The Great Climate Con | Alex Epstein | EP 312

So the Hebrews created history as we know it. You don't get away with anything. And so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally, and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost. You will pay the piper; it's going to call you out of that slavery into freedom, even if that pulls you into the desert. And we're going to see that there's something else going on here that is far more cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine. The highest ethical spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of freedom against tyranny.

I want villains to get punished, but do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price? That's such a Christian question. You're optimizing for minimal impact, and I think that is really the core of the modern environmental movement. It's not this just blanket collective desire for as much life as possible, and we're somehow getting in the way of that. It's specifically against us that when they discovered the greenhouse effect, they said this is going to, on its own, make the earth a much more lush place. You know, they speculated like the fruits are going to be bigger and everything is going to be lush because we're going to have more farmland and more biological...

And it's kind of obvious; if you have a warmer world with more CO2, it's a more tropical world with more life; it's a more green world in the life sense of green. And yet, the green movement hates it because we caused it. So they can see no good in anything we caused, even when it leads to more biological productivity. It's fundamentally an anti-human movement, not a pro-life of any kind movement. The ineluctable conclusion that has to be drawn from that proposition is that any human activity whatsoever is to be regarded as evil, even if it increases total biological flourishing in terms of, like, let's say, the net metric tonnage of biological life on the planet. And so that's also perverse because that is definitely a game that none of us can win. If the a priori rule is no matter what you do, you're evil; then the only solution to that is, well, how about a hell of a lot fewer of you?

Thank you. Hello, everyone watching and listening on YouTube or the associated podcast platforms. I have with me today Alex Epstein. I'm looking forward to this discussion. He's a philosopher and energy expert who argues that human flourishing should be the guiding principle and the appropriate metric for our energy and environmental policy and our determination of its progress. He's the author of the new book "Fossil Future," as well as the New York Times bestseller "The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels," which was published in 2014. He's also the creator of energytalkingpoints.com, a source of powerful, well-referenced talking points on energy, environmental, and climate issues.

Epstein began his work in 2011 with the founding of the Center for Industrial Progress, a for-profit think tank offering insights into the world of fossil fuels and fighting back against the mainstream narrative of so-called environmentalism. Widely recognized as a master of persuasion and debate on energy issues, Alex has spoken to dozens of Fortune 500 companies and at dozens of prominent universities, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Duke, his alma mater. He's also a highly sought-after consultant on messaging, working with dozens of major political offices on pro-energy, pro-freedom messaging.

We're here today to talk about the moral necessity of an energy-rich future, one that both must and should rely on the abundant provision of the petro-based fuels so carelessly currently demonized. So welcome to all of you who are watching or listening, and welcome to Alex. So maybe we could just start by having you walk through the book. One of the things I found interesting to begin with was your discussion of the motivations, let's say, of some of the more radical people that are pushing what is purported to be a pro-environment stance, people like Paul Ehrlich, who clearly have an agenda that could be more accurately conceptualized as anti-human, certainly anti-industrial, rather than pro-environment.

And I think that's something that's worthwhile alerting everyone to, especially given the current state of energy price increase in Europe, let's say, and the consequences that's going to have for the poor around the world. Let's start with that, though. You wrote this book in 2014. Let's talk about why you wrote it and how you think your prognostications have fared in what's almost an intervening decade.

Well, I think one thing that's relevant — I'm not sure if you know this, but there's a new book in 2022 called "Fossil Future," which is the successor or replacement to "The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels." So I talk a bunch in that about how the moral case for fossil fuels has fared, and I think in terms of a predictive book, it's not primarily a predictive book, but it has been extremely accurate. Because if you look at what people have said in the last eight or so years, the main narratives have been we're not going to need fossil fuels as much as we used to; they're going to be rapidly replaced by solar and wind primarily, and that climate impact — the climate impact of fossil fuels is going to be increasingly catastrophic.

So we're going to see more and more suffering and death from climate-related disasters. And in the book, I talk about that's not going to happen because, one, fossil fuels will remain uniquely cost-effective, particularly in a world that needs far more energy, which is something that was not stressed in the past and is not stressed enough today. People are starting to realize most of the world doesn't have enough energy, so replacing fossil fuels is almost impossible, given that you're not talking about just replacing it for the people who use it, but for the people who need it. So I've been very vindicated on the continuing cost-effectiveness of fossil fuels.

And then on the climate disaster point, we have documented that climate-related disaster deaths are down 98 percent in the last 100 years, and they've continued to decline. And the basic reason is because, whatever impact we have on climate that is negative, it is far outweighed by our ability to master climate, to neutralize all sorts of climate dangers, and so we're much better off overall climate-wise than we were 50 years ago and certainly 100 years ago.

So with regards to, let's start with the second one there, the climate disaster, so the biophilic types, and so those would be people like Ehrlich, they seem to make the case that metrics that involve human flourishing or even human death aren't relevant because the primary issue is to restore the biosphere to something approximating what it hypothetically was before there were human beings, which is a rather strange notion, all things considered. And so they might object to the fact that you're using the mere decrease in number of deaths, say, associated with climate trouble, with weather events, as a metric because the metric should be something like the purity of the planet.

And so what do you think about that argument? What metric should we be using to determine whether or not a climate emergency actually exists? Well, I definitely think we should be using a human flourishing metric, but in a broad sense. So the climate disaster deaths are not the only aspect of that, but they're a very important aspect. We can also see that damages are flat or down. We can see that life overall is much better, and actually, our ability to preserve the most valuable parts of nature is better. Generally, when you're not dependent on the land and dependent on wood, depending on your local environment for your fuel, and you're wealthy, you can be much better at preserving the parts of nature that you want to preserve.

If you look at places in Africa and Asia, and even now Europe, because they're now energy-poor, like cutting down their forests, it's because they don't have better sources of fuel. So, but I would challenge the idea that Ehrlich is really using this, I think you called it biophilic standard, because if you look at his public rhetoric, he's always appealing to a human flourishing standard. So how did Ehrlich become famous? He became famous through the 1968 book "The Population Bomb," where he's telling human beings not, hey, the planet is going to become more impacted, and that's intrinsically bad. He's saying you're all going to starve.

And his close colleague Sean Holdren, who was Obama's Chief Science Advisor, no, he predicted in the '80s that we'd have up to a billion climate-related disaster deaths from famine by 2020, which has come and gone, and the world is better fed than ever. So what I find is that people who, I think internally, they don't really care about human flourishing, and they're really optimizing for eliminating our impact as much as possible, but they appeal to human flourishing to win over converts. Because if they really said the best possible Earth is the one that would exist had we never existed, and our goal is to eliminate as much human impact as possible as an end in itself, they would not win many converts.

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Okay, so the case that you're making in some sense is that the argument on the radical pro-environmental side actually varies sometimes, so to speak, in secret or behind the scenes, sort of voce, I suppose the argument is made that the planet would be better off if it was returned to some natural and unspoiled condition, but then public-facing the arguments are essentially predicated on the argument that if we don't do something drastic about, let's say, climate change, we're going to cause a radical increase in actual human suffering.

Okay, so that all has to be straightened out conceptually before we, as a species, let's say, can move forward intelligently on this front. I think the most powerful point you made, however, and I think this is where the rubber really hits the road in more modern times, is that even if you use the metrics that are put forward by those who, let's say, oppose the continuing use of fossil fuel, so those would be metrics associated with climate change remediation and environmental improvement, the policies that are designed to drive energy costs upward do nothing at all that isn't counterproductive by their own measurements.

So you pointed out, for example— and this is something that people really need to be alerted to— is that because Europe has taken this absolutely foolish route to rely on wind and solar, which is intermittent at best, one of the things that's happening because of the pressure on liquid natural gas supplies primarily is that there's a tremendous amount of deforestation occurring in Europe at the moment because people have to turn to sources of energy that are actually at hand so that they don't freeze in the dark in the middle of the winter.

And so the thing that I find so appalling about what's happening on the environmental front at the moment is that even by the metrics of the people who are pro-environmental, these policies that are driving energy costs upward are utterly counterproductive. You know, HumanProgress.org has a lovely graph showing the relationship between attention paid to true medium to long-term environmental sustainability and overall wealth. And what you see is that you can get as you make people wealthier, so as you remove them from absolute poverty, their ability and willingness to attend to longer-term environmental issues starts to increase rather than decreasing.

And so this has struck me for— I've known this for at least ten years— that the best pathway forward to a truly sustainable planet, even by the definitions of the environmentalists themselves, is to drive energy costs downward to the point where we can remediate absolute poverty so that people aren't driven to use up damaging and polluting immediately available bio-resources instead of turning to more efficient sources of energy. And you are certainly making that case in that in the 2014 book, which, as you pointed out, you've updated.

So that's the critical issue, right? Even by the metrics of the environmentalists themselves, the policies that we're presently pursuing on the energy front are not only counterproductive environmentally, but they're driving poor people into abject poverty. We're going to see a lot of that in Europe, I think. It depends.

So I think if you take the quote 'environmentalists' as having a kind of pro-human interest in nature and pro-human interest in lack of pollution, this is true. But my belief is that the core of it is the belief that human impact is inherently bad, it's intrinsically immoral, and also the belief is it's inevitably self-destructive. So nature is viewed as this god that if we offend it through our impact is going to punish us.

And it really has this character where doing the wrong thing is going to destroy us. And if you really think about it that way, all their policies make sense, because their policies are really aimed at making human life worse and ultimately reducing the human population. So it is true, you can say, well yeah, aren't you cutting down more trees, aren't you doing this? But they would say, well, if you use, let's say we had sheep-free nuclear energy, which they've actually commented on hypothetically when they thought fusion was possible, I talk about this in "Moral Case" and in "Fossil Future."

The leading environmentalists said this would be the worst thing ever— a totally clean, cheap, abundant source of energy would be the worst thing ever because of what we would do with it. One of the leaders called it like giving an idiot child a machine gun. And what they recognized is that energy is really our ability to do work, which means our ability to impact the Earth. And when we use a lot of energy, we impact the earth a lot.

Now we impact it in a way that's beneficial to us, including we preserve the most valuable parts of nature and we give ourselves the ability to enjoy nature. Nevertheless, it is a very humanized earth, and to the anti-human environmental movement, that is offensive. So that movement is not about a clean environment for us or for us to be able to contemplate polar bears or go on safaris or any of this, it's about a dehumanized earth.

It's the believer, right? We are uniquely bad and we need to get eliminated, right? Well, but the problem with that argument, even if you attempt to give the devil his due let's say, is that it's predicated on the idea that if we pursued policies to decrease our overall energy use and if one of the consequences of those policies was the relatively radical depopulation of the earth, perhaps by radically lowering birth rates, that while that transformation was occurring— depopulation and de-industrialization— things would remain stable enough so that in our new poverty and our hopelessness with regards to the future we wouldn't be devouring the planet while we were dying.

And I think that's a preposterous claim. I don't see any peaceful way forward that's based on compulsion and poverty to reduce the population of the world that isn't going to be absolutely destructive on the energy, on the environment front. And that the idea that if we had more energy we would actually be worse for the planet flies in the face of what we've been discussing already, which is the fact that if people can't turn to cheap and efficient and relatively clean sources of energy— and perhaps liquid natural gas and nuclear would be at the top of that list— then they're going to absolutely 100 percent turn to much dirtier replacements.

And we've already seen that happening. Well, everywhere. I mean, China is building coal-fired plants at a rate that's so rapid that everything the West is doing on the climate amelioration front is absolutely irrelevant. And what has the UK in the last week has already pledged to double its coal imports, and Germany has had to turn to its coal-fired plants to provide backup power because wind and solar has proved not only hyper-expensive but so unreliable that, well, when there's no power... so when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, you have to have backup.

And it's been cold; that’s been brought in as a stopgap. So I just can't see any way, even if you accept the arguments that you just laid forward, you know, that there should be fewer people and that the right planet is one that's characterized by minimal human action—I can't see any way forward to that on the energy poverty front that's not going to be positively counterproductive.

I mean, I agree; I agree. I agree with you in terms of how it plays out, and I think it's important. In general, this is not a scientific movement, and part of it not being a scientific movement is it doesn't really have a long-term strategy for achieving its anti-human goals. It's much more— it has a lot of ritual in it, there’s a lot of just hostility toward— kind of hostility toward anything that has impact, and you just oppose that, and then you assume things are going to get better.

And so people didn't think through what's going to happen when you make energy more expensive, what's going to happen to the forest. They didn't think that through at all or when you oppose nuclear, what are you going to use in its stead? Or when you make energy expensive, what's going to happen in terms of riots? It's just— it's not at all thought through, and I think this might be a lesson for us to have when we contemplate these so-called plans for net zero.

This is a movement that's very much— it has this hostility toward human impact; it opposes it wherever it sees it, and it just has a quality of nihilism to it. And it's not thinking through— it's not thinking through either a dehumanized earth or a human-friendly earth; it's sort of going after anything that has impact. But my argument is we need to switch our hostility toward impact; this view that human impact is bad needs to be challenged. Human impact is good if it makes the earth a better place for human flourishing.

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So, yeah, well, it's a strange issue philosophically because one of the things I wonder about is why this idea that human beings are in some sense antagonistic to the Earth— it's a very peculiar metaphysical assumption, especially for people who are hypothetically biologically minded. Because if we're living creatures, which we clearly are, and if we've evolved in the same manner that other living creatures have evolved, which seems relatively indisputable, then how is it that our very existence is somehow antithetical to the flourishing of the biosphere, given that we're clearly part of the biosphere?

And you see this sort of thing with this idiot assumption, for example, that bears some of the same hallmarks of this kind of quasi-philosophical thinking that before the Europeans came to North America, that the nativists were living somehow in harmony with nature and that the entire biosphere was free of the scars of human interaction. And that's utterly preposterous.

I mean, the Native Americans were incredibly sophisticated agriculturalists, and the Western Plains Indians burned the prairies with con, in constantly, to ensure that there is a plentiful supply of the buffalo that they depended on. And so human beings have been affecting the structure of the biosphere ever since we've been around, and that's for a very long period of time.

And the idea that there was somehow some pristine state of nature before we emerged on the landscape and that there's some moral imperative to return to that strikes me as so incoherent that it's barely comprehensible. And there is something like a hatred for humanity, as far as I can tell, that's lurking underneath this hatred for humanity certainly a hatred for industrialization, and those actually turn out to be the same thing.

I mean, one of the things that's really struck me as incomprehensible over the last few years, especially on the left, is that you have these joint claims being put forward simultaneously on the left, and one is that we're radically pro-environmental, and we're also the philosophical doctrine that is standing up for the poor and oppressed. And I think, okay, well, what happens when those two things are pitted against each other?

And when are they pitted? Well, they're pitted when it comes to discussions about cheap energy, because it's clearly the case, and you outline this in your book quite nicely, that the most effective way of remediating absolute poverty— so lifting people out of the privation that's associated at least with lack of education, but also with starvation itself— is to provide them with cheap energy. Because, as you pointed out, there's no difference between energy and work, and there's no difference between work and productivity, there's no difference between productivity and the eradication of poverty.

And so we are pursuing these expensive energy policies, and hypothetically, we're supposed to benefit the planet, although we're not, but we are definitely dooming people who are already poor to a much more truncated horizon of opportunity and to absolute privation and starvation in many cases. Yes. I think it's really— I mean, there are at least two really interesting issues raised here, so this tension between the alleged concern for poverty and then the quote concern for the environment and then this question of how this bizarre view evolved, you know, because this was not the view of our environment and our impact 100 years ago.

And interestingly, it's not the view of our environment that anyone who lives near nature has. People who live in nature don't worship nature as the superior god that can't be impacted. And I think it's my own understanding of the history, and I really enjoy— there's a book by Ayn Rand called "The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution," and it was written at the time that this was happening. And one of the analyses is basically there's a transition between the old left and the new left where the old left claimed to be for industry, for productivity, for prosperity.

And what happened is that was clearly not achieved by their policies. These communisms led to the devastation of industry, the malfunction of industry, widespread poverty. And Rand said, well, you know, the left basically had a choice: are you going to stay with your anti-capitalism or are you going to embrace capitalism because you really care about industry and productivity? And actually, what they did was they kept their anti-capitalism, and they looked for new reasons to support anti-capitalism.

And in the '60s, they decided on this issue of environment, and it was a convenient issue in a number of ways. One is the pro-capitalism side didn't do a very good job with it, particularly rhetorically. It didn't make the point that well— good environments are made possible by prosperity. So the idea of a good environment in a humanistic way was co-opted by the anti-capitalists who had no right to it whatsoever.

I mean, look at the Soviet Union and an environment. But they owned that value issue, but then they packaged it with this hostility toward human impact as such. And what they really did brilliantly was they took over the schools, so they put in the schools this idea that human impact is bad, and especially the idea that it's inevitably self-destructive because the planet is this delicate nurturer that our impact ruins.

And that has permeated the whole educational system where people think that we inherently are destroyers of the planet. And it has permeated the scientific community. What I call this delicate nurturer dogma is unfortunately pervasive in Earth sciences today. It's a very primitive and bizarre view; it has nothing to do with reality that our impact is inevitably self-destructive.

Actually, our impact has made the Earth much better overall, including safer from climate. But nevertheless, I think it's really— there was initially a real political motivation to spread this, but now we have this irrationalist philosophy that has a mind of its own. Yeah, well, that's— okay, so let's delve into that a little bit because the other thing that I've come to understand more clearly in the last 15 years, let's say, as the data has also become clearer, is that we lifted more people out of poverty in absolute terms and also in relative terms between 2000 and 2015 than we had lifted people out of poverty in the sum total of human endeavor before that.

And it's quite clear that the reason for that was that fewer countries pursued absolutely counterproductive economic policies of the type that were put forward, let's say, by the communists when the Cold War was raging. And so you saw all over the world, including in places like Communist China, that there was a radical move towards something approximating free market and free trade between individuals. And in some countries, that was implemented more effectively than others.

But wherever it was implemented, at least quasi-effectively, people immediately stopped starving. And I'm trying to make a case in relationship to the anti-capitalism, so let's say that you are a genuine classic leftist and you are actually concerned with the poor, especially remediation of absolute poverty, and you're looking at the data and you see that after the Soviet Union collapsed and there were fewer countries turning to communist dogma to formulate their economic policies, and more countries started to develop, started to participate in the broad free market— that we drove poverty down to its lowest level, in absolute numbers or in relative numbers, certainly, than we'd ever seen before in history.

And so then again, we're back to the same issue: if the spread of free market policies remediates absolute poverty, which it clearly does and in a staggeringly rapid manner, then what in the world is driving the anti-capitalist ethos? You know, you said that there's this, there's this underlying metaphor of nature as something like fragile virgin, continually. Yeah, what rendered susceptible to our rat, to our raping and pillaging? So there's a weird metaphor lurking at the bottom of all that; but given the overwhelming data that something approximating free market frees people from absolute poverty, and then conjoining that with the observation that richer people actually care more about the environment, you're left again with this question of what in the world is motivating this?

There's some deep hatred—it's like a deep hatred for humanity itself— but even at the expense of the planet. And so I still struggle with trying to comprehend that. There's a kind of existential guilt there for the crime of existence itself; it's something like that. I mean, I think one really powerful fact about the increase in prosperity that I draw attention to a lot in "Fossil Future" because I think it's very notable.

So I point out, I was born in 1980. Since 1980, we've gone from more than four in ten people living on less than two dollars a day, and this is adjusted for inflation, to one in ten. So as you said, this is the greatest alleviation of poverty in human history. Now what's really interesting is if you survey— and this was done in the UK, you might have seen this before— but there’s a survey of college-educated adults in the UK about what has happened to extreme poverty over the past 30 or 40 years.

And this is just an objective documented thing; there's no question. And so what happened is only 12 percent of people thought it got better. Right? 55 percent of people thought it got worse, and the rest thought it stayed the same. And it just shows you the level of miseducation about this issue. And I do think a lot of it is the modern anti-human environmental movement.

Because what they've done is they've taught us that our impact ruins the planet. And so we just assumed that because the world used a lot more fossil fuels, particularly China and India did, which drove much of the increase in prosperity, they just assume that the world is worse. And what I call our knowledge system—so the institutions we rely on for expert knowledge and guidance— they’ve done a totally failed at educating us about how much the world has improved from a human perspective.

And this goes back to my argument that the anti-human environmental movement, they're trying to pretend to be pro-human, so they don't want us to know that the Earth is a much better place than ever to live. They don't want us to know that climate disaster deaths are way down. They don't want us to know about the decline in extreme poverty, because it totally challenges their narrative that impact in general and fossil fuels in particular are bad.

And if we recognized how vital fossil fuels are, then we would be really afraid of these proposals to get rid of fossil fuels in the next 27 years in a world that needs far more energy. And unfortunately, we're starting to realize this involuntarily because these policies just implemented a one percent— these anti-fossil fuel policies just implemented a one percent success rate in the anti-fossil fuel movement’s view have already led to a global energy crisis.

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Right, right. Well, you said that the planet is getting better, let’s say, from a human perspective. And so we've looked at metrics like the radical decrease in absolute privation, but we can turn our attention momentarily to the evidence that, in many ways— and somewhat paradoxically and perversely—the planet actually seems to be doing better from the natural perspective too.

Now, I have been concerned about, I have believed for a long time that one of our focal concerns might be on the environmental front, might appropriately be something like remediation of misuse of oceanic resources. Because I think we've done a pretty cataclysmic job of protecting our, especially our coastal lands and the shelf environments just offshore of the continents where pretty much all the fish are. I think we've done a catastrophic job of managing that. And there are genuine environmental problems, that I think sensible people should take into account.

But, you know, I was looking at a graph this week, and I've known about this phenomenon for quite a while, that again in the last 15 years, a surface area totaling 15 percent of the entire planet has greened. I mean that's an area that's larger than the continental United States! And it's— so, let’s walk through that for a minute. So just so everyone who’s listening is clear, in the last 15 years, the planet has not got less green; it's got more green!

And not only a little bit more green, stunningly more green, 15 percent in essentially in 15 years, and that's an area bigger than the continental United States. And that's happened pretty much everywhere in the world. And then you might say, well, where is that happening? And perversely and contrary to all predictions, it's happening in the drier areas of the planet, especially in semi-arid areas. And here's the reason…

So plants have to breathe, and to breathe they have to open pores on their surface. And the problem for plants when they breathe with these pores is that they also allow water to evaporate from their internal structures. And so the less carbon dioxide in the air, the more the plants have to open their pores, and that means the more susceptible they are to drying out. And that means that they struggle to exist in semi-arid areas.

Now what's happened as a consequence of increased carbon dioxide production is that plants can breathe easier, and so they don’t have to open their pores to the same degree. And what's that— what that has meant is that the very desert areas, at least the semi-arid areas, that the climate apocalypse were claiming would expand and spread, so the desertification of the world, the exact opposite has happened!

And the Sahara Desert, for example, has shrunk to quite a stunning degree. And not only is the planet 15 percent greener than it was in 2000, but there are more trees in the northern hemisphere than there were a hundred years ago. And as well as the planet greening. And so you can think about that as a victory on the objective front for the natural world! At the same time, the planet has greened because it's easier for plants to survive, our food crops have become much more productive for exactly the same reasons.

And so as carbon dioxide output has increased, the planet has got— not only has the planet got greener, it's got greener in the driest areas, which is absolutely stunning and remarkable. And one of the consequences of that increased greening is that our agricultural production has become not less efficient but much more efficient.

And so I’m really wrestling with how to conceptualize that particular— I just thought of an idea; I just thought of an idea I’ve never thought of this before, so we’re just trying it right now. But I think maybe we can think of three conceptions of the earth which capture everything we’re talking about.

So my primary conception is evaluating the Earth from the perspective of human flourishing. How hospitable to human beings is it? And this includes like a lush green beautiful world for us to enjoy, for many reasons you've talked about. But then the second one could be looking at the Earth in terms of just pure biological productivity— so just not even focusing on humans, just how much life is on the planet.

And this captures what you just mentioned with rising CO2 levels, making a greener planet. But then the third one, and I think this is really the core of the modern environmental movement, is— and this is an important distinction— is an unimpacted planet. So you're not optimizing for biological productivity, you're optimizing for minimal human impact.

And I think that is really the core of the modern environmental movement! It's not this just blanket collective desire for as much life as possible, and we’re somehow getting in the way of that; it's specifically against us. And I think you brought up the perfect example, which is the climate catastrophe movement’s total non-interest in kind of the obvious biological productivity benefits of more CO2.

And this was not shocking or stunning; this is exactly what was predicted by the people who discovered the greenhouse effect. When they discovered the greenhouse effect, they said this is going to, on its own, make the earth a much more lush place— they, you know, they speculated like the fruits are going to be bigger and everything is going to be lush because we're going to have more farmland and more biological.

And it's kind of obvious; if you have a warmer world with more CO2, it's a more tropical world with more life; it's a more green world in the life sense of green! And yet the green movement hates it because we caused it, so they can see no good in anything we caused, even when it leads to more biological productivity.

So I think what you’re bringing up really shows it’s fundamentally an anti-human movement, not a pro-life of any kind. Right, right. Okay, but let's talk about that idea of impact. It's like, well, what is this hypothetical perfect world that exists statically that would be pristine and morally valuable in the absence of human beings?

I mean, the biosphere is a dynamic place, obviously, over any time scale, and there's shift in what constitutes quote the environment. There seems to be this presumption that at some point in the past, when there was minimal human activity, the Earth was somehow optimized in the biological but also the moral sense, and that any change in that whatsoever, in any direction— hence climate change, let's say— any change in that whatsoever is to be regarded axiomatically as evil.

But what that essentially means, as far as I can tell, the ineluctable conclusion that has to be drawn from that proposition is that any human activity whatsoever is to be regarded as evil. On the face of it, it doesn't matter what it does, even if it increases total biological flourishing in terms of, like, let's say, the net metric tonnage of biological life on the planet. And so that's also perverse, because that is definitely a game that none of us can win.

If the a priori rule is no matter what you do, you're evil, then the only solution to that is, well, how about a hell of a lot fewer of you? But then you say, well, what's that supposed to serve? Because if what we're doing now is actually making the planet more green— and I’m saying that very carefully because I know that that's not a sufficient metric—I am very concerned with issues, let's say, or conscious of issues that are relevant like the potential loss of a diversity of biodiversity and also the overfishing of the oceans, let's say.

So even although the planet is becoming greener, that doesn't mean that there are no mistakes we're making on the environmental front. But those mistakes have to be differentiated out, and they're all addressable. And you know, as we get richer too and we can do more with less, and our agriculture becomes more efficient, if we can manage that, that also means even by the standards of the environmentalists themselves that we'll be able to set aside reasonably large tracts of land and water to maintain them in something approximating a pristine and untouched state.

I mean, that's certainly something that should be done on the oceanic management front. I mean, the data that I know suggests that if we set aside a certain percentage of the coastal area as marine protected areas, and that might not be the most efficient way to manage the oceans, but it's not bad that we'll reap the benefits of having untouched nature so to speak, which is an aesthetic and economic and environmental good, but we'll also be able to replenish the oceans in a manner that would be economically productive.

And so, well, like why can't— why the hell can't we have our cake and eat it too? That is we can help people become rich with the provision of plentiful energy, and then we can put aside tracts of the world so that they're relatively untouched so that biology can do its thing. And like what the hell is the problem with that? Precisely—well it—it’s—so I think you're pointing to something really good and something really bad. Something really good is why my new book is called "Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas, Not Less."

But part of it— it does talk about we can, you know, we can increase all of these biological things; we can have a much more lush world; we can enjoy nature much more. This is fundamentally good news. The more energy we have, the more control we have over Earth, and the more we can make everything about it better for our purposes, including aesthetic things that poor people can't possibly be confused by.

But the bad thing here is it's really highlighting the nihilism of this view that human impact is bad. And again, I really think it’s the view is not that we want a lush environment and human beings are getting in the way of that, we want biological productivity, and human beings are getting in the way of. Because as you're pointing out, they are opposing all human impact, including obvious things that make the world better. And so it really is the view that if we did it, it's bad.

And you ask something like, what is it serving? But it's a nihilistic view, so it's not really serving anything. Even when you think about unimpacted nature, it's not this beautiful thing for us to enjoy, it's supposed to be protected from us. So that's really the view, including our enjoyment is of no consequence whatsoever.

And in "Fossil Future" and in "Moral Case," I have a lot of quotes from the leaders where they'll occasionally let this slip out, where one guy, for example, who was reviewing Bill McKibben's book "The End of Nature," talks about— you know, like a flourishing biosphere is more important to me than one human or a billion of them.

Yeah, yeah. Let me read that; let me read that— I've got it right here so everybody can hear it. I would ask everyone who's listening to really think about this because this gets to the strikes to the core of the issue as far as I can tell. So for example, this is from your book— in a Los Angeles Times review of "The End of Nature," Kevin's influential book of 25 years ago predicting catastrophic climate change, David M. Graber, research biologist for the National Park Service, wrote this summary of McKibben's message:

“McKibben is a biocentrist and so am I. We are not interested in the utility of a particular species or a free-flowing river or ecosystem to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value to me than another human being, or a billion of them. Human happiness and certainly human fecundity are not as important as a wild and healthy planet.”

Are no social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but that isn’t true. Somewhere along the line, at about a billion years ago, maybe half that, we quit the contract and became a cancer. We had become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil fuel consumption and the third world’s suicidal consumption of landscape until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature.

Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along. You know, I cannot understand how anybody who is positively predisposed to children, let’s might we might say— could read something like that and not be absolutely shocked to their core!

I mean, so let’s walk through the claims. The first claim is an untouched natural landscape of any size, whatever untouched means, is more valuable in and of itself than any individual human being or any group of people, no matter how large the number. Okay, so the implication there is any number of human beings could be sacrificed in order to preserve any geographically demarcated natural zone of any size.

So that's a standard of comparative value. And then the cancer metaphor— well, human beings have deviated from the natural order, whatever that natural order is, whatever our deviation consists of, and we've deviated the same way a cancer deviates. So now the metaphor is human beings equal cancer, and that's a hell of a metaphor because what we do with cancer is strive to eradicate it.

So these metaphors have deep motivational significance. So that’s a little bit on the appalling side, let’s say. And it's grounded in a very narrow Malthusian view of the world, which is that we're something like yeast— cancer, let’s say. And left to our own devices, we'll multiply unchecked until we devour everything and perish, which is a pretty dismal and only vaguely biologically centered view of how human beings conduct themselves because we're not yeast in a bloody petri dish.

We're not yeast, and the world isn't a petri dish, let's put it that way. And then you add to that, though, the closing statement, which is something like those of us who are properly oriented in our moral endeavor in relationship to the non-human world can only sit and pray that the right virus comes along.

So that what? So that we're radically depopulated? To what degree, down to the half a billion people that the world can hypothetically sustain? It's like every single bit of that, to me, reeks of a— of an underlying and barely veiled brutal genocidal impulse.

I agree, and what I want to draw attention to is that this mentality, diluted or not to various degrees, is leading our thinking about what to do about fossil fuels, which is an existential issue for the world. Because the reason I go into this particularly in "Fossil Future" is the point I'm making is that the people and institutions we’re trusting to evaluate what to do about this source of energy that powers the world, that also emits CO2 and impacts the climate, those people are not making that evaluation by anything resembling the goal of advancing human flourishing on Earth.

They are pursuing, to a significant degree, this goal of eliminating human impact on Earth. And the economist George Reisman had this article a long time ago called “The Toxicity of Environmentalism.” And one point he made that I never forgot is he said listening to a modern environmentalist is like listening to a doctor who's on the side of the germs!

Somebody who doesn't have your best interests at heart. And as an example, one of the people I pick on very deservedly in “Fossil Future” is Michael Mann, who's a climate scientist and activist who is one of the leading advisors.

And if you look at Michael Mann’s statements, one thing he has said is the ideal population for Earth is a billion people. Yeah, yeah. How can you possibly say that? There are eight billion people! Like, how can you possibly look at Earth and say, oh yeah, it's too many people? That has a murderous impulse to it!

If you just look at the Earth and you say, oh yeah, seven billion people should go! What I point out with Michael Mann is that if you look at how he's evaluating the issue, he's totally indifferent to the benefits of fossil fuels. He has a whole book— people can look it up— called "The Madhouse Effect" about fossil fuels and climate, and he doesn't mention any benefits of fossil fuels.

For example, he talks about agriculture and fossil fuels; he only talks about negatives. He doesn’t once mention diesel-powered agricultural equipment or natural gas-derived fertilizer, even though those make it possible for us to feed nearly eight billion people.

So what we have is an anti-human mentality. So some of those who are listening likely don't know that the very survival of about four billion people—so half the world's population—depends in no small part on the provision of ammonia as fertilizer, and ammonia is primarily derived from natural gas.

And so what that means is the not just on the energy front—let's point this out— is that the very food that is provisioning half the world's population is a direct consequence of the cheap and easy accessibility of natural gas. And so what’s the idea here? That we're supposed to reduce our provision of fossil fuels? And what are we going to do on the ammonia front?

We're going to drive the price of fertilizer ever more Skyward! Well, if we do that— because that would be the consequence of reducing the plentiful supply of natural gas— if we do that, then what will happen is clearly food will get more expensive and soy energy, but food will definitely get more expensive, and so what that will mean is that huge swath of the world's population that's living on the edge where they can just right now afford enough food to feed themselves so they don't suffer the consequences of nutritional privation or even die.

A huge proportion of those people are going to be tipped back into absolute poverty. Their children are going to be intellectually stunted as a consequence, and they might well starve! And then you think, well, why would we do that?

And if the answer is, well, you know, some of us really believe that the planet should only have a billion people on it, if that— if we have to have any people at all— then well maybe this is all part of the unconscious drive towards— and conscious drive to some degree— towards reducing the planet's population, no matter what the price may be.

And then you see how people justify this: they say things like, well, you know, if we don’t take emergency action right now, which means let's make the poor even poorer, then the poor are really going to suffer a hundred years from now. And I think, look, I don’t have a lot of confidence in your ability to predict even a decade out, much less a hundred years, with your unstable economic models that are predicated on an equally unstable climate model.

So we can forget about your capacity to prognosticate a hundred years down the road, but what you're saying essentially is that the hypothetical poor that occupy my utopian imagination are much more important than the actual poor right now who will definitely die if we implement our higher energy price-inducing hypothetical environmental policies. You know, and one of the things that strikes me is so utterly absurd is partly why I found your book so interesting is that somehow the people who are making such arguments have gained the moral upper hand, even though you don't have to scrape beneath the surface very far to see not only the genocidal metaphor and the genocidal intent, but the actual genocidal impact of these policies.

Because we’re definitely tipping people back into absolute privation. We'll be right back to our conversation with Alex Epstein in just a moment. First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new documentary, "Logos and Literacy."

I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump-started the development of literacy across the entire world. Illiteracy was the norm. The pastor's home was the first school, and every morning it would begin with singing. The Christian faith is a singing religion. Probably 80 percent of scripture memorization today exists only because of what is sung. This is amazing! Here we have a Gutenberg Bible printed on the Press of Johann.

Science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but historically that has not been the case. Now the book is available to everyone—from Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to civilization itself. It is the most influential book in all history, and hopefully people can walk away with at least a sense of that.

Yeah, there’s a lot of really interesting stuff going on. I mean, I think one thing— why do they have the moral high ground? And this is something that is really a core mission of mine to correct. As I mentioned before, they really owned the issue of a good environment starting in the '60s, including loving nature, including caring about clean air and clean water, and more recently, caring about safety from climate.

And that the pro-capitalism side really didn’t concern themselves too much with this rhetorically, at least. And so the anti-capitalist side was able to own this issue, and when you own something as important as our environment and our planet, you do get the moral high ground. And then they supplemented this with this false alternative of, you are either a climate change believer who hates fossil fuels, or you’re a climate change denier who thinks fossil fuels are okay.

So they created this total false alternative which made no sense because what makes sense with climate impact is to weigh it along with the benefits of fossil fuels. You cannot judge a prescription drug by only looking at negative side effects. And you can't judge fossil fuels by only looking at negative side effects or exaggerating negative side effects. You have to look carefully at our climate impacts—negative and positive—and then weigh them against the benefits that come with fossil fuels, including all the benefits that protect us from climate.

So there's this false alternative, and so what they did is they owned the morality of caring about our environment, and they owned the claim to science because the climate change denial thing, so-called, didn’t make much sense because it’s pretty obvious we impact climate at least some. But so doing those two things, they owned this issue.

So people think, well, if I want to be a good person—if I want a good planet and I want to be pro-science, then I have to hate fossil fuels. And a lot of what I’ve tried to do— and I think Michael Schellenberger and Bjorn Lomborg and Steve Cooney, I think what we’ve tried to do is look at climate in a humanistic, full-context way.

And we’re breaking this false alternative, which is a lot of the reason we get a lot of hostility. So you said something there that’s very psychologically interesting. So you said that if I want to be a good person, because the environmentalists have captured this pro-planet narrative, if I want to be a good person, then I have to buy the human beings are bad for the planet narrative.

But I’d like to take that apart a little bit too because it's not exactly true what you said. The truth of the matter is something like if I want to take a shortcut to a good person without having to—being a good person without having to put into the process any real time and effort. So that would mean actually understanding the issues that are associated with environmental management and economic sustainability, which is unbelievably complicated.

I mean Bjorn Well and you too, Schellenberger spent their whole lives devoted to that endeavor trying to wade through the complexities. It's actually really difficult to develop a sophisticated and genuinely moral stance on the environment and the economy. It takes years and years of work, and it's also extremely difficult to be a good person. And merely feeling sorry for the planet does not make you a good person.

In fact, what it makes you is a shallow narcissist who's using the easy identification with a genocidal ideology to elevate yourself in the moral hierarchy. And we see people who are peddling this dreadful story to young people and offering them an easy shortcut to something approximating easily trumpeted moral virtue.

And that's the sort of moral virtue that you can post on your Facebook page when you claim that while you're anti-capitalist and you're in favor of the planet, and therefore, all of a sudden, you're actually a moral actor and someone to be regarded with admiration. And none of that's true. Because it's actually, it's very difficult to be a good person, but it's very powerful that— I agree entirely. But it is very powerful, and one thing I talk about in "Fossil Future," and this is a big mission of mine, is the moral monopoly of what I call the moral case for eliminating fossil fuels has to be broken.

And yeah, when you have what I call a moral monopoly, you basically get a halo over your head for saying, “I hate fossil fuels, I care about the climate, I care about the planet.” You don’t need to do anything; you just need to express this sentiment. It doesn’t matter if we see you can fly on private jets, you can live any lifestyle you want, as long as you say this, you get this halo, and the other side gets devil horns on their head.

But part of what’s happened with what I call the energy humanists, including me, Bjorn, and Michael and Steve, is that we have now shown that actually, quote “saving the planet” in their false view is hurting billions of people and dooming them to poverty, and actually making our environment worse and hurting biology. And so now they hate that; that's why there's such vicious attacks because their racket is coming to a close.

You want it to be controversial. The first thing before winning a debate is actually creating a debate. There hasn’t even been a debate over the morality of fossil fuels until fairly recently. And once the debate is created, that easy claim to virtue will disappear and those people will just pick the next easy thing to join.

Yeah, well, you said that all you have to do is express the sentiment that you care for the planet. So that's something approximating a feeling, or a subjective state of mind, let's say. Yes, I'm a good person because I feel empathy for the planet, which is a pretty damn low-resolution definition of implementable morality. But you know it's tied in with something else too.

So imagine you're trying desperately to make that case that the reason I'm good is because I feel sorry for things, including the planet. Well then, you have to also buttress that claim with the insistence that sentiment, subjective sentiment itself, is the only valid arbiter of reality. And so that's something like I feel, therefore I am.

And I see that this entire modern movement that insists that identity is nothing other than subjective feeling is actually associated in a perverse manner with this ability to justify a claim to moral superiority by appeal to sentiment. It's like it— people see a picture of a, like, a bedraggled kitten on the internet, and they go ah, and they think that because they have that reflexive response, which you know has a certain moral virtue, that all of a sudden they're morally admirable people.

And that's a lovely thing to believe. And you can extend that to something like, well, I'm so concerned about the planet that I can barely sleep at night. It's like, well, fair enough, that might be an indicator of your moral virtue, although I suspect not. But the real question is: do you actually know anything about the problem? Have you spent any work, real work, in differentiating your knowledge of the problem?

Are you taking any concrete steps whatsoever to solve it apart from hand-waving sentimentally? And do you have metrics in place that actually help you measure whether or not what you're doing has a beneficial impact? And that's also complex. That if you bring two people's attention to the necessity of thinking it through, all they do is get irritated at you!

Like, they get irritated with Bloomberg’s— a classic example because he’s the person I think, and I’d like your opinion on this. You know, I don’t think there is anybody who’s a more effective advocate for genuine progress on the environmental front than Bjorn Lomborg. He’s thought it through, as far as I can tell, more deeply than anyone else, perhaps in the world.

And it’s stunning to me the degree to which his ideals fail to gain traction, and I think partly it’s because he makes the issue complicated, right? He says, well, we don’t have just one problem, too much carbon. We have like 20 problems or 100, and they all need to be attended to, but we need to rank order them, and we have to do that in a methodologically rigorous manner.

It’s like, well, we don’t want to do any of that! We just want to feel good about what we feel good about, and we want to make a claim that that makes us morally virtuous. And it’s certainly the case, as far as I can tell, that our educational systems are enticing young people to adopt exactly that attitude and then to also engage in this demonization that you described. So I think one powerful dynamic with this free virtue that you get by just saying, “I care about this issue; I care about the planet,” is that it’s been given the stamp of science.

Because it’s considered scientific to just say, hey, the planet is being destroyed by fossil fuels. We need to do something about it, and it’s really— as long as you feel some way, or you vote some way, that is considered totally sufficient. There’s nothing to think about. But so it's really sad and shameful that science has been stamped on this incredibly irresponsible way of thinking.

And one thing I’ve tried to do, and I think Bjorn does this, but I think I do it probably most explicitly, and I think it's very, very important to do it explicitly, is I keep talking about the benefits of fossil fuels and how the other side is ignoring the benefits of fossil fuels. So I go as far as to call the other side fossil fuel benefit deniers. I also call them climate mastery deniers because they deny our ability to master climate danger.

And I think people can really get that we’re thinking about this issue in a way that makes no sense because if we’re only looking at the negative side effects of fossil fuels, we’re not looking at the benefits. And if you look at my work, “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” “Fossil Future,” it's really stressing the goodness of fossil fuels—not just fossil fuels aren't as bad as you think, but they're an actual positive good.

And I’ve seen you make this case as well. I think it’s very, very powerful. Imagine my book had been called "Fossil Fuels Aren't Quite as Bad as You Think." It would have made no impact. What’s really needed is we’ve had this inverted morality that said that food is poison and poison is food. And I think it’s not enough to just say, oh, they go too far.

It’s to say, no: they are attacking something good. And once you have the right positive case for fossil fuels, the other side goes on the defensive. If you watch what happens when I debate, when people will debate me, they don't really have an answer to looking at the full picture. Their answer is call me a climate change denier; try to smear me, but they can't answer the argument of if you look at the full context— benefits and side effects of what's good for human flourishing— fossil fuels are incredibly good and will remain good for the foreseeable future.

And it's a pretty simple— that climate change denier phrase is a real interesting one too because that's a phrase that's so manipulatively propagandistic that it's almost incomprehensible. I mean, the reason that that phrase emerged is because there's been— we've developed a universal consensus that denying the reality of the Holocaust was a moral crime.

And so the propagandists took a leap from that page and said, well, the people who are denying the cataclysmic reality of climate change are as morally culpable as those who deny the Holocaust, which implies that they're as culpable as the Nazis who run the death camps. And that's a pretty decent smear.

And then you might say, well, what's the moral advantage to doing that? And so the first thing you might point out is, well, you get to have all the unearned moral virtue that goes along with saying that just because you're sentimental about the planet in some vague way that you're now a moral paragon. And that solves all your moral problems, and then conveniently, at the same time, you get to identify a group of people who are essentially satanic in their motivations, and so that would be the climate change deniers.

And so that entire problem of evil, which you no longer contend with in your own life, because you're on the side of the moral, is dumped at the feet of the people that you deem as enemies. That's that form of scapegoating that Rene Girard talked about. And so young people are being enticed to do two things: is one, is to adopt an extremely simple-minded view of the problems and opportunities that confront us; second, to claim a completely unearned moral virtue merely on the basis of a vague sentiment; and third, and more dangerously, to localize the problem of evil in the minds and souls of the people who are hypothetically opposed to their self-aggrandizing sentiment.

And the combination of those three moral errors is really dangerously toxic. And that dangerous toxicity, I would say, is manifesting itself in such things as this idiot insistence, let’s say in the UK, because they’re suffering from this more than any other place now, maybe except Germany, on the moral benefits of an impossible net zero.

The rubber is really starting to hit the road in the last couple of years, as energy prices have spiked out of reach of many people and the unreliability of these hypothetically benevolent renewables has become more and more self-evident, and so we're walking a very dangerous moral path here, right? Easy moral virtue, the— our inability to point out that a lot of this moral virtue is driven by an unthinking ignorance combined with this temptation to demonize those who— well, like Lomborg, Schellenberger, you’re a good example as well, who are standing up and saying, hey, wait a minute everyone!

We’ve lifted billions of people out of absolute privation and starvation as a consequence of the utilization of fossil fuels, and they’re so fundamental that we can’t shift away from them rapidly; that's actually practically impossible without tilting people into the kind of abject poverty that’s going to cause widespread starvation. It’s like that doesn’t sound like a case being made by Satan to me!

No, it’s— I mean, I do think that the energy crisis is an enormous educational opportunity. It’s obviously a tragedy, and it’s— as somebody who’s been talking about this for 15 years and advising in the opposite direction, it’s very sad to see myself being right in terms of if you artificially restrict the supply of fossil fuels in a world that needs more energy, and you don’t have a viable near-term replacement, then prices are going to skyrocket, including food prices and the price of everything else.

Like this was obvious that this was going to happen, and it’s hard to see it, but at least the benefit is that people can see that the establishment has failed. That’s the benefit of a crisis: people see the establishment has failed. And the key is, in my view, two things. One is the right people need to be implicated, and the right people need to be vindicated.

And I say the right people need to be implicated not as a vindictive person at all, but it’s very important when you have a crisis, and this happened with 9/11, it happened with the financial crisis. You know, you need to have some idea of who is responsible and then who was right and gave us better advice. If you look at today’s energy crisis, the number one thing that is scary about it is that it is a crisis that has come from the net-zero movement, not even only achieving a one percent of their goals.

So they have not even reduced the supply of fossil fuels; I want to stress that again. They haven’t even reduced the supply; they just slowed its rate of growth. They already wanted to dramatically reduce the supply. That was their goal! We were supposed to be using way less fossil fuel by now; they just slowed the growth, and that was enough to cause a global energy crisis in a world that needs far more energy.

So that should really wake us up. What if we actually start on their path of getting rid of fossil fuels? And again, we have 27 years now, in less than a month as we record this, to achieve net zero, which in effect means getting rid of fossil fuels. We could talk about offsets and stuff, but that doesn’t work at any scale that there's any evidence of. So it’s really this— this homicidal movement in its consequences.

And I do think people are waking up, and they’re particularly waking up to the idea that, hey, we ignored the benefits of fossil fuels, or what I call our designated experts did this, and these people need to be jettisoned. You cannot listen to anybody about energy and climate who ignores the benefits of fossil fuels to billions of people, because if you do, you get an energy crisis. And if we keep listening to them, it’s going to get a lot worse.

Well, the other thing that you see being the drum being beaten on the side of the radical left, for example, is the anti-colonial— let’s say this continual trumpeting of the anti-colonial interference message. And so then I look at that and I think, well, you give the devil his due, and the fact that the world's cultures have come into contact with one another in a dramatic way in the last 300 years has produced all sorts of consequences, some positive and some negative.

But on the anti-colonial front, the environmental proposition— and this is mostly coming from the radical left— is that there’s no possible way that the third world inhabitants can be allowed, much less encouraged, to develop a standard of living that in any manner approximates the profligate west. Is that we're rich, and you know, maybe we should suffer from that a bit, and maybe we should pay reparations, let’s say.

But all those poor people who are desperately trying to clamber up the socioeconomic hierarchy, so they don’t die— let’s make that perfectly clear— they can’t be allowed to do that because their environmental footprint will immediately become so large that the planet itself will be destroyed.

And so, okay, what’s the consequence of that? Well, the consequence of that is that they should be poor and stay that way and should shut the hell up about it, and perhaps there should be a hell of a lot fewer of them. And if that doesn’t trigger your anti-colonialist morality, then you've got some serious thinking to do because I just don't understand at all how it is that those of us in the wealthy west— and this would certainly include those in the chattering environmental glitterati elite class— have no sense whatsoever how they're in a moral position to be lecturing the developing world about how they should accept limits to growth, which means, for example, that their children won’t have access to enough nutrition to even optimize their brain development as they mature.

It’s like, oh, that’s the price those people get to pay— those people, those poor people in developing countries, who don’t get to be wealthy. And by wealthy, I mean have enough to eat and have schools to send their children, and we in the Western world, we can sit on our high horse and say, well, we used fossil fuels and oops, sorry about that and all the carbon, but you bastards, you can just accept your lot.

And if you stop breeding so goddamn much, that would be a good thing too! Now how that is— it’s Colonial to a degree that’s overwhelming is beyond me! Well, it is, and I think it’s a very, very powerful argument that’s been one of these things that has been ignored because the priorities of the modern environmental movement are not what they say.

And I would say more broadly the anti-capitalist movement, they claim to be concerned about the poor, but if you’re concerned about the poor and you know that fossil fueled productivity has brought an unprecedented number of people out of poverty in recent decades, you would think about how do we expand that? How do we replicate what happened in China, what happened in India? You know, some changes to it obviously, but how do we, you know, they use seven times more fossil fuels compared to four decades ago.

Like, it’s obviously fueled their productivity and their prosperity. Why don’t we do more of that? And yet, there’s been no attention paid in the culture to the energy poor. There’s no attention paid to the fact that we have three billion people who use less electricity than one of our refrigerators uses!

We have a third of the world using wood and animal dung to eat their homes and to cook their food! And in terms of— you’re mentioning wealthy people, three quarters of the world uses an amount of energy that we would consider totally unacceptable in the U.S. or Canada or anything resembling that.

So once these facts are pointed out, it is obvious that there is a moral imperative to do at least nothing to get in the way of people— at least that. And it’s clear that the anti-fossil fuel movement is absolutely getting in the way; they’re trying to destroy all loans to fossil fuels. They’re trying to encourage them to use things that will not actually work for them. They’re trying to, for example, throughout Africa, limit oil and gas development even though that’s a huge potential source of prosperity.

But they’re not winning this argument. Once sunlight has been exposed, I had a personal experience; I don’t know if you heard about this, but the Washington Post tried to basically cancel my book, “Fossil Future,” back before it came out. They got a copy of the book; they didn’t read the book, which I thought that was their job as journalists, to report on a book from a major author. Instead, what they tried to do is dig up what I had written in college where I had said very specifically the poor world needs more capitalism and more individualism, which I stand by.

But they somehow tried to portray that as colonialism. But here’s the key— their whole argument was, “Alex Epstein doesn’t really care about the poor, so you don’t have to listen to his arguments about the poor needing fossil fuels.”

This is a bizarre ad hominem on its face; it’s completely the opposite of the truth! But it was notable to me how they had no answer to this argument that poor people need fossil fuels and that the anti-fossil fuel movement hurts the poor people most. So I think that really shows the power of this argument.

Let’s delve into that issue of caring about the poor because I don’t think that it is really all that wise for any of us to jump up and down about how much we care for the poor because if you cared for the poor, you’d be out there doing something with your life to directly benefit the poor.

And that turns out to be extremely high— I have to— I don’t mean you. I don’t mean you— Oh, okay. And speaking more generally, it’s not that easy to care about the poor. And so I think that any of us who trumpet the idea that we truly care about the poor should be very careful about that.

But having said that, I would also say we could, though, say, even if we don’t care about the poor any more than the typical somewhat selfish human being, we could at least get the hell out of their way when they’re trying to clamber their way up to the socioeconomic hierarchy!

Like, there is a moral calling there, and I think that part— I think of it differently. Okay, let’s hear it. So I think of it as an amazing opportunity. I think of life as an opportunity for human flourishing, and one of the ways we can do that is yes, by helping other people flourish.

So, you know, I don’t want to act like I’m just ministering to every poor person in the world or this kind of thing. I mean, look, I live in a free country. I love doing work that I find really interesting, and I love that it benefits a lot of people, including some of the poorest people in the world.

And one particular way in which I identify with the poorest people in the world is with the lack of freedom. Because I really think about what would it like be like to not be born in the U.S. Whatever advantages I had being born in the U.S. is by far the greatest, and I really think about how can more people be born into that?

And really, the number one thing we need to do to do is spread good ideas and not spread bad ideas. And this is where the anti-fossil fuel movement is so destructive. Particularly, you’ve probably seen this recent climate reparations thing?

Which is saying, hey, we owe the poor world. And I wrote about this recently; people can see it at energytalkingpoints.com, which is where I post my new stuff. But there’s the idea, yeah, that we should feel guilty for ruining the world. And I believe we’ve made the world better for everyone, including the poor, but the other element that is obviously wrong is what is happening is we’re paying people off—usually dictators off— to not use fossil fuels!

So we are paying them to deprive people of the crucial freedom to get prosperity. And that is just totally shameful, and that is absolutely interfering in the lives of the world’s poorest people.

Right, so with our so-called climate reparations that are going to be devoted to the governments of third world countries primarily, we’re going to be propping up frequently brutal quasi-d