Discussing Fossil Future with students from the John Locke Institute, Pt. 3
My favorite discussion so far with the John Locke Institute's pre-college students about energy, climate, and environment.
Last April, I had a fun Zoom Q&A with students from the John Locke Institute’s pre-college program in D.C., directed by Martin Cox. In July, Professor of Economics Bryan Caplan joined me for a second Zoom Q&A with more students from the Institute’s Princeton location. This April, I came back for a third session, this time with some of the Institute’s D.C.-based public policy students.
Prior to the Zoom discussion, I assigned the students to read my article refuting every “net zero” myth plus a summary and the first chapter of my book, Fossil Future.
In the Q&A—my favorite thus far—I answer thoughtful questions from the students about energy, climate, and environment.
Highlights include: how to value animals from a human flourishing perspective, breaking down what’s wrong with the concept of “renewables,” the incredible promise of nuclear, the difficulty of carbon capture, and how the wealthy world’s use of fossil fuels has been unbelievably beneficial to the poor world.
Here’s a video of the event, followed by a complete transcript, edited only for clarity (including avoided repetition):
Alex Epstein:
All right, everyone. So I got an email from Martin I think a few days ago saying that some of you had raised something about fossil fuels and the oil industry. I forget exactly what it was, but we’ve done two of these sessions so far, which I’ve enjoyed, and in each one I’ve tried to send some reading in advance. So hopefully some of you guys have done some of that and might have questions about that. But in any case, basically, I’m here to answer any questions you have about my own views on energy, environment, and climate. So let’s just jump in and you can ask anything you want. We just only have the hour because I have a pregnant wife and a lot of stuff to do preparing for baby. We’ve got 57 minutes and you can ask anything you want.
Host:
Thank you.
Alex Epstein:
All right, do we have any questions? It could also be shorter, if you want.
Jo:
I have a question.
Alex Epstein:
Yes.
Jo:
In your article you spoke about—well, in the two articles and I guess your book—it’s all about how people say fossil fuels are bad because they harm the planet, but in reality, according to you, they actually ensure human flourishing. And you give these examples like, “Oh, in China, I think, lots of people are suffering because they’re freezing to death, but with climate change, temperatures will increase and so then they won’t experience that.” But do you think that the benefits of global warming really outweigh the costs? Because warming can also lead to— I mean, I guess, okay, my pre-question is: Do you consider the value of animals’ lives or whatever, in this thing, or not?
Alex Epstein:
Okay, so there’s a bunch of different things here, but I think they’re all related and they’re all important. So one question we can use is: When we’re saying something is good or bad, what’s our standard of evaluation and where does something like animals’ lives fit in? So that’s one thing: How are we measuring good? And then another thing is: What’s our methodology for determining whether something achieves the good?
And so I’ll start off with the second just to give you a sense of it, which is—I talk about in my book and elsewhere—the methodology I’ll often call it, “considering the full context.” And in the realm of products and technologies, a key aspect of that is carefully weighing both the benefits and side effects of something. So when you look at fossil fuels and, say, climate—there are other side effects, but climate is the one people are most concerned about—you have to look at a couple of things.
You have to look at, okay: What are the broad benefits, if any, that we’ll get from using fossil fuels that we’ll lose if we don’t use them, or to whatever extent we don’t use them? An aspect of that with climate is: What are the climate mastery benefits? So that means: How does the energy we get from fossil fuels, how will that enable us to neutralize all sorts of climate dangers, which could then negate any kinds of climate negatives?
And then within climate, as you mentioned, there are negative things to look at, negative side effects. So, for example, with warming temperatures, how could that perhaps affect storm intensity, or most obviously, how could that affect sea level rises, since warming tends to lead to sea level rise? How could that lead to other things? And then you also need to consider positive side effects.
So, for example, I think you alluded to it, I’ll say occasionally—it wasn’t China in particular—well, one consequence of warming is it’s easier to be protected from cold related death. And in fact, far more people die around the world of cold than of heat.
So in terms of your question of, “Do I think the benefits of global warming outweigh the negatives?”—however you put it—I think that’s the wrong question. It’s an interesting question on its own, but the real question is: “Do the benefits of fossil fuels outweigh the negatives?”
If you do that benefit side effect calculation, then my answer is definitely, because, I argue, I mean, we could talk about this too, but uniquely cost-effective and scalable, so nothing can match them in terms of providing energy that’s cost-effective. So affordable, reliable, versatile, able to power every type of machine that we need, not just machines that use electricity—and then scalable to billions of people in thousands of places.
The availability of that energy to billions of people versus its lack is an existential issue including in climate, because it turns out if we have a lot of energy available to us, we can neutralize drought using irrigation and crop transport. We can neutralize dangerous temperatures. We can build sturdy infrastructure. And what we’ve seen is that, as we’ve used more fossil fuels, put more CO2 in the atmosphere, the death rate from climate related disasters has plummeted by a factor of 50. And that’s testament to our ability to master climate is increasing far more quickly than any kinds of climate challenges.
So that’s how I think of the global warming issue, but I think you’re right to raise the issue... So that’s the method issue of considering the full context and just in broad strokes how it applies to fossil fuels. But then you asked this interesting other thing about—and I think you might’ve called it a pre-question—how do you value animals?
That’s an issue of: What is your standard or what is your goal that you’re ultimately trying to pursue? And how do you weigh something like animals? And the way I think of it is, I say my primary goal—I think when you’re talking about global issues—the primary goal is what I call “advancing human flourishing on Earth.” And what that means is that you’re evaluating everything, including animals, from the perspective of human flourishing.
So it’s not at all antagonism toward animals. I personally am an animal lover. I have a dog. My favorite vacations are safaris. I love wildlife, all of this kind of stuff. I spend a lot of time outdoors. But I think of that as: this is something I’m doing because I enjoy, because it’s beautiful, because I get this experience. And I think many other people relate to that. You can love animals from a human flourishing perspective. But if you have that perspective, it also sets the conditions under which you don’t love particular animals or other species.
So you’re hostile toward malarial mosquitoes and you’re willing to say, “use DDT to wipe them out if you can do that safely,” which I think mainly you can, and people should do more than they do, and that’s actually what protected us from malaria here. But that’s another subject. Sometimes you need to fence yourself off from animals. Polar bears are amazing, but you don’t want them near you most of the time.
So it’s looking at the rest of nature from a pro-human perspective, which means you want a human benefiting or pro-human relationship with the rest of nature—which is very different from, I think, the common view that’s at least implicit in many people, which is that our goal should not be to advance human flourishing on Earth and everything else is in service of that, but rather we should eliminate human impact on Earth.
There’s a very widespread belief that people hold to different degrees that there’s just something wrong with humans impacting things and we just shouldn’t do it. And therefore, in some way, a good planet is one with the least human impact. I mean, that’s definitely an anti-human view because we survive and flourish by impacting, and it’s not even a love of animals because there are plenty of animals and species that will benefit from human activity.
So I don’t think that view is a love of animals. I think it’s actually a hostility toward humanity because it’s really saying we want to single out human impact as an evil. We’re okay with beaver impact and bird impact. Beavers can build dams, birds can build nests, that’s great, but human impact is somehow this immoral force. This is a big philosophical issue that I talk about in Chapter Three, but I regard this as an anti-human view. So, I love animals. I mean, I love animals consistent with being a human being and wanting to advance human flourishing. So that’s how I think of that issue.
Jo:
Oh, I have another question.
Alex Epstein:
Okay.
Jo:
So I guess considering that, what about the fact that, I mean, for the sake of the thing, let’s just say animals suck, I don’t care about animals. But wouldn’t you say that, okay, one, my first question is: Do you think that fossil fuels continuing and increasing our use of fossil fuels, is that sustainable? Because obviously they aren’t a renewable resource, and I know it’s often difficult to gain access to renewable resources and they’re quite expensive. But if we continue our increase of use of fossil fuels, what if in the end it is actually bad because then we run out and then they will get more expensive? And so while currently they are a solution for developing countries and that sort of thing, is it really a long-term solution because in the future then it will get even more less of them, and then what are they going to do? And since you don’t really see a solution I think in renewables, then what will we do then when it’s all run out?
Alex Epstein:
Gotcha. Okay. So this is another big aspect around the use of fossil fuels. And one thing I’ll say—there are a couple of premises behind this idea that I think are more general than fossil fuels and that I disagree with.
There’s in general this perspective that there’s a thing called “renewable resources” and a thing called “non-renewable resources”. And basically, if you use “renewable resources,” then you’re being “sustainable and long-term” and if you’re using “non-renewable resources,” you’re being “unsustainable and short-term.”
The way I think of it is actually everything in nature is finite to some degree. The sun is finite, the sun will go out someday. Hopefully humans or whatever replaces us will figure out some way around that, be multi whatever they need to be. So everything is finite, and the real question is—and even if you look at, so-called “renewable energy,” part of the reason it’s expensive, the main reason of most “renewables,” specifically solar and wind, which is the main growth area right now, is that’s what I call the intermittency problem. It’s not a controllable thing, and that leads to all sorts of costs as well as reliability problems.
But there’s also a huge material challenge with so-called “renewables,” and it’s because they use not just the sun—which in a sense nothing is renewable, but the sun is the most renewable thing—but they also use all of these materials that are in quite short supply and that are having difficulty scaling. And one of the common increasing and valid criticisms of this movement to go to rapid solar and wind and batteries is that the scale of mining is just totally unprecedented, particularly the scale of growing mining is just totally unprecedented.
What you’re seeing with this so-called “renewables” is it’s in fact drawing on all of these very finite resources that are in fact harder to access in the near term than oil, coal, and gas.
So what do you do? Here’s the question: What do you do on a finite planet in a finite universe where every form of energy involves “non-renewable resources”? There’s no panacea there. I think the answer is that you just progressively do what’s cost-effective and you always evolve.
When you think about using oil, when we use oil today, and it’s the most cost-effective thing, certainly for most forms of transportation, that’s not being blind. That’s not saying, “Oh, we’re using oil today, so we have to use oil 100 years from now.” It’s saying, “The best way we can figure out to move a lot of these different vehicles around is using oil, and of course that’s going to change and evolve.” And so what the innovators are always doing is they’re looking for new ways to do things, and they’re also looking for changes in conditions in their whole economic environment, but relevant to this, the raw materials.
So they’re looking for, what’s the state of raw materials? And if you take, say, oil, what’s happened in oil is, there was what’s called “conventional oil”—conventional oil where it was available around the world, and some of that is restricted by politics and we could access a bunch more—but people were having trouble getting oil, particularly the United States, via more conventional means. And then one thing people really focused attention on was: How do we get oil from what’s called shale rock, which is this rock where you wouldn’t even think it has oil at all, but the oil is in fact very hard to access? And then they invented what you’ve probably heard called fracking, hydraulic fracture. Rather, they evolved it and what’s called horizontal drilling. And so they just made America into the world’s leading oil producer using this rock that was inaccessible.
Now, if you look at estimates of how much fossil fuel we have in the ground in one form or another, it’s at least 10 times more oil, 10 times more coal, 10 times more gas than we’ve used in the entire history of civilization. So there’s very good reason to think that we can use this stuff for certainly many generations, but even many centuries. Now, should we do that? I think it depends on what we can come up with to surpass it.
I certainly hope that we surpass it a lot more quickly than a couple centuries from now. I think that would be disappointing. What you really want is something superior, and the most promising form of superior energy is nuclear. And the basic reason is, nuclear is dealing with something that is far, far more dense than fossil fuels. And density is just an enormous, enormous advantage in economics in general because you have more value in a small space, and in particular with energy.
I’s really good for transportation. It means you have to mine less. It means you take up less space. There’s all sorts of advantages to density. And fossil fuels, one reason they prevailed was because they were so dense, particularly oil. And then nuclear is at least theoretically—fission is a million times denser than oil in terms of the forces involved and the energy potential. And in practice it’s thousands of times greater than oil.
So what I think will happen is, in the energy evolution, if we are free—and a lot of my work is on freeing up nuclear because nuclear is really constrained—we’ll have a nuclear renaissance. And then depending on how you look at it, we’re talking tens and tens of thousands of years with known technologies, and then we’ll come up with other technologies.
What we need to look at is not viewing it as, “Oh, we have to use the sun and the wind. We have to ’be sustainable.’” That’s not even real because, again, the resources to harness it aren’t even “renewable.”
But in any case, you don’t want to settle for something mediocre or worse. You want to evolve to do the best thing. So what I see is fossil fuel use today is part of energy evolution that we expect and want to be surpassed, but you don’t surpass it by destroying what works or handicapping what works and then trying to do something inferior.
You try to liberate what works, you have a lot of wealth and a lot of time to free up innovation, and then you do something superior. So I have an evolving view of energy versus a static or circular view of energy.
Great questions. Let’s see if we can get any questions from anyone else.
Student:
Can I push back on something you said there?
Alex Epstein:
Yeah, you can push back on anything.
Student:
So you said one of the problems with something like wind and solar panels is even though the energy is, for all sorts of intents and purposes, unlimited because it will last billions of years until the sun explodes, but you said the problem with that is the materials to make them, which I do agree is an issue especially with, you’re seeing these wind turbine blades that people are struggling to dispose of. But equally when you talked about using fossil fuels to build this infrastructure to safeguard against environmental changes of climate change that sounds more ambitious in terms of resources than building a few thousand square kilometers of solar panels in a desert somewhere.
Alex Epstein:
Okay, I understand. Let me just clarify. When I say “using this infrastructure to protect against climate,” I’m not referring to some fundamentally new effort. I’m just referring to what we do already. It’ll continue, but we’ve already mastered climate to the point of reducing climate disaster deaths by 98%, which ends up being a factor of 50. That’s just what people do when they’re wealthy. One thing they do is they master climate.
Student:
What are some examples of the ways we’re mastering the climate at the moment?
Alex Epstein:
Sure. So the most dramatic example is drought mastery. Historically, drought is the biggest climate-related killer. You can look back at the data from early 1900s, and you can see, in a given year, drought can wipe out a couple million people with famine. Adjusted for population, that’s 10 million people or so. And the reason is because drought is related to famine—which, we need food, obviously—and it’s also related to water.
One thing we do with energy is we power irrigation systems. And so irrigation is a magical thing because even if you have bad atmospheric conditions for growing crops, you can still grow them. But in many cases, irrigation takes a lot of energy.
Another thing is crop transport for drought disaster relief. So you have a region that has drought, particularly poorer places, and the real solution is for them to get richer and that for the foreseeable future will involve a lot of fossil fuel. But even where you are today, a big reason why drought-related death has gone down globally is because we can transport large amounts of crops from one place to another. So that’s another example of energy.
By the way, anyone who wants a free copy of Fossil Future, you can just email me, alex@alexepstein.com, if you’re a student. But the easiest way to get it is just go to FossilFuture.com, and there’s a link where any student or educator can get a full copy if you want. The section of the book—I sent you guys chapters one through three—but the section of the book on climate mastery is Chapter Seven.
In terms of, though, I want to clarify now the mining point, this point about, is it a big deal to scale solar and wind mining? And there’s a sense in which it isn’t. So what I’m not saying is it is impossible to come up with the materials to do this on any timeframe. I think there’s some difficult things involved, but I do think it’s definitely possible in terms of the material of the Earth.
And one thing with solar, wind, and batteries is you can be flexible in terms of the different kinds of technologies. The issue though, with any issue of cost-effectiveness, is what is the timetable on which it’s actually cost-effective to scale?
And with solar and wind—and I think there’s some stuff in the net-zero piece that I sent you, Every Myth about Net-Zero, Refuted, there’s some specific data and images there—the issue is you have a lot of different elements that are involved in solar, wind, and batteries that are mined on a certain scale, and to scale them up to anywhere near what’s imagined involves doubling, it’s at least half a dozen major mined industries per decade.
And nobody has ever pointed to me an example of one mature mining industry doubling per decade. Mines tend to—right now tend to have 16 years to start a mine. So there’s something about taking a relatively small-scale thing, by the standards of what you’re trying to do in the future, and then massively increase mining. If you wanted to do it would be just a totally unprecedented thing.
But it’s not just that. The people who are advocating this generally are hostile toward human impact on the planet, and this would definitely be the most concentrated effort ever of impacting the planet in the name of “saving the planet,” which is one reason why there’s a lot of ambivalence around doing it.
One example of this is the guy Michael Moore. I’m not sure how familiar you’re with him. He was a big deal in my generation, which is a while back, for sort of being a kind of socialist type, but he has a movie called Planet of the Humans, and he’s quite critical of solar and wind for some of these reasons, but he is also critical of fossil fuels and he is also critical of nuclear. And his basic conclusion is there shouldn’t be that many of us and we should just be doing less and we should be poorer. There’s part of that mentality behind this movement.
That’s the way in which it’s challenging is it involves unprecedented scaling of relatively small mature mining industries and the people doing that are not taking it seriously. And that makes me think that people are more focused on how to get rid of fossil fuels than how to actually surpass or even replace them.
Other questions, and again, feel free to pick up on anything I said and ask about that.
Student:
Yeah, so nuclear is quite big. It’s not quite big, but more and more people are starting to adopt it, at least in France where I’m from. But even if we change our energy system, it still doesn’t resolve the question of sea level rise. And I don’t know, because how would you address that issue and drought, which, you can transport crops or irrigation, but you can’t really “elevate land.” It’s very costly to say so. So how would you address sea level rise then?
Alex Epstein:
So the question—it’s really just an issue of—sea level rise becomes more serious the faster it is. It’s just an issue of speed. And fortunately, even the extreme projections by, say, the UN are pretty slow. So we’re talking about three feet in 100 years. That’s an extreme projection. Right now it’s rising about a foot per century.
Just to put this in context, this is much, much slower than our ancestors dealt with. Now, the argument against that is, well, our ancestors didn’t have as much infrastructure. I mean, not anywhere near as much infrastructure. I’m talking 10,000 years ago. But slow sea level rise is not the biggest challenge in the world.
If it’s like Al Gore portrays in his movie and that’s 20 feet in a few decades, yeah, if you’re on the coast, that is a really existential thing and you need a massive scale thing to deal with that. But I think what we’re seeing is… there are also some situations where actually you have sea level rise, but you have what’s called accretion under, say, islands. This happens often. And so the sea rises, the land will rise with the sea.
But in general, it’s a slow phenomenon and we’re very good at dealing with high sea levels. We have large parts of the Netherlands are underwater. We have 100 million people who live below high tide sea level today around the world. So there are lots of different ways to deal with things.
There are probably also large scale ways. There’s probably really creative things to do on a global scale, but we’re just not there. This is the kind of thing where you can’t look at it purely theoretically. You have to look at, what’s the scale? Because if it were the case that warming were leading to sea level rises of say three feet a decade, that’s a very different situation. I’d be advocating very different things and it may just be very different adaptive things. But fortunately that’s not the situation that we’re in.
By the way in terms of nuclear, if you just want to look at climate-wise, what changes something like sea level rise? Basically with a couple of exceptions, all the consequences of what’s called GHG emissions, particularly CO2 emissions, they’re almost all related to warming. So the idea is that the CO2 emissions have a warming influence in the atmosphere, and then that can affect storm patterns and drought patterns and this kind of thing, and sea level rise. So it’s a consequence of the warming.
There’s also the ocean becoming more neutral. This is called ocean acidification, which is a misnomer because it’s not becoming acid, it’s just becoming less basic. So you have that kind of thing. And then you also have more plant growth in the atmosphere. You have more CO2 in the water, which they call acidification, which is really neutralization. And then there’s more in the atmosphere, which is in a sense fertilization.
But the main consequences people are really concerned about are from warming. And so the reason I bring that up is, if you’re interested in addressing the warming, ultimately, if you want to stop warming or you want to stop human influence on warming, that means what they call net-zero emissions. And my view is: trying to pursue that in the near term is murderous for the whole world.
But just in terms of the physics of it, to have no more warming and no more immediate influence on sea level, you would be net-zero. Now, if that is the case, if you were all nuclear and you’re net-zero or close to it, then you’re no longer actively influencing climate, but you still have—there’s stuff built into the system. But you would stop it.
Now, I think that if you wanted to get theoretical, let’s say warming were a lot faster than it is and were on a more aggressive trajectory. Then what people would rightly do is they would try to master climate in a more macro way. And this is often called geoengineering, which is a little bit of a misleading term, but they would really just try to cool the planet directly.
And we already know that this is doable because volcanoes can do it. We’ve had incidents where you’ll have Pinatubo erupts and the global temperature meaningfully decreases for a decent amount of time.
I think part of a pro-technology way of thinking about this—I don’t think this is a situation we’re in, but just to think about hypotheticals—if you are an actual situation of rapid warming and that warming has dangerous consequences, the way you need to deal with that is you need to directly address the warming.
You can’t just cut off everyone’s energy, A) because that ruins the world, and B) because it doesn’t slow things down enough under that scenario. I hope nobody takes that clip out of context. But in all of these things, one of the lessons is, in all of these things, you really need a pro-technology mindset, including embracing intelligent impact.
Sometimes when people are against impact, they think, “Oh, human impact is causing a problem so the solution must be to withdraw it.” But often, if human impact is causing a problem, the solution is to find a more intelligent way of impact to counteract it.
Jo:
I agree that often techno-centric solutions are really good in solving warming and stuff, but if the warming is caused by greenhouse gas emissions and these solutions, these technological solutions, also use fossil fuels that enhance the greenhouse effect, then how does that work? It’s like putting a bandaid on a wound that is going to bleed out all over onto the street. I don’t know. Because I mean, I see the pro. For example, I don’t know, carbon capture and storage facilities are run by fossil fuels and they take it out of the atmosphere, but I’m not sure, or I don’t know if this could be a very feasible solution because the whole creation of some of these things requires the use of fossil fuels. And then wouldn’t that just emit it more? I don’t know. What do you think?
Alex Epstein:
Yeah. So I think there’s two aspects this. Let me deal with the second one. And if people check out, I have a Substack, alexepstein.substack.com, one of the last two or three articles was something like “What government should do about carbon capture?” where I talk about the technology a bit.
The general question is, well, “You’re using fossil fuels to counteract problems with fossil fuels, but then if the problems are caused by the emissions of fossil fuels and you’re continuing to emit, then isn’t it a bandaid on a bleeding wound?” or however you put it. I’ll address that, but the carbon capture is kind of an exception to that, which has a different problem. So it has a problem, but it’s not that problem.
So you could actually use fossil fuels and then use them to also capture the CO2. The issue is the cost. If you wanted to use enough energy, you could be net-zero and use quite a bit of fossil fuel, but then you would just be totally poor because the energy would be incredibly expensive.
So the issue of, if you could do carbon capture—they measure CO2 in tons, which is a little confusing—but let’s say you could do it for a penny a ton or something like that, then there would be no issue, because then you wouldn’t even notice any increase in the price of gasoline.
But it turns out carbon capture is really, really difficult and one reason is it’s hard to pull out of the waste stream of exhaust. And you can only do that if you have, say, a power plant. You can’t really do that if you have a car. You can’t just capture the CO2, because where do you put it?
So there’s issues of how much of it you can capture. Even when you can capture it out of a waste stream, it’s hard. But then it’s way, way harder to just pull it out of the air, because in the air, it’s 0.04%. It’s very difficult to pull something that’s 0.04% of the air out of the air versus a waste stream, it can be a much higher percentage, but it’s location-limited, and then there’s a question of where do you store it? And it’s a huge amount of material to store.
Just to give you a sense, you burn a ton of coal, you generate about 1.75 tons of CO2. So that is a lot of volume of gas. Basically, to capture it all, you need two industries. You basically need to double the fossil fuel industry in terms of its material handling capacity. So carbon capture is a way. It’s saying: Let’s use the energy to directly counteract the side effect by basically putting the side effect underground. That’s a theoretical way that makes sense, but it’s just currently cost and scale prohibitive.
There’s no way anyone knows of doing this on a global scale. So I don’t advocate doing that. I mean people should explore it, but what I am advocating is I’m saying for the foreseeable future we should be using more fossil fuel, which is going to put more CO2 in the atmosphere. And then I’m saying, we should use the energy from the fossil fuel in part to master any negative consequences of that.
And you could understandably view that as “Well, you’re just making everything worse.” One should question though, why do you think it’s making everything worse, or why is it going to get worse and worse? If you look at the nature of CO2 in the atmosphere, we’re at about 0.04% of CO2 in the atmosphere. We started with a little over 0.04… we started with a little under 0.03 at the end of the Industrial Revolution.
This is in the context of: the planet, historically at different points in history, has had more than 10 times as much as we do. Our biological distant ancestors lived with much, much higher levels of CO2. When the levels of CO2 were higher, the planet was a much lusher place. The CO2 historically, it doesn’t perfectly at all correlate with warmth. There’s an effect of warming with CO2, but there are also many other factors that affect the warmth of the planet. Although I do agree, all things may equal, more CO2 will lead to warming.
The issue is: if you have more CO2 in the atmosphere, you can generally expect the planet to become more tropical. But at the levels we’re emitting it at, it takes you a very long time to even get to a quarter—we don’t even really know how to get to a quarter of what the planet has been at different points of history.
So it’s not that the planet is in this perfect state now or this perfect level of CO2 now, and then more CO2 makes it worse and worse. More CO2 makes it different and it becomes different, particularly in a tropical way. Now, the challenge there, which I talk about in Chapter Nine of Fossil Future, the main issue there is not that a more tropical planet is worse for humans—because it’s generally better for humans as a starting point—the issue is: is it a disruptive rate of change given our existing investments?
And that’s a valid thing to look at, but it’s very different from we’re ruining the planet, we’re making it less hospitable. In many ways, we’re making it more alive. To have more CO2 in the atmosphere and have more warmth is generally incredibly conducive to life.
And this is why when the first people discovered the greenhouse effect, they were, leaving aside even energy, very optimistic about its effects, because it’s like, “Oh, we’re going to be able to grow food a lot more.” And in particular, the way the warming works is it’s not concentrated in hot places. It’s concentrated in cold places. That’s why I say it makes the Earth more tropical. It doesn’t make the equator unbelievably hot. It makes the rest of the world less cold.
The philosophical idea here, as I often call it, the perfect planet premise, you don’t want to have the premise that the starting point is bad—good rather—and then human impact is bad. You want to look clinically at: What is the nature of the impact, good and bad? In this case, the impact is to make it more tropical and that has some good and some bad. And fortunately the rate of it is not something that is some huge problem, particularly given our level of mastery.
Also, the other thing is, the time on which we need to do this is probably not all that long. We’re talking like a couple of generations before we have really good alternatives. So my view is, if you want to accelerate the timetable of replacing fossil fuels—and you don’t want to do geoengineering, because that would be one way of addressing things, but otherwise—you just need to accelerate the rate of developing alternatives.
And that’s really not only the only moral way to do it—I say only moral because if you restrict fossil fuels now you ruin billions of lives—it’s the only practical way to do it without world wars. Because China, India, Russia, they’re not going to stop using fossil fuels, or in many cases increasing use of fossil fuels, until there’s a cheaper thing. So the real game is coming up with an innovative superior thing.
There’s really no way of getting around the fact that for the foreseeable future, we’re going to use a lot of fossil fuel, we’re going to put more CO2 in the atmosphere. That’s going to, on its own, have some negatives and some positives. If we’re free and energy is cheap, we’ll be able to master that and we’ll be way better off just like we’re way better off now than we were 50 years ago.
But the question is: Are we going to emit more CO2 and have more CO2 in the atmosphere in a way that we’re really prosperous, or are we going to do it in a way where we try to sacrifice America, we make a lot of people’s lives worse, and we’re actually even slower to develop alternatives? That’s how I think of the progression.
Jo:
I can see where you’re coming from. I think at least for people in America, if we continue the use of fossil fuels and there’s a tiny bit of warming or whatever, it won’t affect most Americans. But what about people who, I don’t know, live in rural China or something and they rely on their farms or whatever to make a living, but with increased warming, potentially the soil is no longer, what’s it called, efficient, anymore, and they’re forced to migrate and their lives are upturned? How can we help that?
Because I think in many developing countries, there are lots of technological solutions that can combat sea level rises or things like that by building sea walls and things. But what role do you think, I guess, is there a role to play to help developing countries who will definitely be adversely affected?
For example, I think in China or Pakistan, there was this big glacier that melted way earlier two years ago, and it went through this town and it flattened all these houses. It got rid of the roads. It broke this bridge that was a major trade route between China and Pakistan. And so many of these villagers’ lives were upturned for ages because that town didn’t have the financial resources to fix it very quickly. That’s my first point. So, obviously, right now using fossil fuels is very economically efficient, but do you not see any benefit in making a slow transition? Maybe 2050 is too soon, but a slow transition where it’s half fossil fuels, half, I don’t know, something else—or not?
Alex Epstein:
All right, make sure, if I miss some part of your question, remind me. But is it okay if I ask you a quick question about your question?
Jo:
Sure.
Alex Epstein:
So you’re pointing out, you’re concerned about, particularly in poorer places, the side effects of fossil fuels affecting them. Given whatever you’ve read or heard from me, how concerned are you about the effects of lack of fossil fuels there and the fact that right now they’re not using much fossil fuel, which is very related to them being poor? How big a concern is that for you? Because one of my key methodological things is we need to look at both the benefits and the side effects of something, and it doesn’t seem like you’re looking as much at the potential benefits of fossil fuels to these places.
Jo:
No, I think if these developing countries had access to fossil fuels, it would help industrialize their systems. I don’t know, lots of farming things in rural developing nations are subsistence so they don’t have machines and whatever, and if they were able to gain access to fossil fuels, to do that, I guess, it would improve their livelihoods.
But then, I guess, there’s so much fossil fuels in economically developed countries currently that maybe potentially—not that the people in poverty should stay in poverty, but maybe it would reach a tipping point or something. I don’t know. What do you think about instead of there being no fossil fuels in developing countries and then lots in developed countries, should there be more of a distribution so it’s not so heavy in one place and small in other ways? Because I guess I do see the pros of using it. It can help alleviate poverty and help industrialize lots of societies, but I don’t know, because what if it just pushes the whole climate to its tipping point if more people continue to use it?
Alex Epstein:
I just want to say, the idea of a tipping point—I still think this is the idea that somehow there was this perfect climate before and that if you deviate from it sufficiently, it just gets worse and worse. I just challenge that as a viewpoint. I think you just need to look clinically, in what ways is it different? In what ways is that bad? In what ways is that good? And in what ways, most importantly, is it all masterable if you have sufficient energy and technology?
So what you suggested at the end I don’t think is right, but it’s at least more right than the view that everyone should be going net zero. What you’ve seen in African nations—and this has been somewhat influenced by my work, although I don’t think it’s quite right—is you’ll see that they’ll often now talk about justice for developing countries and basically saying, “This transition can’t leave Africans behind.”
That part I definitely agree with, but like they said, “We need to use fossil fuels. It’s wrong of you, the West and China, to say, ‘Well, we developed using fossil fuels. Now you go develop using something else. Africa, you go develop using something else, that there’s no reason to believe you can really develop that way.’ And you, yourselves, particularly the U.S., Europe, you’re using a ton of fossil fuel right now, and yet you’re trying to shut down our projects.”
It’s really good that there’s a rebellion against that. But I think the issue I disagree with is the idea—on the Substack, if you look up climate reparations, there’s a whole piece on this—the idea that the use of fossil fuels in the wealthy world is net harmful to the poor world. And I think that’s one premise when you talk about, well, this thing happened in Pakistan, they’re being screwed.
In reality, the wealthy world’s use of fossil fuels has been unbelievably beneficial to the poor world. If you look at things like life expectancy, safety from climate disasters, all these things have improved as a direct result of the wealthy world getting wealthier.
You look at things like medicine and the ability to help out poor parts of the world. That’s dramatically increased by wealth, which is dramatically increased and really made possible on its current scale by fossil fuels. You look at things like decline in climate-related disaster deaths. That’s not just in the U.S. That’s around the world.
I believe our use of fossil fuels is on net helping the rest of the world. My issue is that the only way for the rest of the world to be really well off is to use a lot of energy itself. Right now it’s a lot of charity and byproducts, and that is very suboptimal. I certainly would not want to be in a nation where you’re charity and byproducts.
I have quite a bit of experience with Pakistan since I’ve employed people who live there, and the basic thing is it’s a poor dysfunctional country. They don’t have a reliable grid, which just makes it incredibly difficult even for people who are trying to do remote work other places to succeed. It’s just very poor.
What you really want—when you notice these specific climate challenges in a given area, I think it’s wrong to focus on, “Well, maybe this would’ve been different if we didn’t use fossil fuels.” Maybe it would. Maybe it wouldn’t have. Maybe there’d be something worse that didn’t happen. There’s a lot of things that could change. The key thing is: What is the level of mastery that you have, in general and with climate? Because if you have a very high level of mastery over your environment, these things are fairly little. But if you don’t have mastery, then everything is a crisis.
And it’s a big mistake on the part of a lot of the media to just focus, whenever there’s a poor country that suffers from anything that’s connected to climate, to say, “Oh, it’s climate change. The solution is get rid of fossil fuels.” No, it’s fundamentally poverty and the solution is to become rich and that requires using fossil fuels.
I think we need to be using—we need to be free to use fossil fuels, and others need to be free to use fossil fuels. Now, I think we will lead the development. Where I agree—well I won’t say I agree—but to your question I would say: we are going to be the ones to innovate more in terms of alternatives.
And it’s also true that we can afford to use more alternatives, as in it won’t immediately kill us as much. But I’m still against using things that are expensive, because ultimately that makes you poorer and it reduces your rate of innovation. And reducing your rate of innovation is really bad because ultimately it’s the innovation that makes everything better.
Just to give one concrete example that I think about a lot—maybe some of you may have had this experience, some not—but you think about, if you know somebody, and I think of one person in particular for me, if you know somebody who’s had a parent or a loved one die prematurely of something, and then 10 years later there’s a cure, that really shows you how life and death it is to evolve as quickly as possible. The more you slow down growth and innovation, the more people you are condemning to that and the more people you’re preventing from thriving in the future.
And as you start to—I don’t think any of you are having kids—but as I start to have kids, it’s even more so, you want to think, “Wow, if something goes wrong, I want technology to be in the best possible state.”
So I’m very much just obsessed with: How can we be as prosperous and innovative as possible? Because it not only makes life a lot more enjoyable, but it really can be a life or death issue. I don’t want to restrict our progress at all. Certainly, we have no right to restrict the progress of poorer people.
We’ve got 10 more minutes. Other questions?
Jo:
Sorry. What are some examples? Maybe just because maybe I’m indoctrinated, I guess, so I want to know, what are some examples of where it’s been extremely difficult to shift to renewables? I don’t know, maybe I’m, since receiving fake news, but I thought that renewables were getting cheaper or at least use of solar and that sort of thing.
Alex Epstein:
Unfortunately there aren’t any real success stories of them, although I have some ideas for how you might be able to do it. I’ll make sure to talk about that because it is important. I don’t have anything against using the sun and the wind. I just think you have to understand the challenges and certainly understand the reality of what’s happened so far.
In general—I’ll take the United States, which is the example I know best, although I’m happy to comment on other parts of the world. The United States is a very instructive example because, probably second only to Australia, we have the best "renewable resources in the world,” if you think about the amount of sun and wind that we have available throughout the nation. Europe is nowhere near where we are, which has been part of Europe’s problem. But even South America has a lot of difficulties, and different parts of Africa have different difficulties.
Even in the United States, we have focused a lot on using more solar and wind in our electricity and often shutting down fossil fuel plants and trying to replace them with solar and wind. And what we’ve seen consistently throughout the country is an increase in electricity prices and a decrease in reliability to the point where throughout the country now we have warnings about electricity shortages.
Companies are being cut off their electricity. We’re having now more and more municipalities, when you have growth industries—and AI is probably the biggest coming in—and people are having to turn people away saying, “Hey, we don’t have enough power anymore.”
So the cost is going up and the reliability is going down. The only thing that’s really changed—one thing that could have changed is the raw material for fossil fuels has gone up or the raw material for nuclear has gone up, or there’s no more water for hydro; those things have not happened. There’ve been water issues in any given year for hydro, but in general, you haven’t had these material increases. In many ways, you’ve had dramatic decreases. Natural gas has plummeted in price. Coal has been quite cheap.
But what you’ve had is a combination of shutting down the reliable stuff and then promoting solar wind, but you’re promoting it in a certain way. Basically, you’re subsidizing it, you’re basically having taxpayers pay companies to do more solar and wind, and then you’re giving solar and wind preference on the grid, and you’re basically allowing people to sell electricity whenever there’s sun and wind and then they have no responsibility for reliability.
And what’s happened is, again, prices have gone up, reliability has gone down. The basic reason, you can think of it as, if you have an unreliable, uncontrollable electricity source that can go near zero at any given time—and we’ve seen in different parts of the country, they can go near zero at any given time—to have full reliability, you need almost 100% life support.
But what that means is you need to pay for the solar and wind infrastructure, but then you also need to pay for the life support infrastructure. So that ends up adding costs because you have to pay for two sets of infrastructure. Now, this is a lot of what Germany has done, at least historically, and one reason they’ve had some of the greatest electricity price increases. They’ve really valued reliability so they’ve had two grids, a reliable grid and unreliable grid, and they’re paying for both. And so their prices are something like four times ours, and ours have even gone higher despite declining natural gas prices.
And what sometimes people will do—and this is why we have reliability issues—is instead of paying for the whole reliable grid and unreliable grid, they’ll try to skimp on the reliable grid, which is what I call “reliability chicken.”
So you’ll try to shut down reliable power plants, but then—I live in California, we’ve had this happen and it’s been quite painful—sometimes the sun doesn’t shine enough, sometimes the wind doesn’t blow enough, sometimes it’s too hot, sometimes it’s too cold, and you don’t have enough electricity.
So when people are talking about, that’s the macro thing that’s happening. Now, the way that people are getting around that—and you said something like, well, maybe you’re getting propaganda, I think unfortunately it is the case. And that “net zero” article I shared has a lot of the data refuting this.
What people will do is they’ll focus on component costs of solar and wind. In particular, they’ll focus on the component cost of solar panels and say, "Hey, the cost of solar panels has gone down." And that’s true. There are a number of factors, including, there’s a lot of efficiency. There’s also quite a bit of very cheap, sometimes slave labor from China going on, low environmental standards from China going on. It’s been China that it’s leading this, which has its own set of challenges. But in any case, the solar panels have gone down in price and people will say, "Well, they’re cheaper." But when they’re calculating cheapness, they just say, "Well, what’s the cost to generate electricity from the solar panels?" But they’re not factoring in reliability.
I’m trying to think, there’s one other, oh, there’s another piece on the Substack—and maybe someone can send in a link—but it’s something like “The myth that solar and wind are cheaper than fossil fuels”. And this goes into every aspect of the myth. But the key thing is people are not looking at the full cost of solar and wind to produce reliable electricity. They’re looking at a partial component cost that only produces unreliable electricity. That’s the way in which it’s misleading.
And then the other aspect is people assume that if you can produce electricity at a given price, you can produce everything. But most of the world’s energy is not electricity. So things like heavy duty transportation, a lot of heat for industry, those are either only possible or way cheaper directly burning fossil fuels. So even if solar and wind were as good for electricity, there’s a lot of problems in doing other things. That’s the state of things.
In terms of what can happen, what I advocate is what I call technology-neutral reliability standards for the grid. So I think that solar and wind should be used as much as people want, if they take responsibility for reliability. So I think that companies, like if Elon wants to do this—he’s always bragging about how cheap mega packs and solar panels are, and I’ve run the numbers and I calculate it’s $200 trillion a day worth of battery storage at his best prices—but if he thinks he’s right and I’m wrong, then he should create a generating entity that guarantees reliable electricity to the grid using solar and whatever he wants.
But what you’re allowed to do today is sell unreliable electricity to the grid and taking no responsibility. So I think if you require reliable electricity, it is possible you’ll be able to innovate using a good amount of solar and wind in particular areas. And there are a lot of areas in the U.S. and in Australia, there are a lot of areas. But that’s the way to do it, I think, is create a real market where you can discover the potential of it versus forcibly shut down fossil fuel power plants versus artificially put this stuff on the grid pretending it’s cheaper, even though in the macro everything’s getting more expensive and everything’s getting less reliable.
Alright. Anyone have a final question, which I’ll try to answer succinctly?
Student:
I do, Alex.
Alex Epstein:
Yes.
Student:
You mentioned the anti-human perspective, and I’m curious what you think of how many people are nefarious actors that do just want to make people poor by removing fossil fuels?
Alex Epstein:
Well, I think there are nefarious actors, but—and this is really, I recommend, you might’ve heard it already, but Chapter Three of the book really goes into this—I think it’s possible to hold anti-human ideas and not realize that you’re holding anti-human ideas. And in fact, I think most of the world is holding anti-human ideas to a significant extent and not realizing it.
And just two versions of—one, I already discussed, the perfect planet premise, or in the book I call it the delicate nurture assumption, the idea that the planet exists in a nurturing state that our impact ruins. So without us, it’s stable, it’s sufficient, it gives us enough as long as we’re not too greedy, it’s safe, but then our impact ruins it. I think that’s an anti-human premise. It assumes that human beings just ruin the planet in some holistic way.
I think it’s false, but a lot of people believe that, including a lot of scientists, and it’s a mess. People have that, so they’re overly afraid of changes to the atmosphere, for example. They have a disposition where they assume it’s all going to be bad. So you can create a lot of urgency.
Greta, I think she hasn’t been fully honest as an adult, but as a child, she thinks the planet is fragile. She’s afraid. I get that. I wouldn’t have called her a nefarious actor when she’s 15 years old. She was a very scared child. She’s not a child anymore, but she’s still a young adult who’s very scared. And then also with—I talk about this in depth in Chapter Three—but also even with, the other big idea is that human impact is immoral. It’s wrong for us to impact nature.
And I think some people hold that idea, but they don’t really realize it’s an anti-human idea. It takes a lot of thinking through, because they’ll think, “Well, it means loving animals and I animals and it means loving safaris and not wanting to kill this beautiful species.” And they think that’s the same as being against human impact, whereas it’s not. Being pro-flourishing and embracing impact is very consistent with loving those things in a healthy way.
So I think my focus is, I think there are a lot of anti-human ideas in what I call the knowledge system that everyone is exposed to and they don’t realize either that they’re not true or they’re not actually pro-human.
Now, the nefarious people, I think I would call it more nefarious, are people who know that their ideas are not good for human life and they still promote them. So somebody like Paul Ehrlich, who I talk about in the book, he’s somebody who’s been at Stanford for decades and decades and decades. He’s predicted the end of the world a million times. He’s been wrong. He’s advocated policies that would’ve ruined lives. He’s advocated even racist policies when it was more fashionable to do so in the ’60s, and particularly against India, and just basically saying, “We just need to let everyone”—let’s just say it to be charitable—”a lot of people in India die.”
Somebody like that I would consider nefarious, but my focus isn’t on identifying—I don’t think it’s so much a cabal of people. I think it’s that there have been ideas that are philosophically wrong that people haven’t examined, that have led us to think about this in a wrong way, and often to have a lot of false assumptions about how things work. My focus is on changing the ideas and focusing on the people who, even if they hold ideas I think are anti-human, are basically good and honest people. And I think that’s most of the world.
Student:
Thank you.
Alex Epstein:
And with that, thanks. Speaking of good and honest people, thanks to all of you. I thought they were all great questions. If you want to reach me in the future, my email is alex@alexepstein.com, and I hope you guys have a great time at the rest of your event. So have a great rest of your Saturday. All right. Bye.
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Interesting exchange with an insightful, intelligent audience. Thank you for your work, Alex.