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 a much more Lush place there that 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 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 prior 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 [Music] 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 and uh I think that's something that's worthwhile alerting everyone too 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 you wrote this book in 2014. let's talk about why you wrote it and 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 2022 called fossil future which is the successor or replacement to the moral case for fossil fuels um so I talk a bunch in that about what 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 uh 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 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 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 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 it 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 well the lack of a red wave during the midterms lead to more Reckless spending by a more emboldened Administration higher taxes deeper inflation if you're unsure how the next two years will unfold talk to Birch gold group about protecting your savings with gold Birch gold makes it easy to convert your IRA or 401K into an IRA in Precious Metals so you can own gold and silver in a tax sheltered account gold is the world's oldest most proven form of currency when inflation soars and all other assets go sideways gold is still there this month you can get a free gold back with every five thousand dollar purchase when you convert an existing Ira or 401K into a precious metals Ira with Birch gold by December 22nd just text Jordan to 989898 Birch gold will help you own gold and silver in a tax sheltered account text Jordan to 989898 to claim your free info kit on gold then talk to one of their precious metals Specialists with every purchase you make before December 22nd you you'll get a free gold back this is a great stocking stuffer just in time for Christmas text Jordan to 989898 and protect yourself with gold today 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 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 it was returned to some natural and unspoiled condition and 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 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 the because Europe has taken this absolutely foolish route to rely on so on wind and solar which is intermittent at best um one of the things that's happening because of the pressure on liquid natural gas supplies primarily is that there's 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 and you know human progress.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 if 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 it I've known this for at least 10 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 um 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 so that's the critical issue right even by the metrics of the environmentalists themselves the policies that were 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 I think I think it depends so I think if you 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 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 it's wrong and 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 environmentalist 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 and 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 an 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 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 on the environment front and 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 and 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 that 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 it's been brought in as a as a as a stop Gap 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 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 it 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 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 flourish the biggest banks and investment firms in the world are putting up to half of their total assets into new Investments what do they know that we don't maybe that the economy is about to get worse the CEO of JPMorgan just warned that stocks could slide another 20 percent bigwigs are moving their money into Alternatives like Fine Art because fine art has outpaced even the S P 500 over the last 26 years by 131 percent even in 2022 Masterworks produced results in early November Masterworks had a strategic exit for a 17.8 percent net return to their investors their last three exits have brought in 1721 and 33 net Returns the next six months could be some of the most important of your investing Life paintings are selling out in minutes but you can get Priority Access at masterworks.com with promo code jvp that's promo code jbp at masterworks.com jbp or click the link in the description see important disclosure closures at masterworks.com CD [Music] so yeah well it's a strange it's just very strange issue philosophically because one of the things I wonder about is why this idea that human beings are in some sense in their activity 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 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 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 three 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 it strikes me it's 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 is that 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 uh 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 well 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 uh 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 um by Ein Rand called the the new left the anti-industrial Revolution and it was written at the time that this was happening and one of the analyzes 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 pulse these communism 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 right right and actually what they did was they 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 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 nurture or 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 more clear is that so we lifted more people out of poverty in absolute terms and also in relative terms between 2000 and 2015 then 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 so and I'm 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 um in absolute numbers or in 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 uh 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 you said that there's this there's this underlying metaphor of nature as something like fragile virgin right 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 freeze 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 it's there's a kind of existential guilt there for the for the crime of existence itself it's something like that I mean I think one there's one really powerful uh 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 I point out I was born in 1980 since 1980 we've had 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 intent 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 if 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 you know an objective documented thing there's no question and so what happened is only 12 percent of people thought it got better right 55 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 drive with which drove much of the increase in prosperity they just assume that the world is worse and and what I call I don't use this term in moral case but I use it in fossil future our knowledge system so the institutions we rely on for expert knowledge and guidance they've done a they've 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 one percent these anti-fossil fuel policies just implemented a one percent success rate in in the anti-fossil fuel movements view have already led to a global energy crisis do you have a coffee lover on your holiday shopping list Black Rifle has all the best Brewing gear thermoses mugs and apparel designed for folks who love country and coffee Black Rifle sources the most exotic roasts from around the globe all coffee is roasted here in the U.S by veteran-led teams of coffee experts stuff your Christmas stockings with the latest roast from America's coffee for 10 off with the code Jordan better yet sign your 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better from the natural perspective too now you know 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 of misuse of oceanic resources because I think we've done a pretty cataclysmic job of protecting our our especially our our our Coastal our Coastal lands and the 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 um that I think sensible people should take into account but you know I was looking at a graph this week and I've I've known about this phenomena for quite a while phenomenon for quite a while that again in the last 15 years a surface area totaling 15 of the entire planet has greened I mean that is that's an area that's larger than the continental United States and it's so let's 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 um 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 greener than it was in 2000 but but there are more trees in the northern hemisphere than there were a hundred years ago and as well as the planet Greening and 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 green 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 screening is that are agriculture 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 I think maybe we can think of three conceptions of the earth which capture everything we're talking about so my primary conception is is evaluating the Earth from the perspective of human flourishing how 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 is 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 a is an unimpacted Planet so you're not optimizing for biological productivity you're optimizing for minimum symbol 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 movements 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 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 Korean and yet the green movement hates it because we caused it so they can see no good in anything thing 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 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 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 rather than global warming 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 on the face of it it doesn't matter what it does even if it increases bio even if it increases total biological flourishing in terms of like let's say the net metric tonnage of 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 prior 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 diver of biodiversity and also the overfishing of the oceans let's say so even although the planet is becoming Greener that doesn't mean there 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 uh 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 a an aesthetic and economic and environmental good but will 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 of plentiful energy and then we can put aside tracks 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's it's so I think you're pointing to something really good and something really bad something really good is why my 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 a really highlighting the nihilism of this view that human impact is bad and again I 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 away 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 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 enjoy with this evil of course orange our enjoyment is of no consequence whatsoever and 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 bios sphere is more important me 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 this is something that you cite in your 2014 book I'm going to just read it so everybody can hear it and I would 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 that's a very interesting thing to say or a billion of them which is also a very interesting thing to say 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 it's suicidal consumption of landscape until such time as Homo sapiens should Desi 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 a 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 yes 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 deviate so now the metaphor is human beings equal cancer and that's 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 will multiply unchecked until we devour everything and perish which is a pretty dismal and only vaguely biologically um 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 we're radically depopulated to to what 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 un underlying and barely veiled brutal genocidal impulse I 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 were 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 riesman 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 uh 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 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 and 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 uh agricultural equipment or natural gas derived fertilizer even though those make it possible for us to feed need 8 billion people so what we have is an anti-human mentality so so some of those who are listening likely don't know that the 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 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 and so what 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 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 soil 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 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 100 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 absurdives 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 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 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 as is really a core mission of mine to correct is that 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 them to 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 not 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 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 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 lombborg 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 said 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 in 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 we see people who are peddling this 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 plant 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 and 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 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 you want it to be a 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 Intel fairly recently and once the debate is created that that easy claim to Virtue will disappear and those people will just go pick the 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 in 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's people see a picture of a like a bedraggled kitten on on 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 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 Lombard 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 a hundred and 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 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 one powerful Dynamic with this 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 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 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 how the other side is ignoring the benefits of fossil fuel 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 is 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 it's 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 we've had this inverted morality that said that that says that food is poison and poison is food and I think it's not enough to just to say oh they go too far it's say no they are attacking something good and once you are 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 incred incredibly good and will remain good for the foreseeable future and it's a pretty simple that 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 skate skate scapegoating that Renee Gerard talked about and so young people are being enticed to do two things is one is to to adopt it three things 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 these 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 right the the rubber is really starting to hit the road in the last couple of years as Energy prices have spiked out of 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 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 lomberg shellenberger you you're a good example as well who are standing up and saying hey wait a minute everyone um 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 uh 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 be 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 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 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 from the Net Zero movement not even only achieving 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 27 years and 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 in its consequences and I do think people are waking up 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 um 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 is 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 um 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 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 consequences of that is that they should be poor and stay that way and should shut the hell up about it and should be happy 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 I 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 their brain development as they mature it's like oh that's the price those people get to pay a those people those poor people in developing countries who don't get to be wealthy and and by wealthy means 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 you can just accept your lot and if you stop breeding so God damn 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's it is and I think it's a very very powerful argument it'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 how do we you know they use seven times more fossil fuels compared to four 40 years ago like it's 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 dog 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 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 there 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 and 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 uh back before it came out they got a copy of the book they didn't read the book which that I thought that was their job as journalists a 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 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 Trump at 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 socioeconomic hierarchy and that was the case that you made just a few minutes ago is that we could at least in the west not Implement policies that actually interfere in a serious manner with the attempts of the developing world to lift themselves out of absolute privation we could at least get the hell out of the road and we wouldn't have to do that by hand waving about how moral we are in our care for the poor we can say well we're relatively disinterested at minimum but we won't go out of our way to make your lives more miserable than they have to be well you use your own efforts to acquire for yourself some of the things that we've managed to acquire we can't even do that I think it's a great point and so for me yeah I don't want to act like I'm just ministering to every poor person of the world or this kind of thing I mean look I 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 the 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 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 you know 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 and this is where the anti-fossil fuel movement is so destructive particularly you've probably seen this recent climate reparations thing yeah which is saying hey we owe the poor world and I I wrote about this recently people can see it at energytalkingpoints.com which is where I post my new stuff but the there's there's the 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 are 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 the governments of third world countries primarily we're going to be propping up frequently brutal quasi-dictatorships and bribing them to keep their populations poor yes so that we don't save the planet that's our plan that is that is that is the plan I mean again it's it's not a movement that actually has any kind of goal and strategy long term it's really just hostility toward any impact and at the moment it's CO2 emission so anything that has CO2 missions you hate but observe look there's no enthusiasm for nuclear right which you would expect them to love because it doesn't emit CO2 there's hatred for nuclear there's hatred for hydro and there's hatred for mining which is necessary for solar and wind which require way more mind materials than anything else there's so it's really an anti-impact movement that's just hostile to any human impact and just nihilistically and randomly pursues that with no strategy and no thinking about the future and this mentality is leading the world this is what I call our knowledge system it is blindly pursuing this destructive anti-human path with no strategy okay so let's let's delve into that a little bit that motivation for that so I'm gonna play devil's advocate here a bit and and let you you respond to it so the first thing we might point out is that the the human proclivity for something approximating unspoiled natural Vistas actually seems to have a moral element and a biologically rooted moral element so for example our our aesthetic preferences seem to be associated with something like preference for natural landscapes that are verdant and green and potentially productive in relationship to Agriculture and and the flourishing of let's say edible animals with enough water we like Landscapes that look like that we think they're beautiful and the idea that we might prefer those if they were unspoiled is also worth delving into to some degree because we do need to live in balanced Harmony with such environments so that we don't destroy the very virtue that they they implicitly contain and so in our aesthetic preferences tilt Us in that direction and so we have a bit of a biological tilt towards not wanting to gum up and pollute the works okay so so there's that and then we also have this moral sense that we have a moral obligation right and so the moral obligation is to be grateful to be cognizant of our unearned privilege and so for you that would be the fact that you were born in the United States and that you were a accidental beneficiary of all the work that had gone into that Great Society before you made your appearance on the scene and that there's a moral obligation on your part in some sense to do something about that right and so and that can both of those can be warped the warping of the first one is to push that moral and aesthetic sensibility to the point where we claim that any human interaction with that pristine environment whatsoever is tantamount to to to to to immorality and on the second front it is that the way to atone for our privilege is by being guilty and stopping all activity so those things dovetail we might say instead that if we wanted to genuinely contend with the problem of our unearned privilege and the fact that you know we walk on blood that is being we walk on land that is being soaked by the blood of conflict for Generations right there's a certain guilt in that a certain sense you might say even of original sin is that we do have to atone but the proper proposition on the sophisticated front would be something like well we should atone by putting into place thoughtful and intelligent and genuinely pro-human environmental slash economic policies and we should atone in our private lives for our unearned privilege by being people whose moral striving is so admirable that we've Justified the existence of our privileges and we shouldn't be taking the easy way out and saying just because we're sentimental about Gaia means that we've somehow fulfilled our moral obligation we're doing a very bad job of teaching young people this as far as I can tell so like the guilts there right the sense of original sin is there the sense that we're responsible for the atrocity of history in some sense is there that needs to be contended with what we're constantly looking for easy ways out of the problem instead of actually trying to address it head on well let's start out with the the first part in terms of this this like sense of what we like in natural landscapes and we like life and so I certainly have a version of this myself I mean I'm very obsessed with the ocean and I spend way more time Outdoors than most people and I just like I think people under rate being outdoors a lot and and you know I love seeing different kinds of animals and their natural habitat so like I definitely experienced this but when I when I think of it then what I think about is in impacting the Earth we want to make sure we impact the Earth in a way that allows us to really enjoy this and in fact have more of it there's a lot of things we can do to make the Earth more beautiful and to enhance it with respect to our aesthetic sensibilities and I think the the best thinker ever in this regard was Frank Lloyd Wright because if you look at his buildings and how he approached it he loved nature but he also thought that we could improve nature and that's really what you're doing as a human being is you're saying I can improve nature so you're not hostile to nature but you view it as what I call Wild potential it has the potential to be an amazing place for us it has all these different building blocks and all these starting things and some of them we want to preserve some of them we want to change a lot and even the things we want to preserve we want to make a lot more accessible to everyone which requires changing a lot so I think of it as we can do an even better job at making the Earth an amazing place to live but part of that is recognizing we've done a really good job in a lot of ways the Earth is so much of a better place to live than it was 500 years ago 200 years ago the world is is is you know it's naturally it's naturally Dynamic it's deficient and it's dangerous it's like those are three attributes that's why I call it wild potential and so human beings have had to contend with that and to bring up fossil fuels our basic way of contending with that is to try to produce a lot of value that nature doesn't produce for us nature produces not very much value that we can use and it produces a lot of threats so we need productive ability to create resources nature doesn't including to create resources that neutralize the different threats like creating irrigation to neutralize drought and what we do that with our productive ability but we're naturally very physically weak beings and so the key step is using machines to produce far more value than our meager physical bodies can and that's what we've done with fossil fuels we've had cost effective energy that has allowed say the average American to have 75 machine servants producing value so that we can do far more than we ever could and we can do types of things that we never could like no number of human beings can fly no number of human beings can be an incubator which you know save Millions incubators save millions of lives so we've made the Earth so much of a better place and I think we can make it even more beautiful and I think a lot of the specific things we create are ugly and that's a shame but I think of it as we've done a good job and we can do even better not that we're these Sinners who have ruined who ruin everything by touching it that is a that is a hostile View and it's an unjustified view so I think we can be more like Frank Lloyd Wright but we should be proud of what we've done so far in terms of obligation I mean I feel gratitude for it I don't feel like anyone has really sinned or I've sinned or but I feel like the obligation is to is to keep going is to keep trying to make it better and better and I think just by being a productive person that's really what you're doing but because I think about global issues I try to advise people globally so let me ask you about this psychologically so obviously people there are a lot of people particularly young people perhaps who are bearing a heavy load of existential guilt for the fact of their very existence and so you just made something approximating a pro-human case and so I would ask you a psychological question how do you think you've conducted yourself in your own life effectively so that that sense of existential guilt that potential hostility towards human endeavor itself or even human existence has been ameliorated like what have you done that you believe is sufficiently valuable to justify the cost of your own existence but I guess why would I I don't understand why I would feel it in the first place because the people who feel it have a very warped at least the environmental version we can talk about other versions but the environmental slash climate version is this very warped delicate nurture view of the earth that the Earth is stable sufficient and safe and our impact ruins it and if you believe that and you hear all this propaganda then you think yeah we're all we're all ruining the delicate nurturer but if if you have that view it's a very damaging view but I don't have the view so I don't I don't understand why I would feel so bad yeah but people that's the thing is that and I think we need to contend with this right because people do have that view and lots of people have it and it's easy let's say for educators who are pushing this ideological agenda to capitalize on the prevalence of that view that's why I'm pointing to something like an intrinsic sense of original sin is that we have this sense as human beings or many people do that in some real sense we have to atone for the crime of our existence and I think there's something to that I think that we have to bear a moral burden that justifies the the crime of our existence so to speak and that would mean that we have to be genuinely well in your terminology we have to be genuinely productive people let's say we have to be genuinely productive people that are aiming up maybe in relationship to such things as working for the amelioration of absolute poverty like there is a moral calling there and I think that part I think of it differently okay I think of it differently so I think of existence as an opportunity so I think of it as it's just this amazingly special thing that you know any of us exist in the first place I mean probably you think about the probabilistic nature of it and I feel like being on Earth is just this amazing opportunity and you can look at how different people have handled that throughout history and how they handle it today and I think a lot of people tragically haven't made the most of it but I think you can see certain things that people do who have made the most of it and find it fulfilling and for me one of the observations is people who choose a certain kind of creative work it it is makes a huge difference I'm guessing you've experienced I've certainly experienced this in terms of just finding something that creates value in the world that really really works with how you like to use your mind the thought process hopefully you get to work with certain kinds of people I mean that's just part of it there are all kinds of other opportunities of being alive so I don't think of it at all as oh it's we're guilty and this is bad I think the only guilt is wasting the opportunity that's that's where my kind of fear and guilt come in is like I worry about oh did I waste the opportunity of being alive and part of that is of course you don't want to live at the expense of others and ruin that's another way of wasting it but so I think of life as opportunity not as not as atonement well right and we should also we can address there too the issue that if you conduct yourself successfully so let's say that you are as a consequence prosperous there is also this underlying presumption that's generally unexamined that you had to do that at someone else's expense right it's something like a zero-sum game and that ties into this whole malthusian view that we're yeast in a Petri dish with finite resources and the truth of the matter I think is that if you conduct yourself in the highest manner properly then you end up being creatively productive in a manner that doesn't just benefit you selfishly but simultaneously benefits many other people and also facilitates their ability to do the same thing and so that's a vision that's a kind of Harmony that's a high order ethical calling is you don't have to pursue your creative exploitation of possibility at the cost of the possibility or at the cost of other people quite the contrary you could increase the possibility which we could do on the natural front and you could increase the ability of others to flourish simultaneously yes and I want to really highlight because earlier you responded you said all these people have been have been uh immersed in this what I call this Dogma this delicate nurture dogma and I would add a piece to this dog by it's it's the view that the Earth is delicate nurture that's stable sufficient and safe and then it goes along with what I call the parasite polluter view of human beings which you're getting at with the malthusian view so the view that all we do with our impact is we take from the earth and we destroy it we make it ugly we disrupt it and this kind of thing and insofar as you view the world this way you are going to have a bad life and you're going to be really unhappy because you're going to feel really guilty and you're going to feel really pessimistic and you're going to believe in all of these apocalyptic scenarios so it's it's why it's a fundamental thing that needs to be done to re-educate people about the basic nature of Earth and the basic nature of human beings and replace so delicate nurture with what I call Wild potential and this parasite polluter view with what I call the producer improve overview we actually produce value and we can improve the Earth and we can do even more and in fossil future I talk about this is part of the human flourishing framework a key part of how we have to think about this issue is change our view of human beings in Earth from an anti-human View to a pro-human view and if once you change that in people it is life-changing because it's their their whole view of how the world Works changes from this terribly sad and destructive View to a very optimistic View and that that's one of the things I'm grateful for is early on I learned pro-human environmental philosophy and that was a huge gift that I got when I was 18. how did you learn that why were you fortunate enough to learn that well maybe we'll leave that look we we have to stop we have to stop this part of we'll get into that in the next part of our discussion so for everybody who's watching and listening I do an extra half an hour with my guests on The Daily wire plus platform as part of the arrangement that I've made with them to increase the professional appearance and quality of my podcasts for example which as you are noticing are still available um on YouTube free for wide distribution I do an extra half an hour with people I would be interested and I'm going to continue to talk um to to Alex on The Daily wire plus platform about his philosophical Journey because you've definitely taken an unpopular stance and a minority unpopular stance and you did that pretty early 2014 is pretty early given all things considered and and you did it quite successfully you haven't been particularly effectively canceled interestingly enough and I'd like to find out what your pathway was to your realizations and how you managed that hello everyone I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,043,488

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson, epstein, epsteen, epstien, fossil fuels, climate change

Id: eDWq7-eP5sE

Length: 96min 48sec (5808 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 08 2022