Reframing the energy conversation — my speech to a group of Attorneys General

My speech to a group of State Attorneys General on how almost everyone has accepted anti-human ideas on energy and environmental issues—and how to reverse this.

I recently gave a speech to a group of State Attorneys General on how to reframe the energy and environmental conversation from anti-human to pro-human. A lightly edited transcript and slides are below.

Read until the end for a demo of my newest AI product: AlexAI Gov, an extra-powerful version of AlexAI available for free to all government employees.

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Alex Epstein

Show of hands, how many of you think of yourselves as pro-human? Anyone think of yourself as anti-human?

Are you guys willing to be challenged? Because I actually think that almost everyone, Republican and Democrat, has accepted anti-human ideas that mess with the way they think about energy and environmental issues, and that’s what I’m going to talk about today. By the way, this has certainly been the case with me. It’s taken a long time for me to expunge anti-human philosophy from my thinking.

Today I’m going to talk about how to reframe energy and environmental thinking from anti-human to pro-human. I think this is going to be one of the highest leverage things you can get as attorneys, because the depth to which anti-human thinking has messed up these issues—your ability to think about them, your ability to argue them, how your audience is thinking about them—so even if you don’t think about them in any kind of wrong way, your audience does. I think you’ll find this enormously clarifying.

Certainly what I’m going to share with you today I regard as the root of the success I’ve had persuading a lot of people to think differently about energy and helping a lot of policymakers make better policy. I’m not just going to show you how bad the thinking is and what the anti-human framework is; I’m going to show you the complete pro-human framework.

And then probably most valuable, I’m going to share with you three powerful tools to apply that framework, including an AI tool that—I don’t have any fear of exaggerating—will change your life. And it’s now free to you, if you work in the government, it’s free to you. If you don’t, you have to talk to me separately.

Let me go into what I mean by framework, quickly. Framework is a term that’s used a lot—it’s not usually defined. I think of a framework as a starting structure. So you think, in a physical context, a building has a framework. The starting structure of the framework has enormous determination on how the building turns out. Same thing with a car. Same thing with any kind of physical object that’s planned.

The exact same thing is true for our thinking and our communication. Whether we know it or not, whenever we think about something, we have certain starting points in our thinking that then affect so much else about how our thinking proceeds.

When we have a conversation, we have certain starting points, and I’m going to go through each of these starting points in some depth. But just to give you a preview, one is called your standard of evaluation, which is how you view—how you measure good and bad. Two is your fundamental assumptions, how you think the world works.

Number three is your method of evaluation, how you evaluate and think about competing technologies, and then fourth is your terminology, and that involves all of these things. What words you use and what words you don’t use. There are a lot of words I would advocate you not using that we very commonly use—things like “renewable” energy or “capacity” of solar and wind.

Let’s start off with standard of evaluation. With each of these, what I’m going to do is I’m going to say what the issue is, I’m going to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the prevailing way of thinking, of using it, is anti-human, and I’m going to give you the pro-human alternative.

What do I mean by standard of evaluation? Well, standard is a measure of something, and evaluation is—how do we value it? Do we disvalue it? Is it good? Is it bad? How good? How bad? In particular, I want to talk about our environmental standard of evaluation. How do we think about environmental issues? What do we think of as good or bad, environmentally? The prevailing standard we have is really bad, and I want to show you an example of this.

This is a chart that I’m somewhat known for. What it shows is two things juxtaposed: so, one is the fact that we have rising CO2 levels—which I believe is caused dominantly by the combustion of fossil fuels—and number two is that we have an absolute plummeting in the death rate from climate disasters, which are the things that we’re supposed to be worried about by burning more fossil fuels.

What you can see is we have affected the climate in a certain way. At minimum, we’ve changed the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from a little under 0.03% to a little over 0.04%—and I believe it’s had some other changes in terms of warming and certain consequences of warming—but nobody has refuted that we are at peak climate livability.

You have never been safer from climate. If you think about today versus 100 years ago, would anyone here—from a survival perspective or even an enjoyment perspective—prefer the climate of 100 years ago? No.

Here’s the interesting thing, though. If you take most of our so-called “experts” on this issue, they call the present state of climate—and have for decades now—they call it a crisis. They don’t say, “We’re in a climate renaissance right now, but it’s going to turn into a crisis.” They say we’re in a crisis right now. How is it possible that we have maximum livability for human beings and yet it’s called a crisis? Anyone want to suggest an answer.

Audience Member

They’re saying the trends for the future are—

Alex Epstein

Well, that’s the charitable thing. That’s why—you said that they’re saying the trends for the future, but they’re not just saying that. They’re saying we’re in a crisis now, and the way they portray it is all this hellfire. The New York Times doesn’t say, “Yes, if it just stayed like today, it’s the greatest climate situation humanity has ever faced,” which is exactly the factual case.

What’s interesting is it’s not about the future. I mean, they do have views about the future, that it’ll get worse—and we’ll talk about why they think that and why that’s also a dogma—but it can’t be explained by a scientific prediction about the future. In fact, it can’t be explained by any kind of science, because the science that’s relevant is that human beings are surviving and thriving better in today’s climate, including from a climate death perspective, than they ever have.

So the only thing that can be happening, by people who know this truth—a lot of people just don’t know the truth—but for people who know this truth, is they’re measuring what’s good climate-wise and environmental-wise in an anti-human way, because if you measure in a pro-human way, we’re in a climate renaissance. It’s not just a non-problem, it’s not a problem, it’s a literal renaissance.

Their standard evaluation that they’re using, which I believe almost everyone picks up to some degree—is that a good environment, a good world, a good climate, is one that has a lack of human impact. Notice, the overriding goal of civilization until a couple of years ago was net-zero by 2050, and many of you have companies, many of your companies probably endorse this or associations endorse this, but that was saying our number one goal—they weren’t saying everyone has energy by 2050. They weren’t saying global human flourishing by 2050. They were saying net-zero by 2050.

That was the overwhelming goal that the most political groups—including nations, corporations, investment groups—that was the number one goal. Why? Because they’re on this standard. “Net-zero” just means no impact on climate, so our entire civilization was changing itself to focus on this goal of no impact on climate.

That’s a philosophical thing. It never made any sense from human terms. You would never tell your kid, “Hey, your goal in life should be to not impact the climate.” The easiest way to accomplish that is just to die, and that’s in fact where we were heading in terms of energy policy: this idea of impact is bad, North Korea is the ideal. That’s even too good for human life, for the ideal of low environmental impact. And so this is such a toxic idea, but we accept it all the time.

It’s called being “green.” “Green” means little or no impact, and the fallacy here is we should not be demonizing impact. Impact is how we survive. Impact is not a four-letter word. We absolutely do not want to minimize our environmental impact. We want to minimize negative environmental impact, but that qualification is rarely there.

The pro-human way of thinking of this is that a good environment is not one that is least impacted by humans but one that is most conducive to human flourishing. So, South Korea is a superior environment to North Korea. It’s a superior human environment, and I believe we should be thinking about environment in human terms. That’s number one.

Does that make sense so far? When we think about the world—we think about the environment—we’re thinking of it from a human perspective, not the anti-human perspective of minimized impact.

Just to give you one other way of thinking about this, imagine somebody came up to you and said, “My environmental goal is to minimize bear impact.” What would you think they were trying to accomplish? They’re trying to kill all the bears. Everything survives by impact, so if you’re trying to minimize your impact, you hate that thing and you want to destroy it.

We have a very pernicious phenomenon I call human racism, which is—racism is evil because it’s taking some aspect of human race and saying this group should be marginalized, but the anti-impact idea is saying we should all be marginalized. We’re all inferior. We’re all unnatural. It’s a very anti-human idea, and you see it everywhere.

Once you start seeing it, you see, everyone says, “Let’s minimize our impact.” If people say “minimize impact” in front of me, I don’t care who you are, I’ll say, “No, that is wrong. You should minimize your negative impact.”

Number two is your fundamental assumptions about Earth and humans. Here, again, we have a very, very anti-human way of thinking about it that we’re taught. One of the answers to my original question was, “Well, people are saying climate is going to get worse. That’s why they say it’s a crisis,” but no—they say it’s a crisis now—but they also do say it’s going to get worse.

Notice they don’t just say it’s going to get worse with climate. They always say it’s going to get worse, and their reasons change. Here’s a young Paul Ehrlich, who—can’t really say I’m so sad that his life ended in his 90s, because I think he ended a lot of lives very prematurely because of his ideas—but he was one of the people arguing, “Hey, we don’t have enough resources, including enough fossil fuels.” Basically, there’s not enough fossil fuels, therefore the world was stuck.

But then also, he and others argued, “Well, actually, there’s too much fossil fuels. We’re going to have too many fossil fuels and the world’s going to be overridden with pollution.”

Then it was, “Well, we’re using fossil fuels and it’s going to cause a cooling catastrophe.”

And then, “We’re using fossil fuels and it’s going to cause a warming catastrophe.” Notice that the reasons always shift, but it’s always that catastrophe is somehow inevitable.

The civilization we live in is always “unsustainable”—by the way, do not use “sustainability” as a term. “Sustainability” is a term that comes from—my background is philosophy, by the way, in case you can’t tell—it’s a term that comes from Marxism, and it’s the idea that capitalism is unsustainable. Capitalism is just economic freedom, so it means freedom is unsustainable, and yet companies and lawyers take over these terms. One thing I’m going to caution you against is intellectual parasitism. When your enemy has used terms and you don’t trust them, do not trust their terms.

What’s underlying this—we have this over and over and over. The world’s going to get worse, and yet it doesn’t just not get worse—it gets better, right? We have more usable resources than ever. We have a cleaner environment than ever. We’re safer from climate than ever.

So what’s going on is not just somebody’s wrong in a superficial way. They’re wrong in a deep way, and in particular, they have the idea that the Earth is what I call a “delicate nurturer.” So the Earth in its unimpacted state is stable—it doesn’t change too much; it’s sufficient—it gives us enough as long as we’re not too greedy; and it’s safe—it won’t threaten us too much.

This is the “Gaia” view—and humans are viewed as what I call “parasite polluters,” so our impact consists of taking from the Earth and then ruining the Earth. It’s the “delicate nurturer” versus the “parasite polluter,” and therefore when you see the state of development, it’s always unsustainable, because if we’re impacting things, including impacting climate, it can’t sustain.

So many scientists believe in “delicate nurturer” and “parasite polluter,” but it is total pseudoscience. It’s not even pseudoscience. It’s just the opposite of the truth. The truth is that Earth has what I call wild potential, so it’s not stable, it’s dynamic; it’s not sufficient, it’s deficient—that’s why the cavemen were poor, even though there were so few of them—and it’s not safe, it’s dangerous.

What do we do to it? We produce new value. That’s what we did with oil and gas. I’ll give you another trick question. Who here agrees that oil and gas are valuable natural resources? Raise your hands. Who believes that they’re not? I told you, it’s a trick question. You’re all wrong.

Was oil a valuable natural resource in 1850? No, it was a nuisance. You were trying to find salt, and oil got in the way or whatever—so oil is not naturally a resource, it’s not a natural resource. Human beings made it a resource, and that’s what we do, right?

We take the raw materials of Earth—which have certain inherent physical potential, but usually aren’t resources—and we turn them into resources. So we are producers. That’s why the world keeps getting wealthier and that’s why it can sustain forever—not just sustain, but progress. And so we’re not parasites, we are producers, and we’re not polluters primarily. We can pollute, but we also improve.

Do we have more clean water now than we did 100 years ago? Yes or no? Yeah, we have way more. Why? Because nature didn’t give us Evian and Perrier flowing all over the place, and then fracking ruined it. That’s a narrative that gets bought into. It’s just like, “Oh, we didn’t pollute anything.” Well, it’s a lot better than that. Drinking water is usually naturally distant and dirty, so what do we do? We use energy to pump it and purify it, and that’s a lot of the reason why we have a good environment.

When you see the Earth wealthy and us consuming a lot of stuff and even having quite a few byproducts, that’s not unsustainable. That’s ever improving, and dare I say the P word, it is progressive. I don’t know why pro-freedom people want to abandon the term progressive. Freedom is progressive. Anti-humanism is regressive.

Okay, so we have standard of evaluation, which should not be minimizing our impact; it should be what I call maximizing flourishing. And our assumption about Earth and humans should not be the delicate nurturer and the polluter parasite; it should be wild potential and the producer-improver.

Now let’s talk about our method of evaluation. So how do we compare different forms of technologies? The anti-human method is very stupid when you look at it directly. It just makes no sense how we think about fossil fuels. But it’s important that this was pioneered by anti-human thinkers. It wasn’t an accident.

Because the way we think about fossil fuels, and I kind of became famous for this, but it’s sort of the stupidest thing ever to become famous for. All I basically said is we need to look at the benefits of fossil fuels. There was this, whatever, $4 trillion industry and no one was talking about benefits; people were only talking about the negative side-effects, particularly in a climate context.

Basically, I said, well, this violates good thinking, because in good thinking we want to be even-handed. We want to look carefully at positives and negatives. If you’re going to the doctor, you want the doctor to give you the benefits and the side-effects of all the alternatives, and you want them to do it with precision. If the doctor only gave you the negative side-effects, that would be a very bad doctor. If they only gave you the benefits, that would be a very bad doctor.

And yet, what we see is this incredible tendency to, with fossil fuels, ignore the benefits, and then what I call catastrophize the side-effects, so make it seem like they’re the end of the world. Then often with solar and wind, it’s the reverse. Only talk about benefits and don’t talk about any negative side-effects.

The biggest violation of this—and the most unforgivable violation of this—is from what’s called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is the UN’s allegedly scientific entity for assessing these issues. They come up with lots of different reports, and these reports—if you ever have to go through them—are thousands and thousands of pages.

And the cliché point that conservative lawyers will make that is true is that the scientific claims in these reports are not nearly as extreme as what’s reported in the media. That’s true for sure, but the more interesting thing I think is that these reports are pure fossil fuel benefit denial. They don’t talk at all about the broad benefits of fossil fuels, but in particular, they don’t talk about the climate-related benefits of fossil fuels. Remember, we have an amazing decline in climate-related disaster deaths, which, if you think about it, is obviously related to having a lot of energy, which is obviously related to fossil fuels.

Who knows the number one climate killer, historically? Can anyone guess? Cold is close, but there’s a bigger one. Dung? That’s trivial compared to this. It’s drought, right? Because drought leads to famine and famine leads to death. So drought-related deaths have gone down over 99%, and we basically don’t have drought-related deaths in the United States anymore. But just 100 years ago, you would have millions of people—even not adjusted for population—dying frequently from drought.

Why don’t we have that? We have fossil fuel powered irrigation, which can alleviate a lot of drought, and we have fossil fuel powered crop transport, which, if you still have drought—you don’t need irrigation, people can still bring you food. They can also still bring you water. We can do the same thing for heating and air conditioning, for sturdy buildings, for storm warning systems.

Fossil fuels are fueling our mastery of climate. The way I put it is fossil fuels didn’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous. They took a dangerous climate and made it safe, and yet this whole report doesn’t talk about this at all.

It’s pure fossil fuel benefit denial. It’s a 1000-plus page report. They don’t once mention that climate-related disaster deaths are at an all-time low. This would be like a polio report that didn’t mention, “Oh, by the way, polio is a lot less of a problem than it used to be”—I think overwhelmingly because of vaccines and then also sanitation.

There are other examples, and one that might hit home for many of you is, when you think about health effects—so when people talk about health effects of fossil fuels, and even in statute, it’s often required that you do this—it excludes the fact that fossil fuels are the best thing that ever happened to human health, because they give us ample and healthier food and water, because they power modern medicine, etc.

And yet you can’t talk about—either people don’t talk about it, or even sometimes you’re not allowed to talk about it in EPA analyses because the Clean Air Act is such a bad piece of legislation. You cannot talk about the benefits, and yet the health benefits of fossil fuels, even just compared to particulate pollution, are so great.

The opposite—in terms of a method—you do not want to be biased; you want to be able to spot bias. You want to be pro-human and even-handed. And that’s really what my work does.

That’s really all my work is, saying hey, I’m going to measure good and bad by what’s good for humans, and I’m going to reject this anti-human idea of eliminating or minimizing our impact, and I’m going to carefully weigh the pros and cons of different forms of energy. That’s really all I’ve done. The facts are quite obvious and indisputable once you do that.

Let’s talk a bit about terminology, because all these bad ideas in terms of the standard of evaluation, the assumptions, the methods—they get embodied in bad terminology. One good thing about Fossil Future—I’ll give you some easier resources—is that it challenges all the terminology. You can see what I think is good and bad terminology.

Just to give you some ideas, I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, “minimize environmental impact,” because we survive by intelligently impacting our environment. So the idea of saying we should minimize it is bad. You want to minimize our negative impacts. The pro-human thing is you want to minimize negative impacts, but you want to maximize pro-human ones.

Another one, and this one is even more so, I hate, hate, hate, “protect the environment.” Protect the environment from what? It means protect the environment from us. “The environment” is a very sloppy term because it’s not clear whether it means a good environment for us or unimpacted nature apart from us—but it usually means the latter. It means “the environment” is the rest of nature and it’s superior to us, so we shouldn’t impact it.

“Protect the environment from us,” I think it’s the wrong way to think about it. We want to improve our environment. We want to improve it for us, so one way I put it is, I don’t want to save the planet from human beings, I want to improve the planet for human beings.

Another one—this is a little more subtle—is solar and wind “capacity.” Capacity means the ability to do something, and solar and wind are given these capacity numbers, but they don’t have the actual ability to provide it. It leads to all of this stupidity. So the real thing is solar and wind are intermittent fuel savers. That’s really their function in 90-plus percent of cases. They don’t provide you any capacity you can rely on, but they do save you fuel, and the question is, are the fuel savings worth the often very large cost of saving your fuel?

As I mentioned before, the mindset shift I would suggest here is just: be so rigorous. I know as lawyers you’re taught to do this, but I would say to do it even more. You want to be so rigorous about your terminology, because terminology frames so much of conversations, and the bad side, in my view, has just taken over all the terminology.

I call my approach the human flourishing framework—in terms of these four pro-human approaches—and I call the other one the anti-human or the anti-impact framework. Basically you’ll see it in my work, but I can just outline it really quickly here. Once you do this, it’s very, very obvious. The key is the framing of it, both in your thinking and your conversations, and then it’s pretty obvious.

Point number one is just—to decide what to do about fossil fuels and other forms of energy, we must carefully weigh the benefits and side-effects—so that’s framing it. Then just the facts are pretty straightforward. Fossil fuels for the foreseeable future will remain a uniquely cost-effective and scalable source of energy. I think that’s even more clear in the AI era.

The more cost-effective and scalable energy is, the more we can flourish on this naturally deficient and dangerous planet. That’s important, to not worship the unimpacted planet and to not condemn humans. We perfect the planet. The planet is not perfect without us, from our perspective, anyway.

Given that the vast majority of the world is energy poor, the world needs far more energy as quickly as possible. Any negative climate side-effects of our massive fossil fuel use so far have been way offset by what I call our fossil fuel climate mastery.

If you look at the mainstream climate science, it predicts levels of warming and associated impacts that human beings can continue to master and flourish. So there’s no idea of, “We don’t impact climate at all.” It’s just any plausible account of how we’re impacting climate will be fairly easy to deal with and does not at all justify restricting energy. Energy is the best thing—from a climate perspective and any other perspective—and so the proper policy is energy.

I think it’s quite straightforward if you frame it correctly, and this is true for any sub-argument on the sub-issue: you just need to frame it correctly.

So how do you incorporate this framework easily? The hardest—in that it costs you $17 on Amazon and it takes a while, is reading Fossil Future. You can get it on Audible, too. I spent 16 hours reading that thing—I mean, I spent way more than that, but it’s 16 hours to listen to. Reading Fossil Future, that’s the most comprehensive, and for people who’ve really internalized it, it’s a benefit, but it is hard.

The much easier thing is, we have a resource, EnergyTalkingPoints.com, which has thousands and thousands of very usable copy-and-pastable talking points on every issue.

A resource that I created last year is called the Energy Freedom Fund, which is a truly principled lobbying group where I’m the unpaid president, but I raised a bunch of money to basically hire lobbyists who have to do what’s best for energy freedom and have no accountability to any particular company or interest besides the interest of the country.

Then, finally, the one I really want to get you excited about—and I’m hoping at least a third of you take advantage of this because I worked a lot to get this thing available and to make it free—is called AlexAI Gov. For the past few years, I’ve been developing a public AI called AlexEpstein.ai, which you can check out for free—but much more impressive is my own private one called AlexAI Pro, which behind the scenes has allowed me to do a lot of the work that’s been successful.

I created a government version that is in some ways even better than the Pro version. So it’s free—and by the way, it’s available to all government employees, so it’s not a gift, nothing like that. It’s available to all government employees of any kind. If you’re a private entity, it’s not. You can talk to me about other tools that you can get. It’s secure, so we do not store any of the chat history. We delete everything after 72 hours so that we don’t keep any records of you, and it is by far the most powerful thing.

One reason it’s powerful is it systematically incorporates this human flourishing framework. So it’s been taught to think like I do. It has all my knowledge base. It’s just crazy lengths. I basically have a full-time AI team who does this, so you can do anything you can imagine on it. You can draft legal opinions, you can draft model legislation, you can write op-eds, you can create action plans.

Just to give you a quick demo, I’ll just show you a little video. Some of you are familiar with these false “100% renewable” claims, where Apple and others say, “We’re 100% renewable,” even though they’re using a lot of coal and natural gas, because they pay entities to take the blame—to give others the blame for their fossil fuels and give themselves credit for solar and wind.

I just wrote this prompt for AlexAI Gov, “Write a 1500-word investigative action plan for the state Attorney General’s consumer protection division to launch an investigation.”

The AI goes through a very extensive and energy intensive planning process to figure out exactly what the best way to do this is. It’s searching the web, it’s searching everything, but from my perspective, and it has a lot of checks in it to minimize the errors—it doesn’t eliminate the errors.

Again, it’s free to take advantage of, so all you have to do is—main thing is if you’re interested in this stuff, just email me directly and I can send you access to all these resources really easily.

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Email me at alex@alexepstein.com (ideally with your .gov email) to request access to AlexAI Gov. We will validate that you are a government official, and give you free access!

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Number one thing is that I think the framework is everything. I think that anti-human thinking has affected almost everyone’s framework, but I do think that if you apply the pro-human framework I gave, it’ll be really game-changing for your thinking and for your legal action, allowing you to do a lot more.

In particular, I think AlexAI Gov will get you a lot of the way there, and you can always just email us as well at Energy Freedom Fund, and we’ll help you as well. What I would like to see come out of this is lots and lots and lots of powerful pro-freedom actions by AGs that are made possible by the magic of framework and the magic of AI.

Questions?

Audience Member

One of the issues that we deal with in some states, including legislation, is this idea of attribution that suggests that all the evils in the world that are bad things—including storms and hurricanes and tsunamis—are all the direct result from fossil fuels. I’m curious as to your thoughts on that.

Alex Epstein

Yeah, so these attributions—this is Friederike Otto, and these other kinds of people, who do this—the attribution issue is a perfect example of some of the traps that one can fall into by falling into the other side’s framework. Because the way they’re framing it is that the thing that matters most in the world is climate change. That there’s a lot of devastating climate change, and the only question is, who’s responsible for it? They also have this assumption that the producer of the product gets all the blame and the consumer gets none, which doesn’t make sense, because the consumer is the one who asks for the product.

The whole way of thinking—the temptation is just to go and take Otto or somebody else and be like, “This is nonsense”—to dissect them just from a scientific perspective and say, “Hey, look, our understanding of geophysics is not nearly at the level where you can attribute any given portion of anything to any particular amount of CO2.” At most, what you can do is say, “Well, in general, CO2 has these kinds of impacts around the world and so we might expect this kind of signal,” but even then, most of the signal is in the future.

You can do this kind of analysis for those specifics, and you should, but I think it’s a mistake to let it be framed the way they’re framing it. Because the actual thing that’s happening is the fossil fuel industry—with the voluntary consent of consumers—has created an unprecedented level of prosperity, including climate livability, where the threat to human life from these storms is lower than it has ever been and will continue to get lower by every reasonable climate prediction. Thus, they obviously get a huge amount of attribution for climate safety.

Then, the question is, how big is the side-effect that they have? We know that it’s way less than the benefit, and the question is, how much less? How small is it compared to the benefit? That’s actually the dispute, but it needs to be framed in that context. The climate framing of fossil fuels should always be fossil fuels are making our climate situation way better, and we think about the side-effects in that context.

Also, one thing with energy in general and fossil fuels in particular is—you always need to factor this in—they have a unique ability to cure their own side-effects. This is where you can take antibiotics—and it’s somewhat of an analogy because you need to look at the benefits and side-effects—but if I give my son an antibiotic to cure some infection and it gives him a rash, he still has the rash, which is somewhat of a negative, right? But with energy, you can actually cure it.

If energy causes more drought, energy can also cure drought. If energy causes health problems, energy can also cure health problems, so it’s another thing where—it’s another reason why you can never look—you can never drop the benefit, because the benefit can literally fix the side-effect, which is not true of most things.

We have time for at least one more. That was a really good one. Yes, in the back.

Audience Member

Thank you for all the pro energy advocacy work—particularly engagement with policymakers—I think that’s really important. What’s your perspective on government involvement in energy policy through trying to shape markets through mandates, subsidies, things like that.

Alex Epstein

That’s a softball I assume. Yeah I mean I became most known for helping kill a lot of solar and wind subsidies last year, and I tried to kill everyone’s, I tried to best kill everyone’s subsidies, just to be fair about it, carbon capture, etc. I just wasn’t as successful as I hoped, but I at least killed a lot of the solar and wind ones.

Yeah. I mean, my view is energy freedom. I don’t think the government—I mean, fundamentally, the government needs to do certain things on energy for the national security of the country, but overwhelmingly what it needs to do is just get out of the way and have proper laws—including property rights and proper laws against pollution—and let the best technologies win.

There’s somewhat of—for electricity, it’s a little bit more nuanced. Now, I think ultimately you could have a private electricity system, but we don’t, so insofar as you have a government controlled one, it does need a management role—which it often fails at, by the way, and is manipulated. So you do need things like public utility commissions if you’re giving a government granted monopoly.

But even there, the goal is you want it to function as much as it would if you had a free market, which—just as one editorial comment—the so-called “electricity markets” are totally fake and they do not function at all as a real market would in so many ways. But the most obvious is that in their energy “markets,” they treat intermittent fuel saving from solar and wind as equivalent to the capacity. I know there are capacity markets which don’t compensate sufficiently for this—but you cannot treat an unreliable thing the same as a reliable thing.

I have two kids under two. We look for babysitters. Let me tell you, an unreliable babysitter who costs $20 an hour is totally worthless to me, because then I need the reliable babysitter as well.

And it’s the same thing for energy and electricity. You have all of these huge duplication costs, and you have screwed up so many things by allowing unreliable and reliable to compete and by misclassifying solar and wind as reliable “capacity” when in fact they’re intermittent fuel savings. So in general, totally free market, but when we have the government controlling things with electricity, we need to be really, really wary of phony, fake market things, and that’s a lot—let alone subsidizing, but even the way the markets are structured are a huge subsidy to solar and wind and a huge detriment to the country.

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