00:00:23.000We talk about is the Earth actually getting warmer or not.
00:00:26.000We get all the answers to your questions around global warming and all these very controversial issues that a lot of you have questions about.
00:00:33.000Freedom at Charlie Kirk, freedom at CharlieKirk.com, freedom at CharlieKirk.com.
00:00:38.000Please consider becoming a monthly supporter at CharlieKirk.com slash support.
00:01:11.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:52.000I love how bold you are, especially when it comes to climate change, fossil fuels, and kind of criticizing this push towards green energy in our country.
00:02:05.000Introduce yourself to our audience and then let's go from there.
00:02:11.000Maybe the most interesting thing about me is people think I wrote a book called The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, and people think, oh, you must have been paid by the fossil fuel industry.
00:02:22.000By the fossil fuel industry or something.
00:02:24.000And I actually grew up in a liberal environment, Chevy Chase, Maryland, right outside Washington, D.C.
00:02:29.000And I was told for my whole life through Duke University that fossil fuels are an addiction.
00:02:35.000So they're this, they might be convenient, but there's this self-destructive thing that it may be convenient in the short run, but it's destroying us in the long run.
00:02:43.000And so I grew up believing many of the things I now speak up against.
00:02:47.000And the short version of how my views changed is not that somebody paid me to say anything or not that I had family or anything like that.
00:02:55.000It's that I come from a philosophy background.
00:02:58.000And what I concluded is the way people are thinking about energy is really illogical.
00:03:02.000And just to give you one example of it, in medicine, for example, we think you always need to weigh both the benefits and the side effects of a vaccine or an antibiotic.
00:03:11.000And I noticed that in fossil fuels, we don't do that.
00:03:14.000We only look at the side effects and we don't look at the benefits.
00:03:17.000Whereas when we talk about green energy, we don't look at the side effects and we do look at the benefits.
00:03:22.000And just even observing that from a philosophy perspective made me realize there's a certain kind of bias in the discussion.
00:03:28.000I didn't know what the truth was, but it made me very interested.
00:03:31.000What's actually the truth about the benefits and side effects of different forms of energy?
00:03:35.000And so you have been very outspoken in favor of fossil fuels.
00:03:38.000You wrote the book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.
00:03:55.000And hopefully, by the end of today, by the way, there are many people whose livelihood is they just get paid directly by the fossil fuel industry.
00:04:30.000So fossil fuels, I mean, specifically they refer to coal, oil, and natural gas.
00:04:36.000But the way to think of them is: this is a little bit of a complex definition, but it'll make sense.
00:04:42.000You can think of them as high-energy hydrocarbons derived from ancient life.
00:04:47.000So high-energy hydrocarbons derived from ancient life.
00:04:49.000And I'll explain that, but it's important because it actually connects to climate change and everything else.
00:04:54.000So high-energy hydrocarbons means that there are molecules that are made primarily of carbon and hydrogen, and they store a lot of energy in a very small space.
00:05:03.000Particularly, oil does this most of all.
00:05:05.000That's why we use it for transportation because it has such a high, you can think of it as like a strength to weight ratio.
00:05:10.000So when you're transporting something, you need something really dense.
00:05:12.000And oil with these hydrocarbon molecules that are liquid stores it in a really dense place.
00:05:17.000Now, what happens is when you burn them, you add oxygen to the situation.
00:05:20.000And this is why this is important for climate.
00:05:22.000You release hydrogen and that bonds to oxygen.
00:05:25.000That makes water, but you also release carbon, which connects to oxygen, and that makes carbon dioxide.
00:05:30.000So the same thing that's generating the energy that's powering, say, an airplane is also putting more CO2 in the atmosphere.
00:05:37.000Also, because it comes from ancient dead life, including plants, it sometimes is connected to things that were part of the plant, like nitrogen or sulfur, and that can make things like nitrous oxides or sulfur dioxide, which is involved in smog.
00:05:49.000So we've got this ancient life that created these amazing molecules, but when we burn them, we get CO2, and sometimes we get these other substances.
00:05:56.000And so there are really interesting questions: how do you weigh the benefits of the energy and how do you weigh the different side effects of those other substances?
00:06:03.000So that's a great explanation of fossil fuels, probably the best I've heard.
00:06:06.000So now that we know what fossil fuels are, what is the moral case for fossil fuels?
00:06:12.000Well, let me say first: what is the moral case for anything?
00:06:14.000The moral case for anything depends on how you define morality.
00:06:18.000And I think this is really the key issue at stake.
00:06:22.000And I'd say specifically, how do you define morality with respect to our environment?
00:06:26.000Because the whole concern about fossil fuels is they're hurting our environment, right?
00:06:45.000And just to bring up one quick thing, evidence of that, there's this Oxford University study that asks people, what's happened to extreme poverty over the last 30 years?
00:06:54.000So extreme poverty means people living on less than $2 a day.
00:07:20.000So, no, but it's really, it's really instructive that what we can think of as our mainstream knowledge system.
00:07:26.000So the people who are telling us supposedly what's true, they've communicated to us so that we think the planet is getting to be a worse place to the point where they think extreme poverty is getting worse.
00:07:36.000It's actually gotten better at a miraculous rate.
00:07:39.000So if you just take, let's say, the last 30 years, it's gone from over 30% or about 30% to 10% or under 10%.
00:07:47.000So extreme poverty went from 30% of the world population to under 10%.
00:07:51.000And when I was born, I just think of it, I was born in 1980.
00:07:53.000So exactly 40 years ago now, and it was 42% the year I was born.
00:07:58.000So you think about it, four out of 10 people are living on less than $2 a day, and now that's less than one out of 10.
00:08:03.000Now, we can talk about, we're not going to talk about coronavirus policy, but that's actually starting to bring it up past one out of 10, which is a whole horrific thing.
00:08:14.000Because when people say fossil fuels are destroying the planet, and yet overall, it's not just extreme poverty.
00:08:20.000The planet has never been a better place for human beings to live.
00:08:22.000We have record population, and at the same time, we have record life expectancy and record income, which means the amount of opportunity the average individual has.
00:08:31.000So from a human perspective, the planet has never been a better place to live.
00:08:35.000And yet we're educated to think that the planet has been destroyed and fossil fuels are the cause.
00:08:40.000But yet I would say from a human perspective, again, the planet has never been a better place to live.
00:08:44.000And what's going on there, this is not a scientific issue, it's a moral issue.
00:08:48.000The question is, are you evaluating the planet by the standard of human life?
00:08:53.000And I would call it human flourishing.
00:08:55.000So human beings' ability to live to their highest potential.
00:08:58.000Because if that's your standard, the planet has never been better.
00:09:01.000And then you need to explain how fossil fuels maybe have made it better.
00:09:04.000But if you think it's bad, then you have a different standard.
00:09:09.000The dominant standard we're taught to use morally and environmentally is the standard of unchanged nature.
00:09:16.000So we regard the planet as bad, even though it's better for human beings because we've changed it so much.
00:09:22.000But my view is if we change the planet and it's overwhelmingly for the better, even if some of it is worse, but if it's overwhelmingly for the better, then that's a better planet.
00:09:30.000And my argument for fossil fuels is fossil fuels make the planet a far better place to live.
00:09:35.000But before you can process that argument, you need to know what standard are you evaluating the planet by.
00:09:40.000And the key to my argument, the moral case for fossil fuels, is a human case for fossil fuels.
00:09:45.000So when you talk about the moral case for fossil fuels, I would imagine you actually get more people disagreeing with your interpretation of what is moral than even before you get into fossil fuels.
00:09:55.000Actually, this is interesting, yes and no.
00:09:58.000And this has a lot of implications for how to make the case.
00:10:01.000Because if you make really clear to people, okay, when we're looking at the planet, we can look at it from the perspective of what I would call human flourishing.
00:10:08.000So is this the most human-friendly planet possible?
00:10:11.000And you need to make clear, this doesn't mean human beings versus every other species, although sometimes we're adversarial, sometimes we're not.
00:10:18.000It really means human beings having the best possible relationship with the other species.
00:10:22.000So I want a really good relationship with my dog.
00:10:25.000I want a very hands-off relationship with the polar bear, right?
00:10:28.000I don't want him to just thrive and eat me, but I'm okay for him to exist in certain places.
00:10:32.000The malarial mosquito, I really want to kill, right?
00:10:35.000So human-fourishing perspective just means the planet, we have a good relationship with the other species.
00:10:40.000It doesn't mean that everything is a parking lot because that's not the best thing for us, but it means that we change the planet a lot.
00:10:46.000We need to build factories and farms and automobiles.
00:10:49.000And I think of all of that as improving the planet.
00:10:52.000And when most people hear that, when they recognize that you can be pro-human and as part of that, you're pro-environment because you value the environment, you value our environment for human beings, they see that makes a lot more sense than saying we shouldn't change anything.
00:11:05.000So when you make it clear, people will believe it.
00:11:08.000But by default, people are not taught to think of the world in a pro-human way.
00:11:12.000And just to give you one quick example, this is why there are 3 billion people in the world who have virtually no energy, which that's almost a guarantee of a terrible life because if you don't have energy, you don't have machine power and you can't be very productive and your life is very rough.
00:11:30.000Nobody cares that 3 billion people don't have energy, but everyone is obsessed with what our energy use does to the habits of polar bears, right?
00:11:38.000We have so much sympathy for what's going on with polar bears.
00:11:40.000Most people don't even know polar bears are my favorite animal, by the way, but still, most people don't know anything about polar bears.
00:11:48.000And yet they'll shed a tear if they hear that the polar bear had to move to a different piece of ice, but they don't care that 3 billion people don't have energy.
00:11:54.000What this indicates is that even though most people would be pro-human if they really thought about it, they're not thinking about the earth in a pro-human way.
00:12:03.000They're thinking about it in an unchanged nature way, which is really an anti-human way.
00:12:08.000So, so much of what I try to do in persuasion is to explain these issues from the outset.
00:12:13.000So, to say, look, do you agree that we want to look at the benefits and the side effects?
00:12:17.000Do you agree that ultimately we want the planet to be the best possible place for human beings?
00:12:21.000And then, if you can frame it that way, you start the conversation that way, then people are really open to what the facts are.
00:12:28.000And then, actually, the moral case for fossil fuels is pretty obvious.
00:12:31.000So, let's pretend that people say they're pro-human.
00:12:35.000And they still are very worried about what fossil fuels are doing to the world around them.
00:12:41.000So, I'm going to ask just a series of questions here because a lot of our listeners get so many questions about this.
00:12:46.000And you guys can email us at freedom at charliekirk.com around climate change, global warming, fossil fuel emissions, carbon dioxide.
00:12:53.000Before I get into some of these questions and give you an opportunity to explain them, I think it's very important that we look at things independent of another and not conflate them.
00:13:02.000I think first we need to look at how fossil fuels have made our life better.
00:13:06.000And then, if they are emitting carbon dioxide, is that carbon dioxide even attributable to what they consider to be the climate changing and global warming?
00:13:17.000Okay, well, but you're going to see they run together in a certain way because, insofar as there are any negatives, like when you have an antibiotic and as a side effect, the benefit of the antibiotic is you weigh it and then you have the side effect and you see which is bigger.
00:13:29.000But actually, we're going to see with fossil fuels, the benefit of fossil fuels gives you more machine power, and you can actually use that to counteract the side effects.
00:13:37.000So, imagine you made a storm 10% worse, but then you also gave yourself the ability to build a sturdy home.
00:13:42.000So, fossil fuels are fascinating because they have universal fundamental benefits that can offset their side effects indirectly and directly.
00:13:51.000So, yeah, let's start with just Bernie Sanders says climate change is an existential threat to humanity.
00:13:59.000Well, so it's so how are you how are you measuring that?
00:14:02.000And the interesting thing about Bernie Sanders and what I would call climate catastrophists is they have this view that fossil fuels have made the climate bad and it's going to get much worse.
00:14:11.000Would you agree that that's their character?
00:14:15.000Well, whether it's dogmatic or not, I mean, that's just the claim, right?
00:14:18.000It's made the climate bad and it's getting worse.
00:14:20.000And so, an interesting question is: how do you, I'm again, philosopher, so I ask, how are you measuring the climate being bad or not?
00:14:26.000I primarily measure it by how many human beings die from climate or what percentage of human beings die from climate.
00:14:33.000You can call this the climate death rate.
00:14:35.000So, before I studied the data on the climate death rate, what I figured was the climate death rate has gone up a little bit because we hear all the time about how climate's more dangerous, but there are offsetting benefits of fossil fuels that are way more important than the climate death rate going up.
00:14:49.000But what was interesting is when I learned the data, and I'll give you the most up-to-date data on this, the climate death rate in the last hundred years, as we've been using more and more fossil fuels, has gone down by 98%.
00:15:01.000So, this means the number of people dying from everything that's supposedly getting worse: storms, flood, extreme heat, extreme cold, wildfires, right?
00:15:08.000You have to believe this has gotten worse, right?
00:15:14.000So, this means you are one fifth, anyone in the world on average is 150th as likely to die from a climate-related cause than they were 100 years ago.
00:15:23.000If you're commenting on the future, here's a view I have: I don't trust you to predict the future if you can't predict the present.
00:15:30.000So, anybody who says that climate is terrible and getting worse, that's a non-starter.
00:15:35.000If you're saying that, hey, climate is safer than ever, and I want to understand that, but I'm worried about the future, that's coherent.
00:15:43.000The people who say climate is terrible today and who predict it terrible to be terrible in the future, there's a reason why those go together.
00:15:49.000And one reason is they don't recognize the role of adaptation in climate.
00:15:54.000How livable or how safe the climate is, it's a function of two things: what's going on in the climate and what's going on with human adaptation.
00:16:01.000And what we find is that the overwhelming thing that matters for how livable and safe the climate is is the state of human adaptation and what fossil fuels have done, fossil fuels, energy more broadly, that's machine food.
00:16:14.000So that's the calories that our machines operate on.
00:16:16.000Machines make us way more productive because we don't have to use as much manual labor.
00:16:21.000So machines, our machines in the U.S. do two do 100 times more work than we do, 100 times more physical work.
00:16:28.000That allows us to build a really durable and resilient civilization.
00:16:32.000And so the reason climate is so safe, part of it is because climate hasn't gone out of control like people say, but the main reason is our adaptability is so high.
00:16:41.000And when you're predicting the future, you have to recognize whatever you predict, you have to factor in adaptability.
00:16:46.000So one example I covered on my podcast recently with a guy named Bjorn Lomborg, who has a book about this called False Alarm.
00:16:52.000He gives a good example where they'll do studies, quote studies, where they're predicting the climate, which people are not very good at anyway, but they'll make a prediction and they'll say, you know what, if nobody adapts at all, then, and this happens to the climate, then 187 million people will be homeless, at least temporarily.
00:18:23.000We have to look objectively how good are these or bad are these for human life and then how to weigh those against the incredible adaptation benefits that fossil fuels give us.
00:18:33.000Would you say that carbon emissions contribute to rising global temperatures?
00:18:41.000And so we have to look at how much have global temperatures risen, and there's some controversy, but the mainstream view that's cited by the catastrophists.
00:19:33.000Places like Siberia get not hotter, but they thaw a little bit, right?
00:19:38.000And in the history of the planet, that's why in the warmer periods of the planet, the planet has been on average 25 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it is today.
00:19:48.000But in those periods, what's happening is it's not the equator is 25 degrees warmer.
00:19:52.000It's the planet is overall more tropical.
00:19:54.000So if you think the, and the reason I'm stressing this is the thing that we're supposedly worried about fossil fuels causing is very minor and quite possibly beneficial.
00:20:03.000Because you have, again, one degree Celsius.
00:20:06.000mostly in the colder regions and actually mostly at night and mostly in the winter.
00:20:11.000So it's actually warming where you would like it, when you would like it.
00:20:14.000And at the same time, more CO2 in the atmosphere definitely has caused a lot of plant growth.
00:20:19.000So you have a slightly warmer planet in the colder places and you have a more lush planet.
00:20:25.000And again, this is not what I'm saying so far.
00:20:27.000We could talk about the future and the evidence for the future because they do say more dramatic things.
00:20:31.000But notice that we, again, we have a slightly more tropical planet, including more plant growth, and people say it's terrible.
00:21:27.000It's an anti-human idea that distorts the interpretation of science.
00:21:31.000Some people will say that the rising global temperatures because of CO2 emissions, which is debated.
00:21:38.000There are other scientists that we plan to have on the side.
00:21:41.000And the amount of it is often, the extent of it is often debated and the future is often debated.
00:21:45.000Yeah, and a lot of some scientists have come out and said that's not close to being true.
00:21:49.000It depends on what type of analysis you're doing and sunspots could be contributing to it and tilt to the earth, all sorts of different things.
00:21:57.000So, however, some people will say, and they're convinced of this, and even some conservatives are, that even if you're pro-human, the ice caps are going to melt.
00:22:07.000We are going to have flooding, earthquake, disaster, worse than we've ever seen before.
00:22:11.000We need to slow down our addiction to fossil fuels so we slow down the coming catastrophe that's going to happen.
00:22:52.000And then if we look at, I know maybe we'll address some predictions from the past.
00:22:56.000What's interesting about the global cooling predictions that occurred in the 1970s, we can talk about those.
00:23:02.000But one interesting thing is they were also predicting more storms, more drought.
00:23:06.000All the negative consequences were going to get worse if the Earth cooled.
00:23:10.000And then it's going to get worse if the Earth warmed.
00:23:13.000So again, no matter what human beings do, it's expected to be bad.
00:23:17.000So let me just connect this to philosophy because you say, well, people say they're pro-human, even if we care about human beings, but they're concerned that the world is going to end or there's going to be really bad things.
00:23:29.000We're taught the moral view of the modern environmental movement is that unchanged nature is the goal, which means that all human change and human impact is immoral.
00:23:40.000So it'd be like if there were a tablet for the modern environmental movement, commandment number one would be, thou shalt not impact nature.
00:23:47.000And the whole supposedly secular, actually religious green movement is all about that, right?
00:23:55.000And you notice that if you just told people you shouldn't impact anything and anything is bad because you impacted it, it probably wouldn't go over too well.
00:24:04.000So what goes along with it is they say, no, it's not just that it's wrong for you to impact things.
00:24:09.000It's if you impact things, then you're going to disturb the delicate balance of the planet and everything is going to go haywire.
00:24:15.000And I call this, and this is a mythological view, but it's portrayed as a scientific view.
00:24:20.000I call this the perfect planet premise, which means that unchanged nature is stable, it's safe and sufficient.
00:24:28.000So it won't change much if we don't do anything.
00:24:54.000But if you believe this perfect planet premise, or by promoting this perfect planet premise, what people, the anti-impact environmental movement, they make people afraid that if we change anything, the whole perfect earth is going to be destabilized and punish us.
00:26:12.000Yeah, and it's usually what they do is it's always, I think AOC had 12 years or 10 years or something like that, but it's always that there's some upcoming political deadline.
00:26:23.000And it's always we have like 12 months to, you know, because then we always have to, they always have a 10-year plan that they want agreed on in the next 12 months.
00:26:32.000And if you look at the history of these things, and I love looking at the history, and I talk about this in chapter one of Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, which is, it's titled The Secret History of Fossil Fuels.
00:26:42.000But it's really the secret history of fossil fuel predictions because it goes back to the late 60s and it shows people predicting climate catastrophe, but also pollution catastrophe.
00:26:50.000There's going to be so much pollution, we can't breathe, and we won't even be able to see.
00:26:59.000And what you see is there's always this expectation that catastrophe is going to happen.
00:27:04.000So for example, John Holdren, President Obama's science advisor, predicted in the 1980s that by the year 2020, so now, a lot of bad stuff has happened in 2020, but he predicted that a billion people would die from climate-related famine.
00:27:16.000Now, if you know anything about the history of the world, I mentioned extreme poverty going down.
00:27:21.000We have the best fed population in human history, as well as the largest.
00:27:24.000So what's happened is actually using modern agriculture, which is all powered by fossil-fueled machines, especially diesel-powered agricultural equipment, we've actually fed billions of people.
00:27:35.000And what you see over and over is you have these catastrophists predicting that the world is going to get much worse and it actually gets much better.
00:27:46.000They assume if we're impacting things, it must be terrible and there will be no good.
00:27:50.000So what happens is they exaggerate the side effects beyond all recognition and they ignore the benefits, including the benefits of adaptability.
00:27:58.000And that's what you see with the future.
00:27:59.000The same people, the reason why you can expect these predictions to continue to be wrong is because they keep exaggerating the side effects and they keep ignoring the benefits of fossil fuels, including greater adaptability.
00:28:10.000So when I look forward and I hear somebody say, oh my gosh, you know, the Arctic, I mean, the Arctic melting, by the way, doesn't do much in terms of sea levels.
00:28:17.000But if you talk about, like, they'll say it's really actually hard to think about something climate-wise that would be a real problem for human beings that have fossil fuels and are adaptable.
00:28:27.000I mean, you think even, and this, there's no chance of this whatsoever, but imagine that there were five times as many hurricanes.
00:30:03.000So this whole idea of unchanged nature blends itself with, well, we want to minimize, we don't want pollution, we don't like pollution, right?
00:30:12.000So they say, oh, we're against pollution.
00:30:35.000They'll oppose, you know, I mean, certainly things like pipelines.
00:30:38.000So what's happened is the green movement has packaged together anti-pollution and anti-development.
00:30:44.000And part of what I'm trying to do is unpackage those by saying, look, we're for human flourishing, which means that, of course, we want to minimize negative impacts, but we want to maximize positive impacts.
00:30:54.000So I think most people, the reason to tease it out is not to accuse everybody of holding it consistently.
00:31:01.000It's that insofar as you hold it at all, it's bad.
00:31:04.000Because if you hold a human flourishing standard, then you just don't change nature when it makes sense to not change nature.
00:31:10.000So if you want to preserve a beautiful place, that's great, but you're doing it because it's what's good for human life.
00:31:14.000You're not doing it because you have a duty not to change nature.
00:31:17.000Because if you have a duty not to change nature, how do you draw the boundaries, right?
00:31:21.000If unchanged nature comes above human life, then that necessitates human sacrifice.
00:31:26.000Whereas if human life is the primary, then you change nature or not depending on what's good for human life.
00:31:32.000I think some people would say they have human life as a primary, and they'll say that's why they oppose coal-powered fire, you know, coal plants.
00:31:48.000Okay, so I remember I talked about these high-energy hydrocarbons coming from ancient dead life.
00:31:53.000So coal is the solid version of these.
00:31:55.000It stores a lot of energy in a small space.
00:31:58.000One of the things about it is the life that it came from is fairly near the surface of the earth, and there's a huge amount of it.
00:32:05.000And so this is one thing that somewhat differentiates it from oil and gas, which often you have to go very deep to and are often a little more rare or difficult to get.
00:32:16.000And as part of that, you can transport it anywhere in the world really easily.
00:32:20.000And this is why you see so much coal in the developing world, because you can dig up the stuff and you can transport it at low cost and you can bring it anywhere you want.
00:32:30.000Compare that to, say, hydropower, where hydropower is great, but if you don't have the right kind of river, you can't make a dam and you can't make a hydroelectric plant.
00:32:37.000So if you look at, say, China, but also lots of other places in Asia, including Japan, is using more and more coal.
00:32:42.000Like coal is generally the lowest cost form of electricity in most places in the world.
00:32:48.000And so to say, what do I think of coal means what do I think of people getting low-cost electricity?
00:32:52.000And what I think is that is an unbelievably positive thing.
00:32:55.000That is very, very tied to the dramatic decrease in extreme poverty.
00:32:59.000Because how do you decrease extreme poverty?
00:34:05.000So there's just a whole condescending attitude to say, oh, the whole world shouldn't use coal.
00:34:08.000Well, there's a reason why the whole world is using coal and a lot of the world is using more and more is because that gives them electricity.
00:34:49.000It's sort of a weird thing given other dynamics in our culture.
00:34:52.000But wait a second, like it just, it all depends on what's the process by which you transform the coal into energy.
00:34:59.000Because if you could take the black stuff as just carbon, if you could take that carbon and make that into steel, right?
00:35:04.000And it didn't get in the air, then you could generate really clean electricity and you could get other stuff.
00:35:09.000Whereas solar panels and wind turbines, if you have a process that involves mining a lot of things in poor countries done by children, that's bad safety practices, that can be really dirty and dangerous.
00:35:20.000The whole thing with coal is you shouldn't say, oh, I don't want it to be out of done with coal.
00:35:23.000You should look at is the process, the process that we're using with coal, how does that compare to the other processes in terms of costs and side effects?
00:35:31.000And so that just depends on in the U.S., I think it'll, there are still many places where I think coal is the most cost-effective, where it can be done cleanly, and where they have existing power plants that are generating relatively clean energy.
00:35:43.000And the communities really depend on the cost of electricity.
00:35:46.000So if you take a place like Kentucky and Indiana, if they're shutting down their coal plants and they're putting up natural gas plants, that's going to make their electricity more expensive and that drives out industry.
00:35:56.000So I think these things should be decided on a local basis.
00:35:59.000But for somebody to say, oh, I'm against coal because it seems dirty to me and they're ignorant of the costs and the processes and the side effects, that's a really bad attitude.
00:36:08.000And certainly around the world, and those same people, by the way, should be very in favor of freedom for natural gas.
00:36:13.000One of the ominous trends we have is we've got an anti-coal movement, we have an anti-fracking movement.
00:36:18.000Fracking is how you produce 60% of America's oil, 75% of America's natural gas.
00:36:23.000And we've got an anti-pipeline/slash infrastructure movement.
00:36:27.000And that's really terrifying because whether people know it or not, we live in a world that is hugely dependent on transporting energy from one place to another.
00:36:36.000If you can't get natural, natural gas doesn't store well.
00:36:43.000So you need pipelines to transport that clean stuff all over the place.
00:36:47.000If we're saying, oh, let's use natural gas, but we're opposing pipelines, that's guaranteeing that people are going to freeze to death or something close to it.
00:36:54.000And we're already starting to see that happen around the country, like in the Northeast.
00:36:57.000People are, utilities are saying, you know what, I can't sign up new people for natural gas because nobody's allowing us to build a pipeline.
00:37:03.000And this is one of the big election issues this year is what's going to happen to infrastructure if certain people get elected.
00:37:10.000So from your morality that is pro-human, of which I share, and I have some questions about that that I want to get to in a minute.
00:37:17.000Is there ever a moment where the pollution or the side effects of fossil fuels would make you pause and stop and say human flourishing is now being put at a disadvantage just because of fossil fuels?
00:37:29.000For example, polluted rivers, polluted lakes, water supply being corrupted.
00:37:33.000I mean, I think there's got to be, obviously, has that level or that threshold ever happened in your mind?
00:37:38.000Well, so we have to distinguish between using a technology in general and then abusing a technology.
00:37:44.000So the most obvious thing is abusing technology.
00:37:46.000So just take somebody's irresponsible, a gas line explodes and three people die.
00:38:05.000And then you can have different communities making the wrong decisions.
00:38:08.000So let's take, say, in certain places in China, maybe they're engaging in coal-burning practices that are overly polluting because they're not valuing the lives of the local citizens.
00:38:18.000This is part of why you want to be in a free country that has some respect for property rights because the pollution is going to be viewed in context versus the Chinese government saying, you know what, we want to produce as much stuff as possible at as low cost as possible, and we don't care about the well-being of our citizens.
00:38:33.000So it'd be exactly like saying, do you believe antibiotics ever have more side effects than are worth it?
00:39:11.000And part of my political platform that I promote or that I encourage politicians on is they should be decriminalizing nuclear energy.
00:39:19.000And I'm in favor of freedom for solar and wind, but we might talk about that.
00:39:23.000But they need to compete in producing reliable energy.
00:39:26.000Right now, they get special privileges, which get them paid the same amount or more for producing unreliable energy as producing reliable energy, which would be exactly the same as if the government said, Hey, Charlie, you know, Turning Point USA, you have to, if somebody's an unreliable worker who only comes in one-third of the time, you don't know when that'll happen, you have to pay them the same amount as you would a reliable worker.
00:39:46.000You would say, Well, no, I can't do that because then I need to pay the reliable worker and the unreliable worker.
00:39:51.000And that's that's what we have with solar and wind.
00:39:52.000So, solar and wind are being given special privileges.
00:39:55.000But if they had a way of producing reliable electricity that was competitive, I'm all for that.
00:40:01.000So, the question a lot of people have, and the issue of the environment is constantly being brought up with young people on campuses, especially young conservatives, is that we have a moral obligation to make to do less to the earth than we are right now.
00:40:23.000It's on the spectrum of unchanged earth, but I don't think all of them are necessarily all there or do nothing.
00:40:29.000I know, I think almost nobody has it clearly thought out, but part of it is they don't have a positive pro-human conception of environment.
00:40:37.000So, even I don't use the term the environment.
00:40:40.000I accidentally used it earlier in this interview and I corrected myself.
00:40:44.000And I'll explain why, because what does the environment mean?
00:41:00.000So, habitat really captures what environment captures.
00:41:05.000Yeah, but it's it's environment always means the environment of something for some purpose.
00:41:10.000So, when you're thinking of the planet, you have to think of it as whose perspective are you thinking of it from, which species?
00:41:15.000And you can't say I'm thinking of it from the perspective of all species because the interests of species conflict.
00:41:20.000I mentioned earlier, like, is it the malaria mosquitoes environment or is it the human environment, right?
00:41:26.000And so, when I think of the planet, I think of it as a human environment.
00:41:29.000So, in the in that I'm concerned about my surroundings from a human perspective and I want the relationship with it that's best for humans.
00:41:36.000So, I like thinking about our environment.
00:41:38.000And if you thought about it as we should change our environment as little as possible, if you want to kill billions of people, yeah, that should be your view.
00:41:44.000But otherwise, you should think: if I want the best human environment possible, I want to maximize my positive impacts and minimize my negative impacts.
00:41:52.000So, I'm really trying to encourage pro-human environmental thinking, not this anti-human, let's preserve the, because they want to save the environment, but it's usually save the environment from human beings.
00:42:04.000Whereas I want to improve our environment for human beings.
00:42:07.000So, some of these predictions, and you're not as much in the kind of global warming science space, right?
00:42:46.000But the genesis of this was in 2012, I challenged this guy named Bill McKibben, who's one of the, what someone called him, the thinking man's Al Gore.
00:42:53.000So I offered him, I was really mad at something he wrote in Rolling Stone, and it was against the fossil fuel industry, which I didn't know anyone in the industry.
00:42:59.000But he basically said the industry is evil and we need to divest from them.
00:43:19.000So, we debated at Duke University, which is where I happened to go to college.
00:43:22.000And so, I thought, okay, I got that to work.
00:43:23.000So, then Al Gore, I forget, you know what?
00:43:26.000Al Gore was leading this charge by attorneys general to go after different people, including they went after ExxonMobil.
00:43:32.000And they basically said, Oh, if you are, if you ever funded anybody who challenged climate catastrophe, then we're going to sue you for destroying the planet.
00:43:41.000And basically, saying anyone who's associated with anyone who has these views has no right to free speech.
00:43:46.000And I was named in the subpoena, even though I never got any funding from ExxonMobil or anything.
00:43:51.000And so what I did is the Massachusetts Attorney General had done this.
00:43:55.000And so I just wrote her this said, like, regarding your demand, because she said, sees any emails between me and ExxonMobil.
00:44:00.000And I'm like, you don't have a right to even ask about that.
00:44:03.000So I don't know if you're allowed to curse on the show, but I wrote her an email that said, regarding your demand, and it was just like F off fascist.
00:44:08.000And then I like, but Al Gore was part of that.
00:44:11.000So I'm like, all right, if you're going to come after me, why don't you actually debate me?
00:44:13.000So I offered him $100,000, but he has not accepted.
00:44:18.000He said in 2008 that the North Polar Ice Cap would be gone.
00:44:21.000But what if, I mean, let's just ask you, what if he was right?
00:44:24.000Yeah, but okay, but like if he was right and the ice cap would have gone, I mean, the question is, what's the significance of that?
00:44:31.000I mean, it's important that they're wrong because it shows that they tend to always exaggerate the science involved.
00:44:37.000But the biggest thing he hasn't been telling us is he's been advocating against fossil fuels for 40 years.
00:44:42.000And for 40 years, fossil fuels have been improving billions of lives.
00:44:45.000So the really important thing about Al Gore is not that he's made wrong predictions, but that he's made wrong predictions in the pseudo-scientific way, ignoring all the benefits of fossil fuels and thus advocating policies that would have killed billions of people.
00:45:10.000You want to maximize positive impacts and minimize negative.
00:45:13.000And by the way, just we should say politically, the way you have to do this is via property rights, ultimately.
00:45:17.000So it's, you just think about your, you know, people can earn different plots of land and then they have to, and if the government is deciding it, which I don't think the government should own 40% of whatever of the land, that means nobody owns it, right?
00:45:28.000So I think it should virtually all be privatized.
00:45:30.000But whether it is, if the government owns it, they still have to think about what's a good pro-human way of using this.
00:45:36.000And that means at least it has to be either we're developing the resources and/or we're enjoying it, versus what the government has done with the so-called wildlife refuge in Alaska, which is basically this place nobody goes.
00:45:47.000And they've said nothing can happen there ever, even if you can develop oil and it's a tiny little space.
00:45:54.000And even if the caribou like it, so that's unchanged nature, right?
00:45:57.000The government should not be permitted to value unchanged nature over human life.
00:46:01.000Anyone should be able to say, yes, I want this particular piece of nature unchanged for human life.
00:46:07.000I think there's, I think, Yellowstone is a good thing that we didn't have fracking in Yellowstone.
00:46:14.000Well, and it depends like Granteton National Park.
00:46:16.000I mean, it just, it's going to, it would depend.
00:46:18.000I mean, what if there was some, I mean, not take fracking, but imagine there was some resource that would just save.
00:46:24.000Well, but okay, but I'm what we're talking about is the method by which you make the decisions.
00:46:29.000So it's possible that a government on the wrong, but the government on the wrong outweighs whatever rent natural resource would possibly be.
00:46:36.000Okay, but I mean, you have to really go back to those things and think, okay, was it because in a lot of cases, people were kicked off their land.
00:46:42.000A lot of times their homes were destroyed.
00:46:43.000And so I have to say they were given Fifth Amendment rights for that, but yeah, I think it's Fifth Amendment.
00:47:17.000And without being too absolutist in it, and I'm very sympathetic with what you say, I think it's a good thing that there is no oil rigs, you know, right now.
00:48:04.000Not all land is created equal when you say that there is a moral case to be made that human beings should enjoy this untouched in its current form without having an excavation site at the bottom of the grand.
00:48:17.000So the way to think of it is unchanged nature is sometimes a means to the end of human flourishing.
00:49:31.000I think one reason is some of what's motivating your last question, which is our environment, including the beauty of the planet and enjoyment of nature, that's a huge value.
00:49:40.000I mean, in a sense, environment, that's almost the, that's where we live, right?
00:49:44.000So the whole modern environment, what I would call the anti-impact or anti-human environmental movement, that's monopolized the issue of environment morally for the past 50 years.
00:49:56.000So even though historically it's actually capitalism that really helped our environment, in part by defining property rights, which allows you to enjoy nature, and in part by creating enough prosperity where you can enjoy nature.
00:50:07.000If you're a subsistence farmer, you're not enjoying nature.
00:50:09.000If you're walking three hours a day to get water, you're not enjoying nature.
00:50:13.000But if you have machine power and you're so productive that, among other things, you create leisure time, then you can enjoy nature.
00:50:18.000So the issue of environment morally belonged to capitalists, but it was taken over by anti-capitalists.
00:50:26.000And so what they could do is they could take their anti-capitalist views, but also their anti-impact views, and as I said before, package them together with pro-human views.
00:50:35.000So people think, oh, if I love nature or if I want a clean environment, then I must want to minimize human impact.
00:50:42.000And what I tried to do, I started my organization, it's called Center for Industrial Progress.
00:50:46.000But the idea when I started in 2011 was a pro-human alternative to the green movement.
00:50:52.000So you can think of it as a pro-human environmental movement that owns the issue of environment for the people to whom it belongs, which are the advocates of human life and the advocates of freedom.
00:51:04.000Do you see a future coming where fossil fuels will become increasingly irrelevant?
00:51:10.000I mean, if we have that future in the near future, that'll just mean a lot of people's lives become a lot worse.
00:51:16.000I mean, we want anything to become irrelevant if it's out-competed by something superior.
00:51:22.000So, I would love it, for example, if nuclear energy developed on a trajectory that it could actually out-compete fossil fuels, which means that it could produce everything we need.
00:51:31.000So, electricity, heat for our homes, heat for industry, transportation.
00:51:35.000If it could produce all of those reliably at low cost for billions of people, if it could do that better, of course, I want that.
00:51:42.000But we're nowhere near that reality in part because much of the modern environmental movement has criminalized nuclear energy.
00:51:48.000So, nuclear energy is actually unfortunately becoming less prevalent and much, much more expensive.
00:51:56.000Yeah, it's the safest form of energy ever developed.
00:51:59.000But so, the current economics of fossil fuels is just fossil fuels provide over 80% of the world's energy.
00:52:06.000So, that means fossil fuels are more than four times all other alternatives combined, and they're still the fastest-growing source of energy in the world.
00:52:13.000So, more energy every year is added from fossil fuels than from any other source.
00:52:19.000And if you just think about that, if they become irrelevant, the reason why they're relevant is not because there's a lot of favoritism toward them.
00:52:26.000We know there's actually a lot of antagonism toward them, but because nothing can match them at producing energy for all of our types of machines reliably at low cost for billions of people.
00:52:36.000Like, that's the game you have to play that nobody else is close to doing.
00:52:40.000There are interesting reasons why, and part of it is just the materials of fossil fuels are quite special in terms of these high-energy hydrocarbons that store a lot of energy in a small space.
00:52:49.000There aren't that many materials like that.
00:52:50.000The closest is nuclear material, which is actually even more concentrated.
00:52:55.000But the other thing is with fossil fuels, we have literally generations of millions of people innovating and refining super efficient processes to turn these ancient dead plants into really low-cost energy.
00:53:07.000So, to compete with fossil fuels, you need to have something that can compete with the material and compete with generations of innovation.
00:53:13.000That's why I think nuclear is ultimately going to be it, but we're criminalizing it.
00:53:17.000So, if so, it's generations away from being a true substitute, which means that if fossil fuels become irrelevant in a world where billions of people are still using virtually no machine power, that will mean we've committed an act of international genocide by preventing people from using them.
00:53:32.000I'm a huge fan of nuclear energy, and it's been ridiculously slandered by demonized and criminalized are the two words I would say.
00:53:39.000France used to have almost all their power.
00:53:50.000Which, if you were concerned, it's revealing because if you were concerned about CO2 emissions, even if nuclear were more expensive, you'd say, well, okay, well, this is the only way we know, at least, of producing electricity on a large scale.
00:54:01.000Like solar and wind, we can go into it.
00:54:04.000Basically, they don't produce reliable energy on any scale.
00:54:06.000So, they're always just an unreliable supplement added to the network, but they're always backed up by what I call the reliables.
00:54:13.000So, they're always backed up by coal, gas, oil.
00:54:15.000Sometimes that's mostly transportation, or nuclear hydro.
00:54:18.000So, there's like reliables and unreliables.
00:54:22.000I think we should call them unreliables, not renewables, because hydro is renewable, but it's opposed mostly by the green movement.
00:54:28.000So, the unreliables, those right now are nothing close to a scalable solution because you need a really cheap way to store them, and nothing like that remotely exists.
00:54:35.000So, basically, those are just wasteful supplements right now for most purposes.
00:54:39.000The only thing that could potentially, hydro is great, but only works in certain locations.
00:54:44.000So, for even for just electricity, let alone transportation, nuclear is the only thing that we know of that could really provide reliable electricity all around the world.
00:54:52.000And who are the biggest opponents of nuclear energy?
00:55:20.000If people get that, if they get that the modern environmental movement, it's not an environmental movement, it's an anti-impact movement, and it's not a scientific movement, it's a religious movement, then that makes sense of all of these crazy positions, including people saying, I want to lower CO2 emissions, that's my purpose in life, but you can't build a dam and you can't split an atom.
00:55:40.000Joe Biden has now come out and said he wants a fossil fuel, fossil fuel-free future by 2035.
00:55:47.000You probably pronounce it much better than he did.
00:56:15.000I mean, every, almost every advocate of climate catastrophism and these anti-fossil fuel policies say we're going to make the world better for human beings.
00:56:26.000The question is, are they in any way advocating actions that would do that?
00:56:31.000And if you're Leonardo DiCaprio and you don't recognize that reliable, low-cost energy makes life possible for billions of people, including just agriculture.
00:56:41.000Like if we didn't have modern oil agriculture or something like it, we can't feed billions of people.
00:56:46.000I mean, at best, you go back to a largely manual labor world, but you'd have literal starvation.
00:56:50.000Even before modern agriculture, 40, 50 years ago, 50 years ago, they predicted a population bomb.
00:56:55.000New York Times, you can go read their back issues.
00:56:58.000They said basically the whole world is going to starve with a population of 4 billion people.
00:57:05.000It's because our technology is so good, but our technology is all powered by reliable, low-cost energy, almost all from fossil fuels.
00:57:12.000So the thing I really want to convince people about is that just in terms of our method, we need to look at the benefits and the side effects, and we need to be really focused on human life, human flourishing.
00:57:23.000And if we're not, of course, you can always say, I mean, an example is animal testing.
00:57:28.000This is a really clear-cut example of the same thing that's simpler, right?
00:57:31.000Some people think animal testing is intrinsically wrong no matter what, including some scientists think animal testing is wrong.
00:57:38.000Animal testing is definitely beneficial to human life in some situations.
00:57:42.000There's no chance that no animal testing is ever benefited.
00:57:48.000Because human life is not their standard, right?
00:57:50.000The lives of the animals are their standard.
00:57:52.000Now, what you'll notice is that the people who are saying we shouldn't animal test, they're always making up that, you know what, we don't really need animal testing.
00:58:03.000But they're trying to rationalize a view that people wouldn't swallow.
00:58:08.000And this is what's happening with the modern environmental movement.
00:58:11.000It's people saying, you know what, we shouldn't impact nature because we have no right to, and it's wrong, even though it benefits us to impact nature.
01:00:00.000Yeah, but it's overwhelmingly coming from fossil fuels.
01:00:03.000But the reason I'm pushing on this is we can't think of our fossil fuel use as something that happened in the past.
01:00:08.000As I mentioned, this is the leading, this is the overwhelming and fastest growing source of energy in the world.
01:00:13.000And what's important is this is perpetually fueling the machines that are keeping us alive right now.
01:00:19.000If you just think of agriculture, like if our whole agriculture thing where 2% of the people produce enough food for everyone else, that's wholly machine driven.
01:00:27.000If those machines can't get energy, they don't work.
01:00:33.000But I'm not saying you're suggesting getting rid of it, but there's this, the reason I'm pushing on this is because sometimes people in the industry act like, oh, fossil fuels, they were good in the past, but maybe we don't need them anymore.
01:00:44.000So when we talk about opposing fossil fuels, it's both hurting ourselves now and then depriving people in the poor world of having any opportunities.
01:00:51.000I just don't think they're all made equal.
01:01:11.000For example, when you extract natural gas, you've done the fracking method.
01:01:15.000It's just like opening up a Coca-Cola can.
01:01:17.000The Fizz is the gas, and you get the oil when you extract it.
01:01:22.000The coal mine, you have to do something like coal mine afterwards, and you usually have to pump water out of it so extraordinarily fast, like in Pennsylvania.
01:01:30.000If you just abandon those coal mines, you're going to have rivers, which is what's happened, completely polluted, right?
01:01:35.000There are more external costs to coal mining than just natural gas extraction.
01:01:47.000So as I explained my views on this before, so I won't go into them again.
01:01:51.000But I'm open to that in certain places, but it really has to be that the people who are affected by it get to make a decision based on the full benefits and the side effects from them.
01:02:00.000I'm just very aware of anyone saying, like, oh, I don't like coal.
01:02:04.000Like, no, it's about the people in the situation making the best decision given all the factors.
01:03:34.000But they're not using as many as they should be.
01:03:35.000But if we're honest with ourselves, politically, culturally, more and more people are sympathizing with the unchanged nature of you, to use your own terms.
01:04:23.000But if you just, if, yeah, so it's the, I mean, the religion, the green religion, but in particular, the fossil fuel opposition, yeah, it's massive.
01:04:31.000I mean, it's part of the reason why I'm out there because it's a bad trend and it needs to be corrected.
01:04:36.000The trend will result, in my opinion, in a lot more human suffering than is necessary.
01:05:37.000But the 33% is totally dependent on the reliables.
01:05:41.000So, right, you can use 33% unreliable.
01:05:44.000You could have 33% unreliable workers.
01:05:46.000It would be a pain in the ass and it would cost you a lot of money because you would still have to have the reliable workers and the unreliable workers.
01:05:53.000So Germany pays, average German pays three times for electricity, what the average American pays.
01:05:57.000And the average American pays way too much.
01:06:00.000And we know this in part because natural gas, our major electricity source, our major heating source, has gone way down in price thanks to fracking and other related technologies.
01:07:23.000I mean, that was, and people experienced that as a tragedy.
01:07:27.000And that was as much oil being taken off the market in 73 as Joe Biden would do just by banning fracking, which now Kamal Harris has just been a total advocate of banning fracking.
01:07:38.000Banning fracking would just take as much oil off the market.
01:08:50.000Like it's hundreds of billions of gallons a year worth of energy if you take the oil and the natural gas combined.
01:08:55.000And we've gone from a massive, massive importer of energy to actually often now an exporter of energy in terms of oil in particular.
01:09:04.000So it's 60% of our oil production, 75% of our natural gas production.
01:09:08.000And that's why I said if you banned this, just you banned this one process, it would be a huge blow to the U.S. economy and also to the world economy.
01:09:16.000So if we look at benefit side effects, that is a huge benefit and there's a huge catastrophe of opposing it.
01:09:22.000The side effect, what is the side effect that people are concerned about?
01:09:25.000They're usually concerned about groundwater, right?
01:09:27.000Like it's going to contaminate groundwater.
01:09:30.000So interestingly, fracking is one of the safest processes, industrial processes for groundwater.
01:09:40.000That's what actually contaminates groundwater if you're near groundwater.
01:09:43.000Fracking takes place a mile below groundwater and it's shielded by a mile of solid rock.
01:09:47.000So how are you going to contaminate groundwater that way?
01:09:49.000So how do they get that talking point then?
01:09:51.000Interestingly, the way they get it, and this is really revealing, is they find natural gas in the local groundwater and they say it was fracking.
01:10:00.000Now, there are ways that can happen with conventional oil and gas drilling, but the basic way it happens is the number one polluter of nature put the natural gas in the water.
01:10:08.000Who's the number one polluter of nature?
01:11:13.000Actually, let me ask you the question and then I'll get to the risk.
01:11:15.000So, how equipped do you think candidates, and I know you're focused on Republican candidates, how equipped do you think, let's say, pro-energy, pro-freedom candidates are for dealing with all these energy and environmental issues this election?
01:11:28.000Incredibly ill-equipped or unequipped.
01:11:32.000I think that many of them are pandering to some of these green movements.
01:11:36.000And some of them, quite honestly, lack either a consistent philosophical or moral framework and/or they just are afraid to discuss these issues correctly.
01:11:46.000And they only look at one metric when it talks about energy.
01:12:52.000So, yeah, and my experience has been the same.
01:12:55.000Like people are just, but it's interesting because some people, they're just conceding the argument, but many people I meet, and I want to try to educate those people too, but many people I meet have the same kind of sense that I do.
01:13:06.000And I think that mostly you do, but they just have no clue of what to say in different situations about different issues.
01:13:13.000And there's really nobody who's been giving them different kinds of things.
01:13:17.000And in my experience, I mean, I've done some work with the oil and gas industry and the coal industry.
01:13:21.000Like they don't pay me to speak, but I'll help them with their talking points and stuff.
01:13:26.000And just talking to them, it's such a crisis state right now for the energy industry.
01:13:30.000If you look at the state of their jobs and stuff, even less than usual, they're giving any kind of valid information.
01:13:35.000So I just decided, okay, I'm just going to create a free website, energytalkingpoints.com, and any candidate, any citizen can get talking points on every issue.
01:13:45.000But if you just go to that website, right now it's just Google Drive.
01:13:47.000Just click on that and you get facts about fracking.
01:13:50.000Everyone is a tweet length and everyone is perfectly referenced.
01:13:53.000So people have started using it, but I just want people to use it.
01:13:56.000Again, there's nothing to do besides look at it, learn from it, and use it.
01:14:01.000Because I think that if most people, if they know the facts about energy, and particularly if they're being given the facts from a pro-human, including pro-environment perspective, it's super clear that at least on energy, there is one direction that is much better than the other.
01:14:17.000And there's this false idea that, oh, we're going to do some of the stuff Biden's advocating and it's going to save the planet and that kind of thing.
01:14:23.000Like the only thing that those kinds of fossil fuel abolition plans are going to do is they're going to unilaterally ruin the U.S. and do very little about the rest of the world.
01:14:33.000China and India, they're using coal and more coal for a reason.
01:14:37.000And that's because it's the lowest cost source of reliable energy for their needs.
01:14:40.000They are using it and they should be using it.
01:14:43.000We're not going to change the trajectory of global emissions.
01:14:45.000The only way we can do that is by contributing to the development of low-cost, low-carbon energy.
01:14:51.000And I would say start with decriminalizing nuclear.
01:14:54.000Because there's no, you're not going to, unless you want to go to war, that's really the only.
01:14:59.000Yeah, but if you want to actually go to war and you want to go to nuclear war, that's the only way you're going to stop emissions from rising around the world because it's too big a sacrifice for people and they won't do it.
01:15:10.000So it's not a people act like, oh, if we follow this plan, maybe it would be tough for us, but we're going to save the planet from rising CO2 levels.
01:15:17.000As I said before, you shouldn't be afraid of rising CO2 levels because the influence they have on warming is pretty minor and we're super adaptable.
01:15:25.000But if you are worried about it, you cannot solve it by making a unilateral sacrifice by the U.S.
01:15:30.000The thing you can do is keep the U.S. as a free and prosperous country and focus your efforts, if you want to, on innovation and low-cost, low-carbon energy.
01:15:38.000The only way people will use lower carbon energy is if it's actually cheaper to do so.
01:15:43.000So you are a self-described philosopher.
01:16:59.000What a great conversation that was with Alex Epstein.
01:17:02.000Please consider supporting our program by going to charliekirk.com/slash support.
01:17:07.000Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
01:17:10.000And if you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, the nation's largest student movement fighting for freedom, liberty, the Constitution, and the American way of life, go to tpusa.com, tpusa.com.