The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 312. The Great Climate Con

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone watching and listening on YouTube or the associated podcast platforms.

00:01:14.300 I have with me today Alex Epstein. I'm looking forward to this discussion.

00:01:18.720 He's a philosopher and energy expert who argues that human flourishing should be the guiding principle

00:01:26.020 and the appropriate metric for our energy and environmental policy and our determination of its progress.

00:01:32.820 He's the author of the new book, Fossil Future, as well as the New York Times bestseller,

00:01:39.540 The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, which was published in 2014.

00:01:42.740 He's also the creator of EnergyTalkingPoints.com, a source of powerful, well-referenced talking points

00:01:50.220 on energy, environmental, and climate issues.

00:01:53.500 Epstein began his work in 2011 with the founding of the Center for Industrial Progress,

00:01:59.240 a for-profit think tank offering insights into the world of fossil fuels

00:02:03.260 and fighting back against the mainstream narrative of so-called environmentalism.

00:02:09.120 Widely recognized as a master of persuasion and debate on energy issues, Alex has spoken

00:02:15.460 to dozens of Fortune 500 companies and at dozens of prominent universities, including Harvard,

00:02:21.940 Yale, Stanford, and Duke, his alma mater.

00:02:26.420 He's also a highly sought-after consultant on messaging, working with dozens of major political

00:02:31.700 offices on pro-energy, pro-freedom messaging.

00:02:35.260 We're here today to talk about the moral necessity of an energy-rich future,

00:02:43.120 one that both must and should rely on the abundant provision of the petro-based fuels

00:02:48.580 so carelessly currently demonized.

00:02:52.260 So welcome to all of you who are watching or listening, and welcome to Alex.

00:02:59.600 So maybe we could just start by having you walk through the book.

00:03:03.840 One of the things I found interesting to begin with was your discussion of the motivations,

00:03:10.400 let's say, of some of the more radical people that are pushing what is purported to be a pro-environment

00:03:16.980 stance, people like Paul Ehrlich, who clearly have an agenda that could be more accurately

00:03:25.480 conceptualized as anti-human, certainly anti-industrial, rather than pro-environment.

00:03:32.360 And I think that's something that's worthwhile alerting everyone to, especially given the current

00:03:38.600 state of energy price increase in Europe, let's say, and the consequences that's going to have

00:03:44.140 for the poor around the world.

00:03:45.840 Let's start with that, though.

00:03:47.500 You wrote this book in 2014.

00:03:49.720 Let's talk about why you wrote it and how you think your prognostications have fared in

00:03:55.540 what's almost an intervening decade.

00:03:58.940 Well, I think one thing that's relevant, I'm not sure if you know this, but there's a new

00:04:02.540 book, 2022, called Fossil Future, which is the successor or replacement to the moral case

00:04:07.820 for fossil fuels.

00:04:09.120 So I talk a bunch in that about how the moral case for fossil fuels has fared.

00:04:13.720 And I think in terms of a predictive book, it's not primarily a predictive book, but it

00:04:19.140 has been extremely accurate.

00:04:21.060 Because if you look at what people have said in the last eight or so years, the main narratives

00:04:25.620 have been, we're not going to need fossil fuels as much as we used to.

00:04:29.160 They're going to be rapidly replaced by solar and wind, primarily.

00:04:32.880 And that climate impact, the climate impact of fossil fuels, is going to be increasingly

00:04:38.260 catastrophic.

00:04:38.860 So we're going to see more and more suffering and death from climate-related disasters.

00:04:44.460 And in the book, I talk about that's not going to happen because, one, fossil fuels will remain

00:04:50.020 uniquely cost-effective, particularly in a world that needs far more energy, which is something

00:04:54.940 that was not stressed in the past and is not stressed enough today.

00:04:58.020 But people are starting to realize most of the world doesn't have enough energy.

00:05:01.040 So replacing fossil fuels is almost impossible, given that you're not talking about just replacing

00:05:05.820 it for the people who use it, but for the people who need it.

00:05:09.020 So I've been very vindicated on the continuing cost-effectiveness of fossil fuels.

00:05:13.880 And then on the climate disaster point, we have documented that climate-related disaster

00:05:18.800 deaths are down 98% in the last 100 years.

00:05:22.420 And they've continued to decline.

00:05:24.180 And the basic reason is because whatever impact we have on climate that is negative, it is far

00:05:30.080 outweighed by our ability to master climate, to neutralize all sorts of climate dangers.

00:05:35.120 And so we're much better off overall climate-wise than we were 50 years ago and certainly 100

00:05:40.440 years ago.

00:05:41.620 So with regards to, let's start with the second one there, the climate disaster.

00:05:46.180 So the biophilic types, and so those would be people like Ehrlich, they seem to make the

00:05:52.000 case that metrics that involve human flourishing or even human death aren't relevant because

00:05:58.140 the primary issue is to restore the biosphere to something approximating what it hypothetically

00:06:04.420 was before there were human beings, which is a rather strange notion, all things considered.

00:06:10.080 And so they might object to the fact that you're using the mere decrease in number of

00:06:15.960 deaths, say, associated with climate trouble, with weather events, as a metric, because the

00:06:22.420 metric should be something like the purity of the planet.

00:06:25.600 And so what do you think about that argument?

00:06:29.580 What metrics should we be using to determine whether or not a climate emergency actually

00:06:34.620 exists?

00:06:36.620 Well, I definitely think we should be using a human flourishing metric, but in a broad

00:06:41.160 sense.

00:06:41.540 So the climate disaster deaths are not the only aspect of that, but they're a very important

00:06:45.780 aspect.

00:06:46.280 We can also see that damages are flat or down.

00:06:49.600 We can see that life overall is much better.

00:06:52.360 And actually, our ability to preserve the most valuable parts of nature is better.

00:06:56.640 Generally, when you're not dependent on the land and dependent on wood, dependent on your

00:07:01.300 local environment for your fuel, and you're wealthy, you can be much better at preserving

00:07:06.460 the parts of nature that you want to preserve.

00:07:08.240 If you look at places in Africa and Asia and even now Europe, because they're now energy

00:07:12.680 poor, like cutting down their forests, it's because they don't have better sources of fuel.

00:07:17.160 But I would challenge the idea that Ehrlich is really using this, I think you called it biophilic

00:07:24.480 standard, because if you look at his public rhetoric, he's always appealing to a human

00:07:30.300 flourishing standard.

00:07:31.220 So how did Ehrlich become famous?

00:07:33.040 He became famous through the 1968 book, The Population Bomb, where he's telling human beings

00:07:38.400 not, hey, the planet is going to become more impacted and that's intrinsically bad.

00:07:42.980 He's saying you're all going to starve.

00:07:44.820 And his close colleague, Sean Holdren, who was Obama's chief science advisor, now he predicted

00:07:50.320 in the 80s that we'd have up to a billion climate-related disaster deaths from famine

00:07:54.560 by 2020, which has come and gone and the world is better fed than ever.

00:07:58.880 So what I find is that people who, I think internally, they don't really care about human

00:08:05.260 flourishing and they're really optimizing for eliminating our impact as much as possible,

00:08:10.140 but they appeal to human flourishing to win over converts.

00:08:13.520 Because if they really said the best possible Earth is the one that would exist had we never

00:08:17.720 existed, and our goal is to eliminate as much human impact as possible as an end in

00:08:22.860 itself, they would not win many converts.

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00:10:01.880 Okay, so the case that you're making in some sense is that the argument on the radical

00:10:10.800 pro-environmental side actually varies sometimes, so to speak, in secret or behind the scenes

00:10:18.440 sort of voce, I suppose.

00:10:20.500 The argument is made that the planet would be better off.

00:10:22.840 It was returned to some natural and unspoiled condition.

00:10:26.020 And, but then public facing the arguments are essentially predicated on the argument that

00:10:33.020 if we don't do something drastic about, let's say, climate change, we're going to cause a

00:10:37.600 radical increase in actual human suffering.

00:10:40.700 Okay, so that all has to be straightened out conceptually before we as a species, let's say,

00:10:45.960 can move forward intelligently on this front.

00:10:48.320 I think the most powerful point you made, however, and I think this is where the rubber really

00:10:53.840 hits the road in more modern times, is that even if you use the metrics that are put forward

00:11:00.160 by those who, let's say, oppose the continuing use of fossil fuel, so those would be metrics

00:11:05.540 associated with climate change remediation and environmental improvement, the policies that

00:11:12.040 are designed to drive energy costs upward do nothing at all that isn't counterproductive

00:11:18.100 by their own measurements.

00:11:19.460 So you pointed out, for example, and this is something that people really need to be alerted

00:11:24.780 to, is that because Europe has taken this absolutely foolish route to reliance on wind

00:11:32.480 and solar, which is intermittent at best, one of the things that's happening because of

00:11:39.180 the pressure on liquid natural gas supplies primarily is that there's a tremendous amount

00:11:44.800 of deforestation occurring in Europe at the moment because people have to turn to sources

00:11:50.520 of energy that are actually at hand so that they don't freeze in the dark in the middle

00:11:55.240 of the winter.

00:11:56.320 And so the thing that I find so appalling about what's happening on the environmental front

00:12:00.300 at the moment is that even by the metrics of the people who are pro-environmental, these

00:12:05.620 policies that are driving energy costs upward are utterly counterproductive.

00:12:10.140 And, you know, humanprogress.org has a lovely graph showing the relationship between attention

00:12:16.720 paid to true medium to long-term environmental sustainability and overall wealth.

00:12:23.920 And what you see is that if you can get, as you make people wealthier, so as you remove

00:12:29.820 them from absolute poverty, their ability and willingness to attend to longer-term environmental

00:12:37.700 issues starts to increase rather than decreasing.

00:12:40.480 And so this has struck me for, I've known this for at least 10 years, that the best pathway

00:12:44.900 forward to a truly sustainable planet, even by the definitions of the environmentalists

00:12:50.720 themselves, is to drive energy costs downward to the point where we can remediate absolute

00:12:56.020 poverty so that people aren't driven to use up damaging and polluting immediately available

00:13:04.880 bioresources instead of turning to more efficient sources of energy.

00:13:08.500 And you are certainly making that case in the 2014 book, which, as you pointed out, you've

00:13:13.360 updated.

00:13:14.460 So that's the critical issue, right?

00:13:17.600 Even by the metrics of the environmentalists themselves, the policies that we're presently

00:13:22.900 pursuing on the energy front are not only counterproductive environmentally, but they're driving poor people into

00:13:29.460 abject poverty.

00:13:30.580 We're going to see a lot of that in Europe.

00:13:31.840 I think it depends.

00:13:35.700 So I think if you take the, quote, environmentalists as having a kind of pro-human interest in nature

00:13:42.820 and pro-human interest in lack of pollution, this is true.

00:13:46.920 But my belief is that the core of it is the belief that human impact is inherently bad, it's intrinsically

00:13:53.600 immoral, and also the belief is it's inevitably self-destructive.

00:13:57.100 So nature is viewed as this god that if we offend it through our impact is going to punish

00:14:02.380 us.

00:14:02.660 And it really has this character where it's wrong and doing the wrong thing is going to

00:14:07.080 destroy us.

00:14:07.980 And if you really think about it that way, all their policies make sense because their

00:14:13.480 policies are really aimed at making human life worse and ultimately reducing the human

00:14:19.260 population.

00:14:19.880 So it is true, you can say, well, yeah, aren't you cutting down more trees?

00:14:23.380 Aren't you doing this?

00:14:24.680 But they would say, well, if you use, let's say we had cheap, free nuclear energy, which

00:14:29.380 they've actually commented on hypothetically when they thought fusion was possible.

00:14:32.900 I talk about this in Morrill Case and in Fossil Future.

00:14:36.120 The leading environmentalists said this would be the worst thing ever.

00:14:39.360 A totally clean, cheap, abundant source of energy would be the worst thing ever because

00:14:44.000 of what we would do with it.

00:14:45.540 And one of the leaders called it like giving an idiot child a machine gun.

00:14:50.600 And what they recognized is that energy is really our ability to do work, which means

00:14:55.580 our ability to impact the earth.

00:14:57.400 And when we use a lot of energy, we impact the earth a lot.

00:15:00.480 Now, we impact it in a way that's beneficial to us, including we preserve the most valuable

00:15:05.160 parts of nature and we give ourselves an ability to enjoy nature.

00:15:09.060 Nevertheless, it is a very humanized earth.

00:15:11.380 And to the anti-human environmental movement, that is offensive.

00:15:16.600 So that movement is not about a clean environment for us or for us to be able to contemplate polar

00:15:21.100 bears or go on safaris or any of this.

00:15:24.240 It's about a dehumanized earth.

00:15:26.280 It's the belief that we are uniquely bad and we need to get eliminated.

00:15:30.480 Right, right.

00:15:31.040 Well, but the problem with that argument, even if you attempt to give the devil his due,

00:15:35.380 let's say, is that it's predicated on the idea that if we pursued policies to decrease

00:15:41.920 our overall energy use, and if one of the consequences of those policies was the relatively

00:15:48.880 radical depopulation of the earth, perhaps by radically lowering birth rates, that while

00:15:56.020 that transformation was occurring, depopulation and deindustrialization, things would remain

00:16:01.680 stable enough so that in our new poverty and our hopelessness with regards to the future,

00:16:07.320 we wouldn't be devouring the planet while we were dying.

00:16:10.120 And I think that's a preposterous claim.

00:16:12.540 I don't see any peaceful way forward that's based on compulsion and poverty to reduce the

00:16:20.040 population of the world that isn't going to be absolutely destructive on the energy, on

00:16:24.260 the environment, on the environment front.

00:16:26.040 And the idea that if we had more energy, we would actually be worse for the planet flies

00:16:33.200 in the face of what we've been discussing already, which is the fact that if people can't

00:16:38.060 turn to cheap and efficient and relatively clean sources of energy, and perhaps liquid

00:16:43.580 natural gas and nuclear would be at the top of that list, then they're going to absolutely

00:16:49.180 100% turn to much dirtier replacements.

00:16:52.680 And we've already seen that happening in, well, everywhere.

00:16:56.160 I mean, China is building coal-fired plants at a rate that's so rapid that everything

00:17:01.220 the West is doing on the climate amelioration front is absolutely irrelevant.

00:17:05.920 And what has the UK in the last week has already pledged to double its coal imports, and Germany

00:17:11.640 has had to turn to its coal-fired plants to provide backup power because wind and solar

00:17:17.320 has proved not only hyper-expensive but so unreliable that, well, that when there's no power,

00:17:24.760 so when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, you have to have backup, and

00:17:28.400 it's been coal that's been brought in as a stopgap.

00:17:34.300 So I just can't see any way, even if you accept the arguments that you just laid forward,

00:17:40.560 you know, that there should be fewer people and that the right planet is one that's characterized

00:17:44.600 by minimal human action.

00:17:47.120 I can't see any way forward to that on the energy poverty front that's not going to be

00:17:51.880 positively counterproductive.

00:17:53.980 I mean, I agree.

00:17:55.420 I agree.

00:17:56.000 I agree with you in terms of how it plays out.

00:17:59.320 And I think it's important in general.

00:18:01.140 This is not a scientific movement.

00:18:03.060 And part of it not being a scientific movement is it doesn't really have a long-term strategy

00:18:07.980 for achieving its anti-human goals.

00:18:11.120 It's much more, it has a lot of ritual in it.

00:18:13.840 There's a lot of just hostility toward, kind of hostility toward anything that has impact,

00:18:18.800 and you just oppose that, and then you assume things are going to get better.

00:18:22.540 And so people didn't think through what's going to happen when you make energy more expensive,

00:18:26.640 what's going to happen to the forest.

00:18:28.200 They didn't think that through at all.

00:18:29.580 Or when you oppose nuclear, what are you going to use in its stead?

00:18:33.560 Or when you make energy expensive, what's going to happen in terms of riots?

00:18:36.600 It's just, it's not at all thought through.

00:18:38.700 And I think this might be a lesson for us to have when we contemplate these so-called

00:18:42.500 Plans for Net Zero.

00:18:44.140 This is a movement that's very much, it has this hostility toward human impact.

00:18:48.240 It opposes it wherever it sees it.

00:18:50.400 And it just, it has a quality of nihilism to it.

00:18:53.200 And it's not thinking through, it's not thinking through either a dehumanized Earth

00:18:56.860 or a human-friendly Earth.

00:18:58.460 It's sort of going after anything that has impact.

00:19:01.320 But my argument is, we need to switch our hostility toward impact.

00:19:05.700 This view that human impact is bad needs to be challenged.

00:19:09.100 Human impact is good if it makes the Earth a better place for human flourishing.

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00:20:21.080 So, yeah, well, it's a strange, it's just a very strange issue philosophically, because

00:20:30.720 one of the things I wonder about is why this idea that human beings are in some sense in

00:20:37.520 their activity antagonistic to the earth, it's a very peculiar metaphysical assumption,

00:20:45.520 especially for people who are hypothetically biologically minded, because if we're living

00:20:50.980 creatures, which we clearly are, and if we've evolved in the same manner that other living

00:20:56.020 creatures have evolved, which seems relatively indisputable, then how is it that our very

00:21:01.660 existence is somehow antithetical to the flourishing of the biosphere, given that we're

00:21:06.780 clearly part of the biosphere?

00:21:07.960 And you see this sort of thing with this idiot assumption, for example, that bears some of

00:21:14.140 the same hallmarks of this kind of quasi-philosophical thinking that before the Europeans came to

00:21:19.560 North America, that the natives were living somehow in harmony with nature, and that the

00:21:24.540 entire biosphere was free of the scars of human interaction, and that's utterly preposterous.

00:21:30.780 I mean, the Native Americans were incredibly sophisticated agriculturalists, and the Western Plains

00:21:36.680 Indians burned the prairies constantly to ensure that there was a plentiful supply of the buffalo

00:21:44.640 that they depended on.

00:21:46.200 And so human beings have been affecting the structure of the biosphere ever since we've

00:21:52.620 been around, and that's for a very long period of time.

00:21:55.180 And the idea that there was somehow some pristine state of nature before we emerged on the landscape,

00:22:02.360 and that there's some moral imperative to return to that, it strikes me, it's so incoherent that

00:22:08.260 it's barely comprehensible.

00:22:09.820 And there is something like a hatred for humanity, as far as I can tell, that's lurking underneath

00:22:13.880 this.

00:22:14.440 Hatred for humanity, certainly a hatred for industrialization.

00:22:17.880 And those actually turn out to be the same thing.

00:22:20.060 I mean, one of the things that's really struck me as incomprehensible over the last few years

00:22:25.840 is that, especially on the left, is that you have these joint claims being put forward simultaneously

00:22:32.880 on the left.

00:22:33.680 And one is that we're radically pro-environmental, and we're also the philosophical doctrine that

00:22:41.820 is standing up for the poor and oppressed.

00:22:44.540 And I think, okay, well, what happens when those two things are pitted against each other?

00:22:48.420 And when are they pitted?

00:22:50.360 Well, they're pitted when it comes to discussions about cheap energy, because it's clearly the case,

00:22:55.360 and you outline this in your book quite nicely, that the most effective way of remediating

00:23:01.200 absolute poverty, so lifting people out of the privation that's associated at least with

00:23:07.480 lack of education, but also with starvation itself, is to provide them with cheap energy.

00:23:15.080 Because as you pointed out, there's no difference between energy and work, and there's no difference

00:23:19.180 between work and productivity.

00:23:20.720 There's no difference between productivity and the eradication of poverty.

00:23:26.720 And so we are pursuing these expensive energy policies, and hypothetically, we're supposed

00:23:32.560 to benefit the planet, although we're not.

00:23:34.840 But we are definitely dooming people who are already poor to a much more truncated horizon

00:23:41.080 of opportunity, and to absolute privation and starvation in many cases.

00:23:45.740 Yes, I think it's really, I mean, there are at least two really interesting issues raised

00:23:50.060 here, sort of this tension between the alleged concern for poverty, and then the, quote, concern

00:23:55.400 for the environment, and then this question of how this bizarre view evolved, you know, because

00:24:01.100 this was not the view of our environment and our impact 100 years ago.

00:24:05.100 And interestingly, it's not the view of our environment that anyone who lives near nature

00:24:08.180 has.

00:24:08.620 People who live in nature don't worship nature as this superior god that can't be impacted.

00:24:13.400 And I think it's my own understanding of the history, and I really enjoy, there's a book

00:24:18.600 by Ayn Rand called The New Left, The Anti-Industrial Revolution.

00:24:22.900 And it was written at the time that this was happening.

00:24:25.360 And one of the analyses is, basically, there's a transition between the old left and the new

00:24:30.380 left, where the old left claimed to be for industry, for productivity, for prosperity.

00:24:35.560 And what happened is, that was clearly not achieved by their policies.

00:24:39.420 Communism led to the devastation of industry, the malfunction of industry, widespread poverty.

00:24:44.780 And Rand said, well, you know, the left basically had a choice.

00:24:47.680 Are you going to stay with your anti-capitalism, or are you going to embrace capitalism because

00:24:52.600 you really care about industry and productivity?

00:24:54.800 Right, right.

00:24:55.340 And actually, what they did was they kept their anti-capitalism, and they looked for new reasons

00:25:01.280 to support anti-capitalism.

00:25:03.280 And in the 60s, they decided on this issue of environment.

00:25:06.980 And it was a convenient issue in a number of ways.

00:25:09.380 One is the pro-capitalism side didn't do a very good job with it, particularly rhetorically.

00:25:13.900 They didn't make the point that, well, good environments are made possible by prosperity.

00:25:17.960 So the idea of a good environment in a humanistic way was co-opted by the anti-capitalists, who

00:25:23.960 had no right to it whatsoever.

00:25:25.540 I mean, look at the Soviet Union and environment.

00:25:28.420 But they owned that value issue, but then they packaged it with this hostility toward human

00:25:34.480 impact as such.

00:25:36.180 And what they really did brilliantly was they took over the schools.

00:25:38.900 So they put in the schools this idea that human impact is bad, and especially the idea

00:25:43.780 that it's inevitably self-destructive because the planet is this delicate

00:25:47.800 nurturer that our impact ruins.

00:25:50.020 And that has permeated the whole educational system, where people think that we inherently

00:25:54.160 are destroyers of the planet.

00:25:55.500 And it has permeated the scientific community.

00:25:58.260 What I call this delicate nurturer dogma is unfortunately pervasive in Earth sciences

00:26:02.860 today.

00:26:03.360 It's a very primitive and bizarre view.

00:26:05.380 It has nothing to do with reality that our impact is inevitably self-destructive.

00:26:10.580 Actually, our impact has made the Earth much better overall, including safer from climate.

00:26:14.780 But nevertheless, I think it's really there was initially a real political motivation

00:26:18.960 to spread this.

00:26:20.320 But now we have this irrationalist philosophy that has a mind of its own.

00:26:24.500 Yeah, well, that's OK.

00:26:25.360 So let's delve into that a little bit, because the other thing that I've come to understand

00:26:29.620 more clearly in the last 15 years, let's say, as the data has also become more clear,

00:26:34.980 is that.

00:26:35.300 So we lifted more people out of poverty in absolute terms and also in relative terms

00:26:42.400 between 2000 and 2015 than we had lifted people out of poverty in the sum total of human endeavor

00:26:49.640 before that.

00:26:51.180 And it's quite clear that the reason for that was that fewer countries pursued absolutely

00:26:58.900 counterproductive economic policies of the type that were put forward, let's say, by the

00:27:04.120 communists when the Cold War was raging.

00:27:08.000 And so you saw all over the world, including in places like communist China, that there was a radical

00:27:15.460 move towards something approximating free market and free trade between individuals.

00:27:21.400 And in some countries, that was implemented more effectively than others.

00:27:24.780 But wherever it was implemented, at least quasi-effectively, people immediately stopped starving.

00:27:31.260 And so, and I'm trying to make a case in relationship to the anti-capitalism.

00:27:37.320 So let's say that you are a genuine classic leftist and you are actually concerned with

00:27:42.520 the poor, especially remediation of absolute poverty.

00:27:46.000 And you're looking at the data and you see that after the Soviet Union collapsed and there

00:27:50.860 were fewer countries turning to communist dogma to formulate their economic policies and more

00:27:56.920 countries started to develop, started to participate in the broad free market, that we drove poverty

00:28:02.260 down to its lowest level in absolute numbers or in relative numbers, certainly, than we'd ever

00:28:09.020 seen before in history.

00:28:10.120 And so then again, we're back to the same issue.

00:28:12.880 If the spread of free market policies remediates absolute poverty, which it clearly does,

00:28:21.540 and in a staggeringly rapid manner, then what in the world is driving the anti-capitalist ethos?

00:28:31.020 You know, you said that there's this underlying metaphor of nature as something like fragile

00:28:36.020 virgin, right?

00:28:37.480 Continually, what, rendered susceptible to our raping and pillaging.

00:28:42.540 So there's a weird metaphor lurking at the bottom of all that.

00:28:45.220 But given the overwhelming data that something approximating free market frees people from

00:28:53.420 absolute poverty, and then conjoining that with the observation that richer people actually

00:28:57.900 care more about the environment, you're left, again, with this question of what in the world

00:29:02.500 is motivating this?

00:29:03.580 There's some deep hatred.

00:29:05.480 It's like a deep hatred for humanity itself, but even at the expense of the planet.

00:29:10.720 And so I still struggle with trying to comprehend that.

00:29:13.980 There's a kind of existential guilt there for the crime of existence itself.

00:29:19.000 It's something like that.

00:29:21.200 I mean, I think there's one really powerful fact about the increase in prosperity that

00:29:27.220 I draw attention to a lot in Fossil Future, because I think it's very notable.

00:29:30.360 So I point out, I was born in 1980.

00:29:32.520 Since 1980, we've gone from more than four in 10 people living on less than $2 a day, and

00:29:37.620 this is adjusted for inflation, to one in 10.

00:29:39.840 So as you said, this is the greatest alleviation of poverty in human history.

00:29:43.980 Now, what's really interesting is if you survey, and this was done in the UK, you might have

00:29:48.720 seen this before, but there's a survey of college-educated adults in the UK about what

00:29:53.360 has happened to extreme poverty over the past 30 or 40 years.

00:29:57.220 And this is just an objective, documented thing.

00:29:59.660 There's no question.

00:30:01.000 And so what happened is only 12% of people thought it got better.

00:30:04.920 55% of people thought it got worse, and the rest thought it stayed the same.

00:30:12.900 And it just shows you the level of miseducation about this issue.

00:30:16.840 And I do think a lot of it is the modern anti-human environmental movement, because what they've

00:30:21.740 done is they've taught us that our impact ruins the planet.

00:30:25.300 And so we just assume that because the world used a lot more fossil fuels, particularly

00:30:29.540 China and India did, which drove much of the increase in prosperity, they just assume that

00:30:35.460 the world is worse.

00:30:36.760 And what I call, I don't use this term in moral case, but I use it in fossil future, our knowledge

00:30:41.120 system, so the institutions we rely on for expert knowledge and guidance, they've totally

00:30:47.580 failed at educating us about how much the world has improved from a human perspective.

00:30:53.640 And this goes back to my argument that the anti-human environmental movement, they're

00:30:57.900 trying to pretend to be pro-human.

00:30:59.820 So they don't want us to know that the Earth is a much better place than ever to live.

00:31:04.100 They don't want us to know that climate disaster deaths are way down.

00:31:07.280 They don't want us to know about the decline in extreme poverty, because it totally challenges

00:31:11.320 their narrative that impact in general, and fossil fuels in particular, are bad.

00:31:16.200 And if we recognized how vital fossil fuels are, then we would be really afraid of these

00:31:20.820 proposals to get rid of fossil fuels in the next 27 years in a world that needs far more

00:31:26.240 energy.

00:31:26.640 And unfortunately, we're starting to realize this involuntarily because these policies

00:31:31.060 just implemented 1%, these anti-fossil fuel policies just implemented a 1% success rate

00:31:37.080 in the anti-fossil fuel movement's view, have already led to a global energy crisis.

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00:32:56.000 Right, right.

00:33:01.380 Well, you said that the planet is getting better, let's say, from a human perspective, and so

00:33:07.400 we've looked at metrics like the radical decrease in absolute privation.

00:33:12.040 But we can turn our attention momentarily to the evidence that in many ways, and somewhat

00:33:17.780 paradoxically and perversely, the planet actually seems to be doing better from the natural perspective

00:33:23.220 too.

00:33:23.620 Now, you know, I have been concerned about, I have believed for a long time that one of

00:33:30.060 our focal concerns might be, on the environmental front, might appropriately be something like

00:33:35.760 remediation of misuse of oceanic resources, because I think we've done a pretty cataclysmic

00:33:41.640 job of protecting our, especially our coastal lands and the shelf environments just off shore

00:33:52.600 of the continents where pretty much all the fish are.

00:33:54.700 I think we've done a catastrophic job of managing that.

00:33:57.940 And there are genuine environmental problems that I think sensible people should take into

00:34:03.480 account.

00:34:03.960 But, you know, I was looking at a graph this week, and I've known about this phenomenon

00:34:08.880 for quite a while, that, again, in the last 15 years, a surface area totaling 15% of the

00:34:18.780 entire planet has greened.

00:34:20.620 I mean, that is, that's an area that's larger than the continental United States.

00:34:25.800 And it's, so let's, let's walk through that for a minute.

00:34:28.180 So, just so everyone who's listening is clear.

00:34:30.460 In the last 15 years, the planet has not got less green.

00:34:34.820 It's got more green.

00:34:36.280 And not only a little bit more green, stunningly more green.

00:34:40.260 15% in, essentially, in 15 years.

00:34:43.740 And that's an area bigger than the continental United States.

00:34:46.640 And that's happened pretty much everywhere in the world.

00:34:49.080 And then you might say, well, where is that happening?

00:34:51.820 And perversely, and contrary to all predictions, it's happening in the drier areas of the planet,

00:34:58.380 especially in semi-arid areas.

00:35:00.320 And here's the reason.

00:35:01.260 And so, plants have to breathe.

00:35:05.780 And to breathe, they have to open pores on their surface.

00:35:09.440 And the problem for plants, when they breathe with these pores, is that they also allow water

00:35:15.040 to evaporate from their internal structures.

00:35:18.140 And so, the less carbon dioxide in the air, the more the plants have to open their pores.

00:35:22.860 And that means the more susceptible they are to drying out.

00:35:25.580 And that means that they struggle to exist in semi-arid areas.

00:35:29.100 Now, what's happened as a consequence of increased carbon dioxide production is that plants can

00:35:34.320 breathe easier.

00:35:35.460 And so, they don't have to open their pores to the same degree.

00:35:38.060 And what that has meant is that the very desert areas, at least the semi-arid areas, that the

00:35:44.400 climate apocalypses were claiming would expand and spread, so the desertification of the world,

00:35:52.760 the exact opposite has happened.

00:35:54.740 And the Sahara Desert, for example, has shrunk to quite a stunning degree.

00:35:58.240 And not only is the planet 15% greener than it was in 2000, but there are more trees in

00:36:05.460 the Northern Hemisphere than there were 100 years ago, and as well as the planet greening.

00:36:13.240 And so, you can think about that as a victory on the objective front for the natural world.

00:36:18.220 At the same time the planet has green, because it's easier for plants to survive, our food crops

00:36:23.420 have become much more productive for exactly the same reasons.

00:36:27.000 And so, as carbon dioxide output has increased, the planet has got, not only has the planet got

00:36:32.660 greener, it's got greener in the driest areas, which is absolutely stunning and remarkable.

00:36:38.240 And one of the consequences of that increased greening is that our agriculture production

00:36:44.380 has become not less efficient, but much more efficient.

00:36:47.400 And so, I'm really wrestling with how to conceptualize that particular set of statistics.

00:36:52.820 Yeah, I just thought of an idea.

00:36:54.060 I just thought of an idea.

00:36:54.900 I've never thought of this before, so we're just trying it right now.

00:36:57.680 But I think maybe we can think of three conceptions of the Earth which capture everything we're

00:37:02.340 talking about.

00:37:02.820 So, my primary conception is evaluating the Earth from the perspective of human flourishing.

00:37:07.940 How hospitable to human beings is it?

00:37:10.540 And this includes like a lush, green, beautiful world for us to enjoy for many reasons you've

00:37:15.460 talked about.

00:37:16.260 But then the second one could be looking at the Earth in terms of just pure biological productivity.

00:37:21.600 So, just not even focusing on humans, just how much life is on the planet.

00:37:26.380 And this captures what you just mentioned with rising CO2 levels making a greener planet.

00:37:32.260 But then the third one, and I think this is really the core of the modern environmental

00:37:35.600 movement, is an unimpacted planet.

00:37:38.920 So, you're not optimizing for biological productivity.

00:37:41.780 You're optimizing for minimal impact.

00:37:44.340 And I think that is really the core of the modern environmental movement.

00:37:47.600 It's not this just blanket collective desire for as much life as possible, and we're somehow

00:37:52.500 getting in the way of that.

00:37:53.620 It's specifically against us.

00:37:55.140 And I think you brought up the perfect example, which is the climate catastrophe movement's total

00:38:00.140 non-interest in kind of the obvious biological productivity benefits of more CO2.

00:38:07.340 And this was not shocking or stunning.

00:38:09.080 This is exactly what was predicted by the people who discovered the greenhouse effect.

00:38:13.280 When they discovered the greenhouse effect, they said, this is going to, on its own, make

00:38:17.540 the Earth a much more lush place.

00:38:21.260 They speculated like the fruits are going to be bigger and everything is going to be lush

00:38:25.260 because we're going to have more farmland and more biological.

00:38:28.080 And it's kind of obvious.

00:38:29.080 If you have a warmer world with more CO2, it's a more tropical world with more life.

00:38:35.000 It's a more green world in the life sense of green, and yet the green movement hates it

00:38:39.740 because we caused it.

00:38:41.520 So, they can see no good in anything we caused, even when it leads to more biological productivity.

00:38:47.400 So, I think what you're bringing up really shows it's fundamentally an anti-human movement,

00:38:51.340 not a pro-life of any kind.

00:38:54.040 Right, right.

00:38:54.600 Okay, but let's talk about that idea of impact.

00:38:57.320 It's like, well, what is this hypothetical perfect world that exists statically that

00:39:05.240 would be pristine and morally valuable in the absence of human beings?

00:39:09.760 I mean, the biosphere is a dynamic place, obviously, over any time scale, and there's

00:39:15.240 shift in what constitutes, quote, the environment.

00:39:18.280 There seems to be this presumption that at some point in the past, when there was minimal

00:39:24.120 human activity, the earth was somehow optimized in the biological but also the moral sense,

00:39:31.000 and that any change in that whatsoever, in any direction, hence climate change, let's say,

00:39:36.720 rather than global warming, any change in that whatsoever is to be regarded axiomatically

00:39:41.980 as evil.

00:39:43.360 But what that essentially means, as far as I can tell, the ineluctable conclusion that

00:39:48.880 has to be drawn from that proposition is that any human activity whatsoever is to be regarded

00:39:54.780 as evil on the face of it.

00:39:58.000 It doesn't matter what it does.

00:39:59.020 And your point is, that means even if it increases total biological flourishing in terms of, let's

00:40:07.480 say, the net metric tonnage of biological life on the planet.

00:40:13.120 And so that's also perverse, because that is definitely a game that none of us can win.

00:40:18.000 If the a prior rule is, no matter what you do, you're evil, then the only solution to that

00:40:24.720 is, well, how about a hell of a lot fewer of you?

00:40:27.420 But then you say, well, what's that supposed to serve?

00:40:30.260 Because if what we're doing now is actually making the planet more green, and I'm saying

00:40:34.920 that very carefully, because I know that that's not a sufficient metric.

00:40:38.620 I am very concerned with issues, let's say, or conscious of issues that are relevant, like

00:40:44.420 the potential loss of biodiversity, and also the overfishing of the oceans, let's say.

00:40:53.480 So even although the planet is becoming greener, that doesn't mean that there are

00:40:57.340 no mistakes we're making on the environmental front, but those mistakes have to be differentiated

00:41:02.700 out, and they're all addressable.

00:41:04.120 And, you know, as we get richer, too, and we can do more with less, and our agriculture

00:41:08.640 becomes more efficient if we can manage that, that also means, even by the standards of the

00:41:13.820 environmentalists themselves, that we'll be able to set aside reasonably large tracts of land

00:41:20.500 and water to maintain them in something approximating a pristine and untouched state.

00:41:26.420 I mean, that's certainly something that should be done on the oceanic management front.

00:41:32.460 I mean, the data that I know suggests that if we set aside a certain percentage of the

00:41:38.880 coastal area as marine protected areas, and that might not be the most efficient way to

00:41:43.400 manage the oceans.

00:41:44.040 But it's not bad that we'll reap the benefits of having untouched nature, so to speak, which

00:41:50.240 is an aesthetic and economic and environmental good, but we'll also be able to replenish the

00:41:57.940 oceans in a manner that would be economically productive.

00:42:00.360 And so, well, like, why the hell can't we have our cake and eat it, too, then?

00:42:04.500 We can help people become rich with the provision of plentiful energy, and then we can put aside

00:42:11.920 tracts of the world so that they're relatively untouched, so that biology can do its thing.

00:42:16.660 And, like, what the hell is the problem with that, precisely?

00:42:20.260 Well, so I think you're pointing to something really good and something really bad.

00:42:24.840 Something really good is why my new book is called Fossil Future, Why Global Human Flourishing

00:42:29.620 Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas, Not Less.

00:42:32.580 But part of it does talk about we can increase all of these biological things.

00:42:37.880 We can have a much more lush world.

00:42:39.580 We can enjoy nature much more.

00:42:41.260 This is fundamentally good news.

00:42:43.100 The more energy we have, the more control we have over Earth, and the more we can make

00:42:48.100 everything about it better for our purposes, including aesthetic things that poor people

00:42:52.680 can't possibly be confused by.

00:42:54.940 But the bad thing here is it's really highlighting the nihilism of this view that human impact is

00:43:01.060 bad.

00:43:01.440 And again, I really think the view is not that we want a lush environment and human beings

00:43:07.240 are getting in the way of that.

00:43:08.260 We want biological productivity and human beings are getting in the way.

00:43:10.780 Because as you're pointing out, they are opposing all human impact, including obvious things

00:43:15.480 that make the world better.

00:43:17.860 And so it really is the view that if we did it, it's bad.

00:43:21.140 And you ask something like, what is it serving?

00:43:23.880 But it's a nihilistic view.

00:43:25.360 So it's not really serving anything.

00:43:27.300 Even when you think about unimpacted nature, it's not this beautiful thing for us to enjoy.

00:43:32.920 It's supposed to be protected from us.

00:43:35.620 So that's really the view.

00:43:36.680 Including our enjoyment.

00:43:37.580 Of course, our enjoyment is of no consequence whatsoever.

00:43:43.140 And in fossil future and in moral case, I have a lot of quotes from the leaders where they'll

00:43:48.220 occasionally let this slip out.

00:43:50.060 Where one guy, for example, who was reviewing Bill McKibben's book, The End of Nature, talks

00:43:54.240 about, you know, like a flourishing biosphere is more important to me than one human or a

00:43:59.780 billion of them.

00:44:00.400 Yeah, yeah, let me read that.

00:44:02.260 Let me read that.

00:44:03.180 I've got it right here.

00:44:04.360 So this is something that you cite in your 2014 book.

00:44:08.040 I'm going to just read it so everybody can hear it.

00:44:10.040 And I would ask everyone who's listening to really think about this because this strikes

00:44:17.400 to the core of the issue as far as I can tell.

00:44:20.160 So, for example, this is from your book.

00:44:23.340 In a Los Angeles Times review of The End of Nature, McKibben's influential book of 25 years

00:44:31.780 ago, Predicting Catastrophic Climate Change, David M. Graber, Research Biologist for the

00:44:38.840 National Park Service, wrote this summary of McKibben's message.

00:44:45.500 McKibben is a biocentrist.

00:44:48.460 And so am I.

00:44:49.720 Now, we are not interested in the utility of a particular species or free-flowing river

00:44:56.040 or ecosystem to mankind.

00:44:59.960 They have intrinsic value, more value to me than another human being.

00:45:07.000 That's a very interesting thing to say.

00:45:08.740 Or a billion of them, which is also a very interesting thing to say.

00:45:12.080 Human happiness and certainly human fecundity are not as important as a wild and healthy,

00:45:19.720 planet are no social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature.

00:45:27.420 But that isn't true.

00:45:31.120 Somewhere along the line, at about a billion years ago, maybe half that, we quit the contract

00:45:38.180 and became a cancer.

00:45:41.740 We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the earth.

00:45:44.860 It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil

00:45:52.500 fuel consumption and the third world, its suicidal consumption of landscape.

00:45:59.340 Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for

00:46:09.240 the right virus to come along.

00:46:11.740 You know, I cannot understand how anybody who is positively predisposed to children, we might

00:46:23.060 say, could read something like that and not be absolutely shocked to their core.

00:46:29.760 I mean, so let's walk through the claims.

00:46:31.460 The first claim is an untouched natural landscape of any size, whatever untouched means, is more

00:46:40.640 valuable in and of itself than any individual human being or any group of people, no matter

00:46:46.900 how large the number.

00:46:48.920 Okay, so the implication there is any number of human beings could be sacrificed in order

00:46:55.160 to preserve any geographically demarcated natural zone of any size.

00:47:03.400 So that's a standard of comparative value.

00:47:06.280 And then the cancer metaphor, well, human beings have deviated from the natural order, whatever

00:47:14.860 that natural order is, whatever our deviation consists of, and we've deviated the same way

00:47:20.620 a cancer deviates.

00:47:22.620 So now the metaphor is human beings equal cancer, and that's a hell of a metaphor, because what

00:47:31.020 we do with cancer is strive to eradicate it.

00:47:33.760 So these metaphors have deep motivational significance.

00:47:37.100 So that's a little bit on the appalling side, let's say, and it's grounded in a very narrow

00:47:41.640 Malthusian view of the world, which is that we're something like yeast, cancer, let's say,

00:47:46.880 and left to our own devices, we'll multiply unchecked until we devour everything and perish.

00:47:52.320 Which is a pretty dismal and only vaguely biologically centered view of how human beings conduct

00:48:00.020 themselves, because we're not yeast in a bloody Petri dish.

00:48:02.840 We're not yeast and the world isn't a Petri dish, let's put it that way.

00:48:06.440 And then you add to that the closing statement, which is something like those of us who are

00:48:12.020 properly oriented in our moral endeavor in relationship to the non-human world, can only sit and pray

00:48:19.680 that the right virus comes along, so that what?

00:48:24.120 So that we're radically depopulated?

00:48:27.780 To what degree?

00:48:29.820 Down to the half a billion people that the world can hypothetically sustain?

00:48:33.400 It's like every single bit of that, to me, reeks of an underlying and barely veiled, brutal,

00:48:43.000 genocidal impulse.

00:48:45.640 I agree.

00:48:47.020 And what I want to draw attention to is that this mentality, diluted or not to various degrees,

00:48:53.000 is leading our thinking about what to do about fossil fuels, which is an existential issue for

00:48:59.460 the world.

00:48:59.960 Because the reason I go into this, particularly in Fossil Future, is the point I'm making is

00:49:04.500 that the people and institutions we're trusting to evaluate what to do about this source of

00:49:09.840 energy that powers the world, that also emits CO2 and impacts the climate, those people are

00:49:14.480 not making that evaluation by anything resembling the goal of advancing human flourishing on Earth.

00:49:20.900 They are pursuing, to a significant degree, this goal of eliminating human impact on Earth.

00:49:26.280 And the economist George Reisman had this article a long time ago called The Toxicity of Environmentalism.

00:49:32.980 And one point he made that I never forgot is he said, listening to a modern environmentalist

00:49:37.940 is like listening to a doctor who's on the side of the germs.

00:49:42.820 Somebody who doesn't have your best interests at heart.

00:49:45.460 And as an example, one of the people I pick on very deservedly in Fossil Future is Michael

00:49:50.280 Mann, who's a climate scientist and activist, who is one of the leading advisors.

00:49:55.240 And if you look at Michael Mann's statements, one thing he has said is the ideal population

00:49:59.860 for Earth is a billion people.

00:50:02.380 Yeah, yeah.

00:50:03.040 How can you possibly say that?

00:50:04.700 There are eight billion people.

00:50:06.320 Like, how can you possibly look at Earth and say, oh, yeah, it's too many people?

00:50:09.380 That has a murderous impulse to it.

00:50:11.920 If you just look at the Earth and you say, oh, yeah, seven billion people should go.

00:50:15.900 And what I point out with Michael Mann is that if you look at how he's evaluating the issue,

00:50:20.480 he's totally indifferent to the benefits of fossil fuels.

00:50:22.940 He has a whole book, people can look it up, called The Madhouse Effect about fossil fuels

00:50:26.700 and climate.

00:50:27.480 And he doesn't mention any benefits of fossil fuels.

00:50:29.940 For example, he talks about agriculture and fossil fuels.

00:50:32.700 He only talks about negatives.

00:50:34.020 He doesn't once mention diesel-powered agricultural equipment or natural gas-derived fertilizer,

00:50:40.340 even though those make it possible for us to feed eight billion people.

00:50:44.140 So what we have is an anti-human mentality.

00:50:46.760 So some of those who are listening likely don't know that the very survival of about

00:50:56.680 four billion people, so half the world's population, depends in no small part on the

00:51:03.200 provision of ammonia as fertilizer.

00:51:05.880 And ammonia is primarily derived from natural gas.

00:51:09.140 And so what that means is not just on the energy front, let's point this out, is that the very

00:51:15.900 food that is provisioning half the world's population is a direct consequence of the cheap

00:51:21.900 and easy accessibility of natural gas.

00:51:26.380 And so what's the idea here?

00:51:29.580 That we're supposed to reduce our provision of fossil fuels?

00:51:33.340 And what are we going to do on the ammonia front?

00:51:36.960 We're going to drive the price of fertilizer ever more skyward?

00:51:41.860 Well, if we do that, because that would be the consequence of reducing the plentiful supply

00:51:46.380 of natural gas, if we do that, then what will happen is, clearly, food will get more expensive,

00:51:53.100 and so will energy, but food will definitely get more expensive.

00:51:56.240 And so what that will mean is that huge swath of the world's population that's living on

00:52:02.180 the edge where they can just right now afford enough food to feed themselves so they don't

00:52:08.140 suffer the consequences of nutritional privation or even die, a huge proportion of those people

00:52:13.780 are going to be tipped back into absolute poverty.

00:52:17.000 Their children are going to be intellectually stunted as a consequence, and they might well

00:52:21.040 starve.

00:52:22.060 And then you think, well, why would we do that?

00:52:23.920 And if the answer is, well, you know, some of us really believe that the planet should only

00:52:28.300 have a billion people on it, if that, if we have to have any people at all, then, well,

00:52:33.760 maybe this is all part of the unconscious drive towards, and conscious drive to some degree,

00:52:41.640 towards reducing the planet's population no matter what the price may be.

00:52:45.880 And then you see how people justify this.

00:52:47.980 They say things like, well, you know, if we don't take emergency action right now, which

00:52:52.080 means let's make the poor even poorer, then the poor are really going to suffer 100 years

00:52:58.300 from now.

00:52:59.180 And I think, look, I don't have a lot of confidence in your ability to predict even a decade out,

00:53:04.640 much less 100 years, with your unstable economic models that are predicated on an equally unstable

00:53:11.220 climate model, so we can forget about your capacity to prognosticate 100 years down the

00:53:16.080 road.

00:53:16.340 But what you're saying, essentially, is that the hypothetical poor that occupy my utopian

00:53:21.800 imagination are much more important than the actual poor right now who will definitely

00:53:27.580 die if we implement our higher energy price-inducing hypothetical environmental policies.

00:53:36.400 You know, and one of the things that strikes me as so utterly absurd, it's partly why I found

00:53:40.560 your book so interesting, is that somehow the people who are making such arguments have

00:53:46.140 gained the moral upper hand, even though you don't have to scrape beneath the surface very

00:53:50.560 far to see not only the genocidal metaphor and the genocidal intent, but the actual genocidal

00:53:58.040 impact of these policies, because we're definitely tipping people back into absolute privation.

00:54:05.660 Yeah, there's a lot of really interesting stuff going on.

00:54:08.980 I mean, I think one thing, why do they have the moral high ground?

00:54:12.360 This is something that's really a core mission of mine to correct, is that, as I mentioned

00:54:16.600 before, they really owned the issue of a good environment starting in the 60s, including

00:54:21.940 loving nature, including caring about clean air and clean water, and more recently, caring

00:54:26.540 about safety from climate.

00:54:28.140 And the pro-capitalism side really didn't concern themselves too much with this, rhetorically

00:54:33.200 at least.

00:54:34.020 And so the anti-capitalist side was able to own this issue.

00:54:36.880 And when you own something as important as our environment and our planet, you do get

00:54:42.740 the moral high ground.

00:54:43.760 And then they supplemented this with this false alternative of you are either a climate change

00:54:49.700 believer who hates fossil fuels, or you are a climate change denier who thinks fossil fuels

00:54:55.660 are okay.

00:54:56.640 So they created this total false alternative, which made no sense, because what makes sense

00:55:00.800 with climate impact is to weigh it along with the benefits of fossil fuels.

00:55:05.000 You cannot judge a prescription drug by only looking at negative side effects, and you

00:55:09.700 can't judge fossil fuels by only looking at negative side effects or exaggerating negative

00:55:14.000 side effects.

00:55:14.520 You have to look carefully at our climate impacts, negative and positive, and then weigh them

00:55:19.060 against the benefits that come with fossil fuels, including all the benefits that protect

00:55:23.200 us from climate.

00:55:24.000 So there's this false alternative.

00:55:25.720 So what they did is they owned the morality of caring about our environment, and they owned

00:55:29.900 the claim to science, because the climate change denial thing so-called didn't make much

00:55:34.560 sense, because it's pretty obvious we impact climate at least some.

00:55:37.940 But so doing those two things, they owned this issue.

00:55:41.040 So people think, well, if I want to be a good person, if I want a good planet, and I want

00:55:44.260 to be pro-science, then I have to hate fossil fuels.

00:55:47.240 And a lot of what I've tried to do, and I think Michael Schellenberger and Bjorn Lomborg

00:55:50.800 and Steve Kuhn, I think what we've tried to do is look at climate in a humanistic, full

00:55:56.240 context way.

00:55:57.620 And we're breaking this false alternative, which is a lot of the reason we get a lot of hostility.

00:56:01.580 So you said something there that's very psychologically interesting.

00:56:04.880 So you said, if I want to be a good person, because the environmentalists have captured

00:56:10.540 this pro-planet narrative, if I want to be a good person, then I have to buy the human

00:56:16.480 beings are bad for the planet narrative.

00:56:18.700 But I'd like to take that apart a little bit too, because it's not exactly true what

00:56:24.160 you said.

00:56:24.600 The truth of the matter is something like, if I want to take a shortcut to being a good

00:56:33.200 person, without having to put into the process any real time and effort, so that would mean

00:56:39.980 actually understanding the issues that are associated with environmental management and

00:56:44.900 economic sustainability, which is unbelievably complicated.

00:56:48.760 I mean, Bjorn, well, and you too, Schellenberger, spent their whole lives devoted to that endeavor,

00:56:53.760 trying to wade through the complexities.

00:56:56.400 It's actually really difficult to develop a sophisticated and genuinely moral stance on

00:57:03.240 the environment and the economy.

00:57:04.500 It takes years and years of work.

00:57:07.020 And it's also extremely difficult to be a good person.

00:57:10.820 And merely feeling sorry for the planet does not make you a good person.

00:57:14.800 In fact, what it makes you is a shallow narcissist who's using the easy identification with a

00:57:21.320 genocidal ideology to elevate yourself in the moral hierarchy.

00:57:26.320 And we see people who are peddling this dreadful story to young people and offering them an easy

00:57:35.920 shortcut to something approximating easily trumpeted moral virtue.

00:57:40.980 And that's the sort of moral virtue that you can post on your Facebook page when you

00:57:44.700 claim that, well, you're anti-capitalist and you're in favor of the planet.

00:57:48.420 And therefore, all of a sudden, you're actually a moral actor and someone to be

00:57:51.760 regarded with admiration.

00:57:53.720 And none of that's true, because it's actually extremely difficult to be a good person.

00:57:59.460 But it's very powerful.

00:58:00.540 I agree entirely.

00:58:01.760 But it is very powerful.

00:58:03.200 And one thing I talk about in Fossil Future, and this is a big mission of mine, is the moral

00:58:07.820 monopoly of what I call the moral case for eliminating fossil fuels has to be broken.

00:58:13.700 And when you have what I call a moral monopoly, you basically get a halo over your head for

00:58:18.560 saying, I hate fossil fuels.

00:58:20.440 I care about the climate.

00:58:21.900 I care about the planet.

00:58:22.700 You don't need to do anything.

00:58:24.040 You just need to express this sentiment.

00:58:26.420 It doesn't matter.

00:58:26.960 We see you.

00:58:27.660 You can fly on private jets.

00:58:28.980 You can live any lifestyle that you want.

00:58:30.700 As long as you say this, you get this halo.

00:58:33.140 And the other side gets devil horns on their head.

00:58:35.740 But part of what's happened with what I call the energy humanists, including me and Bjorn

00:58:39.640 and Michael and Steve, is that we have now shown that actually, quote, saving the planet

00:58:45.780 in their false view is hurting billions of people and dooming them to poverty and actually

00:58:51.240 making our environment worse and hurting biology.

00:58:55.420 And so now they hate that.

00:58:57.420 That's why there's such vicious attacks, because their racket is coming to a close.

00:59:02.260 You want it to be a controversial.

00:59:03.780 The first thing before winning a debate is actually creating a debate.

00:59:06.780 There hasn't even been a debate over the morality of fossil fuels until fairly recently.

00:59:11.340 And once the debate is created, that easy claim to virtue will disappear, and those people

00:59:16.680 will just go pick the next easy thing to join.

00:59:19.780 Yeah, well, you said that all you have to do is express the sentiment that you care for

00:59:26.780 the planet.

00:59:27.440 So that's something approximating a feeling or a subjective state of mind, let's say.

00:59:31.640 Yes.

00:59:31.820 I'm a good person because I feel empathy for the planet, which is a pretty damn low-resolution

00:59:38.520 definition of implementable morality.

00:59:41.340 But, you know, it's tied in with something else, too.

00:59:43.680 So imagine you're trying desperately to make that case that the reason I'm good is because

00:59:48.120 I feel sorry for things, including the planet.

00:59:51.880 Well, then you have to also buttress that claim with the insistence that sentiment, subjective

00:59:58.420 sentiment itself, is the only valid arbiter of reality.

01:00:03.280 And so that's something like, I feel, therefore I am.

01:00:06.840 And I see that this entire modern movement that insists that identity is nothing other than

01:00:14.760 subjective feeling is actually associated in a perverse manner with this ability to justify

01:00:21.860 a claim to moral superiority by appeal to sentiment.

01:00:25.680 It's like, it's people see a picture of a, like a bedraggled kitten on, on, on the internet,

01:00:32.000 and they go, oh, and they think that because they have that reflexive response, which, you

01:00:37.600 know, has a certain moral virtue, that all of a sudden they're morally admirable people.

01:00:43.480 And that's a lovely thing to believe.

01:00:46.480 And you can extend that to something like, well, I'm so concerned about the planet that

01:00:51.040 I can barely sleep at night.

01:00:52.420 It's like, well, fair enough.

01:00:54.440 That might be an indicator of your moral virtue, although I suspect not.

01:00:58.440 But the real question is, do you actually know anything about the problem?

01:01:02.380 Have you spent any work, real work, in differentiating your knowledge of the problem?

01:01:07.540 Are you taking any concrete steps whatsoever to solve it, apart from hand-waving sentimentally?

01:01:14.640 And do you have metrics in place that actually help you measure whether or not what you're

01:01:18.820 doing has a beneficial impact?

01:01:20.700 And that's all so complex that if you bring to people's attention the necessity of thinking

01:01:25.820 it through, all they do is get irritated at you, like they get irritated with, Lomberg's

01:01:30.120 a classic example, because he's the person, I think, and I'd like your opinion on this,

01:01:36.120 I don't think there is anybody who's a more effective advocate for genuine progress on

01:01:43.580 the environmental front than Bjorn Lomberg.

01:01:46.160 He's thought it through, as far as I can tell, more deeply than anyone else, perhaps in the

01:01:51.600 world.

01:01:52.360 And it's stunning to me the degree to which his ideals fail to gain traction.

01:01:59.540 And I think partly it's because he makes the issue complicated, right?

01:02:02.520 He says, well, we don't have just one problem, too much carbon.

01:02:05.640 We have like 20 problems or 100, and they all need to be attended to, but we need to

01:02:12.660 rank order them, and we have to do that in a methodologically rigorous manner.

01:02:16.440 It's like, well, we don't want to do any of that.

01:02:18.020 We just want to feel good about what we feel good about, and we want to make a claim that

01:02:22.820 that makes us morally virtuous.

01:02:24.920 And it's certainly the case, as far as I can tell, that our educational systems are enticing

01:02:30.180 young people to adopt exactly that attitude, and then to also engage in this demonization

01:02:35.840 that you described.

01:02:36.660 So I think one powerful dynamic with this free virtue that you get by just saying, I care

01:02:43.860 about this issue, I care about the planet, is that it's been given the stamp of science,

01:02:48.840 because it's considered scientific to just say, hey, the planet is being destroyed by

01:02:52.780 fossil fuels.

01:02:53.760 We need to do something about it.

01:02:55.260 And it's really, as long as you feel some way or you vote some way, that is considered

01:02:59.900 totally sufficient.

01:03:00.780 There's nothing to think about.

01:03:02.740 So it's really sad and shameful that science has been stamped on this incredibly irresponsible

01:03:08.360 way of thinking.

01:03:09.960 And one thing I've tried to do, and I think Bjorn does this, but I think I do it probably

01:03:13.260 most explicitly, and I think it's very, very important to do it explicitly, is I keep talking

01:03:17.820 about the benefits of fossil fuels and how the other side is ignoring the benefits of fossil

01:03:23.420 fuels.

01:03:23.640 So I go as far as to call the other side fossil fuel benefit deniers.

01:03:26.960 I also call them climate mastery deniers, because they deny our ability to master climate danger.

01:03:32.280 And I think people can really get that we're thinking about this issue in a way that makes

01:03:36.980 no sense, because we're only looking at the negative side effects of fossil fuels, we're

01:03:40.920 not looking at the benefits.

01:03:42.220 And if you look at my work, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, Fossil Future, it's really

01:03:46.180 stressing the goodness of fossil fuels.

01:03:48.580 Not just fossil fuels aren't as bad as you think, but they're an actual positive good.

01:03:53.240 And I've seen you make this case as well.

01:03:55.140 I think it's very, very powerful.

01:03:56.480 Imagine my book had been called Fossil Fuels Aren't Quite As Bad As You Think.

01:04:01.060 It would have made no impact.

01:04:02.860 What's really needed, we've had this inverted morality that says that food is poison and

01:04:08.460 poison is food.

01:04:09.640 And I think it's not enough just to say, oh, they go too far.

01:04:12.500 It's to say, no, they are attacking something good.

01:04:15.280 And once you have a positive case for fossil fuels, the other side goes on the defensive.

01:04:20.040 If you watch what happens when I debate, when people will debate me, they don't really

01:04:23.720 have an answer to looking at the full picture.

01:04:26.280 Their answer is, call me a climate change denier, try to smear me.

01:04:29.860 But they can't answer the argument of, if you look at the full context benefits and side

01:04:34.920 effects of what's good for human flourishing, fossil fuels are incredibly good and will remain

01:04:38.940 good for the foreseeable future.

01:04:41.080 And it's a pretty simple argument.

01:04:42.160 That climate change denier phrase is a real interesting one, too, because that's a phrase

01:04:47.520 that's so manipulatively propagandistic that it's almost incomprehensible.

01:04:52.360 I mean, the reason that that phrase emerged is because there's been, we've developed a

01:04:57.300 universal consensus that denying the reality of the Holocaust was a moral crime.

01:05:04.000 And so the propagandists took a leaf from that page and said, well, the people who are denying

01:05:09.100 the cataclysmic reality of climate change are as morally culpable as those who deny the

01:05:14.760 Holocaust, which implies that they're as culpable as the Nazis who run the death camps.

01:05:19.400 And that's a pretty decent smear.

01:05:21.400 And then you might say, well, what's the moral advantage to doing that?

01:05:25.380 And so the first thing you might point out is, well, you get to have all the unearned moral

01:05:29.920 virtue that goes along with saying that just because you're sentimental about the planet

01:05:35.480 in some vague way, that you're now a moral paragon, and that solves all your moral problems.

01:05:41.560 And then conveniently, at the same time, you get to identify a group of people who are

01:05:47.740 essentially satanic in their motivations.

01:05:50.080 And so that would be the climate change deniers.

01:05:52.400 And so that entire problem of evil, which you no longer contend with in your own life because

01:05:57.440 you're on the side of the moral, is dumped at the feet of the people that you deem as enemies.

01:06:01.900 That's that form of scapegoating that Rene Girard talked about.

01:06:05.840 And so young people are being enticed to do two things.

01:06:08.840 One is to adopt it, three things, to adopt an extremely simple-minded view of the problems

01:06:16.640 and opportunities that confront us.

01:06:19.860 Second, to claim a completely unearned moral virtue merely on the basis of a vague sentiment.

01:06:24.960 And third, and more dangerously, to localize the problem of evil in the minds and souls

01:06:32.380 of the people who are hypothetically opposed to their self-aggrandizing sentiment.

01:06:37.520 And the combination of those three moral errors is really dangerously toxic.

01:06:42.460 And that dangerous toxicity, I would say, is manifesting itself in such things as this idiot

01:06:48.180 insistence, let's say in the UK, because they're suffering from this more than any other place

01:06:53.160 now, maybe, except Germany, on the moral benefits of an impossible net zero, right?

01:06:59.040 The rubber is really starting to hit the road in the last couple of years as energy prices

01:07:03.680 have spiked out of reach of many people.

01:07:07.300 And the unreliability of these hypothetically benevolent renewables has become more and more

01:07:13.040 self-evident.

01:07:14.940 And so we're walking a very dangerous moral path here, right?

01:07:17.880 Easy moral virtue, our inability to point out that a lot of this moral virtue is driven

01:07:24.740 by an unthinking ignorance, combined with this temptation to demonize those who, like

01:07:30.720 Lomborg, Schellenberger, you, you're a good example as well, who are standing up and saying,

01:07:35.000 hey, wait a minute, everyone.

01:07:37.860 We've lifted billions of people out of absolute privation and starvation as a consequence of

01:07:44.200 the utilization of fossil fuels, and they're so fundamental that we can't shift away from

01:07:49.500 them rapidly, that's actually practically impossible, without tilting people into the

01:07:54.320 kind of abject poverty that's going to cause widespread starvation.

01:07:57.640 It's like, that doesn't sound like a case being made by Satan to me.

01:08:02.700 No, it's, I mean, I do think that the energy crisis is an enormous educational opportunity.

01:08:08.340 It's obviously a tragedy, and it's, as somebody who's been talking about this for 15 years and

01:08:12.980 advising in the opposite direction, it's very sad to see myself being right in terms of

01:08:19.000 if you artificially restrict the supply of fossil fuels in a world that needs more energy

01:08:23.740 and you don't have a viable near-term replacement, then prices are going to skyrocket, including

01:08:28.280 food prices and the price of everything else.

01:08:30.180 Like, this was obvious that this was going to happen, and it's hard to see it.

01:08:33.900 But at least the benefit is that people can see that the establishment has failed.

01:08:38.520 That's the benefit of a crisis.

01:08:39.740 People see the establishment has failed, and the key is, in my view, two things.

01:08:44.360 One is the right people need to be implicated, and the right people need to be vindicated.

01:08:49.100 And I say the right people need to be implicated, not as a vindictive person at all.

01:08:53.700 But it's very important when you have a crisis, and this happened with 9-11, happened with the

01:08:57.680 financial crisis.

01:08:58.620 You need to have some idea of who is responsible, and then who was right and gave us better advice.

01:09:04.260 If you look at today's energy crisis, the number one thing that is scary about it is

01:09:09.160 that it is a crisis that has come from the net zero movement, only achieving 1% of their

01:09:15.600 goals.

01:09:16.180 So they have not even reduced the supply of fossil fuels.

01:09:19.300 I want to stress that again.

01:09:20.560 They haven't even reduced the supply.

01:09:23.080 They just slowed its rate of growth.

01:09:24.880 They already wanted to dramatically reduce the supply.

01:09:27.260 That was their goal.

01:09:28.280 We were supposed to be using way less fossil fuel by now.

01:09:30.980 They just slowed the growth, and that was enough to cause a global energy crisis in a world

01:09:36.480 that needs far more energy.

01:09:37.980 So that should really wake us up.

01:09:39.500 What if we actually start on their path of getting rid of fossil fuels?

01:09:42.940 And again, we have 27 years now, 27 years and less than a month as we record this, to

01:09:48.320 achieve net zero, which in effect means getting rid of fossil fuels.

01:09:51.620 We could talk about offsets and stuff, but that doesn't work at any scale that there's any

01:09:55.180 evidence of.

01:09:55.760 So it's really this homicidal movement in its consequences.

01:10:01.480 And I do think people are waking up, and they're particularly waking up to the idea

01:10:04.440 that, hey, we ignored the benefits of fossil fuels, or what I call our designated experts

01:10:09.300 did this, and these people need to be jettisoned.

01:10:11.960 You cannot listen to anybody about energy and climate who ignores the benefits of fossil

01:10:16.040 fuels to billions of people, because if you do, you get an energy crisis.

01:10:19.760 And if we keep listening to them, it's going to get a lot worse.

01:10:22.360 Well, the other thing that you see being the drum being beaten on the side of the radical

01:10:27.840 left, for example, is the anti-colonial, let's say this continual trumpeting of the anti-colonial

01:10:35.560 interference message.

01:10:38.320 And so then I look at that, and I think, well, you give the devil his due, and the fact that

01:10:43.140 the world's cultures have come into contact with one another in a dramatic way in the last

01:10:47.580 300 years has produced all sorts of consequences, some positive and some negative.

01:10:51.860 But on the anti-colonial front, the environmental proposition, and this is mostly coming from

01:10:58.860 the radical left, is that there's no possible way that the third world inhabitants can be

01:11:06.100 allowed, much less encouraged, to develop a standard of living that in any manner approximates

01:11:13.140 the profligate West, is that we're rich, and maybe we should suffer from that a bit, and

01:11:18.700 maybe we should pay reparations, let's say.

01:11:20.700 But all those poor people who are desperately trying to clamber up the socioeconomic hierarchy

01:11:25.220 so they don't die, let's make that perfectly clear.

01:11:29.540 They can't be allowed to do that because their environmental footprint will immediately become

01:11:34.800 so large that the planet itself will be destroyed.

01:11:38.320 And so, okay, what's the consequence of that?

01:11:40.840 Well, the consequences of that is that they should be poor and stay that way and should

01:11:45.920 shut the hell up about it and should be happy about it, and perhaps there should be a hell

01:11:50.360 of a lot fewer of them.

01:11:51.740 And if that doesn't trigger your anti-colonialist morality, then you've got some serious thinking

01:11:59.900 to do.

01:12:00.440 Because I just don't understand at all how it is that those of us in the wealthy West,

01:12:05.080 and this would certainly include those in the chattering environmental glitterati elite

01:12:10.860 class, I have no sense whatsoever how they're in a moral position to be lecturing the developing

01:12:18.560 world about how they should accept limits to growth, which means, for example, that their

01:12:24.300 children won't have access to enough nutrition to even optimize their brain development as they

01:12:30.340 mature.

01:12:31.300 It's like, oh, that's the price those people get to pay, eh?

01:12:34.680 Those people, those poor people in developing countries who don't get to be wealthy, and

01:12:40.320 by wealthy means have enough to eat and have schools to send their children.

01:12:44.980 And we in the Western world, we can sit on our high horse and say, well, we used fossil

01:12:49.160 fuels and oops, sorry about that and all the carbon, but you bastards, you can just accept

01:12:55.240 your lot.

01:12:55.880 And if you stop breeding so goddamn much, that would be a good thing too.

01:12:59.800 Now, how that is colonial to a degree that's overwhelming is beyond me.

01:13:04.540 Well, it is, and I think it's a very, very powerful argument, and it's been one of these

01:13:10.760 things that has been ignored because the priorities of the modern environmental movement are not

01:13:15.560 what they say.

01:13:16.300 And I would say more broadly, the anti-capitalist movement.

01:13:18.700 They claim to be concerned about the poor, but if you're concerned about the poor and

01:13:22.820 you know that fossil-fueled productivity has brought an unprecedented number of people out

01:13:27.880 of poverty in recent decades, you would think about how do we expand that?

01:13:32.660 How do we replicate what happened in China, what happened in India?

01:13:35.780 You know, some changes to it, obviously, but how do we, you know, they use seven times

01:13:39.780 more fossil fuels compared to 40 years ago.

01:13:42.800 Like, it's obviously fueled their productivity and their prosperity.

01:13:46.880 Why don't we do more of that?

01:13:48.720 And yet, there's been no attention paid in the culture to the energy poor.

01:13:52.420 There's no attention paid to the fact that we have 3 billion people who use less electricity

01:13:56.900 than one of our refrigerators uses.

01:13:58.920 We have a third of the world using wood and animal dung to eat their homes and to cook

01:14:02.260 their food.

01:14:03.260 And in terms of, you're mentioning wealthy people, 3 quarters of the world uses an amount

01:14:07.460 of energy that we would consider totally unacceptable in the US or Canada or anything resembling that.

01:14:13.940 So, once these facts are pointed out, it is obvious that there is a moral imperative to

01:14:19.320 do at least nothing to get in the way of people using fossil fuels.

01:14:23.360 At least that, and it's clear that the anti-fossil fuel movement is absolutely getting in the

01:14:28.620 way.

01:14:29.120 They're trying to destroy all loans to fossil fuels there.

01:14:32.160 They're trying to encourage them to use things that will not actually work for them.

01:14:36.420 They're trying to, for example, throughout Africa, limit oil and gas development, even

01:14:40.300 though that's a huge potential source of prosperity.

01:14:43.280 But they're not winning this argument once sunlight has been exposed.

01:14:47.140 And I had a personal experience.

01:14:48.500 I don't know if you heard about this.

01:14:49.240 The Washington Post tried to basically cancel my book, Fossil Future, back before it came

01:14:54.320 out.

01:14:54.520 They got a copy of the book.

01:14:55.720 They didn't read the book, which I thought that was their job as journalists to report

01:14:59.780 on a book from a major author.

01:15:01.580 Instead, what they tried to do is dig up what I had written in college, where I had said,

01:15:06.720 very specifically, the poor world needs more capitalism and more individualism, which I

01:15:11.700 stand by.

01:15:12.660 But they somehow tried to portray that as colonialism.

01:15:15.440 But here's the key.

01:15:16.120 Their whole argument was Alex Epstein doesn't really care about the poor, so you don't

01:15:20.900 have to listen to his arguments about the poor needing fossil fuels.

01:15:24.160 This is a bizarre ad hominem on its face.

01:15:26.640 It's completely the opposite of the truth.

01:15:28.620 But it was notable to me how they had no answer to this argument that poor people need

01:15:33.880 fossil fuels and that the anti-fossil fuel movement hurts the poor people most.

01:15:38.220 So I think that really shows the power of this argument.

01:15:41.040 Let's delve into that issue of caring about the poor, because I don't think that it is

01:15:46.780 really all that wise for any of us to jump up and down about how much we care for the

01:15:50.800 poor.

01:15:51.340 Because if you cared for the poor, you'd be out there doing something with your life

01:15:55.900 to directly benefit the poor.

01:15:57.680 And that turns out to be extremely difficult.

01:15:59.740 Well, I have done that, actually.

01:16:01.520 I don't mean you.

01:16:02.360 I don't mean you.

01:16:03.280 Oh, okay.

01:16:03.640 And speaking more generally, it's not that easy to care about the poor.

01:16:08.460 And so I think that any of us who trumpet the idea that we truly care about the poor

01:16:12.900 should be very careful about that.

01:16:14.500 But having said that, I would also say we could, though, say even if we don't care about

01:16:20.400 the poor any more than the typical somewhat selfish human being, we could at least get the

01:16:25.400 hell out of their way when they're trying to clamber their way up the socioeconomic hierarchy.

01:16:30.180 And that was the case that you made just a few minutes ago, is that we could at least

01:16:34.380 in the West not implement policies that actually interfere in a serious manner with the attempts

01:16:42.060 of the developing world to lift themselves out of absolute privation.

01:16:45.480 We could at least get the hell out of the road.

01:16:48.100 And we wouldn't have to do that by hand-waving about how moral we are in our care for the poor.

01:16:53.020 We could say, well, we're relatively disinterested at minimum, but we won't go out of our way

01:16:58.900 to make your lives more miserable than they have to be while you use your own efforts to

01:17:03.960 acquire for yourself some of the things that we've managed to acquire.

01:17:07.860 We can't even do that.

01:17:10.020 I think it's a great point.

01:17:11.480 And so for me, yeah, I don't want to act like I'm just ministering to every poor person

01:17:15.820 in the world or this kind of thing.

01:17:17.080 I mean, look, I live in a free country.

01:17:19.560 I love doing work that I find really interesting.

01:17:22.640 And I love that it benefits a lot of people, including some of the poorest people in the

01:17:27.980 world.

01:17:28.480 And the particular way in which I identify with the poorest people in the world is with

01:17:32.980 the lack of freedom.

01:17:34.060 Because I really think about what would it be like to not be born in the U.S.?

01:17:38.380 Whatever advantages I had being born in the U.S. is by far the greatest.

01:17:42.460 And I really think about, you know, how can more people be born into that?

01:17:46.760 And really, the number one thing we need to do is spread good ideas and not spread bad

01:17:52.340 ideas.

01:17:53.040 And this is where the anti-fossil fuel movement is so destructive, particularly you've probably

01:17:57.360 seen this recent climate reparations thing, which is saying, hey, we owe the poor world.

01:18:02.040 And I wrote about this recently.

01:18:03.600 People can see it at energytalkingpoints.com, which is where I post my new stuff.

01:18:07.900 But there's the idea that we should feel guilty for ruining the world.

01:18:12.640 And I believe we've made the world better for everyone, including the poor.

01:18:15.400 But the other element that is obviously wrong is what is happening is we are paying people

01:18:20.640 off, usually dictators off, to not use fossil fuels.

01:18:24.880 So we are paying them to deprive people of the crucial freedom to get prosperity.

01:18:30.120 And that is just totally shameful.

01:18:31.780 And that is absolutely interfering in the lives of the world's poorest people.

01:18:36.600 Right.

01:18:37.260 So with our so-called climate reparations that are going to be devoted to the governments

01:18:43.480 of third world countries, primarily, we're going to be propping up frequently brutal

01:18:48.720 quasi-dictatorships and bribing them to keep their populations poor so that we don't save

01:18:55.380 the planet.

01:18:57.580 That's our plan.

01:19:00.480 That is a plan.

01:19:02.400 I mean, again, it's not a movement that actually has any kind of goal and strategy long term.

01:19:08.640 It's really just hostility toward any impact.

01:19:12.100 And at the moment, it's CO2 emissions.

01:19:13.880 So anything that has CO2 emissions, you hate.

01:19:16.080 But observe, look, there's no enthusiasm for nuclear, right, which you would expect them

01:19:20.740 to love because it doesn't emit CO2.

01:19:22.560 There's hatred for nuclear.

01:19:24.060 There's hatred for hydro.

01:19:25.440 And there's hatred for mining, which is necessary for solar and wind, which require way more mined

01:19:29.980 materials than anything else.

01:19:31.800 So it's really an anti-impact movement that's just hostile to any human impact and just nihilistically

01:19:38.200 and randomly pursues that with no strategy and no thinking about the future.

01:19:42.640 And this mentality is leading the world.

01:19:44.960 This is what I call our knowledge system.

01:19:46.620 It is blindly pursuing this destructive anti-human path with no strategy.

01:19:52.240 OK, so let's delve into that a little bit, that motivation for that.

01:19:55.940 So I'm going to play devil's advocate here a bit and let you respond to it.

01:20:01.580 So the first thing we might point out is that the human proclivity for something approximating

01:20:08.880 unspoiled natural vistas actually seems to have a moral element and a biologically rooted

01:20:15.040 moral element.

01:20:15.880 So, for example, our aesthetic preferences seem to be associated with something like preference

01:20:23.540 for natural landscapes that are verdant and green and potentially productive in relationship

01:20:29.040 to agriculture and the flourishing of, let's say, edible animals with enough water.

01:20:35.300 We like landscapes that look like that.

01:20:36.920 We think they're beautiful.

01:20:38.200 And the idea that we might prefer those if they were unspoiled is also worth delving into

01:20:44.820 to some degree because we do need to live in balanced harmony with such environments so that

01:20:53.140 we don't destroy the very virtue that they implicitly contain.

01:20:59.200 And so our aesthetic preferences tilt us in that direction.

01:21:02.140 And so we have a bit of a biological tilt towards not wanting to gum up and pollute the works.

01:21:10.420 OK, so there's that.

01:21:12.320 And then we also have this moral sense that we have a moral obligation, right?

01:21:18.300 And so the moral obligation is to be grateful, to be cognizant of our unearned privilege.

01:21:27.920 And so for you, that would be the fact that you were born in the United States and that

01:21:31.420 you were an accidental beneficiary of all the work that had gone into that great society

01:21:36.900 before you made your appearance on the scene.

01:21:39.420 And that there's a moral obligation on your part in some sense to do something about that,

01:21:44.060 right?

01:21:44.940 And so, and that can, both of those can be warped.

01:21:48.500 The warping of the first one is to push that moral and aesthetic sensibility to the point

01:21:54.960 where we claim that any human interaction with that pristine environment whatsoever is tantamount

01:22:01.220 to immorality.

01:22:05.200 And on the second front, it is that the way to atone for our privilege is by being guilty

01:22:13.240 and stopping all activity.

01:22:15.740 So those things dovetail.

01:22:17.300 We might say instead that if we wanted to genuinely contend with the problem of our unearned privilege

01:22:25.540 and the fact that we walk on blood that is being, we walk on land that is being soaked

01:22:31.380 by the blood of conflict for generations, right?

01:22:34.260 There's a certain guilt in that, a certain sense, you might say, even of original sin, is

01:22:38.260 that we do have to atone.

01:22:40.320 But the proper proposition on the sophisticated front would be something like, well, we should

01:22:45.680 atone by putting into place thoughtful and intelligent and genuinely pro-human environmental

01:22:51.960 slash economic policies.

01:22:54.100 And we should atone in our private lives for our unearned privilege by being people whose

01:23:01.060 moral striving is so admirable that we've justified the existence of our privileges.

01:23:06.600 And we shouldn't be taking the easy way out and saying, just because we're sentimental

01:23:11.360 about Gaia means that we've somehow fulfilled our moral obligation.

01:23:16.620 We're doing a very bad job of teaching young people this, as far as I can tell.

01:23:21.120 So like, the guilt's there, right?

01:23:22.980 The sense of original sin is there.

01:23:25.340 The sense that we're responsible for the atrocity of history, in some sense, is there.

01:23:29.440 That needs to be contended with.

01:23:31.680 But we're constantly looking for easy ways out of the problem instead of actually trying

01:23:35.300 to address it head on.

01:23:37.740 Well, let's start out with the first part in terms of this sense of what we like in natural

01:23:43.220 landscapes and we like life.

01:23:44.980 And so I certainly have a version of this myself.

01:23:47.520 I mean, I'm very obsessed with the ocean.

01:23:49.540 And I spend way more time outdoors than most people.

01:23:52.600 And I just like, I think people underrate being outdoors a lot.

01:23:56.340 And I love seeing different kinds of animals and their natural habitat.

01:24:00.300 So like, I definitely experienced this.

01:24:02.680 But when I think of it then, what I think about is in impacting the earth, we want to

01:24:08.380 make sure we impact the earth in a way that allows us to really enjoy this and in fact

01:24:12.460 have more of it.

01:24:13.220 There's a lot of things we can do to make the earth more beautiful and to enhance it

01:24:18.020 with respect to our aesthetic sensibilities.

01:24:20.020 And I think the best thinker ever in this regard was Frank Lloyd Wright.

01:24:23.140 Because if you look at his buildings and how he approached it, he loved nature, but he

01:24:27.880 also thought that we could improve nature.

01:24:30.460 And that's really what you're doing as a human being is you're saying, I can improve nature.

01:24:34.280 So you're not hostile to nature, but you view it as what I call wild potential.

01:24:38.620 It has the potential to be an amazing place for us.

01:24:41.260 It has all these different building blocks and all these starting things.

01:24:44.020 And some of them we want to preserve.

01:24:45.340 Some of them we want to change a lot.

01:24:46.800 And even the things we want to preserve, we want to make a lot more accessible to everyone,

01:24:51.060 which requires changing a lot.

01:24:52.520 So I think of it as we can do an even better job at making the earth an amazing place to

01:24:58.560 live.

01:24:58.980 But part of that is recognizing we've done a really good job in a lot of ways.

01:25:03.420 The earth is so much of a better place to live than it was 500 years ago, 200 years

01:25:08.600 ago.

01:25:08.860 The world is naturally dynamic, it's deficient, and it's dangerous.

01:25:16.240 Those are three attributes.

01:25:17.740 That's why I call it wild potential.

01:25:19.060 And so human beings have had to contend with that.

01:25:22.280 And to bring up fossil fuels, our basic way of contending with that is to try to produce

01:25:26.780 a lot of value that nature doesn't produce for us.

01:25:30.360 Nature produces not very much value that we can use, and it produces a lot of threats.

01:25:34.140 So we need productive ability to create resources nature doesn't, including to create resources

01:25:39.420 that neutralize the different threats, like creating irrigation to neutralize drought.

01:25:43.440 And we do that with our productive ability, but we're naturally very physically weak beings.

01:25:48.700 And so the key step is using machines to produce far more value than our meager physical bodies

01:25:54.180 can.

01:25:54.860 And that's what we've done with fossil fuels.

01:25:56.580 We've had cost-effective energy that has allowed, say, the average American to have 75

01:26:01.140 machine servants producing value so that we can do far more than we ever could.

01:26:06.040 And we can do types of things that we never could.

01:26:08.640 No number of human beings can fly.

01:26:11.260 No number of human beings can be an incubator, which incubators save millions of lives.

01:26:16.220 So we've made the earth so much of a better place, and I think we can make it even more

01:26:21.200 beautiful.

01:26:21.640 And I think a lot of the specific things we create are ugly, and that's a shame.

01:26:26.000 But I think of it as we've done a good job, and we can do even better.

01:26:29.980 Not that we're these sinners who ruin everything by touching it.

01:26:33.940 That is a hostile view, and it's an unjustified view.

01:26:37.540 So I think we can be more like Frank Lloyd Wright, but we should be proud of what we've

01:26:41.540 done so far.

01:26:42.420 And in terms of obligation, I mean, I feel gratitude for it.

01:26:45.880 I don't feel like anyone has really sinned, or I've sinned, but I feel like the obligation

01:26:50.720 is to keep going, is to keep trying to make it better and better.

01:26:54.980 And I think just by being a productive person, that's really what you're doing.

01:26:58.260 But because I think about global issues, I try to advise people globally.

01:27:02.940 So let me ask you about this psychologically.

01:27:05.120 So obviously, people, there are a lot of people, particularly young people perhaps, who are

01:27:10.800 bearing a heavy load of existential guilt for the fact of their very existence.

01:27:15.580 And so you just made something approximating a pro-human case.

01:27:19.720 And so I would ask you a psychological question.

01:27:22.940 How do you think you've conducted yourself in your own life effectively so that that sense

01:27:31.620 of existential guilt, that potential hostility towards human endeavor itself, or even human

01:27:37.140 existence, has been ameliorated?

01:27:39.520 Like, what have you done that you believe is sufficiently valuable to justify the cost of

01:27:44.760 your own existence?

01:27:45.520 But I guess, why would I, I don't understand why I would feel it in the first place, because

01:27:51.980 the people who feel it have a very warped, at least the environmental version, we can talk

01:27:56.300 about other versions, but the environmental slash climate version is this very warped, delicate

01:28:01.120 nurturer view of the earth, that the earth is stable, sufficient, and safe, and our impact

01:28:05.340 ruins it.

01:28:05.860 And if you believe that, and you hear all this propaganda, then you think, yeah, we're all,

01:28:10.060 you are all ruining the delicate nurturer.

01:28:13.320 But if you have that view, it's a very damaging view, but I don't have the view.

01:28:16.960 So I don't, I don't understand why I would feel so bad.

01:28:20.020 Yeah, but people, that's the thing, is that, and I think we need to contend with this, right?

01:28:23.740 Because people do have that view, and lots of people have it, and it's easy, let's say,

01:28:30.720 for educators who are pushing this ideological agenda to capitalize on the prevalence of that

01:28:35.640 view.

01:28:35.840 That's why I'm pointing to something like an intrinsic sense of original sin, is that

01:28:40.580 we have this sense as human beings, or many people do, that in some real sense, we have

01:28:45.580 to atone for the crime of our existence.

01:28:48.040 And I think there's something to that.

01:28:49.820 I think that we have to bear a moral burden that justifies the crime of our existence,

01:28:57.140 so to speak.

01:28:57.920 And that would mean that we have to be genuinely, well, in your terminology, we have to be genuinely

01:29:03.480 productive people, let's say.

01:29:05.140 We have to be genuinely productive people that are aiming up, maybe in relationship to

01:29:09.340 such things as working for the amelioration of absolute poverty.

01:29:13.200 Like, there is a moral calling there.

01:29:15.320 And I think that part of it is-

01:29:16.100 Well, I think of it differently.

01:29:17.980 Okay.

01:29:18.640 I think of it differently.

01:29:19.900 So I think of existence as an opportunity.

01:29:22.840 So I think of it as, it's just this amazingly special thing that, you know, any of us exist

01:29:27.440 in the first place.

01:29:28.420 I mean, you can think about the probabilistic nature of it.

01:29:31.200 And I feel like being on Earth is just this amazing opportunity.

01:29:35.060 And you can look at how different people have handled that throughout history and how they

01:29:38.560 handle it today.

01:29:39.720 And I think a lot of people tragically haven't made the most of it.

01:29:42.660 But I think you can see certain things that people do who have made the most of it and

01:29:46.460 find it fulfilling.

01:29:47.200 And for me, one of the observations is people who choose a certain kind of creative work.

01:29:52.220 It makes a huge difference.

01:29:53.980 I'm guessing you've experienced this.

01:29:55.280 I've certainly experienced this in terms of just finding something that creates value in the

01:29:59.300 world that really, really works with how you like to use your mind, the thought process.

01:30:04.980 Hopefully, you get to work with certain kinds of people.

01:30:07.420 I mean, that's just part of it.

01:30:08.460 There are all kinds of other opportunities of being alive.

01:30:12.100 So I don't think of it at all as, oh, we're guilty and this is bad.

01:30:14.960 I think the only guilt is wasting the opportunity.

01:30:18.300 That's where my kind of fear and guilt come in.

01:30:21.220 It's like, I worry about, oh, did I waste the opportunity of being alive?

01:30:25.040 And part of that is, of course, you don't want to live at the expense of others and

01:30:28.320 ruin the world.

01:30:28.860 That's another way of wasting it.

01:30:30.480 But so I think of life as opportunity, not as atonement.

01:30:35.220 Well, right.

01:30:35.560 And we should also, we could address there, too, the issue that if you conduct yourself

01:30:40.060 successfully, so let's say that you are, as a consequence, prosperous.

01:30:44.960 There is also this underlying presumption that's generally unexamined that you had to do that

01:30:50.060 at someone else's expense, right?

01:30:51.880 It's something like a zero-sum game.

01:30:53.480 And that ties into this whole Malthusian view that we're yeast in a Petri dish with finite

01:30:59.060 resources.

01:31:00.220 And the truth of the matter, I think, is that if you conduct yourself in the highest manner

01:31:06.680 properly, then you end up being creatively productive in a manner that doesn't just benefit

01:31:13.480 you selfishly, but simultaneously benefits many other people and also facilitates their

01:31:19.400 ability to do the same thing.

01:31:21.420 And so that's a vision of a kind of harmony that's a high-order ethical calling, is you

01:31:25.920 don't have to pursue your creative exploitation of possibility at the cost of the possibility

01:31:33.080 or at the cost of other people.

01:31:35.540 Quite the contrary.

01:31:36.500 You could increase the possibility, which we could do on the natural front, and you could

01:31:40.960 increase the ability of others to flourish simultaneously.

01:31:45.000 Yes.

01:31:45.600 And I want to really highlight, because earlier you responded, you said all these people have

01:31:49.840 been immersed in this, what I call this dogma, this delicate nurturer dogma.

01:31:55.360 And I would add a piece to this dogma.

01:31:56.940 It's the view that the Earth is delicate, nurturer, that's stable, sufficient, and safe.

01:32:01.240 And then it goes along with what I call the parasite-polluter view of human beings, which

01:32:05.780 you're getting at with the Malthusian view.

01:32:07.740 So the view that all we do with our impact is we take from the Earth and we destroy it.

01:32:11.940 We make it ugly, we disrupt it, and this kind of thing.

01:32:14.660 And insofar as you view the world this way, you are going to have a bad life, and you're

01:32:20.020 going to be really unhappy, because you're going to feel really guilty, and you're going

01:32:23.380 to feel really pessimistic, and you're going to believe in all of these apocalyptic scenarios.

01:32:28.460 So it's why it's a fundamental thing that needs to be done to re-educate people about

01:32:33.400 the basic nature of Earth and the basic nature of human beings, and replace so delicate nurturer

01:32:38.740 with what I call wild potential, and this parasite-polluter view with what I call the producer-improver

01:32:45.240 view.

01:32:45.520 We actually produce value, and we can improve the Earth, and we can do even more.

01:32:49.660 And in Fossil Future, I talk about this as part of the human flourishing framework.

01:32:53.580 A key part of how we have to think about this issue is change our view of human beings

01:32:58.680 in Earth from an anti-human view to a pro-human view.

01:33:02.360 And once you change that in people, it is life-changing, because their whole view of how

01:33:06.760 the world works changes from this terribly sad and destructive view to a very optimistic

01:33:12.160 view.

01:33:12.620 And that's one of the things I'm grateful for, is early on, I learned pro-human environmental

01:33:17.780 philosophy.

01:33:18.620 And that was a huge gift that I got when I was 18.

01:33:21.420 How did you learn that?

01:33:23.240 Why were you fortunate enough to learn that?

01:33:25.180 Well, maybe we'll leave that.

01:33:26.340 Look, we have to stop.

01:33:27.620 We have to stop this part of it.

01:33:29.240 We'll get into that in the next part of our discussion.

01:33:32.320 So for everybody who's watching and listening, I do an extra half an hour with my guests on

01:33:38.480 the Daily Wire Plus platform as part of the arrangement that I've made with them to increase the professional

01:33:44.420 appearance and quality of my podcasts, for example, which, as you are noticing, are still

01:33:50.000 available on YouTube free for wide distribution.

01:33:54.140 I do an extra half an hour with people.

01:33:55.840 I would be interested, and I'm going to continue to talk to Alex on the Daily Wire Plus platform

01:34:03.660 about his philosophical journey, because you've definitely taken an unpopular stance and a

01:34:11.460 minority unpopular stance.

01:34:13.020 And you did that pretty early.

01:34:14.520 2014 is pretty early, given all things considered.

01:34:17.420 And you did it quite successfully.

01:34:19.380 You haven't been particularly effectively cancelled, interestingly enough.

01:34:24.200 And I'd like to find out what your pathway was to your realizations and how you managed that.

01:34:30.540 Hello, everyone.

01:34:31.920 I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.

01:34:38.460 Thank you.

01:34:40.800 Thank you.

01:34:42.280 Thank you.

01:34:42.760 Thank you.

01:34:43.820 Thank you.

01:34:44.400 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - December 08, 2022

312. The Great Climate Con ｜ Alex Epstein

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