they're just there because they find it useful. And so, but I do, there are a lot of people who want to do the right thing and don't think it's practical. And so I try to bridge that gap for them. Right. Do you just briefly on the issue of subsidies, lots of different energy forms get different levels of subsidies? Could you explain I, you know, I hear this a lot that, you know, oil and gas are massively subsidized. And without those subsidies, there would be more of a level playing field. I know that obviously, alternative fuels or renewable fuels and whatnot get massive subsidies, something like the nuclear power industry is like so heavily regulated by the government, whether they're getting subsidies per se or not, it's, you know, it's hard to talk about a free market. Or is oil and gas massively subsidized directly or indirectly? And how does that stock up to, you know, alternative fuels? So in the traditional, and I would say proper definition of subsidies, solar and wind are vastly, vastly subsidized. And if you want to see the data from Energy Information Administration at energytalkingpoints.com, just search subsidies and all the numbers will be there. So basically in terms of actually giving companies money to do something, that those subsidies are like 10x or more for solar and wind. This is just a fact. So when you hear about these claims of subsidies, there are two categories that don't really mean anything. And in this argument of, oh, they would be super competitive. One is poor countries subsidizing fuel for their citizens. So, you know, you could say in the Middle East, let's say Saudi Arabia, the equivalent subsidizes fuel for their citizens. Okay. We talk about whether that's a good idea or not. But that is not the reason why we're using oil in the US versus other people. It's basically saying, hey, this we think this is really valuable for whatever reason, including we want to stay in power. And therefore, we're giving this as welfare. But it's not that, oh, solar would be super cheap. It's that nothing is affordable. And that we're going to make the least cost thing a little bit more affordable to people because it's still not affordable. So that's just a welfare thing. The other thing that more relates to my work is the argument that the negative externalities of fossil fuels are subsidies. And I think this is a big, a bad mixture of categories. But essentially, what they'll do is they'll say, well, I calculate that the cost of climate change is $5 trillion a year. Therefore, some fossil fuels are subsidized $5 trillion. I think one of the best things about fossil future, by the way, chapter four, I think has in my view, the best discussion of this externality issue that I've, I've ever seen, including some new points, but the basic points here are one, those calculations are crazy because we're safer from climate than ever. Two is all these arguments ignore all the positive externalities of fossil fuels, which are huge because what energy does among other things is it frees up time. So anytime you have lower cost energy, you have a lot more time in the world that leads to innovation and that leads to things like the internet. So if you're going to be calculating externalities, you need to look at the positives. And then the other thing is these externality arguments have this false view that the price of something is somehow some perfect measure of the value. Whereas often you have things at the same price on the market where one is much more valuable than another, but because of the way pricing works, you pay a lower, you pay the same price for both. So for example, like a gallon of oil or several gallons of oil to save your life cost the same on the market as a Barbie doll. But that could be worth $500,000 to you if you have it because it saves your life. So this is, you can read the book for more, but these externality things are not at all scientific, most obviously because they ignore the positive externalities, but also they have this false view of prices as perfect utilitarian measures. Alex Epstein, final question. Are you optimistic about the future? And if so, why or why not? I'd say I'm unusually optimistic about the persuadability of people, about the truth. That's a big motivation of mine. I'm very interested in intellectual persuasion. How do you take somebody who expects to disagree with what you think is true and how do you move them from point A to point B? It's part of the reason why I spent three years working on a new book is because I had this confidence that I could explain it better. And every time I can explain something better, I get a better result. And I haven't even seen diminishing returns in that. In some ways, it can be actually above super, it can be what's called the super linear function, which the greenhouse effect is fortunately not. So, you know, I think what we have is we've got this anti fossil fuel movement that's making the world a lot worse, but we have more pro fossil fuel people who are thinking about it in a rational way, looking at benefits and side effects. And I'd say me, Schellenberger, Lomborg, Coonan, Matt Ridley, Robert Price. Now, we don't agree on a lot of stuff, but I think there's a general movement. I think that's getting traction. I think the other side doesn't have a response. I think, you know, I think I've come up with a new level of making that argument with fossil future. And we happen to be in a crisis that's pretty clearly caused by the other side. And I think that is really leading to an openness to new ideas. So I think this is a great time right now to get armed to learn about these things. And it can be just like in the 70s, the energy crisis led to some better energy policies, the inflation crisis led to better financial policies. I think we can have the same, but it's not guaranteed. You can have a crisis that's misinterpreted and things get worse. But there is the opportunity for things to get better. So things are going to probably get worse in a bunch of ways for the next couple months. And that's tragic. We need to point out that tragedy. We need to at least make something good come out of it by promoting the truth. So I'm very excited that this moment in time, I get the chance to make that case to a lot of people when their minds are open. So I am optimistic. We can do a lot. And the other thing is, you know, you live in an, even when things get bad in today's world, you live in an amazing world. And you shouldn't, you shouldn't forget that because whatever has happened in the past today is the best time to be alive. Yeah. All right. We're going to leave it there. I've been talking with Alex Epstein, the author most recently of Fossil Future, why global human flourishing requires more oil, coal and natural gas, not less. Alex, thanks so much. Thank you.