The Charlie Kirk Show - The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels w- Alex Epstein

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00:00:08.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:09.000 Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, I sit down with the leading expert who is a pro-fossil fuel voice against the green movement.

00:00:17.000 We talk about global warming.

00:00:19.000 We talk about climate change.

00:00:21.000 We talk about the Green New Deal.

00:00:23.000 We talk about is the Earth actually getting warmer or not.

00:00:26.000 We get all the answers to your questions around global warming and all these very controversial issues that a lot of you have questions about.

00:00:33.000 Freedom at Charlie Kirk, freedom at CharlieKirk.com, freedom at CharlieKirk.com.

00:00:38.000 Please consider becoming a monthly supporter at CharlieKirk.com slash support.

00:00:43.000 Alex Epstein is here.

00:00:45.000 Very interesting conversation.

00:00:47.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:48.000 Here we go.

00:00:50.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:52.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:00:54.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:57.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:01:00.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:01:01.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:01:02.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.

00:01:09.000 Turning point USA.

00:01:11.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:01:20.000 That's why we are here.

00:01:22.000 Hey, everybody.

00:01:22.000 Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:25.000 I am joined by Alex Epstein.

00:01:27.000 Epstein.

00:01:27.000 Or is Epstein?

00:01:28.000 Epstein.

00:01:29.000 Yes.

00:01:29.000 I apologize for that.

00:01:31.000 Especially important right now.

00:01:32.000 I was going to say this.

00:01:34.000 Kind of in the conversation, right?

00:01:36.000 So no relation, I presume.

00:01:38.000 No relation.

00:01:39.000 Okay.

00:01:40.000 I'm sure you're getting sick of that.

00:01:41.000 But I wouldn't be guilty even if I was.

00:01:42.000 Yeah, no, exactly.

00:01:44.000 But according to maybe leftist dogma, just because you're related to somebody, you might be indicted.

00:01:49.000 You're very outspoken on a variety of topics.

00:01:51.000 I love your scholarship.

00:01:52.000 I 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.

00:02:05.000 Introduce yourself to our audience and then let's go from there.

00:02:08.000 So my name is Alex Epstein.

00:02:11.000 Maybe 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.

00:02:21.000 I'll be right here.

00:02:22.000 By the fossil fuel industry or something.

00:02:24.000 And I actually grew up in a liberal environment, Chevy Chase, Maryland, right outside Washington, D.C.

00:02:29.000 And I was told for my whole life through Duke University that fossil fuels are an addiction.

00:02:35.000 So 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.

00:02:43.000 And so I grew up believing many of the things I now speak up against.

00:02:47.000 And 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.

00:02:55.000 It's that I come from a philosophy background.

00:02:58.000 And what I concluded is the way people are thinking about energy is really illogical.

00:03:02.000 And 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.

00:03:11.000 And I noticed that in fossil fuels, we don't do that.

00:03:14.000 We only look at the side effects and we don't look at the benefits.

00:03:17.000 Whereas when we talk about green energy, we don't look at the side effects and we do look at the benefits.

00:03:22.000 And just even observing that from a philosophy perspective made me realize there's a certain kind of bias in the discussion.

00:03:28.000 I didn't know what the truth was, but it made me very interested.

00:03:31.000 What's actually the truth about the benefits and side effects of different forms of energy?

00:03:35.000 And so you have been very outspoken in favor of fossil fuels.

00:03:38.000 You wrote the book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.

00:03:41.000 You said it yourself.

00:03:42.000 One of the greatest pieces of criticism you receive is that you're funded by these companies.

00:03:46.000 Which is not true.

00:03:46.000 Right.

00:03:47.000 No.

00:03:48.000 And so you're...

00:03:50.000 I should say, I charge people to give speeches.

00:03:54.000 So I just want to make clear.

00:03:55.000 And 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.

00:04:01.000 That's not my livelihood.

00:04:02.000 But hopefully, by the end of today, people will think, you know what, those people are good people.

00:04:06.000 Today, because we think fossil fuels are so destructive, we think, oh, if you're connected with that industry, you're bad.

00:04:12.000 But if you actually think of them like you think of medicine, then you think, oh, wow, that's heroic to be involved in that.

00:04:17.000 Let's get to the root first and then make the moral case for fossil fuels.

00:04:21.000 Tell us what fossil fuels are, because not everyone can define that.

00:04:24.000 Nobody ever asked that question, interestingly.

00:04:25.000 That's such a good question.

00:04:27.000 Well, and then tell us what the moral case for fossil fuels is.

00:04:27.000 Okay.

00:04:29.000 Sure.

00:04:30.000 So fossil fuels, I mean, specifically they refer to coal, oil, and natural gas.

00:04:36.000 But the way to think of them is: this is a little bit of a complex definition, but it'll make sense.

00:04:42.000 You can think of them as high-energy hydrocarbons derived from ancient life.

00:04:47.000 So high-energy hydrocarbons derived from ancient life.

00:04:49.000 And I'll explain that, but it's important because it actually connects to climate change and everything else.

00:04:54.000 So 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.

00:05:03.000 Particularly, oil does this most of all.

00:05:05.000 That'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.

00:05:10.000 So when you're transporting something, you need something really dense.

00:05:12.000 And oil with these hydrocarbon molecules that are liquid stores it in a really dense place.

00:05:17.000 Now, what happens is when you burn them, you add oxygen to the situation.

00:05:20.000 And this is why this is important for climate.

00:05:22.000 You release hydrogen and that bonds to oxygen.

00:05:25.000 That makes water, but you also release carbon, which connects to oxygen, and that makes carbon dioxide.

00:05:30.000 So the same thing that's generating the energy that's powering, say, an airplane is also putting more CO2 in the atmosphere.

00:05:37.000 Also, 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.

00:05:49.000 So 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.

00:05:56.000 And 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?

00:06:03.000 So that's a great explanation of fossil fuels, probably the best I've heard.

00:06:06.000 So now that we know what fossil fuels are, what is the moral case for fossil fuels?

00:06:12.000 Well, let me say first: what is the moral case for anything?

00:06:14.000 The moral case for anything depends on how you define morality.

00:06:18.000 And I think this is really the key issue at stake.

00:06:22.000 And I'd say specifically, how do you define morality with respect to our environment?

00:06:26.000 Because the whole concern about fossil fuels is they're hurting our environment, right?

00:06:30.000 They're destroying the planet.

00:06:32.000 And I think this is really interesting because we hear this idea of fossil fuels are destroying the planet.

00:06:36.000 Like most people think the planet's getting worse, right?

00:06:39.000 It's a well, it's a well-held belief, especially in higher education.

00:06:44.000 Yeah, and I'll emphasize that.

00:06:45.000 And 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?

00:06:54.000 So extreme poverty means people living on less than $2 a day.

00:06:57.000 Has it gotten worse?

00:06:58.000 Has it stayed the same?

00:07:00.000 Or has it gotten better?

00:07:01.000 What do you think the average answer is of a college-educated European adult?

00:07:05.000 Most of them probably say either stay the same or worse. 0.52

00:07:08.000 You got it.

00:07:08.000 So 55% said worse.

00:07:11.000 33% said stayed the same.

00:07:13.000 12% said better.

00:07:14.000 When it's dramatically better.

00:07:15.000 It's 12%.

00:07:17.000 Maybe you didn't finish college, right?

00:07:18.000 That's probably why I know.

00:07:19.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:07:20.000 So, no, but it's really, it's really instructive that what we can think of as our mainstream knowledge system.

00:07:26.000 So 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.

00:07:36.000 It's actually gotten better at a miraculous rate.

00:07:39.000 So 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%.

00:07:47.000 So extreme poverty went from 30% of the world population to under 10%.

00:07:51.000 Yeah.

00:07:51.000 And when I was born, I just think of it, I was born in 1980.

00:07:53.000 So exactly 40 years ago now, and it was 42% the year I was born.

00:07:58.000 So 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.

00:08:03.000 Now, 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.

00:08:10.000 But there's this general trend.

00:08:12.000 And why am I bringing this up?

00:08:14.000 Because when people say fossil fuels are destroying the planet, and yet overall, it's not just extreme poverty.

00:08:20.000 The planet has never been a better place for human beings to live.

00:08:22.000 We 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.

00:08:31.000 So from a human perspective, the planet has never been a better place to live.

00:08:35.000 And yet we're educated to think that the planet has been destroyed and fossil fuels are the cause.

00:08:40.000 But yet I would say from a human perspective, again, the planet has never been a better place to live.

00:08:44.000 And what's going on there, this is not a scientific issue, it's a moral issue.

00:08:48.000 The question is, are you evaluating the planet by the standard of human life?

00:08:53.000 And I would call it human flourishing.

00:08:55.000 So human beings' ability to live to their highest potential.

00:08:58.000 Because if that's your standard, the planet has never been better.

00:09:01.000 And then you need to explain how fossil fuels maybe have made it better.

00:09:04.000 But if you think it's bad, then you have a different standard.

00:09:07.000 It's not a human standard.

00:09:08.000 And here's what's going on.

00:09:09.000 The dominant standard we're taught to use morally and environmentally is the standard of unchanged nature.

00:09:16.000 So we regard the planet as bad, even though it's better for human beings because we've changed it so much.

00:09:22.000 But 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.

00:09:30.000 And my argument for fossil fuels is fossil fuels make the planet a far better place to live.

00:09:35.000 But before you can process that argument, you need to know what standard are you evaluating the planet by.

00:09:40.000 And the key to my argument, the moral case for fossil fuels, is a human case for fossil fuels.

00:09:45.000 So 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.

00:09:55.000 Actually, this is interesting, yes and no.

00:09:58.000 And this has a lot of implications for how to make the case.

00:10:01.000 Because 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.

00:10:08.000 So is this the most human-friendly planet possible?

00:10:11.000 And you need to make clear, this doesn't mean human beings versus every other species, although sometimes we're adversarial, sometimes we're not.

00:10:18.000 It really means human beings having the best possible relationship with the other species.

00:10:22.000 So I want a really good relationship with my dog.

00:10:25.000 I want a very hands-off relationship with the polar bear, right?

00:10:28.000 I don't want him to just thrive and eat me, but I'm okay for him to exist in certain places.

00:10:32.000 The malarial mosquito, I really want to kill, right?

00:10:35.000 So human-fourishing perspective just means the planet, we have a good relationship with the other species. 0.58

00:10:40.000 It 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.

00:10:46.000 We need to build factories and farms and automobiles.

00:10:49.000 And I think of all of that as improving the planet.

00:10:52.000 And 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.

00:11:05.000 So when you make it clear, people will believe it.

00:11:08.000 But by default, people are not taught to think of the world in a pro-human way.

00:11:12.000 And 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.

00:11:26.000 3 billion people don't have it.

00:11:28.000 We talk about energy every day.

00:11:29.000 Nobody cares, right?

00:11:30.000 Nobody 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?

00:11:38.000 We have so much sympathy for what's going on with polar bears.

00:11:40.000 Most 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.

00:11:46.000 They never plan to see one.

00:11:46.000 They've never seen one.

00:11:48.000 And 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.

00:11:54.000 What 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.

00:12:03.000 They're thinking about it in an unchanged nature way, which is really an anti-human way.

00:12:08.000 So, so much of what I try to do in persuasion is to explain these issues from the outset.

00:12:13.000 So, to say, look, do you agree that we want to look at the benefits and the side effects?

00:12:17.000 Do you agree that ultimately we want the planet to be the best possible place for human beings?

00:12:21.000 And then, if you can frame it that way, you start the conversation that way, then people are really open to what the facts are.

00:12:28.000 And then, actually, the moral case for fossil fuels is pretty obvious.

00:12:31.000 So, let's pretend that people say they're pro-human.

00:12:35.000 And they still are very worried about what fossil fuels are doing to the world around them.

00:12:35.000 Yes.

00:12:40.000 Yeah.

00:12:41.000 So, I'm going to ask just a series of questions here because a lot of our listeners get so many questions about this.

00:12:46.000 And you guys can email us at freedom at charliekirk.com around climate change, global warming, fossil fuel emissions, carbon dioxide.

00:12:53.000 Before 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.

00:13:02.000 I think first we need to look at how fossil fuels have made our life better.

00:13:06.000 And 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?

00:13:14.000 I think it's conflated far too often.

00:13:16.000 So, let's start.

00:13:17.000 Okay, 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.

00:13:29.000 But 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.

00:13:37.000 So, imagine you made a storm 10% worse, but then you also gave yourself the ability to build a sturdy home.

00:13:42.000 So, fossil fuels are fascinating because they have universal fundamental benefits that can offset their side effects indirectly and directly.

00:13:51.000 So, yeah, let's start with just Bernie Sanders says climate change is an existential threat to humanity.

00:13:57.000 Right.

00:13:58.000 What's your thoughts on that?

00:13:59.000 Well, so it's so how are you how are you measuring that?

00:14:02.000 And 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.

00:14:11.000 Would you agree that that's their character?

00:14:14.000 That's a very dogmatic belief.

00:14:15.000 Well, whether it's dogmatic or not, I mean, that's just the claim, right?

00:14:18.000 It's made the climate bad and it's getting worse.

00:14:20.000 And 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?

00:14:26.000 I primarily measure it by how many human beings die from climate or what percentage of human beings die from climate.

00:14:33.000 You can call this the climate death rate.

00:14:35.000 So, 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.

00:14:49.000 But 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%.

00:15:01.000 So, this means the number of people dying from everything that's supposedly getting worse: storms, flood, extreme heat, extreme cold, wildfires, right?

00:15:08.000 You have to believe this has gotten worse, right?

00:15:11.000 There's more death, et cetera.

00:15:12.000 No, 98% decline.

00:15:14.000 So, 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.

00:15:23.000 If 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.

00:15:30.000 So, anybody who says that climate is terrible and getting worse, that's a non-starter.

00:15:35.000 If 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.

00:15:41.000 But it's related.

00:15:43.000 The 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.

00:15:49.000 And one reason is they don't recognize the role of adaptation in climate.

00:15:54.000 How 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.

00:16:01.000 And 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.

00:16:14.000 So that's the calories that our machines operate on.

00:16:16.000 Machines make us way more productive because we don't have to use as much manual labor.

00:16:20.000 We can use machines.

00:16:21.000 So machines, our machines in the U.S. do two do 100 times more work than we do, 100 times more physical work.

00:16:28.000 That allows us to build a really durable and resilient civilization.

00:16:32.000 And 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.

00:16:41.000 And when you're predicting the future, you have to recognize whatever you predict, you have to factor in adaptability.

00:16:46.000 So one example I covered on my podcast recently with a guy named Bjorn Lomborg, who has a book about this called False Alarm.

00:16:52.000 He 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.

00:17:08.000 And what happens?

00:17:09.000 The New York Times, Washington Post, they run with this and they say 187 million refugees.

00:17:13.000 But the study also says this is if people don't adapt, but of course they will adapt just as they adapt constantly, right?

00:17:20.000 And then what happens if they do adapt, less than, I think less than 1 million people will be homeless.

00:17:26.000 How many people move every year?

00:17:28.000 It turned out the number, according to Bjorn, was actually something like 300,000.

00:17:31.000 So less than half the people who move from California every year.

00:17:34.000 So it's a fascinating thing when you're talking about climate.

00:17:38.000 The main cause of the catastrophe view is not understanding human adaptation.

00:17:43.000 The other thing that's going on, because I mentioned that climate has never been safer, how can they say that it's so bad?

00:17:49.000 It's because they're not using the human standard, the human flourishing standard, to evaluate the state of climate.

00:17:55.000 They're using the unchanged nature standard.

00:17:57.000 Notice the term is climate change.

00:17:59.000 People think if we change climate, it must be bad.

00:18:02.000 But why is that?

00:18:03.000 That's an anti-human view, that if humans change something, it must be bad, right?

00:18:07.000 If the rest of nature changes climate, it doesn't matter.

00:18:10.000 But if human beings do anything, then it must be bad.

00:18:12.000 But wouldn't we want to neutralize hurricanes?

00:18:14.000 Wouldn't some forms of climate change be good?

00:18:17.000 So when we look at the impacts of rising CO2 levels, we can't assume they're good.

00:18:21.000 We can't assume they're bad.

00:18:22.000 We can't assume they're neutral.

00:18:23.000 We 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.

00:18:33.000 Would you say that carbon emissions contribute to rising global temperatures?

00:18:38.000 Probably.

00:18:40.000 I think they probably do.

00:18:41.000 And 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.

00:18:48.000 So I'll give the catastrophist view.

00:18:50.000 And I think this is more or less true, is about one degree in the last 170 years.

00:18:56.000 So one degree Celsius, that's 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit.

00:18:59.000 So if you think about that, just on a common sense level, that's not a big temperature rise.

00:19:03.000 The other thing people don't realize, it's called global warming often, but global warming isn't really global.

00:19:09.000 The way it works, and this is according to the UN IPCC, that's the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

00:19:15.000 This is the basis of many catastrophe predictions.

00:19:17.000 But if you look at what they say, they'll say, you know what, the warming actually occurs mostly in colder areas.

00:19:23.000 So it occurs more toward the poles.

00:19:25.000 This is interesting because you hear so much about the Arctic.

00:19:27.000 Why do you hear so much about the Arctic?

00:19:28.000 Because warming, it doesn't happen that the equator gets a lot hotter.

00:19:32.000 The poles get hotter.

00:19:33.000 Places like Siberia get not hotter, but they thaw a little bit, right?

00:19:38.000 And 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.

00:19:45.000 So this is not unprecedented warmth.

00:19:48.000 But in those periods, what's happening is it's not the equator is 25 degrees warmer.

00:19:52.000 It's the planet is overall more tropical.

00:19:54.000 So 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.

00:20:03.000 Because you have, again, one degree Celsius.

00:20:06.000 mostly in the colder regions and actually mostly at night and mostly in the winter.

00:20:11.000 So it's actually warming where you would like it, when you would like it.

00:20:14.000 And at the same time, more CO2 in the atmosphere definitely has caused a lot of plant growth.

00:20:19.000 So you have a slightly warmer planet in the colder places and you have a more lush planet.

00:20:25.000 And again, this is not what I'm saying so far.

00:20:27.000 We could talk about the future and the evidence for the future because they do say more dramatic things.

00:20:31.000 But notice that we, again, we have a slightly more tropical planet, including more plant growth, and people say it's terrible.

00:20:37.000 It's not a scientific issue.

00:20:39.000 It's a moral issue.

00:20:39.000 The reason they think it's wrong is because they think even if the change is good for us, it's bad because it was caused by us.

00:20:46.000 And a term I have for this, I call this human racism, because they think everything the human race does is bad.

00:20:53.000 Everything the rest of nature impacts is good, but every human impact is bad.

00:20:58.000 That's why we have a whole ideology and a whole commercial movement, the green movement, that means minimal human impact.

00:21:04.000 You think about that.

00:21:05.000 Imagine if you said, oh, I want to minimize the impact of bears.

00:21:09.000 Somebody said, I want to minimize the impact of bears.

00:21:10.000 You would say, you must hate bears, right?

00:21:12.000 You just want to kill all the bears because the bears survive by impacting their environment.

00:21:16.000 What does it say that we have a huge cultural and commercial movement that says minimize the impact of our species? 0.66

00:21:22.000 That is a very anti-human idea.

00:21:25.000 It's not a scientific idea.

00:21:27.000 It's an anti-human idea that distorts the interpretation of science.

00:21:31.000 Some people will say that the rising global temperatures because of CO2 emissions, which is debated.

00:21:38.000 There are other scientists that we plan to have on the side.

00:21:41.000 And the amount of it is often, the extent of it is often debated and the future is often debated.

00:21:45.000 Yeah, and a lot of some scientists have come out and said that's not close to being true.

00:21:49.000 It 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.

00:21:55.000 Or all of those things could be.

00:21:57.000 Correct.

00:21:57.000 So, 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.

00:22:07.000 We are going to have flooding, earthquake, disaster, worse than we've ever seen before.

00:22:11.000 We need to slow down our addiction to fossil fuels so we slow down the coming catastrophe that's going to happen.

00:22:18.000 Can I ask a question?

00:22:20.000 And I love that you play devil's advocate. 0.71

00:22:21.000 Can I ask a devil's advocate question to your devil?

00:22:24.000 So isn't it weird?

00:22:27.000 And I'm not saying I hold this position.

00:22:28.000 No, no, I understand, but I think it's good.

00:22:30.000 It's always good to address the positions that are commonly held and commonly taught.

00:22:34.000 Isn't it weird that everything is going to be bad?

00:22:38.000 You just think about a scientific view, like the climate, the atmosphere is a very complex system.

00:22:43.000 All things being equal, you'd imagine, okay, if we change things, there's going to be some good and some bad.

00:22:49.000 But notice it's all bad, right?

00:22:51.000 Everything is going to get bad.

00:22:52.000 And then if we look at, I know maybe we'll address some predictions from the past.

00:22:56.000 What's interesting about the global cooling predictions that occurred in the 1970s, we can talk about those.

00:23:02.000 But one interesting thing is they were also predicting more storms, more drought.

00:23:06.000 All the negative consequences were going to get worse if the Earth cooled.

00:23:10.000 And then it's going to get worse if the Earth warmed.

00:23:13.000 So again, no matter what human beings do, it's expected to be bad.

00:23:17.000 So 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.

00:23:27.000 But here's how these connect.

00:23:29.000 We'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.

00:23:39.000 It's intrinsically immoral.

00:23:40.000 So it'd be like if there were a tablet for the modern environmental movement, commandment number one would be, thou shalt not impact nature.

00:23:47.000 And the whole supposedly secular, actually religious green movement is all about that, right?

00:23:52.000 It's thou shalt not impact.

00:23:55.000 And 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.

00:24:04.000 So what goes along with it is they say, no, it's not just that it's wrong for you to impact things.

00:24:09.000 It's if you impact things, then you're going to disturb the delicate balance of the planet and everything is going to go haywire.

00:24:15.000 And I call this, and this is a mythological view, but it's portrayed as a scientific view.

00:24:20.000 I call this the perfect planet premise, which means that unchanged nature is stable, it's safe and sufficient.

00:24:28.000 So it won't change much if we don't do anything.

00:24:30.000 It won't endanger us.

00:24:32.000 It keeps us safe.

00:24:33.000 And it's sufficient.

00:24:34.000 It'll give us what we need.

00:24:35.000 And the problem with this is just not at all true.

00:24:37.000 But the view is if we change anything, then it's going to get unstable and unsafe and it's going to become deficient.

00:24:43.000 And in reality, the reality is what I call the imperfect planet.

00:24:46.000 So nature is not stable.

00:24:48.000 It's dynamic.

00:24:49.000 It's not safe.

00:24:50.000 It's dangerous.

00:24:51.000 And it's not sufficient.

00:24:52.000 It's deficient.

00:24:54.000 But 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.

00:25:07.000 And it has the same function.

00:25:09.000 It basically says if you violate our commandment not to impact things, you're going to go to hell.

00:25:13.000 And global warming is a kind of earthly hell where it's saying, you know, if you do the wrong thing, you're going to cause this.

00:25:20.000 But it's really the nature, nature is conceived of as a God that if we violate the commandment, it's going to punish us.

00:25:25.000 And that's why it's this universal thing.

00:25:27.000 It's like no matter what we do, it's going to be bad.

00:25:30.000 And so again, I consider this all, it's all a philosophical issue.

00:25:34.000 And I consider the whole anti-impact focus.

00:25:36.000 I consider that a religion, a moral religion says it's wrong to impact things.

00:25:40.000 And then a mystical belief that if we impact things, it must be bad.

00:25:43.000 Even though in reality, when we impact things, it's overwhelmingly good.

00:25:47.000 And when the impacts are negative, we can adapt to them.

00:25:50.000 It's absolutely a religion on the left.

00:25:52.000 It's become pathological.

00:25:55.000 They have turned the green movement into a form of worship in one way or the other.

00:25:59.000 That implies that it wasn't one before.

00:26:01.000 It's even more so than ever.

00:26:02.000 And so one of those, for example, the French foreign minister in May of 2014 said, we have 500 days to avoid a climate chaos.

00:26:10.000 So it's always bad.

00:26:10.000 It's always catastrophic.

00:26:12.000 Yeah, 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.

00:26:21.000 So they want some commitment made.

00:26:23.000 And 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.

00:26:32.000 And 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.

00:26:42.000 But 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.

00:26:50.000 There's going to be so much pollution, we can't breathe, and we won't even be able to see.

00:26:54.000 And also resource depletion.

00:26:56.000 We're going to run out of fossil fuels.

00:26:57.000 We're going to run out of everything.

00:26:58.000 The whole world's going to starve.

00:26:59.000 And what you see is there's always this expectation that catastrophe is going to happen.

00:27:04.000 So 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.

00:27:16.000 Now, if you know anything about the history of the world, I mentioned extreme poverty going down.

00:27:21.000 We have the best fed population in human history, as well as the largest.

00:27:24.000 So 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.

00:27:35.000 And 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.

00:27:43.000 What's going on?

00:27:44.000 It's this perfect planet premise.

00:27:46.000 They assume if we're impacting things, it must be terrible and there will be no good.

00:27:50.000 So what happens is they exaggerate the side effects beyond all recognition and they ignore the benefits, including the benefits of adaptability.

00:27:58.000 And that's what you see with the future.

00:27:59.000 The 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.

00:28:10.000 So 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.

00:28:17.000 But 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.

00:28:27.000 I mean, you think even, and this, there's no chance of this whatsoever, but imagine that there were five times as many hurricanes.

00:28:34.000 Would that overwhelm civilization?

00:28:36.000 It would not overwhelm civilization.

00:28:38.000 Like we could definitely deal with that and we'd just get a little better at dealing with hurricanes.

00:28:42.000 And I mean, it wouldn't, it's not the ideal, but the idea that it's going to, it's an existential threat, it's going to kill people.

00:28:48.000 It's going to kill people en masse and we should stop using energy.

00:28:52.000 What we need is there are billions of people in the world who have no energy, no machine power, very low adaptability.

00:28:52.000 No.

00:28:58.000 The whole focus in terms of climate should really be get them energy, get them machine power, get them adaptability.

00:29:05.000 That way, whatever happens to the climate, which nobody really knows what will happen, we'll be ready for it.

00:29:10.000 So I want to dive into some more of these kind of headlines and they kind of echo what you're saying.

00:29:16.000 But before I do, I want to kind of dive into something, which is some people might not be completely in the unchanged nature camp.

00:29:24.000 I think some people.

00:29:25.000 Oh, I think everybody is partially in it.

00:29:27.000 It's always held.

00:29:29.000 Sorry to interrupt, but no evil view is ever held completely consistently.

00:29:35.000 So it's always, I mean, I think you're somewhat of an Ayn Rand fan, at least.

00:29:39.000 This is a big point in Atlas Shrugged.

00:29:41.000 I was going to say, you're talking like an objectivist.

00:29:43.000 Yeah, well, no accident.

00:29:45.000 But I learned these views.

00:29:46.000 I mean, I think that's the same thing.

00:29:47.000 I have some problems with Ayn Rand, but I'm just going to say that.

00:29:49.000 Yeah, well, I think she's generally great.

00:29:50.000 We can do another episode on that sometime.

00:29:52.000 But it's, I was just rereading Atlas Shrugged.

00:29:56.000 The point is that bad ideas always put themselves over by concealing themselves, by blending themselves with good ideas.

00:29:56.000 So I was thinking about this.

00:30:03.000 So 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?

00:30:12.000 So they say, oh, we're against pollution.

00:30:14.000 So let's be green.

00:30:15.000 Let's minimize our impact.

00:30:16.000 And when you say minimize impact, people think, oh, that means I have clean air and clean water and good food.

00:30:22.000 But they don't realize that that's being packaged together with anti-development, with not building roads, with not building factories.

00:30:29.000 But if you look at the green movement, they oppose all development, virtually all production.

00:30:33.000 So they'll oppose roads.

00:30:35.000 They'll oppose, you know, I mean, certainly things like pipelines.

00:30:38.000 So what's happened is the green movement has packaged together anti-pollution and anti-development.

00:30:44.000 And 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.

00:30:54.000 So I think most people, the reason to tease it out is not to accuse everybody of holding it consistently.

00:31:01.000 It's that insofar as you hold it at all, it's bad.

00:31:04.000 Because if you hold a human flourishing standard, then you just don't change nature when it makes sense to not change nature.

00:31:10.000 So 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.

00:31:14.000 You're not doing it because you have a duty not to change nature.

00:31:17.000 Because if you have a duty not to change nature, how do you draw the boundaries, right?

00:31:21.000 If unchanged nature comes above human life, then that necessitates human sacrifice.

00:31:26.000 Whereas if human life is the primary, then you change nature or not depending on what's good for human life.

00:31:32.000 I 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.

00:31:44.000 I always screw it up.

00:31:45.000 Coal-firepower plants.

00:31:46.000 Yeah.

00:31:46.000 Talk about coal.

00:31:48.000 Okay, so I remember I talked about these high-energy hydrocarbons coming from ancient dead life.

00:31:53.000 So coal is the solid version of these.

00:31:55.000 It stores a lot of energy in a small space.

00:31:58.000 One 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.

00:32:05.000 And 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.

00:32:12.000 Coal is super easy to get.

00:32:14.000 It's quite concentrated.

00:32:16.000 And as part of that, you can transport it anywhere in the world really easily.

00:32:20.000 And 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.

00:32:30.000 Compare 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.

00:32:37.000 So if you look at, say, China, but also lots of other places in Asia, including Japan, is using more and more coal.

00:32:42.000 Like coal is generally the lowest cost form of electricity in most places in the world.

00:32:48.000 And so to say, what do I think of coal means what do I think of people getting low-cost electricity?

00:32:52.000 And what I think is that is an unbelievably positive thing.

00:32:55.000 That is very, very tied to the dramatic decrease in extreme poverty.

00:32:59.000 Because how do you decrease extreme poverty?

00:33:02.000 You do it with extreme productivity.

00:33:04.000 How do you get extreme productivity?

00:33:05.000 Is you give people who are doing manual labor and you have them do machine labor.

00:33:09.000 And so that's what coal has done.

00:33:11.000 And so you have to look at any side effects of coal in that context.

00:33:14.000 And what we find with coal is the richer the country, the fewer side effects it can have with coal.

00:33:20.000 And so over time, you know, initially, this happened historically too.

00:33:23.000 We used coal and it had way more pollution than China has today, much, much more.

00:33:27.000 But as you become wealthy, then you can develop and afford better forms of pollution control.

00:33:32.000 So in the U.S., you can have places like North Dakota that use coal and have very, very good air quality.

00:33:36.000 So it's all about all the fossil fuels right now.

00:33:39.000 You can use all of them.

00:33:40.000 And with the right technology, you can get a lot of energy and relatively low pollution.

00:33:45.000 But in some places, it makes sense for people to have more pollution because that helps them with the cost.

00:33:51.000 And it's really dangerous for us in the wealthy world to tell people in the poor world, oh, you need to have pollution-free coal.

00:33:58.000 Well, what if you can't actually feed your family?

00:34:00.000 What if you can't heat your home doing that?

00:34:02.000 What if you can't purify your water?

00:34:05.000 So there's just a whole condescending attitude to say, oh, the whole world shouldn't use coal.

00:34:08.000 Well, 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.

00:34:15.000 And for them, electricity is life.

00:34:16.000 For some people, though, they say, America is a wealthy country.

00:34:20.000 We don't need to use coal here.

00:34:22.000 What do you say about that?

00:34:23.000 Well, that would depend on what are the different options.

00:34:26.000 So it always depends on what are the different options.

00:34:28.000 And natural gas is much cleaner in emissions, right?

00:34:31.000 Well, that's I would say that's, it depends.

00:34:34.000 It always depends on the process.

00:34:35.000 So there's a mythology about energy that people think of energy as the material and they think, oh, do I like the material or not?

00:34:42.000 No, coal is black.

00:34:42.000 So do I like coal?

00:34:43.000 I don't like, interestingly, it's just a weird kind of thing.

00:34:47.000 But there's like, oh, I don't like black energy.

00:34:48.000 I like green energy.

00:34:49.000 It's sort of a weird thing given other dynamics in our culture.

00:34:52.000 But wait a second, like it just, it all depends on what's the process by which you transform the coal into energy.

00:34:59.000 Because if you could take the black stuff as just carbon, if you could take that carbon and make that into steel, right?

00:35:04.000 And it didn't get in the air, then you could generate really clean electricity and you could get other stuff. 0.90

00:35:09.000 Whereas 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. 0.78

00:35:20.000 The whole thing with coal is you shouldn't say, oh, I don't want it to be out of done with coal. 0.96

00:35:23.000 You 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?

00:35:31.000 And 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.

00:35:43.000 And the communities really depend on the cost of electricity.

00:35:46.000 So 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.

00:35:56.000 So I think these things should be decided on a local basis.

00:35:59.000 But 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.

00:36:08.000 And certainly around the world, and those same people, by the way, should be very in favor of freedom for natural gas.

00:36:13.000 One of the ominous trends we have is we've got an anti-coal movement, we have an anti-fracking movement.

00:36:18.000 Fracking is how you produce 60% of America's oil, 75% of America's natural gas.

00:36:23.000 And we've got an anti-pipeline/slash infrastructure movement.

00:36:27.000 And 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.

00:36:36.000 If you can't get natural, natural gas doesn't store well.

00:36:39.000 That's one of its disadvantages.

00:36:40.000 It's a gas.

00:36:41.000 It's not like coal or oil.

00:36:42.000 It's not very dense.

00:36:43.000 So you need pipelines to transport that clean stuff all over the place.

00:36:47.000 If 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.

00:36:54.000 And we're already starting to see that happen around the country, like in the Northeast.

00:36:57.000 People 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.

00:37:03.000 And this is one of the big election issues this year is what's going to happen to infrastructure if certain people get elected.

00:37:10.000 So 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.

00:37:17.000 Is 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?

00:37:29.000 For example, polluted rivers, polluted lakes, water supply being corrupted.

00:37:33.000 I mean, I think there's got to be, obviously, has that level or that threshold ever happened in your mind?

00:37:38.000 Well, so we have to distinguish between using a technology in general and then abusing a technology.

00:37:44.000 So the most obvious thing is abusing technology.

00:37:46.000 So just take somebody's irresponsible, a gas line explodes and three people die.

00:37:52.000 Like, do I think that's okay?

00:37:53.000 Do I think, oh, that's great?

00:37:54.000 Well, we still have it.

00:37:55.000 No, I mean, that's a tragedy that's happening.

00:37:58.000 And you can have, so you can have deliberate abuse.

00:38:02.000 You can have accidents.

00:38:03.000 So those are kinds of bad things.

00:38:05.000 And then you can have different communities making the wrong decisions.

00:38:08.000 So 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.

00:38:18.000 This 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.

00:38:33.000 So it'd be exactly like saying, do you believe antibiotics ever have more side effects than are worth it?

00:38:38.000 Of course.

00:38:38.000 I mean, antibiotics have way more problematic side effects actually than fossil fuels because they develop resistance.

00:38:44.000 And we don't have that with fossil fuels.

00:38:46.000 Of course, there's no fossil fuel resistance.

00:38:48.000 But yeah, any technology has negative side effects.

00:38:50.000 And so it's all about using it in the best possible way.

00:38:54.000 And I would just stress that when I say the moral case for fossil fuels, it's really the moral case for the freedom to use fossil fuels.

00:39:01.000 So I'm in favor of using the best form of energy everywhere.

00:39:05.000 And that's going to depend on different things.

00:39:07.000 So I'm a big advocate of hydroelectric energy, where it's the best.

00:39:09.000 I'm a big advocate of nuclear energy.

00:39:11.000 And part of my political platform that I promote or that I encourage politicians on is they should be decriminalizing nuclear energy.

00:39:19.000 And I'm in favor of freedom for solar and wind, but we might talk about that.

00:39:23.000 But they need to compete in producing reliable energy.

00:39:26.000 Right 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.

00:39:46.000 You would say, Well, no, I can't do that because then I need to pay the reliable worker and the unreliable worker.

00:39:51.000 And that's that's what we have with solar and wind.

00:39:52.000 So, solar and wind are being given special privileges.

00:39:55.000 But if they had a way of producing reliable electricity that was competitive, I'm all for that.

00:40:01.000 So, 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.

00:40:21.000 Yeah.

00:40:21.000 And so that's a really bad question.

00:40:23.000 It's on the spectrum of unchanged earth, but I don't think all of them are necessarily all there or do nothing.

00:40:29.000 I 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.

00:40:37.000 So, even I don't use the term the environment.

00:40:40.000 I accidentally used it earlier in this interview and I corrected myself.

00:40:44.000 And I'll explain why, because what does the environment mean?

00:40:47.000 Everyone uses this, right?

00:40:48.000 Conservatives use this right, but people use it, and they talk about the environment, but that's weird.

00:40:54.000 Would you use the term the habitat?

00:40:56.000 Would you say, like, oh, I want to preserve the habitat?

00:40:58.000 Well, you'd probably like which habitat?

00:40:59.000 Yeah, whose habitat, right?

00:41:00.000 So, habitat really captures what environment captures.

00:41:05.000 Yeah, but it's it's environment always means the environment of something for some purpose.

00:41:10.000 So, when you're thinking of the planet, you have to think of it as whose perspective are you thinking of it from, which species?

00:41:15.000 And you can't say I'm thinking of it from the perspective of all species because the interests of species conflict.

00:41:20.000 I mentioned earlier, like, is it the malaria mosquitoes environment or is it the human environment, right?

00:41:26.000 And so, when I think of the planet, I think of it as a human environment.

00:41:29.000 So, 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.

00:41:36.000 So, I like thinking about our environment.

00:41:38.000 And 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.

00:41:44.000 But otherwise, you should think: if I want the best human environment possible, I want to maximize my positive impacts and minimize my negative impacts.

00:41:52.000 So, 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.

00:42:04.000 Whereas I want to improve our environment for human beings.

00:42:07.000 So, some of these predictions, and you're not as much in the kind of global warming science space, right?

00:42:14.000 You're more kind of in the moral.

00:42:15.000 I mean, I'm very aware of it.

00:42:17.000 I just think the range of plausible predictions, all of them are extremely things that we can adapt.

00:42:24.000 Prince Charles says in 2009, 96 months to save the world.

00:42:29.000 I think he was wrong there.

00:42:30.000 10 years ago, I want to ask you about this.

00:42:33.000 Al Gore predicted the North Polar Ice Cap would be gone.

00:42:37.000 Still there, 2018.

00:42:39.000 You actually did a challenge to Al Gore to debate that, right?

00:42:44.000 Yeah, it has not worked yet.

00:42:46.000 But 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.

00:42:53.000 So 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.

00:42:59.000 But he basically said the industry is evil and we need to divest from them.

00:43:03.000 And I said, this is a terrible idea.

00:43:05.000 The fossil fuel industry should stand up.

00:43:06.000 And I waited a few weeks and nobody stood up.

00:43:08.000 So I'm like, all right, screw it.

00:43:10.000 I had no money, but I'm like, all right, I'll give you $10,000.

00:43:12.000 I figured I'd get it somewhere.

00:43:14.000 Like, I'll pay you $10,000 if you debate me.

00:43:16.000 Because he had ignored me before that.

00:43:17.000 And then he said, okay, I'll do it.

00:43:19.000 So, we debated at Duke University, which is where I happened to go to college.

00:43:22.000 And so, I thought, okay, I got that to work.

00:43:23.000 So, then Al Gore, I forget, you know what?

00:43:26.000 Al Gore was leading this charge by attorneys general to go after different people, including they went after ExxonMobil.

00:43:32.000 And 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.

00:43:41.000 And basically, saying anyone who's associated with anyone who has these views has no right to free speech.

00:43:46.000 And I was named in the subpoena, even though I never got any funding from ExxonMobil or anything.

00:43:50.000 But I was pissed off.

00:43:51.000 And so what I did is the Massachusetts Attorney General had done this.

00:43:55.000 And so I just wrote her this said, like, regarding your demand, because she said, sees any emails between me and ExxonMobil.

00:44:00.000 And I'm like, you don't have a right to even ask about that. 0.91

00:44:03.000 So 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.

00:44:08.000 And then I like, but Al Gore was part of that.

00:44:11.000 So I'm like, all right, if you're going to come after me, why don't you actually debate me?

00:44:13.000 So I offered him $100,000, but he has not accepted.

00:44:18.000 He said in 2008 that the North Polar Ice Cap would be gone.

00:44:21.000 But what if, I mean, let's just ask you, what if he was right?

00:44:24.000 Yeah, 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?

00:44:31.000 I mean, it's important that they're wrong because it shows that they tend to always exaggerate the science involved.

00:44:37.000 But the biggest thing he hasn't been telling us is he's been advocating against fossil fuels for 40 years.

00:44:42.000 And for 40 years, fossil fuels have been improving billions of lives.

00:44:45.000 So 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.

00:44:57.000 Like that's the problem.

00:44:58.000 So let me push back a little bit on one thing.

00:45:01.000 So your metric is human flourishing, right?

00:45:04.000 So I think some parts of our country being untouched actually maximize human flourishing.

00:45:04.000 Yeah.

00:45:09.000 Right, but that's what I said.

00:45:10.000 You want to maximize positive impacts and minimize negative.

00:45:13.000 And by the way, just we should say politically, the way you have to do this is via property rights, ultimately.

00:45:17.000 So 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?

00:45:28.000 So I think it should virtually all be privatized.

00:45:30.000 But whether it is, if the government owns it, they still have to think about what's a good pro-human way of using this.

00:45:36.000 And 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.

00:45:47.000 And they've said nothing can happen there ever, even if you can develop oil and it's a tiny little space.

00:45:54.000 And even if the caribou like it, so that's unchanged nature, right?

00:45:57.000 The government should not be permitted to value unchanged nature over human life.

00:46:01.000 Anyone should be able to say, yes, I want this particular piece of nature unchanged for human life.

00:46:07.000 I think there's, I think, Yellowstone is a good thing that we didn't have fracking in Yellowstone.

00:46:13.000 It depends.

00:46:14.000 Well, and it depends like Granteton National Park.

00:46:16.000 I mean, it just, it's going to, it would depend.

00:46:18.000 I mean, what if there was some, I mean, not take fracking, but imagine there was some resource that would just save.

00:46:24.000 Well, but okay, but I'm what we're talking about is the method by which you make the decisions.

00:46:29.000 So it's possible that a government on the wrong, but the government on the wrong outweighs whatever rent natural resource would possibly be.

00:46:36.000 Okay, 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.

00:46:42.000 A lot of times their homes were destroyed.

00:46:43.000 And so I have to say they were given Fifth Amendment rights for that, but yeah, I think it's Fifth Amendment.

00:46:47.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:46:48.000 Okay, but I think this is a broader discussion.

00:46:50.000 But I think we should, if we're going to look back at these decisions, we should ask, like, how were these decisions made?

00:46:55.000 And it's the main thing is, if they're being, they need to be made with some human benefit in mind.

00:47:01.000 So it has to be human enjoyment.

00:47:02.000 So part of Yellowstone is it's configured in such a way that people are actually able to enjoy it.

00:47:07.000 If they had it there, no one was allowed to see it.

00:47:09.000 That would be an unchanged nature view.

00:47:11.000 And that would be evil.

00:47:11.000 Yes.

00:47:12.000 So like Teton National Park, I go every summer.

00:47:14.000 Yeah.

00:47:14.000 It's gorgeous.

00:47:15.000 It's generally untouched.

00:47:17.000 And 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.

00:47:27.000 But Jenny Lake.

00:47:29.000 Of course, but just with private property, people make that decision all the time, right?

00:47:32.000 I mean, there are people who have oil under their land that say, you know what, I don't want this rig there.

00:47:36.000 Overall, I don't think that's of course.

00:47:38.000 Generally, I think that's right.

00:47:40.000 I'm not saying there's a universal moral obligation to drill for fossil fuels wherever you could.

00:47:44.000 What I'm saying is people should be free to make these decisions.

00:47:48.000 And when the government is making them, it really needs to have a pro-human idea.

00:47:52.000 So you would agree that if the idea of Grand Teton is for human relaxation, enjoyment, and basically being able to appreciate the beauty.

00:48:02.000 I don't know if you've seen the Tetons.

00:48:03.000 It's extraordinary.

00:48:04.000 Not 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.

00:48:17.000 So the way to think of it is unchanged nature is sometimes a means to the end of human flourishing.

00:48:23.000 So sometimes it's the right policy.

00:48:26.000 Okay.

00:48:27.000 But it's not the goal.

00:48:29.000 Because it's the ultimate goal.

00:48:31.000 So it's not that certain parts of unchanged nature is necessarily bad.

00:48:35.000 It's that if unchanged nature is a means to have human beings live a better or more fulfilling or flourishing life, then so be it.

00:48:42.000 But then the green movement would say, but it's never really untouched, and that's the thing.

00:48:47.000 So if you're traveling there, if you're walking there, so sometimes people...

00:48:51.000 I get mad at that too.

00:48:52.000 Exactly.

00:48:53.000 So this is an issue of standard.

00:48:54.000 If it's there for human enjoyment, then obviously you need to touch it a little bit to enjoy it.

00:48:59.000 And so that's again.

00:49:00.000 They don't even want people to go to some of these things.

00:49:02.000 What do you mean?

00:49:02.000 They don't even want people.

00:49:03.000 Of course, because the goal is not people.

00:49:05.000 The goal is non-people.

00:49:06.000 Unchanged nature means not changed by humans.

00:49:09.000 It's an anti-human view.

00:49:10.000 It's again human racism.

00:49:12.000 It says if the human race does something, it's bad.

00:49:14.000 If the rest of nature does something, it's good.

00:49:17.000 So I think I find agreement with you in that.

00:49:21.000 And so why do you think the environmental movement is so persuasive?

00:49:25.000 A lot of people believe in it.

00:49:26.000 And when I say environmental movement, you know what I mean, green movement, whatever.

00:49:29.000 Why do you think it's so persuasive?

00:49:31.000 I 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.

00:49:40.000 I mean, in a sense, environment, that's almost the, that's where we live, right?

00:49:44.000 So 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.

00:49:56.000 So 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.

00:50:07.000 If you're a subsistence farmer, you're not enjoying nature.

00:50:09.000 If you're walking three hours a day to get water, you're not enjoying nature.

00:50:13.000 But if you have machine power and you're so productive that, among other things, you create leisure time, then you can enjoy nature.

00:50:18.000 So the issue of environment morally belonged to capitalists, but it was taken over by anti-capitalists.

00:50:26.000 And 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.

00:50:35.000 So people think, oh, if I love nature or if I want a clean environment, then I must want to minimize human impact.

00:50:42.000 And what I tried to do, I started my organization, it's called Center for Industrial Progress.

00:50:46.000 But the idea when I started in 2011 was a pro-human alternative to the green movement.

00:50:52.000 So 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.

00:51:04.000 Do you see a future coming where fossil fuels will become increasingly irrelevant?

00:51:10.000 I mean, if we have that future in the near future, that'll just mean a lot of people's lives become a lot worse.

00:51:16.000 I mean, we want anything to become irrelevant if it's out-competed by something superior.

00:51:22.000 So, 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.

00:51:31.000 So, electricity, heat for our homes, heat for industry, transportation.

00:51:35.000 If 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.

00:51:42.000 But we're nowhere near that reality in part because much of the modern environmental movement has criminalized nuclear energy.

00:51:48.000 So, nuclear energy is actually unfortunately becoming less prevalent and much, much more expensive.

00:51:53.000 It's all a regulatory kind of thing.

00:51:55.000 It's safer than anything else.

00:51:56.000 Yeah, it's the safest form of energy ever developed.

00:51:59.000 But so, the current economics of fossil fuels is just fossil fuels provide over 80% of the world's energy.

00:52:06.000 So, 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.

00:52:13.000 So, more energy every year is added from fossil fuels than from any other source.

00:52:19.000 And 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.

00:52:26.000 We 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.

00:52:36.000 Like, that's the game you have to play that nobody else is close to doing.

00:52:40.000 There 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.

00:52:49.000 There aren't that many materials like that.

00:52:50.000 The closest is nuclear material, which is actually even more concentrated.

00:52:53.000 That's why I'm excited about it.

00:52:55.000 But 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.

00:53:07.000 So, to compete with fossil fuels, you need to have something that can compete with the material and compete with generations of innovation.

00:53:13.000 That's why I think nuclear is ultimately going to be it, but we're criminalizing it.

00:53:17.000 So, 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.

00:53:32.000 I'm a huge fan of nuclear energy, and it's been ridiculously slandered by demonized and criminalized are the two words I would say.

00:53:39.000 France used to have almost all their power.

00:53:41.000 Well, all their electricity at least.

00:53:43.000 They have now basically shut down plants.

00:53:46.000 Some, but they're still dominantly powered by it.

00:53:49.000 It should be.

00:53:50.000 Which, 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.

00:54:01.000 Like solar and wind, we can go into it.

00:54:04.000 Basically, they don't produce reliable energy on any scale.

00:54:06.000 So, they're always just an unreliable supplement added to the network, but they're always backed up by what I call the reliables.

00:54:13.000 So, they're always backed up by coal, gas, oil.

00:54:15.000 Sometimes that's mostly transportation, or nuclear hydro.

00:54:18.000 So, there's like reliables and unreliables.

00:54:20.000 The unreliables are solar and wind.

00:54:22.000 I think we should call them unreliables, not renewables, because hydro is renewable, but it's opposed mostly by the green movement.

00:54:28.000 So, 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.

00:54:35.000 So, basically, those are just wasteful supplements right now for most purposes.

00:54:39.000 The only thing that could potentially, hydro is great, but only works in certain locations.

00:54:44.000 So, 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.

00:54:52.000 And who are the biggest opponents of nuclear energy?

00:54:55.000 Not me.

00:54:55.000 I'm a big champion.

00:54:56.000 Not the Republicans, if you want to categorize it that way.

00:55:00.000 It's the modern environmental movement.

00:55:02.000 And why is it?

00:55:03.000 Well, it's because they think nuclear is impacting nature too much.

00:55:06.000 So, it's really not about human life or preventing climate catastrophe.

00:55:10.000 It's about we shouldn't be changing nature.

00:55:12.000 It's wrong to split the atom.

00:55:13.000 It's wrong to create this kind of waste, even though the waste you can handle it really safely isn't causing problems.

00:55:18.000 They're just against changing nature.

00:55:20.000 If 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.

00:55:40.000 Joe Biden has now come out and said he wants a fossil fuel, fossil fuel-free future by 2035.

00:55:47.000 You probably pronounce it much better than he did.

00:55:49.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:55:50.000 Well, that's not saying much.

00:55:51.000 Fossil fuel-free future.

00:55:53.000 Say that five times.

00:55:54.000 Yeah.

00:55:54.000 Fossil fuel-free future, four F's, go figure.

00:55:57.000 By 2035 or something, something ridiculous.

00:56:00.000 This has now become a top-tier issue of the Democratic Party.

00:56:04.000 Leonardo DiCaprio has come out and said that he wants to leave a better planet for his kids and his grandkids.

00:56:10.000 So he's trying to take a pro-human lens to some of that.

00:56:13.000 Yeah.

00:56:13.000 Maybe, maybe not.

00:56:15.000 I 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.

00:56:15.000 Well, yeah.

00:56:26.000 The question is, are they in any way advocating actions that would do that?

00:56:31.000 And 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.

00:56:41.000 Like if we didn't have modern oil agriculture or something like it, we can't feed billions of people.

00:56:46.000 I mean, at best, you go back to a largely manual labor world, but you'd have literal starvation.

00:56:50.000 Even before modern agriculture, 40, 50 years ago, 50 years ago, they predicted a population bomb.

00:56:55.000 New York Times, you can go read their back issues.

00:56:58.000 They said basically the whole world is going to starve with a population of 4 billion people.

00:57:02.000 Now we're at almost eight.

00:57:04.000 Yeah.

00:57:04.000 Why is that?

00:57:05.000 It's because our technology is so good, but our technology is all powered by reliable, low-cost energy, almost all from fossil fuels.

00:57:12.000 So 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.

00:57:23.000 And if we're not, of course, you can always say, I mean, an example is animal testing.

00:57:28.000 This is a really clear-cut example of the same thing that's simpler, right?

00:57:31.000 Some people think animal testing is intrinsically wrong no matter what, including some scientists think animal testing is wrong.

00:57:38.000 Animal testing is definitely beneficial to human life in some situations.

00:57:42.000 There's no chance that no animal testing is ever benefited.

00:57:45.000 There's just a 0% chance.

00:57:46.000 Why are people against it?

00:57:48.000 Because human life is not their standard, right?

00:57:50.000 The lives of the animals are their standard.

00:57:52.000 Now, 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.

00:57:59.000 They make that up, right?

00:58:00.000 They say, oh, you know, it's not really necessary.

00:58:02.000 It doesn't work there.

00:58:02.000 It doesn't work here.

00:58:03.000 But they're trying to rationalize a view that people wouldn't swallow.

00:58:08.000 And this is what's happening with the modern environmental movement.

00:58:11.000 It'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.

00:58:18.000 People won't swallow that.

00:58:19.000 So they say, you shouldn't impact nature. 0.99

00:58:21.000 And if you do impact nature, it's going to kill you and you're going to go to hell.

00:58:21.000 It's wrong.

00:58:25.000 That's why they're so focused on these hell narratives.

00:58:28.000 And if you look at climate, it's a really good example because let's say flood.

00:58:32.000 They say like, oh, this region flooded.

00:58:34.000 I'm so concerned about them.

00:58:35.000 I'm like, really?

00:58:36.000 You're concerned about them?

00:58:36.000 Why don't you help them build a dam?

00:58:38.000 Like, that would actually help them.

00:58:40.000 What's their policy say?

00:58:41.000 Let's have the whole world stop using fossil fuels in 30 years and then maybe there'll be a little less flooding.

00:58:45.000 Does that count as caring about the people who are victims of the flood?

00:58:49.000 No.

00:58:50.000 What it shows is the people claiming to care about the flood, they're not concerned with flood-related deaths.

00:58:55.000 They're using flood-related deaths as an excuse to promote their anti-impact, anti-human agenda.

00:59:01.000 One thing that always strikes me is how we in the West have had the luxury of using fossil fuels to build our incredible civilization.

00:59:08.000 And now we want to deprive third world countries from having that very same opportunity, that bridge that we had. 1.00

00:59:14.000 Well, but it's not a bridge. 1.00

00:59:16.000 I agree with that entirely, except there's no bridge.

00:59:18.000 We're using more of them than ever.

00:59:20.000 But we're not using coal as much as we did in 1920.

00:59:24.000 No, we're probably using it more than we did in 1920.

00:59:27.000 Okay, but fossil fuels are coal, oil, and gas.

00:59:30.000 So we're using, I don't have the exact numbers of the U.S., but definitely over 70% of our energy.

00:59:35.000 There's only like one active coal power plant that's been built in the last decade.

00:59:39.000 Okay, but there's a lot of coal.

00:59:41.000 But anyway, fossil fuels is not just coal.

00:59:42.000 So I'm talking about coal, oil, gas.

00:59:44.000 Right, but natural gas is more prevalent.

00:59:46.000 And I want to get in the fracking.

00:59:47.000 I do.

00:59:48.000 What I'm saying, though, is that the pie chart is decreasing in terms of coal.

00:59:54.000 Okay, but in terms of right now, the U.S. is using as much energy as ever.

00:59:59.000 We also 340 million people.

01:00:00.000 Yeah, but it's overwhelmingly coming from fossil fuels.

01:00:03.000 But the reason I'm pushing on this is we can't think of our fossil fuel use as something that happened in the past.

01:00:08.000 As I mentioned, this is the leading, this is the overwhelming and fastest growing source of energy in the world.

01:00:13.000 And what's important is this is perpetually fueling the machines that are keeping us alive right now.

01:00:19.000 If 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.

01:00:27.000 If those machines can't get energy, they don't work.

01:00:30.000 Like we start to starve.

01:00:31.000 I'm not suggesting.

01:00:33.000 But 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.

01:00:43.000 No, we're using them now.

01:00:44.000 So 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.

01:00:51.000 I just don't think they're all made equal.

01:00:52.000 I don't.

01:00:53.000 I mean, coal is a different animal than natural gas.

01:00:57.000 I mean, I don't know what that means.

01:00:58.000 I mean, it's a better animal in some places and a worse animal in other places.

01:01:01.000 It does have higher emissions.

01:01:03.000 It is harder to extract.

01:01:05.000 Depends on what.

01:01:06.000 Depends on the situation.

01:01:07.000 You can have a coal plant.

01:01:08.000 I'm speaking generally.

01:01:11.000 For example, when you extract natural gas, you've done the fracking method.

01:01:15.000 It's just like opening up a Coca-Cola can.

01:01:17.000 The Fizz is the gas, and you get the oil when you extract it.

01:01:22.000 The 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.

01:01:30.000 If you just abandon those coal mines, you're going to have rivers, which is what's happened, completely polluted, right?

01:01:35.000 There are more external costs to coal mining than just natural gas extraction.

01:01:39.000 Yeah, it'll depend.

01:01:40.000 But I mean, all of these things are...

01:01:41.000 What I'm saying is I think those costs now are worthy of pause.

01:01:45.000 It depends on the situation.

01:01:47.000 So as I explained my views on this before, so I won't go into them again.

01:01:51.000 But 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.

01:02:00.000 I'm just very aware of anyone saying, like, oh, I don't like coal.

01:02:04.000 Like, no, it's about the people in the situation making the best decision given all the factors.

01:02:04.000 I like gas more.

01:02:09.000 Okay.

01:02:09.000 So what I was saying, and you took exception with the bridge, but I'll use it again.

01:02:13.000 That's fine.

01:02:14.000 I don't take exception again.

01:02:14.000 In some ways.

01:02:16.000 Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, India, they're being deprived of even the baseline of any sort of fossil fuel coal power plant.

01:02:24.000 Well, I mean, there's international pressure, and I'm like, Vietnam is using a lot of coal, but there's...

01:02:28.000 There's pressure for them to stop.

01:02:29.000 Yeah, right.

01:02:30.000 And that's...

01:02:30.000 Which I think is completely unfair given their substandard living conditions versus the Western world.

01:02:36.000 Yeah, I mean, so I think it's all evil, but it's particularly evil to say to somebody who's really poor, you cannot use low-cost energy.

01:02:45.000 I completely sympathize with that.

01:02:46.000 And because they were never given the opportunity to build their civilization for hospitals, for schools, for technology.

01:02:46.000 Yeah.

01:02:52.000 I don't know.

01:02:52.000 But I don't mean by given the opportunity.

01:02:54.000 I mean, it's an achievement of the U.S. that we built these things.

01:02:58.000 And part of the reason we built them.

01:02:59.000 But you weren't given the opportunity because they had dictatorships.

01:03:01.000 Yeah, no, exactly.

01:03:03.000 Right, right.

01:03:04.000 But it's important that there's a virtue involved, is in when you have a free country and you develop early.

01:03:08.000 I completely agree.

01:03:09.000 But Pol Pot was controlling Cambodia and that whole region. 0.81

01:03:12.000 There was no development.

01:03:14.000 There were firing squads, right?

01:03:14.000 Right.

01:03:15.000 Yeah.

01:03:15.000 Well, this is a good lesson that maybe we shouldn't give one or two people control of our entire economy.

01:03:20.000 Yes, I agree.

01:03:22.000 So whether we like it or not, your viewpoint is losing.

01:03:29.000 Yeah, it's definitely well, it's interesting because people are still using more fossil fuels than ever.

01:03:33.000 Completely.

01:03:34.000 But they're not using as many as they should be.

01:03:35.000 But 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.

01:03:43.000 Is that probably fair?

01:03:44.000 Yeah, but directly, I mean, fossil fuel sentiment is getting really bad for sure.

01:03:49.000 I mean, the anti-fossil fuel movement is sort of shockingly popular.

01:03:53.000 Like in the corporate world, it's really alarming in particular.

01:03:56.000 You just see there's something called the divestment movement that I originally debated McKibben about.

01:04:00.000 Universities are doing that.

01:04:01.000 I mean, universities, you might expect, but just corporations.

01:04:04.000 I mean, Amazon just renamed, they bought an arena for something like $2 billion, and then they renamed it Climate Pledge Arena.

01:04:12.000 And it's supposed, I mean, it's supposedly going to be run by solar, even though the games are at night.

01:04:16.000 So there's all this accounting fraud that people are pretending that unreliable energy is doing things that isn't.

01:04:21.000 I like that term, unreliable energy.

01:04:23.000 But 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.

01:04:31.000 I mean, it's part of the reason why I'm out there because it's a bad trend and it needs to be corrected.

01:04:36.000 The trend will result, in my opinion, in a lot more human suffering than is necessary.

01:04:42.000 Well, it's already happening.

01:04:43.000 But yes, if you just take like what Joe Biden is advocating for the U.S., yeah, I mean, that would be by far the worst event.

01:04:50.000 Like if his energy plan happened, that would definitely be the worst event in the past.

01:04:55.000 I mean, let's say since World War II, at least, in terms of just American death.

01:05:00.000 Well, but it's, yeah, it relates to, so again, you can think of energy as machine food.

01:05:05.000 Energy is the industry that powers every other industry.

01:05:07.000 What he's saying is, I mean, if you take what he's advocating, he's saying, I want a carbon-neutral grid.

01:05:13.000 He's always changing the dates, but it's something like 2035, right?

01:05:17.000 I heard 2035.

01:05:18.000 Okay, so 2035, so that's 15 years.

01:05:20.000 So arbitrary.

01:05:21.000 Where is that energy going to come from?

01:05:24.000 And especially he's not really supporting nuclear.

01:05:25.000 He's not doing anything to deregulate nuclear.

01:05:27.000 So it's basically saying we're going to use solar and wind dominantly.

01:05:31.000 So nobody has any idea how to do that.

01:05:33.000 That hasn't been done anywhere where they try it.

01:05:35.000 Like in Germany, they're 33%.

01:05:37.000 But the 33% is totally dependent on the reliables.

01:05:41.000 So, right, you can use 33% unreliable.

01:05:44.000 You could have 33% unreliable workers. 0.54

01:05:46.000 It 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.

01:05:51.000 So it would drive your cost up. 0.97

01:05:53.000 So Germany pays, average German pays three times for electricity, what the average American pays.

01:05:57.000 And the average American pays way too much.

01:06:00.000 And 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.

01:06:09.000 And yet electricity prices go up.

01:06:10.000 Why?

01:06:11.000 How does electricity, did we forget how to generate electricity?

01:06:14.000 Did we get worse at the other things?

01:06:15.000 No.

01:06:16.000 We added a bunch of wasteful solar and wind and transmission lines to the grid.

01:06:21.000 So what happens is the unreliables always add costs to the grid.

01:06:24.000 They don't replace costs on the grid.

01:06:26.000 There's no way for them to actually run the grid.

01:06:29.000 Nobody has any idea how to do that whatsoever.

01:06:32.000 And so if Biden actually got this thing, we would just have constant blackouts in a totally different economy.

01:06:38.000 And you have to realize that our whole way of life is actually very fragile.

01:06:42.000 People think it's fragile because the planet is fragile.

01:06:45.000 Planet's not fragile.

01:06:46.000 Planet changes all the time.

01:06:47.000 We adapt just fine as long as we have fuel, as long as we have mobility and as long as we have electricity.

01:06:53.000 But as soon as you stop having mobility, you stop feeding New York City and every city.

01:06:57.000 As soon as you stop having electricity, all your factories stop working.

01:07:00.000 All your equipment stops working.

01:07:01.000 Like it's so everything is so precarious if energy is precarious.

01:07:07.000 So our whole standard of living is based on having machines do 100 times more physical work than we do ourselves.

01:07:14.000 If you take away the machine power, that is a catastrophe.

01:07:18.000 That's why, what's the worst economic thing that's happened in the last 50 years?

01:07:21.000 1970s energy crisis, right?

01:07:23.000 I mean, that was, and people experienced that as a tragedy.

01:07:27.000 And 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.

01:07:38.000 Banning fracking would just take as much oil off the market.

01:07:38.000 So you think about that.

01:07:41.000 That's not banning the use.

01:07:42.000 That's just banning the production as the 1973 energy crisis.

01:07:47.000 Like it's so important for people to know how vital energy is and how deadly it is to oppose energy.

01:07:52.000 52% of people in Pennsylvania say they oppose fracking.

01:07:56.000 Why should people support fracking?

01:07:58.000 And what is fracking?

01:07:59.000 Can you go into it really quick?

01:08:00.000 And then there's a couple minutes we have remaining.

01:08:02.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:08:03.000 And then I'll give people a resource for this, actually.

01:08:06.000 Do a quick kind of posted some stuff.

01:08:08.000 It's amazing, but a quick topic.

01:08:09.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:08:10.000 But no, it's basically a new process for getting oil or natural gas out of the ground.

01:08:16.000 Oil and natural gas, there's a lot of it in the ground, but most of it is inaccessible because it's really tightly wedged in rocks.

01:08:23.000 And this is basically a process for fracturing.

01:08:25.000 That's why it's called fracking.

01:08:26.000 You fracture the rock and you open it up in such a way that the oil and gas can come out that couldn't come out before.

01:08:32.000 And if that doesn't sound like a big deal, right now we've gone from, I mean, I'm trying to think of the numbers.

01:08:38.000 I have these on, if people go to energytalkingpoints.com, they'll see the exact numbers.

01:08:42.000 But it's something like, I think it's in the hundreds of billions of gallons a year.

01:08:48.000 Like think of a gallon of oil.

01:08:50.000 Like it's hundreds of billions of gallons a year worth of energy if you take the oil and the natural gas combined.

01:08:55.000 And we've gone from a massive, massive importer of energy to actually often now an exporter of energy in terms of oil in particular.

01:09:04.000 So it's 60% of our oil production, 75% of our natural gas production.

01:09:08.000 And 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.

01:09:16.000 So if we look at benefit side effects, that is a huge benefit and there's a huge catastrophe of opposing it.

01:09:22.000 The side effect, what is the side effect that people are concerned about?

01:09:25.000 They're usually concerned about groundwater, right?

01:09:27.000 Like it's going to contaminate groundwater.

01:09:30.000 So interestingly, fracking is one of the safest processes, industrial processes for groundwater.

01:09:35.000 And the reason is simple.

01:09:36.000 Processes that contaminate groundwater have one thing in common.

01:09:39.000 They are near groundwater.

01:09:40.000 That's what actually contaminates groundwater if you're near groundwater.

01:09:43.000 Fracking takes place a mile below groundwater and it's shielded by a mile of solid rock.

01:09:47.000 So how are you going to contaminate groundwater that way?

01:09:49.000 So how do they get that talking point then?

01:09:51.000 Interestingly, 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.

01:10:00.000 Now, 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.

01:10:08.000 Who's the number one polluter of nature?

01:10:12.000 Mother nature, right? 0.99

01:10:13.000 So mother nature is the number one polluter. 1.00

01:10:15.000 And so mother nature puts a lot of natural gas in the water, along with arsenic and salt and other things. 0.94

01:10:20.000 And that's the frack nation, they go and they turn on these faucets. 0.96

01:10:23.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:10:24.000 And out comes all the way.

01:10:26.000 Well, water that you can light on fire.

01:10:27.000 Yeah, methane.

01:10:28.000 It has methane in it, right?

01:10:29.000 It's just natural.

01:10:31.000 Why is that wrong?

01:10:32.000 Overwhelmingly, it's because that existed in the, well, it happens, but it's because the methane was already in the water.

01:10:37.000 That sort of thing existed 100 years ago.

01:10:39.000 Again, because it's naturally, methane in the water is a natural phenomenon.

01:10:39.000 Exactly.

01:10:44.000 Part of the whole anti-impact movement is they pretend that nature is really clean, absent us, whereas nature is actually dirty.

01:10:50.000 We haven't taken a naturally clean world and made it dirty.

01:10:53.000 We've taken a naturally, really dirty world and made it overwhelmingly clean.

01:10:56.000 Yeah.

01:10:57.000 Same thing with the climate.

01:10:58.000 We didn't take a safe climate and make it dangerous.

01:11:00.000 Took a dangerous climate and made it safe.

01:11:02.000 That's a good point.

01:11:03.000 Yeah, there were thunderstorms and hurricanes that predated us.

01:11:05.000 Can I just refer people to something that they might find useful?

01:11:08.000 And I have one question for you.

01:11:09.000 I know we've got to go through.

01:11:10.000 No, we're good.

01:11:11.000 I think we're good.

01:11:11.000 They'll yank me off.

01:11:12.000 So you go, you go.

01:11:13.000 Actually, let me ask you the question and then I'll get to the risk.

01:11:15.000 So, 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?

01:11:28.000 Incredibly ill-equipped or unequipped.

01:11:31.000 Why do you think that?

01:11:32.000 I think that many of them are pandering to some of these green movements.

01:11:36.000 And some of them, quite honestly, lack either a consistent philosophical or moral framework and/or they just are afraid to discuss these issues correctly.

01:11:46.000 And they only look at one metric when it talks about energy.

01:11:50.000 That's just jobs.

01:11:51.000 That's the only metric they look at.

01:11:52.000 Yeah, because jobs are only good if the activity is good. 0.98

01:11:57.000 Like let's say you say, well, let's have more mafia because that'll create more mafia jobs.

01:12:02.000 That's not an argument, right?

01:12:03.000 If the thing is bad, then the jobs are bad.

01:12:07.000 It's also only good if the job is a productive job.

01:12:09.000 I mean, the one thing we have a million people filling in ditches to, you know, digging ditches and filling them in again.

01:12:15.000 And that's part of the green jobs thing. 0.77

01:12:17.000 I mean, it's true in a sense.

01:12:19.000 If you had green energy, then you wouldn't really have much energy.

01:12:23.000 And then we'd all go back to manual labor.

01:12:25.000 So you'd have to work a lot more.

01:12:26.000 Is that a good thing?

01:12:27.000 I mean, you want everything to eliminate less productive jobs so you can have more productive jobs.

01:12:27.000 No.

01:12:32.000 That's my point: is that if we just focus on the disenfranchisement of labor, then we actually should shut down all of our fossil fuels.

01:12:40.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:12:40.000 So I think it's good.

01:12:41.000 Because that'll create more jobs.

01:12:42.000 Yeah.

01:12:42.000 So it's really interesting.

01:12:43.000 And I didn't bring up jobs, but it's an interesting point that that's kind of the standby argument.

01:12:48.000 And the Greens can just argue that just the same.

01:12:50.000 They're going to win on that argument.

01:12:51.000 Right, right.

01:12:52.000 So, yeah, and my experience has been the same.

01:12:55.000 Like 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.

01:13:06.000 And I think that mostly you do, but they just have no clue of what to say in different situations about different issues.

01:13:13.000 And there's really nobody who's been giving them different kinds of things.

01:13:17.000 And in my experience, I mean, I've done some work with the oil and gas industry and the coal industry.

01:13:21.000 Like they don't pay me to speak, but I'll help them with their talking points and stuff.

01:13:26.000 And just talking to them, it's such a crisis state right now for the energy industry.

01:13:30.000 If you look at the state of their jobs and stuff, even less than usual, they're giving any kind of valid information.

01:13:35.000 So 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.

01:13:43.000 So you asked about fracking.

01:13:44.000 I gave some facts.

01:13:45.000 But if you just go to that website, right now it's just Google Drive.

01:13:47.000 Just click on that and you get facts about fracking.

01:13:50.000 Everyone is a tweet length and everyone is perfectly referenced.

01:13:53.000 So people have started using it, but I just want people to use it.

01:13:56.000 Again, there's nothing to do besides look at it, learn from it, and use it.

01:14:01.000 Because 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.

01:14:17.000 And 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.

01:14:23.000 Like 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.

01:14:33.000 China and India, they're using coal and more coal for a reason.

01:14:37.000 And that's because it's the lowest cost source of reliable energy for their needs.

01:14:40.000 They are using it and they should be using it.

01:14:43.000 We're not going to change the trajectory of global emissions.

01:14:45.000 The only way we can do that is by contributing to the development of low-cost, low-carbon energy.

01:14:51.000 And I would say start with decriminalizing nuclear.

01:14:54.000 I completely agree.

01:14:54.000 Because there's no, you're not going to, unless you want to go to war, that's really the only.

01:14:59.000 Yeah, 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.

01:14:59.000 Some people do.

01:15:10.000 So 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.

01:15:17.000 As 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.

01:15:24.000 We don't need to worry about it.

01:15:25.000 But if you are worried about it, you cannot solve it by making a unilateral sacrifice by the U.S.

01:15:30.000 The 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.

01:15:38.000 The only way people will use lower carbon energy is if it's actually cheaper to do so.

01:15:43.000 So you are a self-described philosopher.

01:15:46.000 Yes.

01:15:46.000 What philosophy do you describe yourself articulating?

01:15:50.000 Well, it depends on the situation.

01:15:52.000 As you mentioned, I'm hugely, or Kim, I'm hugely influenced by Ayn Rand, so that would be an objectivist philosophy.

01:15:58.000 But on this issue, I mean, I describe myself as a humanist, or some of us describe ourselves as environmental humanists.

01:16:05.000 So it's, I think of it as I'm bringing a human or human-flourishing-based philosophy to this issue.

01:16:12.000 And the major tenets are: the standard of evaluating or the standard of value is human-flourishing.

01:16:18.000 The planet is not perfect, it's imperfect.

01:16:20.000 And intelligently impacting the Earth is a huge virtue, not a vice.

01:16:24.000 So, as I said, I'm for maximizing positive impacts and minimizing negative impacts.

01:16:28.000 And then the other thing I'm for is always looking at things in their full context.

01:16:32.000 So, I mentioned at the outset, look at the benefits, look at the side effects, and weigh them.

01:16:36.000 So, it's all about we're looking at things from a human-flourishing perspective.

01:16:39.000 We're recognizing the planet is an imperfect place that we need to impact a lot.

01:16:43.000 And then, when we're deciding what impacts to do, we need to look at the benefits and side effects with as much precision as possible.

01:16:49.000 The book is The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, energytalkingpoints.com.

01:16:53.000 You got it.

01:16:54.000 Thanks for coming on, Alex.

01:16:55.000 That was great.

01:16:56.000 Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

01:16:57.000 You bet.

01:16:57.000 Thanks.

01:16:59.000 What a great conversation that was with Alex Epstein.

01:17:02.000 Please consider supporting our program by going to charliekirk.com/slash support.

01:17:07.000 Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.

01:17:10.000 And 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.

01:17:22.000 Thank you guys so much for listening.

01:17:24.000 God bless you.

01:17:24.000 God bless our great country.

01:17:26.000 Talk to you soon.

The Charlie Kirk Show - August 17, 2020

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels w- Alex Epstein

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