How to Solve All of America's Energy Problems

My new interview with Jordan Peterson

On the latest episode of the Jordan Peterson Podcast, I analyze the crucial moment we’re at with American energy policy, and break down my “Energy Freedom Platform” to make the absolute most of this moment.

Stream the full interview on Youtube, X, or Spotify, or read the transcript below.

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Alex Epstein’s influence on energy

Jordan Peterson:

So I had the good fortune to speak again today with Alex Epstein, who I spoke with two years ago almost to the day. Alex is the author of two influential books. One, the first one, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, and the second one, Fossil Future.

Alex has been beating the pro-human energy/environment drum for some 17 years, and with increasing effectiveness I would say. He’s one of the people at the forefront of the dawning realization that impoverishing humanity and destroying the industrial infrastructure of the West while making energy spectacularly expensive and unreliable and simultaneously increasing our dependency on, let’s say, dictatorial governments, is not really a very wise policy all things considered.

Alex has been an icebreaker in that regard, pointing out to anyone who will listen—and listen carefully—that fossil fuels, all things considered, are obviously and overwhelmingly a net good, and that if we want to move forward into a future of abundance then it’s necessary to get that straight in our minds and stop playing foolish games.

We had an opportunity to continue that conversation today and to deepen it, because Alex has spent the last several years making his knowledge about the energy/environment nexus more and more detailed at the practical level in a manner that enables policymakers to move towards an energy-rich, abundant, pro-human future.

And so he laid out these ideas today in our podcast and in a manner that is at least illustrative of the wealth of knowledge that he has that could be brought to bear for policymakers who are interested in developing exactly that kind of policy framework. And so, join us for that.

The dramatic AI-fueled increase in energy demand

Jordan Peterson:

I thought we might as well begin this by briefly evaluating the change in the conceptual landscape since 2022. I would say two years ago, the stance that you have been promoting, a positive stance towards fossil fuel, was not only, what would you say, controversial, but could we say fringe? And I don't think that's the case now. And I think that has a fair bit to do with you actually, which is quite cool.

And so that's my sense broadly speaking. It's not like there still isn't all sorts of work to do to make the case for fossil fuels, but how are you feeling about... If you evaluate the landscape over the last two years, how are you feeling about it?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah. So I've been at this 17 years now, and it's definitely at a peak in terms of enthusiasm and opportunity in this sphere. And I think it's interesting to break down, so maybe I'll do my own part last and the part of people who think like me, but there are a few other developments that are notable and they're all intertwined.

But one of the interesting ones that I take no credit for, but is very fortuitous intellectually, is the dramatic increase in electricity demand that is occurring right now in the world of

Jordan Peterson:

Because of IT.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, right, exactly. So specifically data centers and within that AI, and in particular where you see it is with the very large digital tech companies and what their role has been in the energy debate so far, and then how it has drastically changed in the last year or two.

So if you look at, even in 2022, what's the posture of the big tech companies for the past years before that, it's overwhelmingly a posture of, "We are 100% renewable and you should be, too." Then politically advocating the net-zero-by-2050 kind of goal, which basically means rapidly eliminate fossil fuels.

Jordan Peterson:

And prosperity.

Why tech companies stopped promoting “100% renewable”

Alex Epstein:

And so you have them and you have to think of them as they're just an incredible center of gravity in the culture. And where they are is hard to move the culture away from, because there's just so much wealth and so much influence and people in many ways want to be like them. And I think their posture was part of the Larry Fink era. So Larry Fink, the head of BlackRock... By the way, I'm in DC, whenever I'm in DC this guy is always in DC. I always spot this guy. Hart building and Dirksen building. This guy...

But I think he seems nervous right now, whereas he was on top of the world. So if you take two years ago and especially four years ago, he was called the Emperor. Actually, the first time I had Vivek on my podcast, he was fighting against Fink. This was in about 2020, 2021 maybe. And he's talking about him as the Emperor.

And you see now, just to give a sense of Larry Fink. Larry Fink went of all places to the World Economic Forum. This is after telling the whole world, you have to go net-zero and specifically you want to be 100% renewable. He goes to the World Economic Forum and says, "Hey, we have data centers, we have AI. There's going to be massive new demand for what he'll call dispatchable or reliable electricity. So electricity available on demand."

Jordan Peterson:

You mean the kind of electricity we got accustomed to with our systems that work?

Alex Epstein:

Right, exactly.

Jordan Peterson:

Before people mucked around with them.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, exactly. What we used to just call electricity. And he said, "And we cannot power this with solar and wind and we need dispatchable electricity like natural gas." I'm like, "Whoa, where has this guy been?" This was the leader of net-zero, “100% renewable.”

And you're seeing it with the tech companies too. Facebook, with Microsoft trying to resurrect Three Mile Island, everyone is admitting it. I mean, Elon, his stance has been really interesting. So he's been, I think radically improving on oil and gas, radically improving... Very much dampening on any climate catastrophism at this point. I don't even think he's a climate catastrophist, which is like if you look at videos of him back when he's introducing the Powerwall. There's a lot of climate catastrophism.

So it's just this fascinating development and he's using natural gas like a lot of new natural gas to power Grok. So what we had is, there is just the economic reality. Once you need a lot more electricity, you have to run into the reality that you need more specifically natural gas. Unfortunately with nuclear, our policy is so bad. We'll discuss in a minute how to fix that, but it's so bad we cannot rapidly scale up nuclear. Solar and wind have limited scaling ability in terms of actually contributing to reliable electricity because

Jordan Peterson:

As we see continually.

Alex Epstein:

Yes, exactly. The storage is just so prohibitively

Jordan Peterson:

Norway's having a fit at the moment because they're having to export their electricity because of the treaties they've signed. And their power supply is so unreliable that they're having spot price hike. What spot price hikes of up to $1,000 per kilowatt-hour, something like that.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, I mean Europe has been a precursor in all of these dimensions. I mean, Germany, they used to tell us it's the model and now it's a joke. Now they disavow Germany. So you have everyone going, and it's because when you really need a lot more electricity, you have to face economic reality. What was the case before is we had stagnant electricity demand and we could accommodate a certain amount of intermittent electricity on the grid and we could get away with shutting down a little bit of reliable capacity, although we were bursting at the seams in terms of the polar vortex, the grid almost crashes. We see a crash in California, we see a crash in Texas, we see warnings across the country. But now we have massive new demand. And what the tech companies had to do is they had to go from... What they did before is they just relabeled the fossil fuel electricity. So they would use the fossil fuel electricity and pay the utilities to label it as green. This is called renewable. Oh, electricity credits.

And unfortunately this is legally allowed, which is one of my recommendations to the new administration is they need to disallow this.

Jordan Peterson:

Explain that in more detail. What are they doing exactly?

Alex Epstein:

You are allowed to claim that you are 100% renewable, which everyone takes to mean you are using 100% renewable electricity if you buy credit from somebody else to relabel your fossil fuel electricity as renewable.

Jordan Peterson:

Is that part of carbon offset?

Alex Epstein:

It's a similar kind of thing, but it's a different version of it. It's specifically labeling yourself renewable. So you take Apple in North Carolina. So Apple is drawing from the grid in North Carolina. When you draw from the grid, you draw an equal percentage of every source in the grid. They all become a homogeneous thing. So whatever, I don't know the exact state of the grid right now, but it has historically had a bunch of coal, a bunch of gas, a bunch of nuclear, but Apple wants to label themselves 100% renewable. So how do they possibly do that? Well, they pay the utility to say, "Hey, the coal and gas that Apple is using, that's the responsibility of the home consumers. They're actually using that." And Apple gets credit—

Jordan Peterson:

Apple has the special electricity?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, they just take the portion of the electricity. It's just a total figment.

Jordan Peterson:

I see.

Alex Epstein:

And you can do different versions of this called power purchase agreements, which Google does a lot of where you'll buy a certain portion of the wind in Iowa, even if you're not in Iowa, but you claim that you're using it. So it's all a fraudulent relabeling scheme, but you can get away with that as long as you don't need much new electricity. But once you need new electricity, you're running out of reliable electricity to relabel as green. And so that's what's happened is... And a friend of mine who's a CEO of a major company was telling me he was at a conference and he was telling me about the shift in attitude on electricity. He said before these tech companies said to us if it's not 100% renewable to different districts and stuff, don't even talk to us. And now they said they'll burn anything from bunnies to puppies to get electricity. That's the shift—

The unlimited need for energy to expand our abilities

Jordan Peterson:

So can you walk everybody through what's at the base of the demand for the IT? I know it's associated with artificial intelligence and these massive banks, computational banks, they're producing, but I'm unclear about the details. What is it that's drawing such immense resources of power?

Alex Epstein:

Well, I mean the best person to talk to is an expert in large language models. But I'll give it to you in the macro and especially I'm very proud that I forecast this in Fossil Future. So Fossil Future was completed in 2021, came out in 2022, and the basic mechanism I talked about is there's really an unlimited human need for energy. And what energy is, it's “machine food” or “machine calories.” And historically the major use of energy has been to expand and amplify human physical labor. So by expand, I mean via machine. So we can do things that we couldn't do. We can power an incubator with energy. We can't get five humans together and make an incubator. We can't get a thousand humans and be a plane. So one thing energy and machines do is they expand our productive abilities and then they also amplify.

So the example of, well, a modern combine harvester will make an agricultural worker able to reap and thresh 1000 times more wheat than he could on his own. So that's the kind of classic thing. So it expands and amplifies the abilities. Historically, it's been primarily our physical abilities. And what the AI does, and it's really better thought of as augmenting our intelligence, is it's figuring out new ways to dramatically expand and amplify our mental ability. As we're recording this, it's been about a week since ChatGPT Pro came out. So ChatGPT Pro is a $200 a month product of OpenAI, which for certain businesses I think is going to just be wildly cheap, including mine. So any kind of... I'm in a business including the creating of energy policy and arguments and this kind of thing. And this is something modern AI and specifically these large language models has become incredibly good at.

And with the Pro version, it's unbelievable in terms of just helping you make decisions, helping you solve problems. So I had a very complex accounting and legal question that I needed because I'm in the world of politics and there's always a question of what's lobbying and what's not lobbying, and do you want a non-profit structure or a for-profit structure? And I can just lay this out and it can give me the equivalent of 10 hours of a lawyer and then I can just run it by an actual lawyer for one hour to vet it and I save whatever it is, $5,000 or something like this. And it's of course much quicker. The thing is on-demand, it doesn't get sick, it doesn't make spelling errors. It's this thing. But the way in which we do this is the computation involved is incredibly, to call it crude is not quite the right way to put it, but it's like—

Jordan Peterson:

It's very energy-intensive.

Alex Epstein:

It's not nearly as energy efficient as our brains. It's not even remotely as energy efficient. And basically part of what it does is it just scans the entire sum, at least in terms of words of human knowledge and everything that we've ever created to find patterns in these very sophisticated ways. And this is where I'm no longer an expert, but the key thing is to amplify our mental abilities to our maximum capability right now requires this incredibly energy intensive thing that people are very, very excited about.

Jordan Peterson:

So our brains are remarkable not only for the fact that they're intelligent, but for the fact that they're insanely energy efficient.

Alex Epstein:

Right. And so we don't have... There's a lot of stuff in biology that's just insanely efficient that we have not been able to replicate with non-biology. And this is the thing. But of course, the great thing about energy is we don't need to be as efficient as nature at any given point because for a human in the United States, we have 75 times more energy used by our machine servants than we do by our own bodies. But with the AI and with the need for knowledge, what we're finding is there's no real end point to our desire to augment our intelligence and in particular in the realm of medicine, and then more broadly longevity. And this is going to be really paid—

Jordan Peterson:

It's one scientific discovery in general.

Alex Epstein:

But if you think about things like what are billionaires going to be willing to pay for? Well, how much are... If you have $100 billion, are you willing to invest $10 billion with a 10% chance that you'll get a five-year longer life? Probably. And I think that's a great thing and that's going to benefit all of us tremendously. But there's also just the whole phenomenon of creating, not just advising. Right now AI is primarily an advisor that's giving us advice on what to do. But as it becomes more of an agent model, then you can do more and more. Of course, nobody knows exactly how successful these will be, how much they'll proliferate, what their limits will be, what new capabilities they'll have. But obviously the world is very excited about it, particularly the digital tech world from a security perspective. We view it as existential, which I think is a correct read on it, given the power in every sense of this, including metaphorical—

Jordan Peterson:

And the rate of change.

Alex Epstein:

This is the kind of thing you want to be very much on top of. So for all of these reasons, there is huge urgency in I think, proper urgency in the digital tech world to—

Jordan Peterson:

Well, even to keep ahead of the Chinese, for example.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, right. And you're seeing that, and I think somebody like Burgum in the new administration, this is a big focus of his in particular. He's very sensitive to the national security implications of it.

Jordan Peterson:

Well, so it's lovely to see that when push came to shove, so to speak, that the big tech companies in the United States returned to their own narrow self-interest and made the right bloody decisions. Yes, really. It's really something to see—

Alex Epstein:

I'm not even so cynical about that.

I think part of why sometimes populations will have better conclusions than the experts at a given time, although I'm a big fan of consulting experts in a proper way. But you'll often have something like people will just sort of know it's not right... Like with the whole anti-fossil-fuel thing, even just in terms of common sense.

The failure of the net-zero agenda

Alex Epstein:

So I mentioned one development is the urgent need for more electricity and the recognition that fossil fuel expansion is necessary for that. But number two, and this is what you were alluding to with Norway, is the very conspicuous failure of the net zero agenda even when only barely implemented.

Jordan Peterson:

Right.

Alex Epstein:

So it's important—

Jordan Peterson:

Well, one of the scandalous elements of that is that there's no single town on the planet that runs entirely on renewables. There's no micro projects proof of concept—

Alex Epstein:

Except poor ones do, they run on wood and dung.

Jordan Peterson:

Right. Well, yeah.

Alex Epstein:

And they don't really run.

Jordan Peterson:

Well, that's the problem.

Alex Epstein:

They die.

Jordan Peterson:

Yeah, exactly. And the fact that electricity prices spike toward the infinite as the wind stops blowing and it's nighttime, which turns out to be a real problem if you happen to be in the winter. And then you need the parallel. The thing that's so bloody peculiar about that is that because these renewable sources are sporadic and unreliable, you have to have a backup system that has the same capacity as the renewable system when it falls to zero. And so what you have is a new system built on top of the old system being particularly catastrophic in Germany where they shut off their nuclear plants and now use late night fired coal plants to augment their unreliable renewables. I mean, it's complete insanity. Quadruple the price.

Alex Epstein:

And so this is a case where I think the general public was much smarter than say the New York Times, where the general public was like, "Wait a second, we were told to shut down these reliable fossil fuel plants and they could be easily replaced. And now we have all these electricity shortages and our electricity prices are higher. Maybe these two are related." And then the New York Times is like, "No, no, no, no, no. There's nothing to see here. Renewables are actually cheaper. They're actually cheaper even though we added a lot of them and our electricity got more expensive and less reliable, they're really cheaper.

And we will make up a number called Levelized Cost of Electricity that tries to calculate the cost of electricity if it doesn't have to be reliable. And so we'll tell you..." So there's all this mumbo jumbo, which I debunk in Fossil Future, like Chapter 6 type stuff.

But this is another thing where the net-zero agenda promised us we would be richer and then even just a very marginal implementation... And I want to stress this because we haven't even reduced the supply of fossil fuels in the world. We've just slowed the growth and we're having all these problems. So even just a very bare marginal attempt to slow the growth in net-zero has been a disaster. So that's number two.

And they're related because we have this clear demand that fossil fuels are needed for, and then we restrict fossil fuels some, and we start getting these big problems when we were told we would get big wealth basically. And then—

The need for technology-neutral electricity markets

Jordan Peterson:

Do you think there's any utility in the renewable energy sources?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah.

Jordan Peterson:

You do? Okay.

Alex Epstein:

Well, of course I mean, the obvious things are where they're already used in a free market. So with their off-grid kind of applications and that kind of thing. I think what we need, and this relates to some policy ideas, is insofar as we're going to have electricity markets, what you really need is some form of tech-neutral reliability or dispatchability standard where you allow the intermittent sources the chance to provide reliable electricity, but you require them to.

So just to give you an example, let's say in five years Elon thinks, hey, you know what? I can get solar and batteries to the point where I can provide dispatchable electricity. Or maybe it's I can get solar and batteries and maybe I'll have a few gas peaker plants as a backup, and I think I have this system to do it. I want to encourage that kind of thinking because you could imagine it could be possible, but you also don't want to burden the grid with somebody's incorrect idea. And most people's initial ideas are incorrect. So the basic way you do this conceptually, the details become difficult, but you basically say everyone on the grid has to meet a certain standard of dispatchability or reliability.

We don't care how you do it. You can do it with whatever you want. You're a black box, and we just demand certain standards of performance of the black box. I think that kind of model will allow you to have market discovery if any of these ideas are true. But unfortunately what's happened is people have made these crackpot claims that we can just power it with solar and a little batteries. And they've used all these false models that people like me spend a lot of time debunking, but then they just ruin the grid because what they're really getting is they have the right to sell unreliable electricity with no reliability guarantee at the same price. And in fact, the subsidy is a far greater price than reliables.

And so this would be the equivalent of the government passes a law and says, rental car companies have to charge the same for a car that works all the time and a car that works a third of the time and you don't know when, and actually you have to pay... Actually, we're going to subsidize the car that works a third of the time and you don't know which then actually is going to take money away from the reliables. What just happened on our grid is we give whatever pool of utility payments and stuff we have on the grid, more and more of that goes to solar and wind in part because of subsidies, because they can always bid. If they want a negative price, they can basically say, I'm going to pay you to take our electricity because we're giving them so much as taxpayers, so even if they pay the grid, we pay them way more than that. So it's just this totally screwed up system. But I'm not one of these people who says, we should just not consider solar. We shouldn't consider solar and wind, but we need real markets—

Jordan Peterson:

Yeah. Well, the fundamental question under that, it's got to be something like, well, why would we take off the table any potential source of innovation that would make energy more plentiful and more reliable, because we need it?

Alex Epstein:

We wouldn't. But with the grid, what we have is we have a monopoly situation. So you have to think of it in that context. Now, I think long term we could argue that we don't even need to have a monopoly with the electricity grid, but in anything resembling the near future, when you have government monopolies and you have insofar as you have these electricity markets which are not exactly markets, they're more like government pricing schemes. You need to orient those so that they reward reliability and they really value reliability. And right now they don't. So people talk about “all of the above,” which I think is a pretty bad term because you don't just want everything because it happens to exist. We don't want animal dung, we don't want wood, those are “part of the above.” You really want “best of the above,” and that's what you get in a real market. So with electricity, we need to create the closest approximation we can with a monopoly system of a real market where the lowest-cost, most reliable solution is allowed to emerge and rewarded.

How to think about energy in a pro-human way

Jordan Peterson:

Okay. So we talked at the beginning here when we were trying to structure this conversation, I remembered that you had written these two books, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and then Fossil Future. And I asked you if you were writing another book, and you sort of said kind of, but you're not. You're focusing on energy policy per se, and you wanted to step through the... You have five points—

Alex Epstein:

We have five kind of big objectives.

Jordan Peterson:

Well, I'd like you to go through those. And one of the things I want to return to at some point, because I don't want to forget about it, is how you view the role of nuclear power in this.

Alex Epstein:

Well, that's going to be one of them.

Jordan Peterson:

Okay.

Alex Epstein:

Let me lead into this actually by saying the way in which I think I am part of this change in the culture because it relates to the relationship between my work in the past and my work right now.

So I think if you think of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Future, they were really designed to create the ultimate guide to evaluating energy sources. Fossil fuels just happened to be the conclusion that this needs to be our dominant form of energy because there's nothing close in terms of cost, reliability, versatility, and scalability for the foreseeable future. But it's really about how do you evaluate our energy situation and potential side effects of energy, including climate side effects, which is the main thing people are concerned about, in a pro-human way. And the basic idea is that you need to be very even-handed. So you need to very carefully weigh both benefits and side effects of fossil fuels, particularly with climate and within side effects, you need to be even-handed. So you can't just look at negative climate effects. You also have to look at positive effects. And part of being even-handed is you need to be precise.

Jordan Peterson:

You mean like more plants? Positive effects.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, exactly. Things like that. Yeah, exactly.

Jordan Peterson:

Way more plants as a matter of fact.

Alex Epstein:

Right, we talked a lot about that last time. But then also, of course, open to things like heat, more heat waves and expansion of water and sea-level rise. And the idea is you need to be very even-handed. And so that's one of the core methodological things that I think I've encouraged people to use and that I think you're seeing more and more of, and people like Bjorn and Shellenberger and Koonin, I think have also done this. And then the other thing, which is a little bit deeper, is that we have to evaluate them in a pro-human way and be aware that most people are either deliberately, I think in most cases inadvertently evaluating fossil fuels from an anti-human perspective. And then within that, again, we talked about this last time, but just the sort of key ideas are, one is, when we're thinking about the Earth and what our goal for it is, our goal, we need to be clear, our goal could either be to advance human flourishing on Earth or to eliminate human impact on Earth.

And that the dominant goal guiding our policy is this goal of eliminating human impact as evidenced by the fact that the number one cultural political goal in the world right now is eliminating our impact on climate. That's what net-zero means. So our whole focus with the Earth is how do we eliminate our impact on it in general, and particularly with climate. And my argument is that's an anti-human perspective. In the same way that if our goal were to eliminate bear impact, you'd think that's an anti-bear perspective.

Jordan Peterson:

Well, and just get rid of the bears.

Alex Epstein:

Exactly. That's the logic.

Jordan Peterson:

There's too many of those damn bears.

Alex Epstein:

Exactly. That's obviously where this is trending, although they don't say that, right? They used to say it, but they don't say it as much anymore. They used to say, we're against population growth and we're against technology, but that didn't go over well. So then they said, we're just against climate change. We're against climate impact. And then you fill in the blanks, oh wait, the way to get rid of that is regress technologically—

Jordan Peterson:

And have no people.

Alex Epstein:

And have no people. Right. So there's this moral perspective of what I call your standard of evaluation: is your standard advancing human flourishing on Earth or eliminating human impact on Earth? And of course, I'm on Team Human here.

And then there’s the part you are most interested in, which is your basic premise about the nature of humans and our environment and what I call the “delicate nurturer” view, which is the main view that the Earth... Basically the un-impacted Earth is this nurturing—

Jordan Peterson:

Utopia.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, it's this nurturing mother that's stable. So it doesn't change too much. It's safe. It doesn't endanger us—

Jordan Peterson:

Harmonious.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, and it's sufficient. It gives us enough resources as long as we're not too greedy. And then human beings are what I call parasite polluters. So we just take from the Earth and we ruin the Earth. And my view is, well, in reality, this is all just nonsense. It's total pseudoscience, even though many scientists believe it, and in fact human beings are producer-improvers—

Jordan Peterson:

Many people who identify as scientists believe it.

Alex Epstein:

Well, no, I think even many real scientists do, unfortunately, because many specialized intellectuals are in the thrall of bad philosophy because they don't think about philosophy. So I think we're producer-improvers, so we add value to the world. That's why we have this amazing world now that's abundant and safe, even though the caveman had nothing. If the world were abundant absent us, the caveman would be rich and we'd be poor because there's so many of us. But it's the opposite. So we improve our environment in many ways. We've gotten rid of all kinds of disease and disgustingness. And then of course, we give ourselves access to natural beauty. We can decide to cultivate whatever species we want. If we love a species, we can make it plentiful.

And then the Earth is not this “delicate nurturer.” It's actually, I call it “wild potential.” So it's not stable, it's dynamic. It's not safe, it's dangerous. And it's not sufficient, it's deficient. And we need to impact it a lot intelligently to make it abundant and a safe place. And so when you think of fossil fuels in this even-handed way from a pro-human value perspective, and you get rid of this anti-human view of humans in our environment, it's very obvious that, well, this thing we've cultivated called “fossil fuel” is just this incredible net benefit because it just allows us to harness energy and therefore machine labor, all these machine servants like never before. And one of the things about energy is it can solve any problem including the problems it creates. So if energy creates a drought challenge, well, it can also create irrigation, and it can also create crop transport, even if it creates something like an air pollution challenge. It can also create the technology that can filter the air and if anyone happens to get sick, and it can also create the whole medical industry.

Jordan Peterson:

And God only knows how much that'll be augmented by the electricity-dependent AI.

The Energy Talking Points strategy: ready-made solutions to policy problems

Alex Epstein:

Yes. So it's, again, it's energy solving its own problem. So I feel like I got, particularly with Fossil Future, I sort of got to a level where I felt like I had fully fleshed out how to think about this in a pro-human way. And then to amplify that, we created this thing called Energy Talking Points, which people can see at EnergyTalkingPoints.com. And the idea there was: let's make it easy for anyone to make and understand these arguments. And I basically just broke every issue up into tweet-length points. And our target was politicians. So we wanted to make it easy for politicians to talk about this. And what we saw is once we made it easy, once you make it easy for people to say the right thing, they'll say it a lot more. So we saw even in this Republican presidential primary candidates like Ron DeSantis and Vivek making points, we've had a 98% decline in climate-related disaster deaths over the last century. This used to be a niche point that only people like me were making. And now it's something that you see it all over the place. So I feel like—

Jordan Peterson:

Right. Well, there's a good practical lesson embedded in what you just said that everyone should listen to very carefully when they're considering negotiating. If you want things to move in a particular direction, make it very easy for people to move in that direction. You want to do a lot of the work, a priority that would be necessary to help them move in that direction. If you go to your boss with a problem, it's very useful to accompany that with a solution that's thought through and already ready to implement. It's much more likely to occur.

Alex Epstein:

As someone who employs about 10 people, I’d say you'll be in the top 99% of employees if you come with solutions.

Jordan Peterson:

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Well, and if you have some idea about what a solution might be, desirable for you, coming armed with the strategy that would make that simply implementable and some indication that you've thought through the consequences radically improves your chances of success. Otherwise, you're just a pain. The kind of messenger that gets shot.

Alex Epstein:

And this is, I feel, and this is going to relate to what I'm doing now, but even in the realm of energy evaluation and messaging, I found it was a huge breakthrough to make it easy to be my ally. That was a breakthrough. And there's obviously tons more work to do here, but I felt like... I think of myself as either a practical philosopher, an intellectual engineer. I like engineering intellectual products that help people flourish. And I felt like my core work that I wanted to do here, there was less innovation forward than there was behind me in terms of energy evaluation. And of course, I build a team and there's a lot to do, but I feel like I had really, to my satisfaction, answered all the arguments on the other side, taught people how to think about this. And I was trying to think of, okay, what else?

And it's going to take a long time for this all to flesh out and stuff, and I'm going to keep working on it, but what's the next frontier that I'm interested in? And I do think that those of us, I call us energy humanists. I do think we've made a big difference. So like Bjorn Lomborg, me, Michael Shellenberger, Steve Koonin, and I think you've really taken up this mantle, as well. And it's really helped a lot. And I don't want to be complacent because we need massively to spread it, but in terms of what I personally wanted to do, I felt like there was a much bigger gap now to fill and potentially in a very time-limited window.

The true relationship between our environment and economy

Jordan Peterson:

Well, I really like your emphasis on the nexus between energy provision and human flourishing. I mean, partly you can make a pretty blunt case for that from an environmental perspective, even if you're rather radically environmentally oriented in that if you realize that if you impoverish people, which you certainly will do if you make energy expensive, if you impoverish people, you make them desperate and desperate people are not investing in a green future, that's for sure.

They're going to rampage through whatever resources are available to them in very short order. And so I got convinced of this, well, probably 15, 20 years ago when I started to understand the statistical data indicating that if you got people's GDP up, average GDP up about $5,000 a year, US dollars, that they started taking a long-term view of the future ecologically.

It's like, well, of course that's the case. Then I thought that's so cool, that means that you could work really hard to make energy inexpensive and people rich. And one of the consequences of that would be that people would be much more attendant to genuine ecological concerns, locally and over time.

Alex Epstein:

When I talk about advancing human flourishing on Earth, I don't draw a distinction really between our economy and our environment. I mean, I think it's actually all our environment. And I think of environment in a very humanistic way. Take a bird, is a bird's nest a part of its environment? I would say yes.

So I think a factory is our environment and the beach is our environment. I think we're just uniquely good at reshaping our environment to be particularly conducive to us. So when you talk about ecological thinking, I really think of that as humanistic, thinking about our environment as in how do we make sure that we—

Jordan Peterson:

Yes, I was still using that dichotomous perspective.

Alex Epstein:

So, you're looking at it from an advancing human flourishing on Earth perspective. But what you're pointing out is the more resources you have and the more time you have, the more you can have a broad... you can think about that in a broad way. When you're just freezing to death—

Jordan Peterson:

Yes, exactly.

Alex Epstein:

You just cut down whatever trees are around you and you burn them. What else are you going to do? Versus you don't think as holistically about your environment, not because you wouldn't care about those things, it's just you have a sense of urgency.

Jordan Peterson:

Yes, yes.

Alex Epstein:

Because once you're wealthy, you can think about things like, hey, even, hey, what would the ideal climate be? Let's leave a aside whether we are negatively impacting it. How can we maybe make more places like California? Or how can we optimize the species on this particular island for some particular goal? Or even, we really like, at home, we have a dog, and it's like, how can we make this dog really survive? Or how can we get rid of these mosquitoes? We don't like these malarial mosquitoes, the polar bears, they're beautiful, but we want them cordoned off so they don't eat us. We're really engineering the Earth.

So when you talk about ecological stuff, I think about it as this very long-term and broad thinking engineering of the Earth to advance human flourishing. Whereas the anti-impact crowd, that's not how they think of it.

So if you made that argument to them [about prosperity being good environmentally], they're like, "No, we don't want to impact it at all. We don't want eight billion prosperous people who have nice gardens and clean air. That's way too humanized in earth. We need back to the Pleistocene as the Earth First I think used to say."

So that's just to say, I don't like this idea of, oh, “from an environmental perspective,” because is it a pro-human environmental perspective or anti-human environmental perspective? If it's anti-human, they won't accept anything that involves human success.

Jordan Peterson:

Correction gratefully accepted.

The Energy Freedom Platform: fully worked-out pro-freedom energy policies

Alex Epstein:

Thank you. So let's go on in terms of what I think the big opportunity is. And so when I'm ... I'm very, I wouldn't exactly say hedonistic, but I'm very much an enjoying-life-and-work person, and I like doing things that are very beneficial to others that I really like doing. I'm not I'm going to be miserable for 20 years and everyone else is going to be happy.” That doesn't appeal to me much.

So I think I do as much as anyone for energy, but I like to enjoy it. And part of that is I like to ... For me, what's interesting is an unsolved problem that I think would be fun to solve that I'm not convinced anyone else is going to solve unless I work on it, which again, people can say that's megalomaniacal or whatever, but in this case, I think it was pretty clear there was an unsolved problem.

Which is there was no real pro-freedom energy policy fully worked out in the event of a pro-freedom administration and Congress. And so you look back a couple of years ago, and I learned this particularly, maybe we could start there, on the issue of nuclear energy. Because I'm just a huge ... I've been interested in nuclear and enthusiastic about nuclear far longer than I've been enthusiastic about fossil fuels. I grew up in a liberal environment, I was afraid of climate change and this kind of thing.

Whereas nuclear, I was never really afraid of the nuclear kinds of fears. I know you have your own background in terms of nuclear war, but I didn't grow up in that era. I was born in 1980, by 1989 we have the fall of the Soviet Union. I didn't really buy this idea that we're all going to be three eyed fish and whatever.

Jordan Peterson:

And that's also a concern that is many ways importantly separate from the issue of nuclear power anyways.

Alex Epstein:

Totally, because the nuclear power plants can't explode. That's a very fundamental distinction. The physics make it impossible to explode. But when I say nuclear, my focus is why is nuclear so stagnant? We had this ideal of too cheap to meter, what, back in the forties. The electricity is going to be so cheap, you don't even need an electricity meter at your house because who cares?

Jordan Peterson:

Be like air.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, it's going to be air. Even like data on hard drives. Think about how much that's gone down in price in the last 30 years. And yet nuclear just, it had this boom in the sixties, and then starting in the seventies and then the early eighties, it just totally starts stagnating. To the point where from the beginning of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in 1975, we went 48 years until 2023 until we had one plant go from conception to completion. And these were these Vogtle plants in Georgia. And they were just seven/eight/nine times over cost. They were just catastrophically expensive.

Everyone who knows anything about nuclear knows the policy is a disaster. You need to fix the policy. And yet I would ask nuclear advocates, okay, what do we do? If you were the president, what would you do? And they'd always say, "It's nuclear policy so bad, it's terrible." I'm like, okay, but what was—

Jordan Peterson:

It's pretty low resolution.

Alex Epstein:

What would you do? And then I started realizing, this is the problem, is that I don't really know what to do. And so even if I help people evaluate energy in a better way. Of course there are some things I can know how to do in terms of stop blocking these pipelines and stuff like that. But even at the resolution of, okay, what exactly should the air quality standards be and how do you determine them?

You can say, oh, this recent thing on ozone is ridiculous because it sets the level of ozone below the background level in some parts of the US. So how are you going to possibly meet that? Background ozone is greater than your ... But you could see these irrationalities. But there's a question of, well, how do you actually come to the solution?

And I just kept seeing this with every issue. And I just thought I don't know the answers. And it's not that nobody knows the answers, but that the people who know the best answers, in no way has this been put together in a usable, coherent way.

And at the same time, through Energy Talking Points, I had really proven to myself that, hey, if you can make it easy for politicians to do something, they're going to be a lot more likely to do it. A lot of these politicians want to do—

Jordan Peterson:

Well, someone might just come along and capitalize politically on your ideas. That's certainly a possibility.

Alex Epstein:

But they need to be developed. You need to have something to hand them. And I noticed when I would talk to them, would be too much vaporware, it'd be too abstract. And so then I became really interested in, okay, let's say we have a new pro-energy president and a pro-energy Congress, how can we be prepared for that situation?

Because if you think about, at a certain point, it became clear it'd be Trump, but even if you take some of the others like DeSantis and Vivek, that field was incredibly pro-energy compared to previous years. And I hope this is something that I and the energy humanists have contributed to, certainly in terms of the arguments available. I'm certain I've helped contribute to it. But we had this—

Jordan Peterson:

You've definitely broken the ice for those arguments at that minimum, at bare minimum.

Alex Epstein:

And then you see, in many cases, I know, people are using the exact argument and that kind of thing. But that was this situation where, even compared to Romney, who by the way, in many ways I admire, so I'm not trying to criticize Mitt Romney. But I'm just saying, if you look at the 2012 situation, where Republicans were in 2012, there was much less positive enthusiasm for energy, certainly fossil fuels. And much more friction in terms of: let's hold back fossil fuels for climate reasons.

With the crop that we had, and certainly ending up with President Trump, that was not the case. And with Trump, we saw in the end a central campaign thing was, let's unleash American energy. Which, that is to my energy ears, that's music like, oh, you want to actually do that because that hadn't been [the case with previous politicians].

But then I feel this obligation of, well, we, as in a country, we need to be ready for this situation. And I don't think we are. I mean, we in the sense of they did a lot of good things the first administration. So it's not like they'll do nothing good. But if you have an opportunity like that, you want to do as much good as possible, right?

Jordan Peterson:

Yes.

Alex Epstein:

As a citizen, I felt like, okay, what I can do is try to create a very specific platform and accompanying messaging so that they at least have the option of the policies. Because I've always said I'm never going into politics, which I'm not. I'm never going to have any control, but at least I can be the ultimate resource if somebody wants to take advantage of the resource.

And so this is the last year and a half has been developing what I call the Energy Freedom Platform. And this is a very step-by-step detailed guide. So I thought we'd walk through the high level.

Jordan Peterson:

Do it.

Alex Epstein:

Then we'll go into just some specifics because people can get a flavor. Because what I don't want to do is say, well, you have to be specific, but then just be high level. But of course, I sent you one of the internal documents I've shared with people the other day. It's like 125 specific policies. So we're not going to get into that. But I just want to ... I'll give a few indications of some of the kinds of specific things. Does that make sense?

Jordan Peterson:

Absolutely.

Alex Epstein:

And then just ask questions and interrupt.

Jordan Peterson:

Absolutely.

5 keys to unleashing American energy

Alex Epstein:

Maybe I'll just start off with the five key objectives. And then maybe we can drill down in whatever you're most interested in, because any one of these has numerous priorities and then numerous policies. But I'd say at a high level, number one is liberating responsible domestic development. So that includes all the pipelines, all energy production, all sorts of stuff

Jordan Peterson:

That's music to an Albertan's ear.

Alex Epstein:

Yes, exactly. So you have a slightly different set of obstacles, but in many ways the same kinds of obstacles in Canada. Canada is a total tragedy that I'm also trying to work on at the moment in terms of ... And in some ways, even much more of an energy tragedy, I mean, way more oil reserves than the United States, and could be just be

Jordan Peterson:

Provided with way worse policies. The mind boggles.

Alex Epstein:

I know. Well, that's the thing, a worse philosophy. But we'll focus on the US first. So it's like liberating responsible development from anti-development policy. So that's that one bucket.

Number two is ending preferences for unreliable electricity, which we talked about a little bit. But fundamentally, our grid, our policy is just totally punishing reliability and rewarding unreliability in the name of so-called renewability. So there's that.

Number three, this is a really important one, that there's not been enough work on to date, which is setting environmental quality standards based on cost-benefit analysis, on real cost-benefit analysis, including objective health science, not health speculation. That might be an interesting one to go into in terms of how that's done.

Number four is addressing climate danger through resilience and energy innovation, not punishing America. So the way we ... our idea is we're going to keep ourselves safe from climate by destroying fossil fuels, which by the way have made us way safer from climate. And then suddenly the climate's going to be nice to us, even though the rest of the world's not going to fall. We have this insane thing of we punish ourselves by destroying our fossil fuel industry and somehow

Jordan Peterson:

We'll set an example to the rest of the world.

Alex Epstein:

And the climate will be nice to us. Versus—

Jordan Peterson:

Yeah. Well, what you see in Canada, as far as I can tell, to the degree that there's anything remotely like logic driving this, is that, well, Canada has a responsibility to set the moral example that other countries like China could follow. Which do not in the least follow. And the same with India. And their economies that are of such a scale compared to say the Canadian economy. That example is essentially irrelevant.

Now, you could argue that the Canadian fossil fuel industry is comparatively clean in its approach, and maybe there's some benefit in that. But the idea that if Canada sets a moral standard, China's going to follow suit is egotistical beyond belief and it's utterly preposterous. Plus there's no evidence that it's happening. So that's a major problem.

Alex Epstein:

But I would say the key is really the combination of resilience. So the way you make yourself safe from climate is by becoming incredibly resilient. That's what we've already seen.

Jordan Peterson:

Right. That's only valid if you take that pro-human perspective that you described to begin with, right?

Alex Epstein:

Yes, of course, yes, yes.

Jordan Peterson:

There's much more practical things that we can do to keep people safe from climate change, let's say, than making everybody poor by making fossil fuels impossible to access.

Alex Epstein:

Yes. And then the other thing though, I mention energy innovation, countries can set an example insofar as they want superior forms of energy. If they can actually innovate a globally cost-competitive alternative energy.

Jordan Peterson:

Of course.

Alex Epstein:

Which is really the only way you can actually address a global issue that's caused by the cheapest form of energy emitting CO₂ in the atmosphere. The only way you can really address it in a remotely humane and practical way is come up with a cheaper form of energy that doesn't emit—

Jordan Peterson:

That doesn't do it.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, that's right. And you need to be a wealthy and prosperous and free society to do that. You're not going to run your economy into the ground and then innovate the new nuclear.

Jordan Peterson:

Absolutely. So what was the fifth one?

Alex Epstein:

And the fifth one is unleashing nuclear energy from the many pseudo scientific restrictions. Yeah. Which one do you want to talk about?

Jordan Peterson:

I think we might as well just go through them in order. I think they're all extremely interesting. And you can go into them in as much detail as you see fit.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah. I'll just highlight some priorities for all of them where I think the... And of course, by the way, if any politicians watching this or anything like that, email me, alex@alexepstein.com, and I’m happy to help with the details.

Honesty about the cost of carbon capture

Alex Epstein:

I should say one thing about, by the way, because I think you're always good at drawing lessons from things, about how to compile this. Because this is certainly not just me thinking in a room. Although I do think a lot in a room. I mean, part of it has been trying to find the absolute smartest people who had already figured out as much of this as possible. So some of what I'm going to say has been me or often my team. So I have a very brilliant team who works for me full time. They're all around the world. I found them in these very, it's almost like the X-Men, you just find them in these very obscure places. Like one guy—

Jordan Peterson:

Are the AI systems helping you now?

Alex Epstein:

Yes, they are, but I think it's going to be ... particularly they're good at the messaging part of it. So I was doing something last night actually playing around with explaining why I'm very suspicious of these CO2 capture schemes. And I was getting it to do the math on how much ... I wanted a set of talking points on how much we pay. I might as well tell you. How much you pay for the coal and how much we are subsidized to sequester the air, the CO2. Because people have no idea.

But it's basically, the math is one ton of coal generates between two and three tons of CO2. So it's more than it's mass. And it's similar with gas, but gas has twice the energy density per mass. So with coal, that means if you have a $50 ton of coal, you get paid $85 a ton to sequester the CO2. So that means you're on the order of $200 to store the air. So for $50 of coal, you're paid $200 to put the air underground. Is China going to do that? Is India going to do that?

Jordan Peterson:

Oh yeah, it's ridiculous, it's utterly insane.

Alex Epstein:

And so for gas, it's about half. So gas you basically pay for ... you can think of it for, you basically pay about half that much.

Jordan Peterson:

So it's preposterous economically. And that's on top of the fact that the ... What would you say a detached analysis of the cost-benefits in relationship to carbon emission has not been conducted properly. One of the things I just can't figure out, and then we'll get back to these five points, is like when I ... I've spent a lot of time looking at scientific data. And there's a pattern to doing that that works to some degree across disciplines. It's hard to know the details of the discipline if you're not an expert in it. But the pattern of evaluation is similar.

When I look at the carbon dioxide data as a whole, and I think, well, what stands out to me in this mess of consequences of carbon dioxide? I would say the thing that stands out to me most is the magnitude of global greening. It's overwhelming. And then I think, it's not only overwhelming in terms of its magnitude, so immense areas have greened. It's also the case that the areas that have greened tend to be semi-arid areas. And so when I look at that, I think, well, if you were looking at this neutrally, at least the question of whether or not that's a net good should arise because—

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, the CO2 on its own, leaving aside the energy that's coupled with it, because if you factor in the energy—

Jordan Peterson:

Just the CO2, exactly. And that's being accompanied by a 13% increase in crop productivity in consequence of the additional CO2 emissions. Well, that's just an example of the preposterousness of the claim that carbon dioxide sequestration is something that makes sense. It's like, well, actually that stuff might be useful plus it's really, really expensive to sequester it. You already made the economic case. That's devastating by any reasonable standard.

The benefits of having 100% integrity in political advocacy

Alex Epstein:

And this is actually a really important issue right now. Because I think one of the big challenges to what I call energy freedom policies is now thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, which is the thing that really set these carbon capture prices incredibly high, we have a huge portion of the oil and gas industry now lobbying to keep these very large subsidies.

Jordan Peterson:

Of course.

Alex Epstein:

The oil and gas industry was more consistently pro-energy-freedom before. But now when it comes to Congress talking about, do we repeal the whole IRA or do we part of it, there's a lot of very influential people are saying, "No, no, of course we have to keep the carbon capture stuff." And I think it's a wrong view.

But also people very much underestimate how valuable it is to be known as a truth teller and to have intellectual integrity across a lifetime. And I found this out, just as a digression, when I was... Many people interacted with the transition team. And I'm never officially on any kind of team. And I definitely wasn't there. But I remember I was making some recommendations. And one person on the team told me. By the way, I'm not taking responsibility for any given pick. I'm just saying I was one of the people consulted. And he said, "To make really good picks, we need outside experts that we can totally a hundred percent trust." And that's the way this person said he felt about me.

And I thought, that's interesting. Because I didn't even know this person, met him once a while ago, but he's seen me think consistently for 17 years in a way that's logical and not partisan or tribal or not pro-fossil fuel industry when the fossil fuel industry is doing something badly.

And when the fossil fuel industry tries to convince people, oh, well, it's good to subsidize the hell out of CO2 reductions for carbon capture, but it's bad for solar and wind, how are people supposed to take that?

Jordan Peterson:

Right, right.

Alex Epstein:

So I think short-term it feels like, oh, well, maybe we can keep these subsidies, and we were planning on getting these subsidies. But in the long term, you establish these anti-freedom things and you diminish your credibility.

Jordan Peterson:

I think you're pointing to the fact that there isn't a better medium to long-term strategy than the truth.

Alex Epstein:

Like quality is the best business model in the long term. But it's one of these things where it's a lot easier for the missionary to figure that out. Sometimes people talk about missionaries and mercenaries in business. And often the missionary, it's just like, you can't even do anything else.

For me, whatever, because I'm an entrepreneur, but I'm really just, I like thinking about what I think is ... I like trying to figure out what I think is right and then convincing other people of it. So just psychologically, there's no appeal to me of, oh, I'm going to say something someone else thinks is right and that I think is wrong and I'm going to make money. I mean, that's just throwing my life away and it's going to be miserable.

So it's like, I didn't do it with the idea of, oh, in 17 years I'm going to be a trusted political advisor. But maybe people, if it takes that to convince other people, like these trade groups. Because when I do Energy Talking Points, now we advise on policy, and I just find people just roll out the red carpet for us, they're so interested. And we do no lobbying, no public support, I have no affiliation. I give no money to anybody, I don't endorse anybody.

Jordan Peterson:

That's very important. Because what you did was you focused on addressing the problem.

Alex Epstein:

Yes.

Jordan Peterson:

And that was the focus and not the consequences of that. And you're pointing out that the medium to long-term consequences of that really couldn't have possibly been more positive. It took a long time, it's a long-term investment strategy.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, exactly.

Jordan Peterson:

But yeah, I found exactly the same thing, it's exactly the same.

Alex Epstein:

So it's just this thing where ... But I noticed these trade groups. I was in a meeting recently, and another person in the meeting might be way more famous and way richer than I am, but I feel like everyone in the room trusts me more because they know I'm saying what I think is right. Which doesn't mean they'll agree with me, but they know that I—

Jordan Peterson:

It doesn't even mean that you're right, but it does mean you can be trusted.

Alex Epstein:

In this case I am right.

Jordan Peterson:

Well, yes, fair enough, yes, there is also that.

Alex Epstein:

No, no, but yeah, no, it's like in just knowing that you can ... if the trade groups really came across like, "We really believe this and we're saying this not just because we're in oil or solar or whatever, we're in oil or solar because we think it's good, and we're going to only tell you what the truth is even when it causes us to lose some short-term subsidy," they would be so powerful.

Jordan Peterson:

Yes. Amen that, that's definitely the case.

AI’s incredible potential to trade energy for mental labor

Alex Epstein:

So I forget, oh, yeah, I was just saying, you were the ChatGPT. Yeah, it came up with this, and I just thought, oh, wow, this is going to be really fun in the messaging because you can just ... And even some of the Canadian stuff I've been doing, I've been using it. So yeah, people need, if you're in any kind of intellectual thing or really anything that relies on high quality decisions, you need, here's my free advertisement, Sam Altman, you should use something like ... you should just get whatever the cutting edge thing is because it's so much cheaper than people. And it really is replicating and replacing a bunch of human functionality.

Jordan Peterson:

Oh yeah. Well, let's return to that for one second before we go back through. So a point you made very early is that energy transformed into work has substituted for labor. And so we trade energy for labor. And now we're trading energy for intelligence. And intelligence itself is a labor multiplier.

Alex Epstein:

Exactly.

Jordan Peterson:

So the question is, well, is trading energy for intelligence a good trade? It's like, well, that's what we do, that's what human beings do, that's our niche.

Alex Epstein:

Is buying intelligence really cheaply a good thing?

Jordan Peterson:

Right. Right, right. Exactly.

Alex Epstein:

Well, it's a good thing for every individual who buys it, so in the aggregate, it's probably going to be pretty good.

Jordan Peterson:

Yes, yes. Well, and this is what you want to do when you hire someone to do a complex job, you're going to pay for intelligence.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah. And people are just so, just as one final digression, people are just so, they just don't yet realize how efficient it's going to be to use these things, not every application by any means, but for many applications. They have all these things like, "Oh, it doesn't always get directions." Oh, really? All your human employees always get the directions correctly?

At this point, ChatGPT Pro is better than almost any human you will ever employ in terms of following directions. It is really, really good in terms of just if you write out what you think, even if you say it in a circuitous way, it is pretty damn good.

And in terms of the output, this is another thing I think people don't get is ... For instance, I'll give you an example. I was running this CO2 thing, this natural gas CO2 thing, and I ran it with the non-Pro version of ChatGPT. And it gave me a false thing that was something like ... I wanted to know how does the volume of natural gas compare to the volume of CO2 generated? Because one way to think about this idea of let's use fossil fuels and capture the CO2 is you need to build a whole new industry for the capture of CO2.

So if it's a one-to-one ratio, if it's a one-to-one ratio of natural gas and CO2, then you need to basically double the size of the industry in terms of piping it and putting it under the ground. And I thought it was a one-to-one. And then I was in the airport and talking to ChatGPT Plus, and it told me it was 59 times. I'm like, that sounds wrong, but if that's true, that's crazy. And I was excited like, oh, wow, that's a blockbuster.

But then I was like, I ran it the other day with ChatGPT Pro, and it said, no, no, it's one-to-one which made more sense to me. But it's like, okay, yes, sometimes it'll make a mistake like that, but I don't go to print with that thing without confirming it by an expert.

But even if it's right 95% of the time or 98% of the time, you can often get, I don't have the perfect words for this, but you can often get the shape of what the solution will look like, even if not every value is correct. So you can get the idea of, yeah, you do need to build a whole new parallel industry and it would cost a lot of money. Even if it's your estimate is 50 times too high, you can help think through it.

So just the fact that it can make errors…humans can make errors too, but it can really help you explore territory and develop ideas very, very quickly. And then what you might find is that you make one or two errors at the end, but usually those are not decisive errors that throw out the whole project.

Because every thought process involves lots and lots of little assumptions and interrelationships. And if you get 98% of that right, probably the overall thing is going to be right. Probably a very small percentage of the time it's going to be, oh, there was one false assumption and the whole thing is wrong. I have yet to find .. It could happen. It could happen. So yeah, I think people are just underestimating how good this stuff is going to be.

Jordan Peterson:

Although not the people who are demanding more energy so that they can make faster artificial intelligence systems, they're not underestimating it. And that's why they're driven to—

Alex Epstein:

And they may be even overestimating certain things. And it could be we're back in five years and there might even be a bubble in certain ways. But at this point, it's obvious that for a lot of people it's going to help them. And I would just say as an entrepreneur who runs a small business that's very intelligence-based, it obviously helps me think much, much better.

Jordan Peterson:

It helped me a lot when I was writing my last book.

Alex Epstein:

Interesting.

Jordan Peterson:

I used the AI systems a lot. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. To sketch out research domains. You have to check the references. You have to make sure it's not lying to you. But you can do that. You have to be careful with it, and you have to interact with it intelligently. But yeah. And we've built specialized AI systems too, that some of them based on my work that I consult. Because, well, that's an extension of my thinking, and that's been extremely helpful.

How AlexAI is engineered to answer questions as Alex

Alex Epstein:

Oh yeah. I should mention AlexEpstein.ai is now free, so people should check that out.

Jordan Peterson:

Oh yeah. Okay.

Alex Epstein:

We're already having some elected officials use this for floor speeches. You can have AlexAI write you a floor speech. And so we've spent a lot of money customizing an AI. And in particular—

Jordan Peterson:

That's AlexEpstein.ai?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, .ai.

Jordan Peterson:

Oh yeah.

Alex Epstein:

And what it's really done is it's engineered with prompting that is very based on this even-handed and pro-human thinking.

Jordan Peterson:

So, you've built that ethos into it?

Alex Epstein:

Yes. And really, one thing it does really well is question assumptions. So it scans everything for, does this question or statement have an assumption that Alex Epstein would disagree with? So for example, if you say, "Hey Alex AI, how do we get to net-zero by 2050 as quickly as possible?" It doesn't just try to manufacture an answer. It says, "Would Alex agree that that's the right goal?" And it says, "Well, actually I disagree, I don't think this is the right goal, I don't think our"—

Jordan Peterson:

So, it will question the premise?

Alex Epstein:

Yes, exactly.

Jordan Peterson:

That's very funny.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah. But that's one thing we had to

Jordan Peterson:

That means it accurately reflects you.

Alex Epstein:

Yes, yes, exactly. It's just as annoying in some circumstances.

Jordan Peterson:

All right, let's go back to these five points.

Liberating domestic development: The need for radical reform of NEPA

Alex Epstein:

So in terms of liberating, so let's make sure to cover at least one of the big things for this. So I would say with the liberating domestic development, one of the key things we need to do is address what's called NEPA. I don't know if you've heard this term, you might've heard it. It's National Environmental Policy Act. This is one of the early environmental laws.

And NEPA is the thing, and I forget what the Canadian equivalent is, I think you just passed a new version of this that's nuts. But it's basically, it's a duplicative review process, that's what NEPA is. So it basically says, any agency that does anything, it has to also go through an additional review for its "environmental impacts" or impacts on the human environment. I mean, it's worded something like any significant impact on the human environment. And significant is not defined. Human environment isn't defined.

So what it means is basically... And then it has to do with federal actions, so it's like a major federal action. But what is a federal action? Is it anything where federal law applies? So originally it was supposed to be, okay, the federal government is building a giant bridge that's a mile long or something like that. Is it going to cause any kind of major damage or something like that? And you write a 10-page report.

Now it's become, every project imaginable is covered. And it can take 10 years. And one of the major mechanisms is judges. So NEPA has no official authority to stop anything, it's just a review thing. But people can sue, activist groups can sue, and they can say, "You left out this bird on your NEPA review." So you throw it back and then the judge says, "Yeah, you have to ..." So in practice, this is why we can't build any roads, why everything takes forever, why a mine takes something like 15 years to permit.

Jordan Peterson:

If you had put your five points here into one of these AI systems, could you ask it, for example, if we were moving in this conceptual direction what policy changes should be implemented, prioritized by their benefit to cost?

Alex Epstein:

I'll have to look now. When I tried it a year ago, it was horrible. But it didn't have search back then, it didn't have a sophisticated processing. So with the search, it would be ... It's a good thing, I'll do it right after this and see.

Jordan Peterson:

Because it's a Pareto distribution issue, there's going to be a couple of things you could change that are going to have a disproportionately positive effect, and everything else is going to—

Alex Epstein:

Now, interestingly with this kind of thing, it's often very efficient to just talk to a very smart lawyer. So lawyers that we pay, at the top end it's I think over $1,800 an hour, we'll pay lawyers. And it's worth it because you can just ask them, an expert in NEPA, an expert in electricity, what really needs to change? Because you often find that the thing people talk about isn't the thing that really matters.

Jordan Peterson:

Yeah, that's exactly my point. Yes, definitely.

Alex Epstein:

So with NEPA, some of the things are, one of the big issues is ... one of the big kinds of solutions is you can what's called limit NEPA to agency discretion. So basically the agency can do the NEPA review, but it basically decides, okay, we've done the review and it can't be challenged, something like that. And it's fine because it's the agency's responsibility to review the thing. You don't need to put everything in double jeopardy and just take forever and have outside people allowed to question your review. And basically if it's—

Jordan Peterson:

That just makes it impossible.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah. That's what it is. So that's this kind of thing where when politicians will talk about NEPA, they'll often say something like, "Let's limit the length of the process." Let's limit an environmental impact statement to two years or one year or what's called an environmental assessment to a smaller amount of time. But they don't fully get that you can still have infinite litigation on that.

Jordan Peterson:

Right.

Alex Epstein:

So even if you set a shot clock, if you have infinite ability to challenge it. So that's the kind of example where... And there's specific—

Jordan Peterson:

That's a fix that won't work.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah.

Jordan Peterson:

Okay. I'm going to guide you through these one at a time. So I think what we should do, is let's go through them one at a time, and you can hit the highest point. And then we can go back if we still have additional time. Okay?

Alex Epstein:

Okay. So that's the highest point for liberating responsible development, is really limiting NEPA's ability to delay projects, but addressing the real course—

Jordan Peterson:

Right, so that's a red tape reduction process?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, but it's the ultimate one. So if you're talking about DOGE, you've got to go after NEPA.

Jordan Peterson:

Yeah. Okay, got it. Because it produces this infinite, exponentially expanding network of litigation in the aftermath of the review. Right, so activist groups can weaponize it?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, have.

Jordan Peterson:

Yes, of course.

Alex Epstein:

It's their weapon. Yeah.

Jordan Peterson:

Right. Okay, great. The renewal subsidy issue?

Ending preferences for unreliable electricity: The need for a federal reliability standard

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, so the ending preferences for unreliable electricity. So there's a lot of interesting ones here. I would say the most important thing is that FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has to become laser-focused on reliability and secondary—

Jordan Peterson:

Right, that's a real conceptual switch?

Alex Epstein:

Which it hasn't done. So one of the major, so right now it's focused on things like climate. So they’ll review a project, and they'll say, "Is this project climate-friendly?" Now let me ask you, if you're approving a natural gas pipeline, how the hell can you tell, and climate as a global issue, and this is going to be de minimis, how do you decide is it going to add more GHGs ... It's not its job at all. It has no statutory right to discuss that kind of thing, but it is threatening all sorts of projects on the grounds. If I think this will lead to slightly more greenhouse gasses in the world or slightly less. So it needs to get out of that. So that's one thing, is it getting out of this whole set of issues. So part of that is the focus.

Jordan Peterson:

Right, so is your point there, that I think it's related to the point that you made earlier, is that there's going to be criteria for acceptable sources of power, and one of the fundamental criteria is going to be reliability? And—

Alex Epstein:

Well, that's actually, you anticipated what I was going to say next. So one thing is just get non non-electricity concerns out of the mix, except for safety. It has a mandate of safety, if your power lines are endangering people and this kind of thing. But FERC should have nothing to do with climate or anything like this. And this is going to be related to the climate thing, we have to get rid of the whole-of-government climate agenda. But then to your point, yeah, so it means exclusively focusing on reliability and cost and also safety, but then it also means it needs to do new things. In particular, it needs to have some sort of national reliability standards, which it doesn't have. There's a lot of complexity as to why, because technically FERC is not allowed to regulate what's called, "Generation." But the way, FERC oversees a set of institutions called RTOs and ISOs, RTO stands for Regional Transmission, it's Operator or Organization, and then ISOs are Independent System Operators, and they are these interstate entities.

So you'll sometimes hear about PJM or, ERCOT is not quite one of these, or CalISO, what we have here in California. But most of them, like MISO is a big one that'll cut across, say, Indiana and Iowa and multiple states like that. What's happening is these are electricity organizations that are supervising all the electricity among all these states, but they're imposing no reliability requirements on the states. So this is allowing certain states, like Iowa can just build a whole bunch of unreliable generation and then parasite off Indiana's coal plants. What's happening, because there's no real oversight on reliability, is we're getting a nationwide decline in reliability.

I used to dig deep into these things, what would happen is someone will put forward what's called an IRP, an Integrated Resource Plan, for their electricity, and their plan will be, "We're just going to build all this intermittent stuff and we're going to get the excess from the grid." But nobody's responsible for the grid being reliable. So everyone's making these plans to do unreliable stuff, and saying, "We're going to get the rest of it from the grid." But nobody's responsible—

Jordan Peterson:

Assuming it's reliability?

Alex Epstein:

But there is no grid. Yes, exactly. So that's a key thing, is they need to have some sort ... If we have this system, this regional system that we have, they need real reliability standards there. That relates to the concept I mentioned earlier of technology-neutral dispatchability standards.

Jordan Peterson:

Right.

Alex Epstein:

That means you don't prohibit solar and wind, but you require them to be firm or reliable. Then generators can meet that however they want. If they think they can do a solar plus storage, if they think they can do a solar plus gas, or solar wind, let them experiment, but don't allow people to sell unreliable electricity onto the grid, and then have everyone else pay for it. So that's—

Jordan Peterson:

Right, and compromise the reliability of the grid across time in a degenerating way?

Alex Epstein:

Of course, yeah, pay for it in the financial sense, but ultimately in the reliability sense. And the cost that we pay for electricity in dollars is nothing compared to the cost of unreliability.

Jordan Peterson:

Right.

Alex Epstein:

I mean, the cost of unreliability is, I mean, you can see it's literally death in a case like the Texas freeze. I mean, just imagine the grid goes out for a week, you don't pay that—

Jordan Peterson:

A terrible thing for an Albertan to think about.

Alex Epstein:

I mean, yeah, in any kind of cold, like where we are today is Hollywood Hills, yeah maybe. But even there, your whole system gets... The way to think about it—

Jordan Peterson:

Oh, your food's gone.

Alex Epstein:

... electricity ... In the way I think about environment, as in our environment is everything that affects our wellbeing, there's no more important aspect of the human environment than electricity. I mean that and maybe the roads and transportation system, those two things, without those, your environment is destroyed, you regress, the world cannot support eight billion people. So any threat to reliability is just such a catastrophic cost in terms of lives. Then in terms of industry, because if you start to have any kind of frequency of blackout, you just can't support any industry, which means your contribution—

Jordan Peterson:

Especially the kinds of industries that depend on being on 100% at the time.

Alex Epstein:

Yes.

Jordan Peterson:

Right.

Alex Epstein:

Which is why these tech companies, guess what they're doing? They're starting to not build things on the grid. They're starting to build things off the grid, because they can't ... So what's going to start to happen, and this is going to lead to outrage, is they're going to be partially on the grid. They're going to be sucking up a lot of electricity.

Consumers are going to have outages, and then they're going to learn that these companies are both taking reliable electricity from their grid while promoting solar and wind, and that they're building their own natural gas while touting 100% renewable. So to avoid this PR nightmare, they should join me and pro-freedom people and be pro-electricity and pro-fossil-fuel.

Jordan Peterson:

Right.

Alex Epstein:

So that's on the electricity-side, keep the focus on reliability, including federal reliability standards over the RTOs and ISOs.

Setting environmental standards: Correcting EPA’s bogus benefit calculations

Jordan Peterson:

Environmental quality cost-benefit analysis?

Alex Epstein:

I mean, this is such an interesting one. The core thing is you need to do, you need to calculate very carefully. So let's just start with the benefit. So the cost people can probably guess. You need to look at the full cost of a given policy. So if you're talking about, let's lower what's called PM2.5, let's lower it from 10 to 8, whatever level of microns they're talking about. You have to look at what is the cost of doing this throughout the economy?

They totally failed to do this for a number of reasons, but let's talk about the benefit-side. Because this is often something that trips people up where they think like, "Oh my gosh, I want clean air. I don't want to die. I don't want to choke." So people are very, very sympathetic to incremental reductions in air quality standards. But what you have to realize is those, at certain thresholds, those have little or no benefit, I mean with any kind of—

Jordan Peterson:

And they take resources away from other things that might be useful?

Alex Epstein:

Massive. So that's the cost. But just to give you a sense of how skewed the benefit calculations are, the EPA calculates that the Clean Air Act gives us $15,000 per household per year in value. Think about how much a household makes. It's like a quarter of their income. How do they calculate this?

Well, they have this whole system of dramatically inflating the benefits of things. Some of this is just using speculation, very loose correlation as causation, engaging in all sorts of speculation. But the most obvious one, which I think people are afraid to address, is what they call the value of a statistical life, which is an absolute scandal the way we do it. So the way they do it, is they'll say, every life, "We're going to sign $10 million per statistical life."

And people feel like, "Oh, wow, that's a lot of money. You must really value life. The higher the value you accord to life, you must be a really nice person." But what does it mean to give higher value to that? That just means you're willing to pay $10 million of cost per life saved, but that means you're willing to take away $10 million from everyone else to prevent one life from being saved.

Jordan Peterson:

Right.

Alex Epstein:

So even that should be suspicious because the average person maybe has $1 million of productivity throughout their life. So you're basically taking away the livelihood, a 10X livelihood takeaway, if only it were that good. Because how is the value of statistical life calculated? It is calculated by literally any delay of death, even a day. So if you can claim via speculation... I'll just use myself. I'm 44 now. Let's say when I'm 88, I have something that says, "Alex will die on Tuesday instead of Wednesday," then I consider that a $10 million benefit, and therefore I'm going to take away $10 million from everyone else, which is what they're doing in terms of things.

So it just leaves this insane looting of the economy in favor of these just totally, they're both speculative and then tiny things that no one would ever accept for themselves. That's the thing, you have to think of it as, "What would you accept for yourself in terms of what”—

Jordan Peterson:

What would you replace that with? Can you tie that back to the energy issue that we're focusing on? So the basic cost, you're making the case that the basic cost-benefit assumptions underneath many of the current policies are radically wrong and counterproductive?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah.

Jordan Peterson:

So what would you replace it with?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah. Oh, well, so you need two elements. So one is you need a statistical life year, so you can't do life, because what life does is it doesn't differentiate between a day and a 100 years, which of course as humans ... And ultimately you have to think about it like we would think of as individuals rationally, and then if you have some sort of aggregate policy, then you need to think of it that way. So one, is you think of it ... This happened with COVID, where people are like, "Oh, we saved a life. Somebody was about to die, but they can't see their grandchild because they might die a day earlier," or something like .... I want to see my grandchild, or even a lot of older people said, this is a perfect example, "I'm willing to take the risk because it's worth it to me to be around my family."

Jordan Peterson:

Right.

Alex Epstein:

People are willing to take serious risks, not like the risk of having

Jordan Peterson:

Like driving to work, for example?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah. Well, yeah. But here they're acting like nobody's willing to take the risk of inhaling a tiny minuscule percentage of a couple cigarettes worth of PM over a decade or two, or something like this. It's just crazy. So what you need is you need to measure in terms of life years. And then you need a value that's based on typical human productivity, because that's actually how we make decisions. If I'm deciding how much do I spend on medical care, it's based on my productivity. I don't get to say, "You know what? I really value my own life, so I'm going to allocate $50 million to keep myself alive for six extra months in the ICU."

You don't get to say that, because those resources don't exist. Resources are potentially unlimited over time, but at any given moment, they are finite. So to take them from one person to just allow people to have these irresponsible, tiny delays of death that they don't even ask for, and then wreck the economy and wreck the young, that's what's happening. So that's an example of you go from death, $10 million per death delayed to whatever lifetime productivity is for a full life of life years. And that already will just dramatically reduce the benefit calculation. To give you a sense, there's a really-

Jordan Peterson:

So you're basically making the claim, if I understand it properly, that the thorny problem of how to calculate the economic, the value of a life in economic terms, is just to turn to productivity? What you basically say is, "Well, the typical person has a productivity level of this amount, and that's how we're going to value their life from ... That doesn't mean that's what their life is worth." That's something—

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, that's a different thing. It's life-sustaining ability.

Jordan Peterson:

Yeah. Well, you can't translate that into economic—

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, and so there are questions of do you always use this in every situation? Are there alternative ways to use it? Because you don't even need to do that. I mean, you could also do other things like, "Hey, tell people what the general science is and then have them vote on, 'Hey, what do you think is a good standard?'" Insofar as you are ... So I'm not saying this kind of economic calculation applies to every situation.

Jordan Peterson:

Right.

Alex Epstein:

But when you are using it, it needs to be ... Your productivity is your life-sustaining and saving ability.

Jordan Peterson:

Right.

Alex Epstein:

And so for every individual, that's how we rationally make decisions about delays in—

Jordan Peterson:

So that's what we can afford to spend on a life, typically speaking, which is not the same thing as what a life is worth?

Alex Epstein:

It's not even ... It's really how much are you willing to take away from life-sustaining ability in order to limit this risk, right? Because that's...

Jordan Peterson:

Yes.

Alex Epstein:

And that's what people need to realize is that the number one thing you need to, the biggest risk is depriving people of potential productive ability. One reason is that you're not only depriving them of what you know they can do, but you're depriving them of innovation. This, by the way, relates to the whole externalities fraud, where people are like, "Oh, fossil fuels have so many negative externalities," they're not talking about positive, but everything that frees up human time, and that's really what energy does, it frees up human time. One of the things it frees up time for is innovation. Innovation has an incalculably large positive externality to it.

Jordan Peterson:

Right.

Alex Epstein:

Because you don't know when it's going to lead to the internet, when it's going to lead to a cure for cancer. So the government—

Jordan Peterson:

That's the economics, that's the economist's repose to the Malthusian biologist, right? It's like, "It's not a zero-sum game because if you free up time for innovation, you transform the territory that would otherwise be zero-sum."

Alex Epstein:

Yeah. Well, there's a question of is it ever zero-sum. I mean, the key thing to the Malthusians is they don't understand. They think resources are taken from nature, not created from it.

Jordan Peterson:

Yes, definitely.

Alex Epstein:

Then innovation is basically you're expanding your resource. You're expanding and amplifying your resource creation-ability through the discovery of new knowledge. I call this in Fossil Future, what do I call this? The, it's called, I call it ... Oh my gosh, it's been so long since I've read my own book, but it's like... [It’s the virtuous circle of empowerment vs. the vicious circle of unempowerment!]

Jordan Peterson:

You need AlexEpstein.AI.

Alex Epstein:

He would totally know this immediately. See, there you go. I'm declining in some way, and he's still going strong on fossil fuels. I can't run on fossil fuels, unfortunately. But it's something like, it's basically the vicious circle of a low energy life. Where you just have very little energy, and you can produce very little, and you have very little time and resources for innovation.

Versus the virtuous circle. What happens is once you get, or I often call it the hockey, you start to get that hockey stick thing, because what happens is you free up time that teaches you how to become more productive. That frees up more time, that teaches you how to become more productive and more productive and more productive. So in general, when we're doing environmental quality regulation, we need to, or standard-setting, we need to be deathly afraid of anything that impedes productivity. Because impeding productivity is impeding health, including life expectancy. That's not the way people think of it at all.

They just think, "The only thing that matters with health is I want to breathe in less smoke," and then I'll be a little healthier. Versus, "No, you want to create life-saving cures, and by the way, you can create air filters and you can ..." It's so stupid that we're just destroying our productive-ability for these tiny little reductions in particulate that nobody would notice. Which is different from the marginal benefit of if you have huge particulate pollution and you have the wealth to lower it, then you should definitely do that.

Or if you have a particular region that's very difficult, maybe you want to switch from diesel-powered buses, diesel-powered trucks to natural gas-powered trucks in a port. There are real reasons to do this, but any calculation you're doing has to be based on rational things. So that value of statistical life at $10 million, that's a total killer for cost benefit analysis. I want people to know there are 20 more of these. It's so bad the way it's done, but fortunately, I think we have solutions for all of them, but people just need to be aware of the solutions.

Jordan Peterson:

Yeah. Well, you can see why the approach that you're taking is difficult, because as you cascade down the levels of abstraction to the detail, the details multiply, and the complexity multiplies, right?

Alex Epstein:

But that's part of what's fun about it, is it's like it's a big frontier, but you also start to see commonalities. But yeah, it is, I'm still in the mode of, I mean, we figured out a lot, but I'm still, I feel like maybe two or three years from really feeling like I have a mastery of it.

Because there's also so many areas, it's not just ... But what I find is there's, at a certain level of understanding, you can absorb most of the, you can find there's always a level at which the details don't matter that much for the essential action. It's like in energy. There are a million things somebody could quiz me about energy technology, like something specific about the workings of an internal combustion engine, and they could catch me on that, but I still think I know everything I need to know about the workings of an internal combustion engine for purposes of evaluating energy.

So there's the thing of what details do you need to know to guide policy? It's a lot, but it's not infinite. One of the things I think I do well, is be very, for better or worse, I'm very purposeful in knowledge. So I'm not the most curious guy. I don't just learn about the world and just study a lot on my own. I have specific goals, and then I want to learn exactly as much as I need to achieve that goal and no more.

So I have these really weird gaps where if somebody catches me, it'll look like, "How could you ... I thought you were a smart guy, how could you not know that?" But then with the goals, I do feel like, "Oh, yeah, I either know what I need to know or I know what I need to know." So at the moment, I have plenty of gaps, but I also know, "Oh, here's the direction to go." But the direction is not, I'm going to become the world expert on every detail of the Clean Air Act, but I can tell you the Clean Air Act is a piece of garbage, and why it's a piece of garbage, and how fundamentally it needs to be reformed, Fundamentally, it does not allow you to consider the cost of air quality improvements. So that's a big flaw.

Jordan Peterson:

Right. That's a big flaw?

Alex Epstein:

Because you could literally use the Clean Air Act to justify killing the entire population, because it's a health benefit. Because you say, "We're going to get rid of all this particular emission by killing everybody," but we're not allowed to look at the cost of killing everybody.

Jordan Peterson:

So we don't want to program an AI with the Clean Air Act?

Alex Epstein:

Exactly.

Jordan Peterson:

Yeah, no kidding.

Alex Epstein:

Not make it an agent anyway.

Jordan Peterson:

Right. Climate resilience?

Addressing climate danger through resilience and innovation

Alex Epstein:

Oh, so I mean, this is the one that's pretty easy in terms of what people would expect, I would say, in terms of unwinding the whole-of-government approach and reforming the international institutions is a big one too, but maybe the one we'll focus on is ... And then of course unleashing all energy innovation, which we'll talk about nuclear, we talked about NEPA. That's key to all energy innovation. But let's see, what was I ... Oh, maybe the key one to talk about is the resilience itself, because the broader term I use, is called, "Climate mastery," so it's the ability of using energy and machines and technology and intelligence to neutralize climate danger and amplify or create climate opportunity or benefit. So an example of the latter would be taking—

Jordan Peterson:

It's like a definition of civilization?

Alex Epstein:

Yes, well, civilization is environmental mastery. We've civilized nature. People used to realize that. They used to not worship the unimpacted environment. They used to want to civilize it so they could—

Jordan Peterson:

Mm-hmm, that's because they had to live in it?

Alex Epstein:

Yes, exactly.

Jordan Peterson:

Yeah, that's for sure.

Alex Epstein:

If you live, right, people live in our mastered, civilized environment and they think everything they like about it is natural and everything they dislike is unnatural, is human-created. But yeah, so the mastery element, so we can do things like make a very snowy area into an expensive paradise like Snowbird, Utah, where I'll go snowboard a lot. That used to be a menace, but through climate mastery, we've made it a very expensive destination through the warm buildings and the synthetic clothing and stuff. So one point about climate people need to get, is there's not even really such a thing as a climate negative depending on your level of mastery. Because anything, if you have enough mastery, you can make use of anything-

Jordan Peterson:

I live in Scottsdale, right? It's a desert.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah.

Jordan Peterson:

It's really nice to live there because there's water.

Alex Epstein:

Right? Yeah.

Jordan Peterson:

It'd be a rough place otherwise.

Alex Epstein:

And at some point we'll be able to, people will customize the temperature there more and do all sorts of stuff. Hurricanes, if you could harness the energy of a hurricane, you would be thrilled every time a hurricane came around. So we have to have that mentality with climate danger, that the higher your level of mastery, the higher your level of resilience. And any given challenge ceases to become a problem, and it can in fact become a benefit. The snow can become a benefit, or heat can become a benefit when it was a horror before.

Jordan Peterson:

More endless sunshine in the desert for solar panels?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, but it's not really endless, unfortunately.

Jordan Peterson:

Well, yes.

Alex Epstein:

It's not like being out in space. If it were out in space, then it'll be a lot better, but then you have to beam it to the ground. But it's unfortunately not endless all the time. Otherwise. It would be nice. It'd be a lot better. We could make a lot more use of solar, which has certain advantages, like it's really cheap to make the panels, but its fuel source is very problematic. But if we take mastery, maybe an area to focus on is something like wildfires where, because wildfires is an important area of mastery, because it's the one where the green anti-development movement has most impeded us. So with most things, like we're not actually, people think we're more endangered from hurricanes, we're less. They think we're more endangered from floods, we're less. And a lot of that is we've at least semi allowed ourselves to master our environment.

Now, the more governments are controlling these things, we're leaving a lot of opportunity on the table, including we reward people for, we give them free flood insurance, so we reward them for living in disaster-prone areas. Policies like NEPA prevent you from being more resilient more quickly. So there's all sorts of ways in which we're not mastering our environment and making it climate resilient to the extent we could. I'd say DeSantis in Florida is a good counter example. He's very focused on the right kinds of things. Like, "Hey, let's harden our grid. Let's harden our infrastructure. Let's lower the number of days we have [electricity] down." He's very good on that. I think he has that kind of mentality, and that state seems very open to that kind of leadership, but around the country we don't have that as much.

But wildfires are this very conspicuous thing, where in many ways they've gotten worse. Where you'll see, certainly in California, we have these dangerous, out-of-control wildfires, and of course people jump to, "Oh, well, Mother Nature punishing us for our sins. If only we hadn't used those evil fossil fuels, we would have a totally pristine, lush forest that never caught on fire and never endangered anyone. So we just have to make a net-zero pledge and then we'll have no emissions. The rest of the world will have no emissions, and then the forest will like us again." That's Newsom's plan, more or less, basically, exactly his plan. But actually it's pretty easy to deal with dangerous, out-of-control wildfires. There are places that deal with this very well, because really they're dangerous and out-of-control if they have a certain fuel load, which is based on the amount of dead wood and stuff that's allowed to accumulate

Jordan Peterson:

We learned that in Canada when Jasper, the town of Jasper burnt to the ground, because people ignored, the federal government ignored the fuel load that was gathering around the town, despite repeated warnings.

Alex Epstein:

And you've seen, I mean, there are books going back decades talking about around the country, that this is a problem. The way I think of California is we've engineered through government-controlled land, federal and California-controlled land, and these green policies that basically say, "Thou shalt not interfere with nature," you've just allowed this huge accumulation of fuel load. You have often these huge unbroken things of forest, which people think are a good idea, but that's just the ultimate environmental hazard. The California forest is the biggest environmental hazard in the United States. If it were a company, it would not be allowed to exist, because it's such a big threat to just allow all this fuel ... It's basically building a forest-bomb, the way we've set it up.

[This was recorded in Los Angeles a month before the catastrophic wildfire damage that could have been dramatically lessened with better climate mastery practices and policies.]

Jordan Peterson:

Right.

Alex Epstein:

So we need to take advantage of fuel load management, including logging, which we used to be allowed to do. That's a hugely important thing. You need to have things like fire breaks, and we should really think of how do we engineer the forest so that it's really manageable. But that requires this pro-human way of thinking about things. I think this is an issue where Trump's definitely on the right track about it, but he recognizes it's the forest management thing. We need to be open to a lot of stuff, including ultimately, how much of this can, I mean, I don't know if the current administration or Congress will do this, but how much of this can be privatized? But you really need to start to think of certain forests as an environmental danger. You cannot just allow them to exist. You can't allow anything in a society to exist in a way that is a mortal danger to the human population

Jordan Peterson:

Mm-hmm, or even to the forest itself. I mean, one of the problems, as far as I've been able to tell, is that if forests are managed in such a way that that undergrowth builds up and builds up, when they do burn, which they will, they can burn so hot that they burn the topsoil out. So that's obviously not good for the long-term viability of the forest itself.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, I mean, there's a question when you're thinking, what exactly does that mean? The forest is just a collection of things. It's not like the forest is one little—

Jordan Peterson:

Right.

Alex Epstein:

It's not a forest being, but in terms of the forest for any purpose you would want it for, right? Yeah. But it's just we have this very religious un-impacted nature worship attitude toward forests in particular, I think. That's not what our ancestors had.

Jordan Peterson:

That's where the unicorns hang out, in the forest.

Alex Epstein:

I guess. I don't know. It's just everyone loves these areas like Alaska and the California forest where they don't go, but they really want them unchanged, and they're really willing to inflict a lot of harm on the local residents. Alaska is the ultimate example. Everyone claims to care about the Arctic. I don't know why you're so against development in a place where there's almost no life. Why are you so against that? The reason is because there's not much there, and it's always easier to oppose progress in a new area than an existing area. That's why they focus on it. But it doesn't make sense. Why are you against drilling in the Arctic? There's so little there. You'd be much more against drilling—

Jordan Peterson:

Is it’s white.

Alex Epstein:

It's white, but they don't want—

Jordan Peterson:

They don't want to get dirty.

Alex Epstein:

Exactly.

Jordan Peterson:

Well, it's something like that. It's a purity violation.

Alex Epstein:

But it's always, it's to your point, they're not in it, they're not near it. So they just have this fantasy in their head.

Jordan Peterson:

If they were in it, they would die too.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah.

Jordan Peterson:

Pretty quickly.

Alex Epstein:

You're like, if you go outside there, yeah, you're not like, "Yeah, maybe we do need some oil here to keep us warm."

Unleashing nuclear energy: Eliminating LNT and ALARA

Jordan Peterson:

Yeah, and quickly. Okay, so let's close with comments on nuclear?

Alex Epstein:

So nuclear, there's a bunch of different things, but at the core of it, the biggest problem by far is how we make policy with regard to the allowable amount of radiation from a plant. This is a very important thing. It's the same thing with the air quality issue. You need to set a standard that is overall healthy for human life. The worst thing you can possibly do, is set a standard so low that it has little or no benefit to human health, but a massive cost. And nowhere has, because it's always hard to limit the natural emission of something to near-zero.

In the case of nuclear, it's radiation in the event of some sort of radiation release. Because part of what they're doing, is it's not just radiation under normal circumstances, but radiation in the event of a meltdown or something like that. They do what are called Probabilistic Risk Assessments, but it's all ... And when they do evacuations, it's all based on how do you measure the danger of radiation. So you need very precise measurements of radiation, and then you need very rational policies for weighing those risks against any cost to lower them. And so on both counts we're wildly irrational, because we measure the radiation risk 50 to a 100 times too high through something called LNT, which is Linear No-Threshold. Then I'll talk about how we do the policy. So with nuclear, think about sunlight, right? Sunlight is, like many different substances and phenomena, it is healthy in certain quantities. It's benign or healthy in certain quantities, and it is deadly in certain quantities.

Jordan Peterson:

Right.

Alex Epstein:

If you go outside long enough, you'll get sunlight poisoning and die. Does that mean that any amount of sunlight is deadly? No, because there's a threshold at which it is benign, or even in the case of sunlight, beneficial, right? Because if you get no sunlight, it's bad. This is definitely true for radiation more broadly, there's a threshold at which is benign and even arguably beneficial. There are lots of interesting studies about places with higher levels of radiation that people seem to have less propensity to different kinds of cancers. It's very interesting, like the physics of it. But part of it is that the radiation, what's happening is it attacks your cells in a certain way, but then they repair, and it's like muscle-building. Do they actually need to be stimulated to a certain extent to do it?

Jordan Peterson:

It like exposure to immunological agents in childhood?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, exactly. There are different versions of this, but yes. So what's absolutely true, is there's a threshold at which nuclear is safe. But the model that we use to measure nuclear risk, is called Linear No-Threshold, which means there is no threshold at which radiation from nuclear is safe. So what that means, to use an analogy of—

Jordan Peterson:

So that's another zero-problem?

Alex Epstein:

But it's a really bad one. Because we set, what we do, is we treat it as dangerous at any level, and then we set the level, the allowable level to be 50 times lower than that of nuclear workers, even though nuclear workers have zero sign of any damage whatsoever from their level. So it's at least 50 times too low. So think about that. So this just is the thing behind so much stuff. You have to way overbuild it. You have to have all sorts of backup scenarios to just prevent this. So we need to change the LNT model. Then on top of this, what's even more irrational, is we have something called, "As low as..." The way we make policy. So we measure danger by this No-Threshold model, and we make policy by what's called a ALARA, which is As Low As Reasonably Achievable, which means we want it as ... And now you can ask what is “reasonable”?

Jordan Peterson:

Yeah, and that threshold would change as technology advances too?

Alex Epstein:

Alex Epstein:

Exactly. But it needs to be based on a scientific understanding of risk in the first place. So, if you make a reasonable standard based on a 50 times too low level, so you're 50 times off in terms of what's safe, you're not going to be very reasonable. And in this case, what they do is they basically say you can go even below. So, let's say the standard should be here, it's totally safe, there's no benefit in going below. They put it down here, but then ALARA says, "You have to put it even lower." Because there's no threshold, right? So, you have to put it even lower if it's reasonable to do so. How do they calculate reasonable?

If nuclear at any given point in time is cheaper than an alternative, then it is reasonable to increase its cost.

Jordan Peterson:

Oh, yeah.

Alex Epstein:

Now let's look at what happens in the 1970s. Well, how expensive is natural gas in the 1970s? It is very expensive, right? And oil, which was a major source of electricity, we had an energy crisis with the Middle East and around the world. So great, what do the regulators say? "Oh, well, nuclear is now too cheap. It's now reasonable to make it more expensive. So, let's even lower the threshold more past the point of no benefit."

But then what happens when natural gas and oil and coal get cheap? Do they ratchet back the nuclear regulation? No, they do not. So, it's an infinite upward ratcheting of totally useless regulation, anytime nuclear has any advantage. So, it basically prevents nuclear from ever becoming cheaper, and makes it prohibitively expensive. So, the fundamental risk model and the fundamental policymaking model are both broken. And so, we need executive actions announcing that this needs to change, and then the NRC needs to have a dramatic reform process, and/or the NRC needs to be scrapped, and we need to have something new. Or put it under the Department of Energy.

The power of being a detail-oriented public intellectual

Jordan Peterson:

So, what's interesting about talking to you? Well, I think first of all, it's a sense of relief, I would say, because it's quite remarkable watching you delve into the details. You differentiated the energy problem into five major tranches, and then you've developed this very detailed knowledge of each of those tranches, and it was obvious that we were just scraping the surface there. And it's easy to understand in consequence of talking to someone who's developed the kind of detailed knowledge that you've developed, just exactly why it is that so much public policy fails.

There's a lot of work to be done at the level of detail. It's very, very difficult to understand exactly what the obstacles are. And it's very attractive intellectually and morally to hand-wave at the highest level of abstraction possible. And that hand waving is part of the problem that causes all the impediments, or produces all the impediments that you've been describing. So, now you're hoping—

Alex Epstein:

Wait, just one quick comment on this.

Jordan Peterson:

Yeah.

Alex Epstein:

So, I think one benefit that I've had is the combination of being a fairly well-known public intellectual, and interested in working in the details.

Jordan Peterson:

Yeah exactly.

Alex Epstein:

It's a very unusual thing.

Jordan Peterson:

Definitely.

Alex Epstein:

It's a very unusual thing, because part of, at the beginning in particular, being a well-known public intellectual, particularly in energy, made it easy to get in the door and to talk to people. But then if it's most other people, most other people their business is a Substack, or their business is speaking, or they're writing books. This is part of why I'm not writing a book right now, I'm trying to write a new American energy policy and eventually I make a book, but I'm not thinking about a book right now, because that's a really hard focus and it's a really distracting focus, if you have a book deadline, or a book contract and that kind of thing.

But it's this unique position that I have, where I am well-known for the ideas, and people have a certain kind of trust and interest in me. But then I'm super-interested in the weeds, and I have a team that's interested in the weeds, and so when I can talk to any congressman or senator and staffers, and we work with, through Energy Talking Points, we have 500 staffers who get our stuff and are part of our group in one way or another. That's a really... In case anyone else wants to try it, then you have to have the motivation, because it's hard.

Jordan Peterson:

Oh yeah.

Alex Epstein:

And there's a trade-off, at least temporary, with public notoriety. And it depends on how much pleasure one gets from the public notoriety. And there's a lot that's great about public notoriety, including you get to meet a lot of interesting people, but my personal bent is I like the problem-solving the most. So, I like the public stuff too, but I'm happiest doing the problem-solving and figuring stuff out for myself.

So, that for me works very well and might work well for others, but I would just say that, yeah, if you're a well-known person publicly, there is this path of you can make a really big difference. And one of the differences I can make is I can make the market for the best political ideas being adopted into policy much more efficient, because it's been really easy for me to get to know a very large portion of the people in power and have a trusted relationship with them. And I think that would have been impossible if I were not publicly known, I think it would've been so hard.

Jordan Peterson:

Yeah. Well, you're straddling this weird divide between public notoriety, which is one skillset, and your ability to delve into the details of policy at a micro level.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah.

Jordan Peterson:

That's a very rare combination of interest and ability.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah. And the second one is definitely still in progress, and I need to give a lot of credit to the people that I work with. But I think there are all these smart people out there that I have met, like these lawyers that I pay, or sometimes I don't pay them, these people who have spent 30 or 40 years, and I'm the first person who's come to them... Not who's come to them, but who's come to them and said, "You know what? There's a real chance that if you explain your really good idea to me, an exact solution, it might become policy." And it sometimes takes a while, because they're so cynical, because they've spent their whole life coming up with these good ideas and knowing that at least for some piece of the puzzle, they have the solution.

Jordan Peterson:

They don't have the public face.

Alex Epstein:

How are they going to get it to them? It's not like Senator X will talk to them, or whatever. But Senator X will usually talk to me, A, because they knew me, and then now I and my team are a resource. That's part of what I'm excited about is the ability to be a clearinghouse for the best ideas. And once you have that reputation, then the smart people will say, "Oh, you should really talk to Alex. It's worth your time, because he can really get the ideas here." So, I think that—

Jordan Peterson:

So if policy-makers and other interested people are watching, well, they can contact AlexEpstein.ai?

Alex Epstein:

No, no, no.

No. Anyone can contact AlexEpstein.ai, but if you really want help contact Alex Epstein HI, Human Intelligence, which is alex@alexepstein.com, that's just my address.

Jordan Peterson:

And what about online resources, apart from the AI system?

Alex Epstein:

Oh, so there's EnergyTalkingPoints.com. I would say the most important thing for people is just, I was talking about Substacks, just have a Substack, it's free, it's just to share my latest stuff, that's where they'll get this Energy Freedom Platform. So, AlexEpstein.substack.com.

Jordan Peterson:

Okay, well, we'll put all that in the description of the video as well.

How you can help unleash American energy

Alex Epstein:

And I would say one more thing, so in case it helps people, in case people want to join us. One other benefit I have is that a few years ago I switched from just a public intellectual model to for the political work, I basically got it subsidized by creating a membership group where a bunch of people would contribute $25,000 a year, and they would like talking to each other and getting information from us, but they would agree to let me do whatever the hell I wanted, with zero control.

So, we now have 120 people in that group, so giving us a lot of resources, and on their deal, it is no lobbying, no representation, no control, and that's a very fortunate arrangement to have.

Jordan Peterson:

Yeah, that's for sure.

Alex Epstein:

Because that's what allows me to pay for all these really smart people, like pay a lawyer $1850 an hour.

Jordan Peterson:

Why do they pay it?

Alex Epstein:

Because they think it's right, I think.

Jordan Peterson:

Yeah, okay.

Alex Epstein:

And at this point, also these networks at a certain stage become a benefit just to be part of it.

Jordan Peterson:

Right, right, right.

Alex Epstein:

And now we give them free access to our consulting, which nobody gets except politicians. Now it's become a profitable thing to be part of Energy Talking Points, to give your $25,000 membership. And I think this is why most people do it, it's just they believe in it. And by the way, for half the people, they're contributing post-tax dollars, because it's not a 501c-3, so we have no restrictions on our activity. But yeah, people really believe it. And then they see it's an unusually effective group that we have. And it's like, I think at this point, people who see what we're doing are like, "Wow, you guys really are making it easy for pro-freedom politicians to adopt great energy policies."

Jordan Peterson:

Okay, so let's review, and for the people who are just going to be listening on audio. Tell me again the right places of contact, your email address, and then the other proper places of further investigation online.

Alex Epstein:

So, alex@alexepstein.com. AlexEpstein.substack.com, to just get the latest talking points. And then the two big repositories are EnergyTalkingPoints.com and AlexEpstein.ai. And so, anyone can email me, but particularly if you're a politician who wants help on this, we're actively working on this right now, and I work with a lot of people, but I want everyone to at least know about us as a resource.

Jordan Peterson:

Yep, me too.

Alex Epstein:

And certainly if anyone wants to join our Energy Talking Points group, you can email me, as well.

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