Answers to questions about "the social cost of carbon," California, polar bears, and more
Select Q&A from some of my recent speeches
I’ve gotten some great questions from audience members following my speeches recently, so I thought I’d share some of the best Q&A.
What follows are transcripts of questions (paraphrased for clarity and anonymity) along with my answers (edited only for clarity).
This Q&A covers:
How “the social cost of carbon” is an inherently biased concept,
My response to claims that the relationship between CO2 and temperature is unknowable,
California and Germany as cautionary tales for anti-fossil-fuel policies,
My response to claims that climate change harms polar bears,
“Failure-worship” in the Green movement,
My analysis of methane emissions.
(To inquire about having me speak at your event, email speaking@alexepstein.com with your desired date(s), location, and topic(s).)
Q: The “social cost of carbon” was $50/ton a few decades ago. Now they’re even saying it’s over $100/ton. But if you look at the benefits of fossil fuels, the social cost of carbon is actually negative. Could we quantify how many people would be dead right now without fossil fuels, and call it the social cost of not having carbon?
A: I work a lot in policy these days, and someone is suggesting a taskforce on the “social cost of decarbonization,” which is what you’re getting at here. The thing I want to highlight here—we can talk about how to quantify it—but one of the things that happens in this general anti-fossil fuel movement is they use very technical terminology to obscure very crude thinking errors.
For example, they use a term called “Levelized Cost of Energy.” If you’re just a lay person and you hear that Lazard has something called “Levelized Cost of Energy,” and a newspaper is reporting that it says solar and wind are cheaper, you think, “That sounds pretty intimidating to me. I can’t challenge that.”
Then if you look at it, it says that “Levelized Cost of Energy” is the cost excluding “reliability-related considerations.” It’s just a total trash metric that allows you to favorably compare unreliable energy to reliable energy because you don’t have to actually factor in the cost of making solar and wind reliable.
This is a similar issue where they are ignoring the benefits of fossil fuels, including the climate benefits. What happens is, then, if you ignore the benefits of fossil fuels, including the climate benefits, what you can then do is take climate side-effects—and even if you don’t exaggerate them, though they do exaggerate them a lot—they pretend that, “Hey, we’re going to have all these climate side-effects and we’re not going to be able to do anything about them.” Whereas in fact, any climate side-effects of fossil fuels we’ve seen so far are trivial compared to the benefits, because fossil fuels have this unique ability to cure their own side-effects, especially in climate.
Anything we do to create climate challenges, we can do far more to neutralize climate. That’s why we’re safer from climate. First of all, you would never call it the “social cost of carbon.” Notice that the whole idea of a “social cost of carbon” is just isolating a negative side-effect from a benefit—but you cannot isolate the side-effect of fossil fuels from the benefit of fossil fuels. What they’re building in there is they want you to do that, and they want to pretend that fossil fuels don’t have unique benefits.
What you actually need to do is you need to do an analysis of the relative benefits and side-effects of fossil fuels versus alternatives, and if you did that, you’d see that getting rid of fossil fuels kills everyone and using fossil fuels makes everyone’s life better.
I just want to highlight how all this technical terminology is obscuring terrible thinking. So you need to be very careful when you use it. Even saying “we should recalculate the social cost of carbon”—we shouldn’t be thinking in those terms.
It’s the same thing when people say, “Hey, let’s talk about climate change,” I never talk about “climate change,” because what people mean by “climate change” is the climate side-effects of fossil fuels. Well, I’m never just going to have a conversation about the side-effects of antibiotics. You can’t have conversations about side-effects apart from benefits, unless you’re just isolating them temporarily to study them. The whole device is to get you to deny the benefits of fossil fuels over and over.
Most of the resources we have, by the way, you can get for free on EnergyTalkingPoints.com. But one issue I have more in my book, which unfortunately you have to pay 20 bucks for, but in Chapter 4 I talk about this and other things. There’s what’s called externalities. They’re like, “Oh, negative externalities.” They have all this terminology, which is all just very crudely just looking at negative side-effects and not looking at benefits, which never makes sense, but it makes even less sense when the benefits of something cure its own side-effects.
Q: David Collum of Cornell University says that the relationship between CO2 increase and global temperature changes is too complex and unknowable. What’s your take on that?
A: He’s an interesting guy. I’ve interacted with him a little bit. Let me say one thing about this. I won’t address his exact version of the argument because I haven’t seen it, but there is a kind of argument that I don’t like, which is the idea of, “Science is always unsettled.” It’s often put this way.
People will say, “Well, climate change is settled science,” and then somebody will say, “Well, science is always unsettled.” What does it mean, science is always unsettled? In the sense of, you’re open to new ideas—but we have to make decisions, including policy decisions, based on our understanding of how the world works. We make it based on gravity, we make it based on the science of guns killing people and stuff like that, and if you have a nuclear weapon in your backyard, you’re not really allowed to do that, and that’s based on the current understanding of nuclear weapons. “The science is unsettled”—maybe the nuclear weapon, if it goes off, will make you really healthy or something.
You have to go on what the best evidence we have at a given time is. When people say, “Oh, the science is unsettled, etc, etc,” it gives way too much credit to the other side, because it makes it seem like the best evidence we have is that fossil fuels are making the climate unlivable, whereas all the evidence we have is that they’re making it livable.
In terms of Collum’s point, the complexity we have is that the cause is going both ways, as far as we can tell historically. So historically, temperature increases CO2, and CO2 can increase temperature to a certain degree, and there are all sorts of other things going on. If you look historically, Al Gore will show you this thing of “Look, the CO2 went up and the temperature went up,” but historically, it’s actually the CO2 went up after the temperature went up. It’s actually that the temperature went up and warmed the oceans and then the CO2 evaporated.
More recently, despite what people say, the warming has trailed the CO2. There are physical reasons for both of these, and there are lots of other things. So in the sense of: is it too complex for us to really predict exactly? Yes. But I don’t think that means somebody can’t say at least a plausible range of, “We think it’ll warm this much.” And we should think about it.
And my view is that the range of plausible things people can think about, none of them really create problems, so we shouldn’t be very alarmed. But if somebody, given the current state of science, said, “You know what? There’s a possibility hurricanes are going to be 10 times more intense,”I would listen to that. I wouldn’t say, “Well, we can’t really know exactly.”
So, he’s definitely right technically, but sometimes even when you have an imperfect understanding, you need to make decisions.
Q: What do you think the future of Colorado’s oil and gas industry will look like if Colorado keeps following in the footsteps of California?
A: At this point, I know a lot of people in oil and gas, and it’s funny, when you talk to the CEOs, there’s a sympathy continuum and it’s highest in California, and then Colorado, and then maybe New Mexico. In Texas it’s like, “Oh, great, you just got a permit in three days. There’s no problem.”
What happens is at first they try to be careful about when they’re restricting development. They try to do this “perfect” amount where they can still have the golden goose, but also symbolically be against it. But then either the same person is compelled to move in a certain direction or a new person comes in who doesn’t know. What gets scary is as long as you have the same intellectual trends, you don’t really ratchet back. Once you have one person who starts ruining it, it doesn’t really go back and improve, it just keeps getting worse, and you have to worry about the next person who’s going to make it worse.
Polis is really bad, but I’m sure there’s somebody worse. He’s not an idiot. He’s actually smart in ways, I think—but he’s really bad.
Is he as bad as Newsom? Even Newsom is not insane in ways that some of the council people in California are. What you see in California is Southern California is the most geologically explored place in human history. I believe it’s Los Angeles County, I think it’s Los Angeles County, they just said, “We’re getting rid of the rest of our oil development.” They have this whole history, most people don’t even know that they have buildings and they have oil derricks and buildings to hide them from people and stuff. And now they’re just saying, “Let’s just get rid of all of them.” That’s just a long way of saying that the fact that the state depends on it is not nearly as effective as you would like in leading them not to destroy it.
New Mexico will be the most interesting because it is so dependent—the most dependent—on oil and gas, and they have so much hostility. At the moment, as far as I can tell, the governor’s view is, as far as I’ve heard her say is, “I hate oil and gas, but we really need you guys right now.” That’s not a very stable position to be in, but that seems to be the position.
That’s a case where either you need to elect people who are friendly, or you really need to do more cultural/political advocacy. That’s a case where you really need to change the cultural environment. It’s not like you say, “Hey, Jared Polis, go talk to Alex Epstein. Here’s his phone number. He’ll help you liberate oil and gas.” He doesn’t want to do that. And I don’t know how to fix that, except through getting the people very upset.
I would say use California as a cautionary tale. I would also focus on the electricity side of it. You’re also seeing this in Colorado where the mistakes there lead to the most obviously catastrophic consequences in terms of having statewide blackouts in 2020 and that kind of thing. That’s definitely where a lot of these states are headed. The problem with it is that with electricity, it’s not like you just lose X percent of revenue, it’s that you lose the entire functioning of the system.
We’re really in this interesting period where nationally we’re having this crazy situation of we have an organic increase in demand for electricity through AI and data centers, we have artificial increase in electric demand from EV mandates, and then we have an artificial decrease in reliable supply thanks to the administration and then thanks to governors like Newsom and Polis.
It’s just this absolute train wreck, worse than a train wreck, ready to happen. And that I think is the easiest thing to warn people about, because you can show them. That’s where California I think is the best example. Gavin Newsom says, “No more internal combustion engines. You have to use EVs.” Literally six days later says, “Don’t charge your EVs. We don’t have enough electricity.”
I always focus on electricity as my first example because it’s the one that’s most stark to people. In California, there is a great failure case, unfortunately.
Q: Why don’t fossil fuel advocates use Germany more as an example of solar and wind failing to replace fossil fuels?
A: It’s being more and more used. What is interesting is when I started debating people on these issues, Germany used to be their success case, even when it was failing at the beginning. By the way, we should take maximal advantage of all the stupid policy decisions and bad outcomes that have already happened to preempt future ones.
Germany is a great example. Germany, California, all of these different examples, they should be used all the time. I’m totally in favor of using them. Sometimes people have this attitude that, “You know what? We just have to let things get really bad, and then people will wake up.” Unfortunately when things get really bad, A) they got really bad and that’s bad, since this means people suffered and died. And B) the people who caused it don’t usually admit it was their fault.
Even in Germany—I was talking to some people in Congress who went over in a delegation there. They went over to Germany and they just thought Germany was just going to be apologizing and saying, “You know what? You Americans were right.” But Germany was like, “No, we’ve been right all along. We should be doing more of this.” The people with the correct interpretation need to be sounding a warning at every increment of destruction and drawing on these examples.
We already have plenty of grid problems to show that the green agenda is bad. We don’t need more grid problems to show this, we need more awareness of what’s happening. By the way, one way to take advantage of this is to not just consider things bad—we should consider things bad and treat them as bad, not just if thousands of people die—we should consider them bad if we regress at all.
One thing I’ve convinced some politicians to say, particularly in Texas, is that you guys should be embarrassed that you’ll have 30 days in a row where your electric utilities tell you, “Use less electricity.” Thomas Edison would be so ashamed of the industry. We uninvented the reliable electric grid.
We need to be ashamed that we are having problems with reliable electricity in this day and age. In the fifties, they thought we were going to be having flying cars, not that we would have insufficient electricity. We should already be alarmed going backwards. It’s like the iPhone 16 is like the Motorola Razr. That’s what’s happening, and we should be outraged about it. All the bad stuff is plenty for us to be upset about and change people’s opinions.
Q: I think many of us have seen videotapes of polar bears, the ice floe breaking up and they don’t have any place to go. How do you respond to that kind of imaging?
A: Well, it’s an interesting thing. I’ll say how I’d respond to it in a second—but it captures my point that people aren’t really thinking of the world from a human perspective when there’s a lot more focus on, “This polar bear lost his piece of ice,” than three billion people have almost no electricity. It’s an interesting focus that that’s the thing. Most people have no intention of ever seeing a polar bear, don’t know anything about polar bears. In other languages they’re called water bears; they don’t just need ice, they’re in water all the time.
The whole thing with polar bears, one is valuing human beings above polar bears is morally problematic. The second thing is, insofar as human beings value polar bears, having a high-energy world that is slowly warming is way better for polar bear populations than having a slightly colder world with no resources. The more resources we have, the more we can preserve and protect any species that we care about.
There’s this meme—I don’t know if you’ve seen this meme, but it’s a good meme that flows around, and I forget the exact numbers—but it’s Al Gore. it’s a polar bear and Al Gore. He says, “When Al Gore was born, there were 5,000 of us. Only 25,000 remain.”
They’re a dramatically increasing population. This is the thing, of course they don’t give you that context. So the easy thing is, yes, we’ve had more polar bears, but the more important thing is when you have energy, fossil fuels enable you to do virtually anything you want to make the world better, including if you care about polar bears, to increase polar bear populations.
Again, I don’t think most of the people opposing fossil fuels really care about polar bears. It’s a symbol of “evil human beings had an impact on nature.”
Sometimes there is a man-made change that on its own is adverse, but we could counteract it. Other times, at least in my understanding with for example the caribou, and it certainly often happens with marine life, is often other life likes us.
One of the fallacies of “human impact is bad” is that human impact is always bad for the rest of nature. That’s a ridiculous bias. Why would you assume that? In general, human activities, what do we do? One of the conspicuous things they do is they create warmth. The world is too cold for almost everything. When things are warm, organisms go to them. By the way, we create warmth and we create a lot of new raw material, and often raw materials are in short supply. You’ll see birds will use our material and other things use our material. Even things like waste, what we consider waste, many forms of life thrive on it.
If you’re thinking about parts of non-human nature that we value, which I think all of us do in various ways, you need to think about 1) energy allows us to pursue all of those things much more than we otherwise could, and 2) you cannot assume that our impacts, even our inadvertent impacts, are bad. You have to look at it clinically.
Again, with polar bears, people just assume, “Oh, we made it warmer. Obviously all the polar bears died. I don’t even need to look into the numbers,” versus, “No, actually there are more of them than in a long time, and actually people are having a lot of problems with them.” And guess what? The people who claim to care about them are not remotely concerned about the problems they’re causing.
Q: Could it be that the thinking within the Green movement, which seems so detrimental to their own well-being, reflects a form of self-loathing?
A: It is, but I think the key to it psychologically is a lot of people are willing to accept a certain amount of self-loathing if they get to engage in greater amounts of other loathing.
You could watch these videos of me at these climate protests, and these are very unpleasant human beings to deal with in most cases. It’s not very happy and friendly. They would never say, “I’m so virtuous.” It’s much more like, “I’m less bad.”
Their focus is on you guys or me—they’re associating me with a fossil fuel industry. They’re like, “You guys, you fat cats”—sometimes they’ll do it about the 1%, but it’s always people who are successful—they’re like, “You guys are evil. And yes, I’m evil, I’m bad, but you guys are really evil.”
There’s a lot of things that can be challenging and insecurities and stuff like this. One way people deal with that is they find ways to feel better than others. And one way is you can try to have a positive view of the other and an even more positive view of yourself, but sometimes that’s very implausible. So maybe what you can do instead is you can have a negative view of yourself, but an even more negative view of another person. The green movement is the perfect vehicle for this kind of thing because anyone who is successful has an impact, and if impact is evil, then the person who does nothing has less impact than the person who does a lot. It’s a perfect morality for failures to feel superior. So yes, the self-loathing and other-loathing is very important.
Q: What is your stance on the newer topic of methane emissions?
A: When you burn fossil fuels, it creates these greenhouse gases, and the main one is CO2, then the second most significant one is called methane. It’s a CH4—one carbon, four hydrogens—and that’s basically what natural gas is. But instead of the natural gas burning and generating CO2, it’s basically a natural gas in the atmosphere.
What people like to say is, “It’s 40 times more powerful than CO2” and things like this. But the same basic analysis applies, that the warming effect of methane is not that significant relative to how much is emitted. My basic analysis is the same. I don’t really say anything different about methane because it’s basically if you look at all the greenhouse gases and the amount of warming they cause and are expected to cause, that’s not that big a deal, so you should not be restricting energy based on that.
Just some facts about methane that are important though is people say it’s more powerful, but we emit much less of it and it disappears from the atmosphere much more quickly. Actually the real challenge of CO2, insofar as there’s a challenge, is that it sticks in the atmosphere for a long time. Most things we emit just enter in and out really quickly. Most particulate pollution doesn’t last that long, but CO2 aggregates. Methane gets cleared a lot more quickly.
So in a sense, if you’re concerned about warming long-term, methane is less concerning. You get rid of the “problem” more easily. The main thing is it’s not that much warming, and energy is what matters, not small changes in the climate.
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Great article. It was particularly interesting to see how “failure becomes virtuous”, for those who produce little or nothing, and attack the rich for being productive. Like those who attack Amazon for, I don’t know, making so many people’s lives better?
Please continue your excellent work. Thank you for sharing the enormous value fossil fuels have provided.