ETP in Action: My Q&A at Gettysburg College

One of the main goals of this Energy Talking Points Substack and EnergyTalkingPoints.com is to empower you to have the words you need, when you need them.

I thought readers would enjoy this transcript of a Q&A I did at Gettysburg College a couple months ago. One interesting feature of the Q&A is that, due to some students’ scheduling constraints, many of the questions came before my talk. This, I think, led to more confidently adversarial questions than I usually get. (After I present my basic framework and conclusions it’s hard to be confidently adversarial). These questions are reflective of some of the toughest questions you might face when talking to people. I hope you enjoy my answers, and I especially hope you see how many of the answers employ the material I share in this Substack and on EnergyTalkingPoints.com 

Note: The event wasn’t professionally recorded, but if you’re willing to deal with very unprofessional audio quality you can listen to this recording I made on my iPhone.

Pre-speech Q&A

Host:

Hi everyone. We'll be starting the reception now. If you have questions for Mr. Epstein, you can ask him now. We also have books to sign, just something casual beforehand. We'll be starting around 6:55. Thank you for coming.

Alex Epstein:

All right. It's going to be awkward if none of you have questions.

Student 1:

I wanted to get this in here because I have an event at seven. So I was doing some background research on your book. I noticed you published it in 2014.

Alex Epstein:

So, just to be clear, there are two books. The one here is called Fossil Future. This was published in 2022. There was one in 2014 called The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.

Student 1:

Okay. So, given the advances in renewable technology in terms of efficiency and the lowering of cost, how did your opinion or justification for why fossil fuels are still better change from 2014 until now? Because there's been some pretty significant technology. Again, I haven't read the book, so I'm not sure about the exact arguments you're making, but I would imagine that the data you are working with is somewhat outdated at this point.

Alex Epstein:

But you've already read the book, right? Is that right?

Student 1:

I haven't had a chance to read.

Alex Epstein:

Okay, so you're interested in my view in 2014 or my view now?

Student 1:

Yeah, definitely.

Alex Epstein:

It's a really interesting question because I actually had this thought myself because the first book came out in 2014, and it was based on 2013 data. And then, for a few years I didn't follow the data closely and I heard very extravagant claims about how much things had been improving. And so, I started looking into it again. And unfortunately, the improvements in data are much less significant than people think. And the reason is something called “partial cost accounting.” When you're looking at the cost of energy, you always need to recognize that energy is a process. So when you're looking at, say, electricity, you need to look at what the sum total of the cost necessary to end up with reliable electricity is.

And when you're using solar and wind, what you always have to do is you have to have something that compensates for the inherent unreliability of solar and wind. Solar and wind can always go near zero. For example, in Texas, one of the leading places for wind, and to some extent,solar, in 2021, during the winter storm, it went to 1% of its theoretical capacity, which is basically zero. So, to have full reliability, you need essentially a 100% reliable system. And that can either be something like fossil fuels and nuclear, but then you have to duplicate, or it can be some sort of battery. So, it turns out batteries are very, very, very expensive to store relatively small amounts of energy. So, in practice what you do is you have fossil fuels and then you have the solar and wind mostly duplicated on top of that.

In places like Germany where they kind of prize reliability, they basically have two systems. They have an unreliable system and a reliable system. and you have to pay for both, which is why their consumer electricity prices have doubled in the last 20 years. In other places like California and Texas, they've tried to play what I call “reliability chicken.” So, they have a bunch of unreliable solar and wind, and then they don't want to pay the full price of having a fully reliable system, so then they have inadequate reliable capacity. But I think, as we've seen in both cases, that leads to blackouts. So, what happens when you hear claims of vast declines in the price is they're not looking at the price of the full process. They're usually looking at the price of the solar panels and wind turbines themselves, and sometimes (but often not) the transmission infrastructure.

So, unfortunately the most expensive part of solar and wind is the need to back it up all the time. And so, fundamentally, they have not gotten to the point where they can be self-sufficient, which is why no place in the world is using just solar and wind. It's always solar and wind on top of fossil fuels. So the basic conclusion is: while it is now cheaper to use solar and wind plus fossil fuels because solar and wind are cheaper, it is not yet a replacement for fossil fuels even for electricity. The only way to solve that, the only way to have a full replacement, would be to have some sort of amazing storage that doesn't exist at all, or some way of combining them at very long distances, which doesn't exist at all. So right now, even for electricity, they're very much supplemental and in most cases, they make things more expensive.

So, that's the current state. Now, because I'm not against them fundamentally, I think the best way to figure out their full potential is to have what I call “technology neutral reliability standards.” So, basically, right now, one of the problems with our grid is that you are allowed to sell unreliable electricity to the grid if you're a solar and wind producer and you get paid the same as a reliable electricity provider. And in fact, because we just passed 400 plus billion dollars of subsidies, you actually get paid more. So, this is as if you went to a rental car place and you paid way more for a car that works only a third of the time. It's a totally bizarre system. So what we need is a system where everyone who's generating electricity has to provide reliable electricity.

And if you want to use solar and wind, great, but you have to provide the batteries and you have to provide the fossil fuel backup or something else like geothermal or hydro. And then, I think, once we do that, we can figure out where solar and wind can actually be used cheaply. But so far, they are not reducing cost, they are adding cost both in terms of the prices we pay and also in terms of more frequent blackouts. Take Texas, for example: they paid something like $15,000 a household for their blackouts, which I believe were caused by these anti-fossil-fuel policies. Okay, you're going to have one follow-up.

Student 1:

Okay. So, in my preliminary background research, I found that you did actually debate Bill McKibben.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah.

Student 1:

I actually read Deep Economy before class, in the spring of my freshman year. And of course, if memory serves me well, his main point is that our current economic system that's centered around fossil fuels does not account for the externalities that are caused from the damages that they incur on our environment and long term damage that carbon emissions will have in terms of spurring on the effects of climate change. So, if we're talking about raising costs with renewables, I guess, what is your opinion on the externality that is not being accounted for in terms of carbon emissions, the degradation of environment, disunification of water bodies and all the other human health issues that sometimes arise from coal power plants, oil refineries and that kind of stuff?

Alex Epstein:

I'm just curious, if I answer this well, will you read Fossil Future? You can get it for free.

Student 1:

If I get it for free, I'll read it.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, Fossilfuture.com. You can get it for free, through YAF, actually. I think, regarding Deep Economy, it would be really interesting to see the debate, which was 11 years ago. But I think it'd be particularly interesting to read that because it's the exact opposite basic philosophy compared to mine. Let me answer your specific thing and then I can talk about Bill's things. So, the whole issue of externalities, the idea of externalities is (and I cover this a lot in chapter four of the book in particular at the end) that there are these negative consequences of things, extremely negative climate consequences, and we're not paying for them, therefore, we should make fossil fuels more expensive.

That's the basic argument. So, I'm just curious, has anyone here studied externalities in class and stuff? This is kind of a popular refrain in economics. So, one of the basic fallacies involved when people use externalities, which is definitely at work here, is that they usually only look at negative externalities. This is what's going on. So it'd be interesting to see in Bill McKibben's work: has he ever discussed the positive externalities of fossil fuels? And I've read a lot of his work and I would say, “No, he hasn't.” So, whenever somebody talks about externalities and they only talk about negative ones or they only talk about positive ones, it usually indicates there is a certain bias. So, in the case of fossil fuels, the positive externalities are absolutely stratospheric because what fossil fuels do, what fossil fuels have done is they've provided way, way, way cheaper energy than anything else.

And one of the many positive externalities of energy is time. Because the more energy you use, the more machines do work for you, the more time you free up for human beings to innovate. So, for example, the positive externalities of using fossil fuels include huge portions of modern medicine and the Internet. Without the positive externalities of fossil fuels, we would not have those things. So, we have vastly longer life expectancies from fossil fuels, not just from using them to produce stuff, which is huge, too, but from all the time they've freed up in other fields. And when you make energy more expensive, you take away people's time and you retard growth. Another example that might put this in perspective: if we had followed Bill McKibben's advice in the eighties, China would not have septupled its fossil fuel use since then.

But China has done that and their life expectancy has gone up by about 10 years. Now, if you just looked at the negative externality thing, you’d say, “No, you shouldn't do that.” They should have made fossil fuels really expensive, and then they would not have been able to afford to use them like they hadn't previously been and then they would just stagnate. So, what's going on with the externality thing? For one, it's ignoring positive externalities and then the other thing is: it exaggerates negative externalities. This is another thing I talk about a lot, but the basic thing with climate externalities is: people try to look at the climate impacts of fossil fuels without fully accounting for our ability to neutralize negative climate impacts. And I'll point this out in the presentation which, I guess, you're not able to go to, but we have a massive, massive decline in the death rate from climate-related disasters over the last hundred years, and even in the last 30 years.

So, although people like Bill McKibben have predicted that the climate would get deadlier and deadlier, it's actually safer and safer because we're so good at neutralizing climate danger through heating and air conditioning, through irrigation for drought, through crop transport for drought, et cetera. I'm going to talk about this more in the talk, but the basic two errors people make with fossil fuels are: either they ignore the benefits or they what I call “catastrophize” the side effects, and the externality argument is just a fancier way of doing that. So, that's how they can advocate things like policies that would've taken years of life expectancy off China and India, but still act like they're being scientific. But the externality calculations are wrong. Great questions.

Student 2:

What is your stance on nuclear energy? Because I know right now we've talked about wind, solar and then, we've talked about fossil fuels. Nuclear hasn't been in one conversation. I was just wondering if there's a place for that in your sort of energy philosophy.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, basically my energy philosophy is: I want anything that can be cost-effective, period. So by “cost-effective” I mean affordable (meaning that a typical person can afford a lot of it), reliable (I'll talk about this more later), and versatile (i.e. able to power every type of machine), and then also scalable, available to billions of people in thousands of places. And so, the reason why I support fossil fuels, as I'll argue later, is that those are uniquely able to provide affordable, reliable, versatile energy for billions of people for, let's say, at least the next 30 years. And I believe energy is crucial to human life, and certainly, billions of people have way too little energy. I mean, 6 billion people use an amount of energy you guys would just consider the end of your life if you used as little energy as those people use. So, in that context, fossil fuels are great, but we want everything else that we can get that's actually cost-effective.

Now, if something makes your energy a lot more expensive and less reliable, it's not very useful because it's not cost-effective. Nuclear, I think, has the most potential long-term to be cost-effective. In the seventies, it demonstrated a lot of potential. But unfortunately, the green movement in the United States made it something like 10 times more expensive through, I believe, irrational regulations. I think it has enormous potential, but unfortunately, that potential has been held back for a long time. So, what I'm working on, and I do a lot of stuff in politics, is giving us what I call a “decriminalized” nuclear policy, so that nuclear can actually fulfill its potential. But right now, there's some promise, but, for example, we just put this plant online in Atlanta and it just was catastrophically expensive because of the regulations. So, I love it, but it's not able to replace fossil fuels very soon, unfortunately. Or even supplement them as much as we would like. Other questions? Yeah?

Student 3:

A lot of times I hear about rising sea levels. Is that something that's talked about at the academic level a lot or is that something that's reached public dialogue and has been diluted a lot? Are there actual concerns related to that?

Alex Epstein:

If you think about it logically, the main thing is: we put more greenhouse gasses, mostly CO2, in the atmosphere, and this has a warming effect. People are concerned about the warming effect, but they're also concerned about other effects. What warming does to storms, and what warming does to drought, and this kind of thing. And the most plausible concern, I believe, is about sea levels because sea levels are logically going to rise as you warm, because it's going to expand the water. And in certain places, if the ice is on land, the ice can melt into the ocean and that can raise the sea level as well. And you have a civilization that is built with a certain rough sea level in mind. So, if the sea level rose past a certain point, you would at least have to take some corrective action.

As I'll say in the talk, we're good at dealing with sea levels. But, to give a perspective, right now, the sea level rise is about one foot a century. And so in Al Gore's movie, for example, he portrays it as, it's going to be 20 feet in a few decades. And that's not in any science, but I think it's definitely something we could think about as plausible. But I'll talk about it in the talk, I'll show you some data. It's not actually plausible that it's a big threat, given the magnitude of it, and given how slow it is, and given how good we are at dealing with this kind of thing.

Student 4:

So if I'm following your reasoning, what you're saying is, “Basically, if we use more fossil fuels so that we can flourish, we can get better at dealing with a negative side-effect,” right? That's what you're saying?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, it's definitely part of it, but it's also with climate, you have to look at side-effects, both positive and negative. You can't only look at the negative ones. And then, the natural climate is massively dangerous. So, dealing with our negative side-effects on climate is just one aspect of dealing with climate danger, which, regardless of our side-effects, is a huge danger, absent our ability to deal with it. But yes, I believe the world needs more fossil fuels so that more people can have better lives, including for protecting themselves from the naturally dangerous climate.

Student 4:

So, I guess I would think that for developed countries, if we get a lot richer, that wouldn't necessarily mean that we would be a lot safer. I think that the main benefit in this sort of approach would be for those smaller countries that would need more money to deal with these things. So, do you see some big connection between, for instance, how America uses its wealth and the world overall or climate overall? Do you see the rich helping the poor in that respect?

Alex Epstein:

With any aspect of life, you're in a sense going to get diminishing returns in terms of anything, as you get richer. So, if somebody is incredibly poor and they get an extra $10,000 a year, that's going to make a much bigger difference to them than for somebody who makes $100,000 a year or $1,000,000 a year. So, we are already really good at, for example, protecting ourselves from climate. So, us being able to do that better is not going to be as significant as, say, in Bangladesh where they have much more to improve. That's going to be true of every issue though. Climate is not unique in that respect. So, is it good for us to get richer? Well, part of it is climate, but it's good for us to get richer because that can make every aspect of life better.

On climate, I don't look at it in isolation. Climate is just one aspect of human life. It's something that can be a threat, it's something that can be an opportunity. But the main thing is, “Yeah, I think it'd be way better for Americans to be way richer, including getting some of the things we can do that will make a lot of difference, like innovating in AI and discovering cures that will allow more and more of us to live to 80 and 90 and 100, and have better healthspans, all sorts of things. So climate is just one part of it. 

Now, it's also true that us getting rich makes the poor world much better off. And so, if you look at the life expectancy increases in the poor world over the last 50 years, they're astonishingly high. And a lot of it is because of the innovations that we've made in medical care, our ability to give relief to people, et cetera. So, those have been significant, but the real thing that needs to happen is: the poor world needs to become much freer and they need a lot more energy. That's the only way to actually become seriously wealthy. So my view is, “Yeah, everyone needs to become richer.” The poor world needs it the most, but I don't think that should stop us. And we certainly shouldn't do anything to stop anyone else.

Student 4:

So, I guess my follow-up question on that is: do you think that there would be any difference in proposed policy between different areas of the world or between different GDPs or whatnot? Do you think that this is a pretty universal claim that you're making or is it more nuanced?

Alex Epstein:

Well, so, the policy claim I'm making is that everyone should be free to use fossil fuels and other forms of energy. I think that's a universal claim. The people who are poorest will gain the most from that. But even in countries that are rich, most people do not consider themselves rich. Certainly, most people in the United States won’t say, “Oh, I have way too much money, way too much time, et cetera.” So yeah, I think the basic policies apply to everyone. And with CO2 emissions, it's a global issue. So part of it is: insofar as you want to do anything to lower emissions, the only way to actually do that globally is to discover cheaper ways of making energy that emit less or no CO2. I think that's another reason why the freedom policy is the best policy.

What you really need is you need innovations, like innovations in nuclear or geothermal or even solar and wind, if they can actually meet reliability standards that actually make them cheap. Because right now, what we have is differential policies. Right now, some of the wealthier countries have decided, “Well, we are going to unilaterally or somewhat unilaterally try to restrict the availability of fossil fuels to our citizens, or at least our production of those, and we're going to hope that the rest of the world follows suit. Europe is a perfect example of this. Germany had incredible vulnerability to Russia, but it didn't stop China and India from increasing their use of fossil fuels because fossil fuels are still the most cost-effective solution. So, if they wanted to reduce emissions, they would've been much better off liberating their domestic alternative energy industries to come up with better solutions that China and India would actually adopt voluntarily.

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Note: The particular speech I gave at Gettysburg College wasn’t professionally recorded. To get an idea of what I presented, see this speech I gave to Young America’s Foundation students last year.

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Post-speech Q&A

Student 5:

So, you claim that people come to sensationalize the negative effects of fossil fuels and neglect the positive effects. What motive would the scientific community have for deceiving people like that, whether that's the case?

Alex Epstein:

What do you think?

Student 5:

I'm not sure.

Alex Epstein:

Does anyone have any ideas?

Student 5:

Money, maybe? Grants?

Alex Epstein:

I mentioned that I think what I am saying is consistent with what most expert researchers think, but not with what the people who claim to represent the experts say. And so, I found a very helpful concept that I call the “knowledge system.” So, whenever we get allegedly “expert” knowledge and guidance, we are not getting it from all the researchers in say, energy and environment and climate. There's no way for that to happen because there are so many of them and they're so specialized. So, what happens is there's a set of institutions and people that kind of process what the researchers come up with. And there are multiple stages. There's a stage of synthesis, where you try to take a vast amount of research and synthesize it together and decide what's relevant and what's best. And so the synthesizers can make a big mistake.

And I mentioned with the U.N.: the synthesizing bodies take climate research, but they ignore the benefits of fossil fuels and they ignore the climate mastery benefits. So, even if all the researchers are right, then the synthesizers can make a mistake. And then, you have mainstream institutions like media outlets, which I call the “disseminators.” They can further distort things, for instance, they can just pick the things that are most sensational. Why would they do that? Well, there's the kind of “if it bleeds, it leads” thing. People want sensational things. But I think the more common thing, particularly for people in journalism, is different. What do you think is the number-one reason people go into journalism? What do you think they say? I haven't studied this clinically, but I think there's a refrain. I hear it more than any other reason when I hear about why people go into journalism.

Student 5:

The truth.

Alex Epstein:

I wish.

Student 5:

[inaudible 00:02:33]

Alex Epstein:

I heard, “I want to change the world.” It's kind of that thing. And so people often want to go there because they know the media are influential, and this happens with both conservatives and liberals. I think it happens a lot. They want to change the world. And what you decide to cover has a lot of impact on perception. So, people tend to cover things in a way that's consistent with their worldview. It's really hard to get around that. I think it's very well documented how media institutions distort things. And so, there's research synthesis, dissemination, and then, evaluation. This is how the people guiding us make decisions. And I mentioned at the beginning that if those people are not looking at the benefits of fossil fuels, they are making a huge mistake. And I think the thinkers that are guiding us demonstrably aren’t. So, let me ask you, why do you think Michael Mann is not talking about the benefits of fossil fuels in his book? I mean, what would his motive be?

You can read the book and see. He clearly isn't. And if you've ever dealt with him, which you probably haven't, and I have, he responds to everything by blocking people. He even made a false accusation about me. And I said, “Prove it.” And then, he just blocked me. So, there's a real question of why they would do it. So, one thing we have to admit is:, first, it is very common for research to be distorted in the name of certain kinds of moral and political objectives. This is a very common thing today, and it's been a very common thing throughout history. Just look at some of the worst abuses: say, the eugenics movement or different forms of racism.

A lot of these involved distorting genetic research. It wasn't that genetic research actually justified this thing, but people claiming to speak for geneticists distorted it to support really, really horrific policies. This is a common thing. And then, there's the question of what motivates it. And I think one thing that motivates it is: people have false assumptions about the world that they don't question. And so, with energy and environment, people have what I call the “delicate nurturer” assumption. This is the view that the planet without us is basically perfect. It's stable, doesn't change too much, it's sufficient, it gives us enough resources if we're not too greedy, and it's safe, it doesn't endanger us too much. And then, human beings are viewed as parasite-polluters. We just plunder the Earth and we ruin the Earth. Now, this view is everywhere.

It's in academia, it's in the Lion King, it's everywhere. That we are just these bad creatures who impact the Earth. The Earth is great without us. This view is everywhere. You read Stephen Hawking's children's book: it just talks about how we've ruined the Earth. About how if Martians saw us, they'd say, “Who are those people who screwed up the Earth?” There's just this total view that the Earth is great without us and we ruin it. This is a religious assumption, I believe, definitely not a scientific view, but it's so pervasive. So, when people have this view, they expect that our impact is going to ruin the Earth. I think that's a big part.

The other thing is values. A lot of people value an unimpacted Earth over human life. A lot of people think (and they don't always realize they're doing it, they usually don't)), “I would rather have an Earth where we've had very little impact than an Earth where we're flourishing.” And those things are very much at odds. They're not always at odds, but they're often at odds. For human beings to flourish, we need to impact the Earth a lot. And if you believe impact is bad and an unimpacted Earth is a beautiful thing, then you're going to have a lot of hostility toward our impact.

Student 5:

You said that you think that policymakers are misrepresenting what scientists are actually saying, and I'm not going to pretend that I'm as knowledgeable as you are on this subject, but it seems in most part that scientists say that fossil fuels are bad in the long run.

Alex Epstein:

So, that's an interesting thing because how would a climate scientist know that fossil fuels are bad in the long run?

Student 5:

Science?

Alex Epstein:

I'll stick with the Michael Mann example. How would he know that? Think about what a climate scientist knows. With a lot of climate science: it's hard to know if it's predictive. But let's say that we know that if we emit X amount of CO2, it's going to get three degrees Fahrenheit warmer in the next 40 years or something like that. Okay. So, you could theoretically know that and you could know it's going to do this to precipitation and that the temperatures are going to change this way in this region. You could predict a bunch of things, but you have no idea if that's good or not by itself, because you have to know another thing. You have to know what our ability to master those kinds of things is.

Because the more mastery we have, the more we can deal with anything and be fine. For instance, snow used to be a terror, and now we pay a fortune to go to ski resorts to experience it. So, our experience of climate is totally based on our level of mastery. The climate scientist is no expert in mastery. And even on climate, he or she can't make an objective evaluation. And then, there are other huge benefits of fossil fuels. This goes back to my major point, which is that you have to look at the benefits, the climate mastery benefits, and the side-effects with even-handedness and precision. So, I think out of the gate: insofar as climate scientists are claiming to tell us that fossil fuels are overall bad, there's something very wrong going on there. Whether they know it or not, they're not looking at the full picture.

And of course, we are not interacting with the vast majority of climate scientists. We are dealing with what I call “evaluators.” An evaluator can be a politician, but it can also be a scientist who's an activist. So, Michael Mann is a researcher in the small field of paleoclimatology, but he is also an evaluator who's making policy. And as an evaluator, he is terrible. So, regardless of how good he is as a scientist, and a lot of people think he's terrible at that, too, he is very bad at evaluation.

So, unfortunately, the “scientists” we hear from are designated experts who are misrepresenting things. And I would say the typical person in the field does not know how to think about the issue well. Because they've been mistrained in the same way as everyone else. I think they'll have a kind of general hostility toward fossil fuels. But there are a lot of people in climate science who write to me and say, “I like your book. I agree with you way more than what this says. But of course, I can't say it publicly because I'll get destroyed.” So that's a whole set of incentives as well. Yes?

Student 5:

So, you talk about how much of human flourishing has historically been thanks to fossil fuels. Do you think it's fair to say that a lot of the modern social currents, at least in the United States and Europe, tend to be very against fossil fuels? And that the development of those countries is a luxury of being in a society that has fossil fuels? Because you don't have to worry about starving or anything?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, it's a sad and dangerous luxury I would say. But yeah, it's a general problem. There's just a general trend for societies where you progress. The danger of progressing is that you forget what it had been like before you progressed and you don't understand how you progressed. And then, you treat your progress as natural. This is just a common thing. It's not just in this issue, but it's a huge issue. So, people in really poor places are not modern environmentalists because they live in nature. It's too obvious to them that nature is not this delicate nurturer. It's actually what I would  call “wild potential.” It's dynamic, it's deficient, it's dangerous, it's not a hospitable place. This is why, when you ask people in the poor world, “What are your top concerns?”, they won't say, “Climate change,” right? They'll say, “Poverty and water, and any kind of basic education.”

So yeah, we've become so wealthy using fossil fuels, but our educational system has totally failed. And all of what I call our “knowledge system” has failed. And so, we have no idea that fossil fuels make our lives possible. We actually think that everything good about our lives is pretty natural. And then, fossil fuels are just responsible for the bad stuff. So, you just take climate reporting: when somebody dies from a storm, “Oh, fossil fuels did that,” but when a hundred times more people live through storms, fossil fuels are not mentioned at all. So yeah, it's a really tragic luxury that the educational system has just totally failed and leads to a lot of that stuff. Let me just make sure I haven't gotten you yet. Right. Okay, go for it.

Student 6:

You talk about the scientists who usually come up and talk about these issues as designated experts that are pushing some sort of agenda. So my question is, “How are you different?” You are, I believe, on a “for-profit think tank.” You get paid by what I assume to be energy concerns to push an agenda that is profitable to them.

Alex Epstein:

Well, I'll discuss me in a second, but how do you tell if anyone is credible? Because there are people who are directly in the fossil fuel industry who I think can be credible or not credible. Where people are getting money from is a relevant thing but I think that the most important thing is: what is the person's thinking method? What are their explicit and implicit thinking methodologies, including any underlying assumptions and values? And then, do you agree with those? And then, are they applying them honestly? So, this is what I look for in people, whatever industry they're in. And so, I guess what I’d say my credibility is: I think that more than anyone else I've ever seen in this field, I'm very explicit about my thinking methodology, my assumptions, and my values.

:I believe I'm carefully weighing the benefits and side-effects. I broke that down. I believe that the Earth is not a delicate nurturer. It's wild potential. I believe human beings are not parasite-polluters but producer-improvers, and our impact is generally good. And when I'm looking at the world, I'm looking at it from a human flourishing perspective. So, I want an Earth that is the most human-friendly, that's the most conducive to human flourishing, which is not being against the rest of nature, but for having a relationship that's good for us. So, look, I'm very clear about that and then, I try to be clear about all of my sources. So, in terms of why I think I'm credible, this is the main thing, and I think that if anyone has an objection to it, they should be able to show that there's somewhere where I'm going wrong.

Because I could be right, whether having no connection ever with the fossil fuel industry or having grown up in there and been paid by it my whole life. I could be right in either case and I could be wrong in either case. In my case, I had come up with my views before I even knew anyone in the industry. This is all documented. You can go back a long time ago when I worked at another think tank and had no connection to the fossil fuel industry at all. And I came up with these conclusions because I believed in them. And then, at a certain point, it changed, and I was very explicit about it, this was not something I hid. I wanted to work with the fossil industry to help it promote itself because I believed it was good. And again, it makes total sense if you thought the fossil fuel industry was as good as I do, and if it were so bad at defending itself. You would want to help them.

And in part, I created a for-profit business so that I could do that effectively. At present, I don't actually do much of that anymore. I work much more with politicians. And then, that stuff gets funded by different people, some from the industry, some not. I set it up so that nobody has any control over what I say. So, those are all the details. You can look them up in detail at AlexEpstein.com. I have an FAQ about this, but I think in general, the key thing is: what's their methodology? What are their underlying assumptions? What are their values? What do they say they are? Do they follow them? And how are they with facts? And so, that's why I think I'm credible.

Student 7:

Okay. So you mentioned earlier in your presentation that China is drastically expanding its coal production.

Alex Epstein:

I didn't say “drastically.” Just “significantly.”

Student 7:

Significantly, significantly. If you look at the cities there, anyways, they have a massive smog problem. And a lot of people are attributing this to the expansion of coal energy production. Would you say that's accurate?

Alex Epstein:

It's partially accurate. This is a great thing to raise. But what you have to look at is: is it inevitable in using coal to have that degree of pollution? Or is it about how they're doing it? And I believe it's mostly about how they're doing it. And in general, China's not a place that respects individual rights consistently. So, in general, they have various agendas of the Communist Party. And one of the agendas has been industrialization, but it's pursuing industrialization in a very collectivized way that is not focused on individual rights. So, my belief is: you have to produce and consume energy in a way that respects the rights of your neighbors. So, you can't just pollute to the point of killing them or destroying their land. You have to have laws that respect people's rights. And so, the way in which coal has been burned in China, both in power plants and in other places, I think, has very often not respected rights.

That said, it doesn't mean that there should be no smog in China or other places. Because even with the smog, they've had life expectancy go up dramatically. When you are poor, you have to be very careful about the extent to which you limit pollution,  and even what you consider pollution. Because if you limit emissions too much before you can do so cost-effectively, you can stop your growth. So, a classic example is fire. When human beings invented fire, there's a huge amount of emissions. People are huddling around a fire, they're breathing in huge amounts of smoke. Somebody can say, “Look at these negative externalities of fire. Why are we using fire? We need to make fire much more expensive. Don't use fire.“But then, everyone's going to freeze and not be able to eat. But I think that in China, and in India as well, they had way more pollution than was necessary.

But it's wrong to think, “Oh, they should have the same pollution level as a cleaner US city or something like that.” The way it works is: you tend to use energy in a somewhat dirtier form early on, and then you get wealthier and there's more innovation, and then you can afford to use it more and more cleanly. So, if there is some amount of smog, it is definitely justified there, but not the actual amount of it. And then, the other deadly practices, I think, are due to the government that doesn't respect rights.

Student 7:

Thank you. Thank you.

Alex Epstein:

All right, thank you everyone.

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