Modern WisdomCan Fossil Fuels Save The World? - Alex Epstein | Modern Wisdom Podcast 324
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,459 words- 0:00 – 15:00
We've lost any real…
- AEAlex Epstein
We've lost any real focus on human flourishing, so we don't even notice how good the world is. And when we talk about, say, polar bears, right? I love polar bears. They're actually my favorite animal, but it's crazy that we talk about polar bears, like, this polar bear has to move from one piece of ice to another and that should make us cry. But three billion people with no energy? Nobody cares at all. (wind blowing)
- CWChris Williamson
You're a philosopher. What are you doing talking about fossil fuels?
- AEAlex Epstein
Yeah, it's kind of an interesting thing. I don't know, you, a lot of people who follow me, probably not most people, have seen this clip where I'm in, uh, testifying in front of the Senate, in front of, uh, Barbara Boxer. Now, I'm from California, so she's my senator. And I give this whole presentation explaining why I think that some of the then Obama administration's policies were in the wrong direction, and she just, like, dismisses all of that and she just asked me, "Mr., Mr. Epstein," sh- that's how she pronounced my name.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- AEAlex Epstein
It's Epsteins but... "Are you, are you a scientist?" And I said, "No, I'm a philosopher." And she said, "Oh, well, you know, why do we have a philosopher?" And I said, "It's to teach you how to think more clearly." And that's really how I, how I think about it. I mean, my... So, my background is actually, I sort of was an aspiring tech entrepreneur until I was 20. I sort of went to very elite math, science, computer science high school. I was... When I went to Duke, that's what I... I was planning on being a tech entrepreneur, and actually fell in love with philosophy because I found that, for me, it was the most practical subject. Uh, because philosophy deals... You can think of it as three things. It deals with our methods, our assumptions, and our values, and we could go into any of those and we may end up mentioning all of them, but all three of those things are fundamental to, uh, every kind of thought process, uh, that exists. So, for example, like, the world is obsessed with renewable energy. Why is the world obsessed with renewable energy instead of, say, cost-effective energy or even low-carbon energy? Why renewable? And I would argue that's ultimately a value issue. People think there's a certain value in doing something that can be repeated over and over and over again, or something that is sort of drawing on more supposedly natural forces like the sun and the wind, versus digging stuff up from the ground. That's, that's a moral issue, a value issue, that's not an issue of... It's not, like, a scientific issue, but people think it's a scientific issue, and so it doesn't strike most people as bad that we oppose nuclear, even though that's a non-carbon source of energy that I believe is much more promising than solar. So, it's just one example among many of how methods, assumptions, and values shape everything. And so I... My goal was to be a practical philosopher, and so for the first seven years of my career, I just wrote about everything, and I was just trying to apply philosophy to help people think more clearly about every issue. So, things like cloning, foreign policy, uh, the economy. And then with energy, I... It was the first thing that I really wanted to become an expert in, and I think the thing that appealed to me about it was, this is the industry that powers every other industry. So, sort of like philosophy is the science that guides every other science, and I do think of philosophy as a science. Like, energy is the industry that powers every other industry, and so our thinking about energy affects, uh, everything. So, if we make a decision, you know, that doubles the price of oil, like, that has ramifications for everything in the world because energy is what powers our machines, and our machines are what, uh, accomplish just about all the productive work that exists in the world. So, that's, that's why I got interested in it and why I think philosophy has to deal with energy in general, and then how we think about fossil fuels in particular.
- CWChris Williamson
You talk about the fact that the fossil fuels/climate change debate has a lot of actors contributing to it-
- AEAlex Epstein
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... from physicists to climatologists to meteorologists to the numbers people to the policymakers-
- AEAlex Epstein
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... and quite rightly it's k- that thing about if you're in a dark room trying to touch an elephant and you could feel different bits of it-
- AEAlex Epstein
Uh-huh.
- CWChris Williamson
... no one really has that entire perspective.
- AEAlex Epstein
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
Is there a role on both sides of this debate, do you think, for someone to come in, like yourself, who is perhaps an all-arounder, and can start to pull together what all of this means, as opposed to just looking very narrow and deep within one domain?
- AEAlex Epstein
Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I'm biased, but I think so. And I think so in two different respects. So, one is just with any interdisciplinary question where nobody is going to be a specialist in all the different elements. So, if you just think of the issue of climate, I mean, it clearly involves or should clearly involve things like, you know, just all the physical things related to how rising CO₂ levels affect the global climate system. But then because the rising CO₂ levels come from using fossil fuels, it, uh, it involves all of our economy, it involves energy economics, questions like, can solar and wind actually replace what fossil fuels do? That kind of thing. So, it's clearly an interdisciplinary question, so you need, you need some sort of generalist who has, hopefully, good judgment to then survey the relevant experts and decide, you know, or at least make a good judgment, you know, what's the best thing? So, I think that's true and, and I do try to do that. I think the more important thing, though, that people don't understand is that it's very possible for almost everybody to be thinking incorrectly about an issue. And so I just want to summarize very quickly why I think almost everyone thinks incorrectly about the issue of, of climate, and this is independent of what the scientific facts happen to be. So, I'll try to make this quick, but I think it's important. Like, I think there are three principles of thinking about our impact on climate that almost everyone will agree with, but almost nobody uses. And so that's always an interesting situation where everyone agrees that it's right i- if presented to them, but nobody uses it. So, one is that we should think of cl- what we call climate change, or I'd say climate impact, we should think of it as a side effect of fossil fuel use. So, just like I think... You know, I decide to take a COVID-19 vaccine, I evaluate the benefits and the side effects. You need to do that with everything. So, when you're thinking of climate impacts, you need to not just think of the climate impacts, and certainly not just the negative ones. You need to think of the benefits that come along with them. So, that's one principle. And I think that's pretty flagrantly violated. People just say like, "Oh, let's listen to the scientists," by which they mean climate scientists, but they don't talk about the benefits of fossil fuels. But obviously we should. The second thing is we need to not look only at the benefits of fossil fuels in general, we need to look at the benefits of fossil fuels that specifically neutralize climate danger and can neutralize the negative potential impacts of rising CO₂. So-You know, when I take a COVID-19 vaccine, it has some side effects, you know, they're pretty minor in my experience, and I think most people's. But you still have those side effects. The, the vaccine itself doesn't cure its own side effects, right? And that's true with antibiotics and other things. But what's interesting about fossil fuels is they do often cure their own side effects, 'cause what fossil fuels are providing is energy and energy allows us to use machines to produce value for us. And so you see in the issue of climate, we can use, let's say, let's say rising CO2 levels cause some challenge with drought. Okay. But fossil fuels also power the machines that alleviate drought. So you have to factor that in. And when you look at the last 100 years, it's really interesting, 'cause over the last century, if you tally how many people are dying from climate-related disasters like extreme temperatures, drought, uh, wildfire, storms, floods, those are down 98%. So that's really astounding. Like, your, your likelihood of dying from a climate-related disaster is one-fiftieth of what it used to be, despite rising CO2 levels for the last 100 plus years. So that either means that the rising CO2 levels haven't done any net damage or that they have sort of been a net negative. But the positive of what I call climate mastery from fossil fuels has far, far outweighed it. So when you're, when we're thinking, we have to look at the benefits, but specifically the climate mastery benefits. And then the third thing, and this really brings up the issue of values, is when we're looking at the climate impacts of fossil fuels, we cannot assume that they are mostly or all negative, let alone catastrophic. We're certainly open to that possibility, but we need to be open to positive, neutral, and negative impacts. And so one example that I found very revealing, 'cause I didn't even think about it before I started studying this, is the obvious phenomenon of the fertilizer effect, which is that when we put more CO2 in the atmosphere, uh, you have a lot more plant growth. And it's really astounding how much global greening there has been that can be directly attributed to rising CO2. And in the history of the planet, it kinda makes sense because we're at about, we're less than one-tenth the historical high of CO2, and a lot of the history, the history of life on this planet where life really flourished was when you had plants big enough to feed dinosaurs and they needed a lot more CO2 than we could possibly provide. So that doesn't mean it's all good, it just means we cannot have the bias that it's bad. Even with warmth, we can't have the bias that it's bad. It turns out cold-related deaths, uh, exceed heat-related deaths by a factor of 15. And in general, and everyone, every climate scientist will agree with this, in general the way global warming works is it warms mostly places that are the colder, more polar regions of the Earth. It warms more during the colder seasons like winter, and it warms more at night, which are generally the times we want warmth. So it's not to say it can't cause negatives, but we have to be open to positive, neutral, and negatives. And what I see with climate is people have this assumption that if we impact climate, it's, it's wrong, it must be a disaster, and we should immediately get rid of fossil fuels. And I, I think that's ultimately a real- a kind of a moral and ultimately religious assumption. I think that, that the root of all of what I call climate catastrophe, and we'll go into the details, but is not that there's actually an existential catastrophe for human beings. I don't think there's any evidence of that. I do think we impact the climate a significant amount. But I think it's based on this idea that it's immoral for us to impact the climate. And when we do something we think is immoral, we expect it to be bad. It's a lot like religion where if you, you know, if you do the wrong thing, like if you violate the commandments, then you go to hell. And I think that, that the whole global warming climate catastrophe is really kind of a secularized religious, uh, hell narrative, because I think if you look at the benefits of the pho- fossil fuels, the climate mastery benefits, and you actually look at the impacts, I don't even think you can show the impacts, the climate impacts on their own are net negative. I don't think anyone could prove that, let alone that they're so bad that we should do without the energy that billions of us use to, to flourish and that billions more need.
- CWChris Williamson
Can you sink into that a little bit more? The perfect planet premise, I think you call it.
- AEAlex Epstein
Yeah. And sometimes I call it the, the delicate nurture premise, and I think of it as just so you get... The, I call the overall thing the, uh, the anti-impact framework. And so that you can summarize the anti-impact framework as it's mor- it's im- intrinsically immoral for us to, uh, impact nature significantly, and then it's, it's, uh, inevitably self-destructive. And so delicate nurture of perfect planet deals with inevitably self-destructive. So if we have significant impact on nature, then somehow it's going to come back to bite us. And delicate nurture is the idea that nature in its unimpacted state, so before we start allegedly screwing it up, is a sufficient, safe, and stable delicate balance. And so you can see this in something like, uh, you know, The Lion King, which I don't wanna... Which I like a lot as a movie in a lot of ways, but, you know, they talk about at the beginning, you know, the delicate balance and the circle of life, and you have this idea that kind of everything is in harmony, and then if you disrupt that, then everything is gonna sort of, uh, go to hell. And this is not at all... This is, unfortunately passes as a scientific view, but this is not a scientific view. This is just a faith-based view 'cause there's no evidence for this at all. If you look at the history of the planet, including human beings, what you see is nature is not sufficient, safe, and stable. It is deficient, uh, dangerous, and dynamic. It's the a- that's why our average life expectancy historically is 30. The planet is not a very nourishing place. It's not a very safe place. And so what happens is most of our lives are just spent trying to find some kind of nourishment, some sort of protection from all of nature's dangers, with very little opportunity for the kind of fulfillment that you study, uh, on your show. And it's only once we figure out not only how to use tools to make ourselves more productive, but how to use tools that have non-human sources of energy, 'cause our, we're very weak ourselves. Once we can make these tools that have non-sources of energy, namely machines, that's when we live in an amazing world, when machines can do work for us, like the combine harvester that can do 700 times more work, more reaping, uh, and threshing of wheat than the best manual labor. And I, I think of the world today as, as I think of it as an amazing place, I think of it an amazing place for human beings.... and I think it all comes down to machines because if you look at every, all the amazing value in our world that did not exist 200 years ago, it falls into one of three categories, usually more. Either is a machine, you know, like my washing machine or the heating machines or the cooling machines, like, that make me super comfortable, or it's produced by a machine, like my whole house is produced by machines, like hundreds of machines ultimately, or it's produced by time freed up by machines. You think of like what both of us do for a living, like, that's only possible because machines allow us to produce the basics so easily that we can have jobs like practical philosopher and, you know-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- AEAlex Epstein
... modern wisdom, uh, expert or whatever your exact thing is. And so I, people tend to think of today's world as bad and I think of it as it's not perfect, but it's, I think of it as an amazing world where we have machine laborers, like, serving us and making our lives amazing. And so much of what we experience as, like, the stability of things is only the stability of having mass machine labor. The, you do not experience nature as stable if you live in nature.
- CWChris Williamson
Draw the line for me between energy and that well-being then. The more energy that we produce, the more machines that we can fuel, and the greater the f- human flourishing? Is that the basic premise?
- AEAlex Epstein
Yeah. And so one way I've come up with to explain this is what I call the private jet problem. So I'll just speak for myself. I cannot, unfortunately, afford to travel by a private jet.
- CWChris Williamson
Me neither, both.
- AEAlex Epstein
Uh, a lot. Um, and why can't I? We have all the technology, right? We know how to do it. But it's not cost-effective, as in the value most people can get from it is not worth all the value that they need to put into it, including, uh, human time. So let's say, you know, private jet round trip costs 50 grand. Well, maybe it saves me five hours total or 10 hours total, but I don't, I can't make enough money to justify that. Whereas Tim Cook can, right? It's total... Or Warren Buffett, like Warren Buffett has a private jet called the Indefensible, but it's not indefensible-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- AEAlex Epstein
... because his time is so valuable. So for him, a private jet is cost-effective, but for most of us, it isn't. And one thing to notice about the modern world is it's a very rare phenomenon that a life-giving machine is not cost-effective. You take like a washing machine, a washing machine is cost-effective. Now a washing machine, it does take human time and resources to make it possible because we have to build it and we have to provide the fuel, the energy to operate it, but we figured out how to do so with little enough human time and resources where most of
- 15:00 – 30:00
So this- …
- AEAlex Epstein
us can afford it, although there are billions of people who can't, and that's why I say we need even more, uh, cost-effective energy. So the idea is that the more cost-effective machine labor is, the more, the more we can benefit from machines. When it's not cost-effective, it doesn't matter if it exists, we can't, uh, benefit from it just like in previous generations, you know, people like kings had a lot of our modern standard of living, not all of it, but a lot of it, but it wasn't cost-effective to provide. It required basically abusing human beings as machines. So cost-effective machine labor is like the key to everything and the key to cost-effective machine labor is cost-effective energy because the energy is the food for the machines. And, and it's, one way, w- we just want to make sure, so you think of the private jet, it's not just the fuel of the private jet, although that is very expensive and that's a big variable. You have to think what made the private jet, and the private jet was ultimately made by thousands of different machines. If you think about the machines that mined for the materials and processed the materials and transported them and manufactured them, et cetera, et cetera. So if you think of every machine that we have as the product of thousands of machines, that machine not only uses the energy it operates on, but the machine, the energy the thousands of machines operated on to make it. And so you get this idea that the cost of energy determines the cost of everything. So if we have energy that is super cost-effective, and, and I think of it as it's low cost, it's on demand, it's versatile, so it can power every kind of machine, and it's on a global scale of billions of people and thousands of places, if you can produce energy with that kind of ultra-cost effectiveness, then you have billions of people who can benefit from the miracle of machine labor. But if you double, triple, quadruple the price of energy, then more and more of our amazing machines become like private jets.
- CWChris Williamson
So this-
- AEAlex Epstein
They're inaccessible.
- CWChris Williamson
... this sounds great. It sounds, yeah, I- I want modern world with loads of things done for me so that I can spend time on myself, but you haven't talked about any of the externalities, and there's this-
- AEAlex Epstein
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... many, many, many stats and many people who are probably part of the green movement who are listening now who are thinking, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great, Alex, but the acidification of the oceans and the melting of the ice caps and the polar bears are losing their homes and we're polluting and there's smog-"
- AEAlex Epstein
Uh-huh.
- CWChris Williamson
"... and 97% of climate scientists say that climate change is real." Wh- how can you lay out some, some insights to do with fossil fuels' externalities that might surprise people?
- AEAlex Epstein
Sure. I mean, it, it come... And then there's also, you know, the other thing they'll raise is, well, can't we do it without fossil fuels? So we can talk about that as well, like, let's not use fossil fuels, let's use these, um, uh, other sources, which I'd be in favor of if, if you could. I'm in favor of anything that's, that's better. But if, yeah, we talk about what's called the externalities, the first thing I want to observe about this whole externalities perspective is it, is it violates the, the principles that I talked about, uh, at the beginning. So when people are talking about the externalities, that's ano- that's kind of a technical way, and it's the negative externalities, notice. That's a technical way of saying we're going to ignore the benefits and we're just gonna focus on, uh, the negative side effects. If you think of the positive externalities of fossil fuels, like take something like the existence of the modern internet, like when we were, when people were paying for coal in the 1970s and 1980s, which provided the vast majority of electricity, so people would say, "Oh, that is a negative externality because it puts CO2 in the atmosphere and that's causing warming," and we can talk about the consequence of that. But what about the positive externality of all of the time and machines freed up for innovation that made possible the internet?... and then all the things the internet has made possible (laughs) in terms of medicine. And just think about like how many people are alive right now with something like COVID-19 because of the internet, because of the knowledge that's disseminated, because of, you know, the rapid ability to develop an mRNA a- a vaccine. Like, all of that came from the coal industry, and yet all of these so-called economists, I mean, they're, they are economists, but I think they, they have the same kinds of prejudices as everyone else, philosophically. So they're so focused on the negative externalities, they can't see, uh, the positive externalities. There's also, I'll try to make this point quickly, there's kind of a technical point about externalities that some people might be interested in. Um, ex- externalities is like, the basic idea of externalities is that certain kinds of negatives and actually positives aren't reflected in the price of the thing, and so then it, some economist or economist king should, like, manipulate the prices. But there's a core reason this is a really bad idea, because that assumes that the price of the thing reflects the value of the thing. But the prices of things don't reflect the value of things, they reflect the value that very, that certain people, they reflect the minimum value of things to people. Like, you wouldn't pay it if it wasn't worth it to you. But you think about oil, like, when my life gets s- if I get pulled by a helicopter to a hospital, what was that oil worth to me? Was that worth $3 a gallon? No. I would pay, uh, whatever I have, right? So part of what's going on with ignoring the benefits of fossil fuels with this kind of pseudo-scientific, pseudo-economic externality thing is we're ignoring the fact that the value we get from fossil fuels is far, far greater than the price we pay from fossil fuels, which is not the same, say, compared to, like, Barbie dolls. Although, for some people, you know, that may be their life. So there's all of these dynamics that are causing people to ignore the truth that the benefit we get from fossil fuels far, far outweighs the side effects, and then the other thing there I would, I would point out, so I think of it as, let's just say I'm right and, and we'll talk about it in a minute, that there is no near-term replacement for fossil fuels, so that to have this ultra-cost-effective energy that's low cost, on demand, versatile, global scale, like, there's no other way to do it without fossil fuels. I, I can prove that later, but I ca- th- like, if I'm right, then to justify restricting fossil fuel use in a world where three billion people have virtually no energy and three billion more have amounts of energy you and I would consider completely unacceptable, like, you would need to prove, like, a total cataclysm from CO2 to justify depriving people of energy. Energy is that important. So I think that's how we should go into the question of side effects, and the fact that 99.9% of people, including climate scientists, don't look at it that way, they don't look at it as, "Oh, fossil fuels make our world possible," including they make it livable as we know it, including we're only as safe from climate as we are because of fossil fuels, th- that just shows that there's this whole bias against, against the benefits and only looking at the side effects. And then if you look at the side effects, you need to really look at them from a human perspective. Are they bad? And you need to be precise about them and you need to look for positive, neutral, and negative. So if, you know, you went through various things like, uh, the polar bears is one where, you know, the populations are growing, and in some ways, in a way that's dangerous to people. And so one thing that's kinda dishonest is people ignore that narrative. Like, they brought up polar bears when it seemed like they were gonna shrink, but then when they didn't, nobody brought them up and were like, "Oh, I'm so happy. I'm so h-" Like Al Gore, there's this meme, like, you know, when Al Gore was born, there were only 7,000 polar bears, now only 40,000 remain.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- AEAlex Epstein
You know, that kinda thing. So there's just this whole bias, um, so I forget the other categories you, you, you brought up, like-
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, so acidi- acidification of the seas, coral reefs being destroyed.
- AEAlex Epstein
Yeah, okay, let's, let's deal with that one. So acidification, so this is interesting term for a supposedly scientific movement. Acid has a very definite meaning on the pH scale, so it's, like, lower than seven. So seven is neutral, you know, above seven is alkaline or basic. And so you're talking about the oceans going from about 8.2 to 8.1, so you should call it neutralization, uh, not acidification. So it's used to, like, act like, oh, it's acid, um, and so there's a real question of why do we expect that going from 8.2 to 8.1 is going to be a catastrophe at all, let alone that justifies depriving billions of people, uh, of energy? Why do we think that way? And I think part of it is we don't, um, and to the value issue, I don't think we value human life and human flourishing enough in these things. So we could talk about that, but definitely it's a delicate nurture premise. The idea that, oh, the ocean that we inherited was this perfect, delicate balance, and if anything changes in the pH, everything is gonna go to hell. If you just look at the history of the planet, this makes absolutely no sense, because the oceans were much more neutral in the past when you had explosions of life. Ocean species deal with much more dramatic shifts in the pH than we're talking about. They don't, it's like temperature. You don't deal with one temperature, you don't deal with one pH, you deal with a range. So a shift in temperature is a shift in the range and a shift in pH is a shift in the range. And also, some of the most prolific seas in the world are the, are the closest to neutral in the world. So I, I think it really is coming from this philosophical or religious perspective that we expect it to be bad. And then where scientists fit in is you can have, like, selective science where the government says, "Hey, I really want to see some negative consequences of fossil fuels. Can you, what can you show me in the ocean?" And of course there are gonna be a bunch of negative consequences in the ocean, e- I mean, even real ones, right? Any change is gonna have certain kinds of negatives. But the, the question is are you getting the full picture and is this anything on the level that we should be, consider depriving people of energy? Is it even possible that it's on the level of the amount of benefit we get from global greening on the land? Which nobody wants to talk about. So notice, they only wanna talk about the things that are negative about fossil fuels and not positive, and they have no concern about depriving billions of people, uh, of a, uh, of a modern life. So I forget what other examples you brought up, but that's another one too where you can see, I just wanna point out, it's like the philosophy and the framework is guiding this and it's distorting science. So there are a lot of people doing good science on this, but that only works if, if you're asking people to really give you positive and negative neutral side effects, and then if you integrate those with the benefits. Oh, the, the one other thing to say about the ocean stuff is...... why do we care about ocean acidification, so-called? Why do we care about it? Like, presumably a big part of it is 'cause we want a prolific ocean that we can get food from. I like seafood, a lot of people like seafood. Well, from a human flourishing perspective, the natural ocean is a desert. It's, a lot of th- how prolific the ocean is, is actually related to our activities and our waste. That's why, that's one reason why you have a lot of m- marine thriving-
- CWChris Williamson
What do you mean?
- AEAlex Epstein
... near coastlines. Well, just, uh, because they, like, you think about the ocean, like the ocean has, it's, it's a lot like an actual desert. It's just like there are certain things that are needed in the ocean, like, like, uh, iron, in order to make these different kinds of plankton that, you know, it's got this whole food chain. But a lot of the lower elements of that are, benefit from certain kinds of, uh, byproducts of our civilization, 'cause you need that to make the food. But the real point is, if we know that the ocean is a desert, why don't we actively try to improve it? And there's what's called aquaculture, which is usually, you know, that's like making modern salmon, which you see people vehemently oppose 'cause they think it's wrong to impact nature. And even more excitingly, there's what's called mariculture. So mariculture is thinking of how do you sort of enrich a large portion of the ocean so that a lot more food appears. So they did this, there was an experiment with this, uh, native tribe in Canada, and this guy, name, I think his name was Russ George, th- uh, they were the Haida tribe. And they basically put a bunch of iron in a certain part of the ocean, and they just had this unbelievable proliferation of salmon. It was just, it was great, and it made sense because the iron was the limiting factor. It was the bottleneck in terms of, you know, plankton and other things existing in that, uh, uh, in that place. And yet, was this celebrated? Did people say, "Hey, let's just do this. Like even if there are some negatives on the ocean, hey, let's, let's, let's make the ocean bloom"? No. The whole modern environmental movement had no interest in this and, in fact, they were very critical. Like one of the main climate catastrophists, Naomi Klein, she was very critical and she, like, described it as, "I don't like this all-you-can-eat buffet that we've made." And it, it, she said it was bad because whales were coming to this bloom and it was unnatural. So it's like, wait, do you care about the whales or you, you want them to die of natural causes versus live of human causes? So again, it reveals this very, I call this the anti-impact framework. It's the anti-human impact framework. So the idea that everything we do to nature is immoral, and it must, it must be self-destructive. And that dogma is just influencing anything. So if you actually care about the oceans, eh, from any kind of human perspective, let's keep using fossil fuels and then let's see how we can engineer the oceans to be far more prolific than they are right now, and let's get, let's improve this ocean desert.
- CWChris Williamson
Does this fear of impacting nature and the perfect planet premise and the other structures that you've given us, does that explain why, if what you're saying is true, almost no one talks about it? I'm not hearing politicians campaign on it, I'm not-
- AEAlex Epstein
On, on, on which?
- CWChris Williamson
Well, on any pro-fossil fuel talking points.
- AEAlex Epstein
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Why is that the case? Eh, why is it that fossil fuels are so demonized? Is it just, is it all explained by the perfect planet premise, the fact that humans are destroying mother nature and it's kind of across a multiple, few different streams at the moment? It seems almost cool to be human-hating-
- AEAlex Epstein
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... to be whatever the opposite of anthropocentric is. Like, anthro po- something else. Some other version. I just-
- AEAlex Epstein
Well, they would call it biocentric, although that's-
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- AEAlex Epstein
... misleading.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- AEAlex Epstein
Because it's, it's a tricky thing to even isolate because it's a specific anti-humanism. Like I call it-
- CWChris Williamson
Yes.
- AEAlex Epstein
... human racism sometimes-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- 30:00 – 45:00
You talk... You give…
- AEAlex Epstein
cause as communism was collapsing and once the Vietnam War was over. And the Vietnam War is a whole mess that, you know, sort of beside the point, but that was like their issue. Then the Vietnam War is over and they very said ex- uh, they said explicitly like, "Let's make our issue that capitalism destroys 'the environment'." Because they had, their, their previous issue was capitalism destroys the worker, it destroys productivity, socialism will make us productive. That didn't work out well at all. Like everyone starved in the communist countries. So Ayn Rand made this point that the, the anti-capitalist side could either choose to embrace, if they really valued production, they could embrace capitalism or if it wasn't, if opposing capitalism wasn't really about production, they would find a new reason to oppose capitalism. And then the reason they found is capitalism "destroys the environment." Now, this is not at all true.... because if you think about, like, you look at the environment of a S- the Soviet Union or of North Korea, like, it's horrible. In part because it's, a lot of it hasn't... the natural environment hasn't been neutralized enough, but also they just pollute all over the place 'cause they have no property rights. In general, what leads to good environments of all kinds is property rights because people protect what they own and they have wealth to clean up their environment, et cetera, et cetera. But there were certain abuses in the US environment and EU- and European environments that people could point to and say, "Hey look, you know, this lake can catch fire. This city has more air pollution than we would want." And I think a big mistake from the pro-capitalism side made is they didn't own that issue. They didn't say, "No, we're for a really good environment for human beings. Like, we like clean air and clean water and productivity. Like, capitalism is where you can have it all." Instead they ceded that to the anti-capitalist side and so the anti-capitalist side started identifying with environment. But it wasn't, at the core, it wasn't really about clean air and clean water, it was about eliminating our impact on nature. But those two got blended together. So if you look at the idea of green, green means minimizing our impact. But what does that mean? Does that mean that we don't build washing machines, that we don't build roads, that we don't build factories? Or does it mean that we don't senselessly destroy natural bo- beauty or senselessly pollute things? Like, I'm in favor of not th- of not senselessly destroying things and, uh, and, and not senselessly polluting, but I want roads and factories and all of these things. And so, but they blended together like either you're for the environment which lumps together, like... Uh, you're, you're for being green which lumps together, like, impacts on nature that are good and impa- ts on nature that are bad for us, or you just sort of hate the environment, you're not green. And part of my own mission was to give a pro-human alternative to the, to the green movement so I think of it as a human flourishing movement where we're for human flourishing which means a good environment for human beings, but that means we very highly value, uh, production and intelligently impacting nature. We don't worship nature, we enhance, we optimize, uh, we improve nature. So you can love nature but realize it's very deficient on its own, so it, it needs to be dramatically engineered and enhanced. And I, and I think that, that will have appeal and I think it is growing in terms of my own, my own movement and my own following, but it's s- the other side is so entrenched and they constantly want us to think that if you want a good environment, you have to be in sync with all of these anti-industrial causes. And, you know, what, what's notable is they've always had some reason why industry is bad, particularly fossil fuels are bad. So first it was, "We're gonna run out of fossil fuels." Then it's, "Oh, they're gonna make the atmosphere just totally polluted." Then it's catastrophic global cooling, then it's catastrophic global warming. There's never any change in the certainty that fossil fuels, the core of capitalist civilization, is going to lead to some disaster, we just don't know which one. And so what that reveals is it's, again, this delicate nurture idea. If we're impacting things a lot, it must be, uh, it must be bad and these people are so... I mean, I'm talking about the leaders now. They're so blind to how good the world is. The stat I think is most revealing is when I was born in 1980, 42% of the world lived on less than $2 a day. Like think about that for f- less than $2 a day. So that's what, 750, $800 a year? Like, that is nothing. And now it's less than 10%. So four out of ten people were in this desperate poverty. Now just 40, 41 years later it's less than one out of ten. This is, the world is such a, much, so much better a place for those people and nobody talks about it. And so this shows how powerful philosophy is because our whole philosophy today is dominated by minimal impact. Let's not change nature. We've lost any real focus on human flourishing so we don't even notice how good the world is. And when we talk about say, you know, talking about polar bears, right? I love polar bears. They're actually my favorite animal. But it's crazy that we talk about polar bears, like this polar bear has to move from one piece of ice to another and that's, that should make us cry. But three billion people with no energy, nobody cares at all about. And as I tell in Moral Case for Fossil Fuels like what that means if you haven't ever lived it or seen it... I mean, I tell a story about like a young woman who has a baby and where we live they'd have, the baby would have an incubator. It's a premature baby without an incubator, it'd be fine. You wouldn't even remember it a few months later. But there, they don't have reliable electricity so that, that baby just dies. And this is like this, this tragedy of lack of energy is happening everywhere around the world to billions of people and nobody cares because our philosophy has told us to care about minimizing our impact on nature instead of maximizing human flourishing.
- CWChris Williamson
You talk... You give a timeline in the book of these Cassandras, the people who make particular predictions. (laughs)
- AEAlex Epstein
I'm just laughing 'cause that's my girlfriend's name too.
- CWChris Williamson
Ah, sorry Cassandra. Um, b-
- AEAlex Epstein
She's not like that at all.
- CWChris Williamson
You know what I mean though, right? You talk about in the '70s this is predicted in 20 years time. 20 years time rolls around and still not there. Okay, now there's a new problem, now there's a new problem, now there's a new problem. Some of the people that are listening will be thinking, "Right, this sounds great but we've got renewable energy. We know that solar and wind and hydro are potentials that will be able to replace what we're using at the moment." Why, why can't we just do that?
- AEAlex Epstein
Well I think it's, it's those points need to be looked at independently. So first of all with the, the Cassandras, or Cassandra, I think it's important they're not that because they're wrong. Like the original Cassandra or Cassand- my girlfriend's is Cassandra. I forget what the original one's called.
- CWChris Williamson
She's gonna come in. If she's somewhere near she's gonna say, "Is he, is Alex shouting me?"
- AEAlex Epstein
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
"Honey, what do you want?" (laughs)
- AEAlex Epstein
Yeah, she'll... She's, she's been w- she's been warned that I'm on a, on a podcast.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- AEAlex Epstein
Now, uh, she'll be happy that she, she gets mention. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Got a shout-out about 20 times, yeah.
- AEAlex Epstein
Exactly, exactly. So, um, yeah, they haven't been right whereas the original Cassandra was right. That's the idea. Like if someone right who wasn't being li- listened to versus somebody who is, versus the boy who cried wolf which is much more except we still don't... and, but interestingly people think, "Oh the wolf is finally coming." So there's that whole thing.... the, f- so that, that people have been totally wrong about fossil fuels causing a catastrophe. And in fact, fossil fuels have made life much better. That's kinda one thing, and then there's another thing of, okay, can we do the same things with, uh, that we do with fossil fuels, can we do those with alternatives? And that's some- certainly something worth exploring. But you have to be clear, are we exploring it from the perspective of, "Life is amazing, let's make it even better with potential supplements or substitutes?" Or is it, "No, fossil fuels are gonna end the world, so we need to just drop everything and sacrifice everything and just come up with some crash scheme to rel- replace it with an alternative"? So I think that that's why I say they're independent, and I think there is no evidence at all, despite what people say, that from a human flourishing perspective there's anything resembling a catastrophe. And I think the path of fossil fuels is, um, is that they're gonna keep make li- making life better and better. But let's say somebody is not convinced of that. They think, "I am at least seriously concerned about future rises in CO2 levels," and, and I haven't given you enough evidence here not to be, so that's, that's a plausible thing. CO2 is different from other emissions because CO2 aggregates in the atmosphere, so like if you have smog, it just disappears from the atmosphere. It doesn't build up over time. But CO2 does build up over time. So we had a little less than 0.03% in the atmosphere before we started using fossil fuels, and now we're a little above, uh, 0.04%. We could easily go to 0.05% or beyond, and there is a greenhouse effect, so we can expect a warming impact. There's a question of, of how much, and we can expect that to have other impacts, uh, for various reasons. I don't think those will even be negative at all, on balance, but let's say you're very concerned about that. I respect that. It is legitimate to look at alternatives. But if we go back to the philosophy, you need to look at alternatives from a, a human flourishing perspective. So that means you want energy that's cost-effective, and if you're concerned about CO2, you want it that's low or almost no CO2. There's actually nothing with no CO2 today 'cause fossil fuels fu- well, here's part of the challenge. Fossil fuels don't prov- just provide electricity, which we have the most alternatives for. They also provide heat, and so residential heat and particularly industrial heat, which is very high levels of heat, and that's very hard to provide cost-effective with electricity. That's why the most cost-effective thing for home heating is natural gas and for industrial heating is often natural gas, and it's a pretty staggering price differential. So, so much of our society is based on just directly burning fossil fuels for industrial heat, and then there's heavy-duty transportation where there's no replacement for fossil fuels for a while. Like, we're talking about cargo ships and planes and all these things. I mean, everything people are talking about is not even close to, you know, any reasonable prototype, let alone commercialization. So this points out to, it is a real bitch if you, if y- if you had a crisis or anything resembling a crisis with fossil fuels, like you would view that as a tragic situation 'cause fossil fuels are so good. And if you had to somehow figure out a r- a near-term replacement, like, that would be so daunting and so upsetting. And the fact that people aren't upset about it just shows that they don't really value, that they don't value the benefits of fossil fuels. They don't really understand energy. So if we look at it from the human flourishing perspective, there is a CO2 issue, if there was, you know, what you wanna do is find every cost-effective means you can of producing energy with little or no CO2, and the most obvious candidates would be hydroelectric energy and nuclear energy 'cause hydroelectric, we can produce that at quite low cost reliably, but it's limited by location. So you can't do it everywhere, but where you can do it, you know, if you have a climate crisis or anything like that, not a crisis but even a problem, that's good. Notice, who is opposing hydroelectric power? The modern environmental movement.
- NANarrator
Why?
- AEAlex Epstein
They shut do- eh, why? It has too much impact on nature. So it's, again, the anti-impact framework. They'll say, like, "Oh, it interfered with the salmon. It's taking up too much space. It interferes with free-flowing rivers," and you think, like, "Wait a second. I thought you said the world was gonna end, and we can't dam a river?" And it just shows you, the whole perspective is about minimizing our impact. It's not really about worrying about a catastrophe. Like, James Cameron, right after he made that Avatar thing, which is really about global warming, like he went down to Brazil to stop them from building a dam. Like, that was his immediate activity. And to him, it's one and the same because humans impacting nature is bad, so I'm gonna stop it everywhere I can. And this idea that CO2 is gonna kill us all, like I think of that as an excuse for shut i- for rationalizing stopping, uh, stopping our, our productive impacts on nature. And then nuclear, you know, that's the most promising 'cause that is controllable, unlike solar wind is controllable, so you can rely on it. It can be done anywhere in the world. It has these three amazing properties that only fossil fuels and nuclear have. So fossil fuels are so cost-effective in large part because they're naturally concentrated energy, they're naturally stored energy, and they're naturally abundant. So na- natural forces have taken raw energy in nature and concentrated into a small space, stored it so we can deploy it at any time, and given us just an unbelievable amount, like way more than 10 times w- all that we used in all of our history, like exists still in the Earth and probably way more than that. Like, that's unbelievable, and that's why it's so cost-effective 'cause nature already did all this stuff to make it pretty convenient, and all we have to do is release the energy. That's sort of true of hydro, like nature brings the evaporation of water to the top of the river. Like, if we had to carry the water to the top of a river of a, you know, of a hydroelectric dam ourselves, it wouldn't work, right? It'd be just this perpetual motion machine that wouldn't work. But nature does that. And with nuclear, it's even more amazing because na- n- 'cause nature has just harnessed these unbelievable forces in the nucleus of an atom. And so if you can release those forces, it's way more concentrated than even oil, like a million times more than oil, and oil is the most concentrated thing we use in most of our civilization. That's why it's so good for mobility. Uh, so it's amazingly concentrated, it's stored, and then there's a huge amount of it. So, you know, probably tens of thousands or more years worth of it from, if you're talking about uranium and thorium, and even more if you pulled it from the ocean. So, like, why aren't we... And we know that, you know, from history in the US, it was pretty cost-effective to do, very reliable in the '70s. If you had anything resembling a climate crisis, you would be focused on, "Let's use what we know about nuclear and at least-"... do as much electricity as we can. It's harder to do the mobility and the heat, but even with nuclear you can generate a lot of heat, so you should be able to do that. And with mobility we have nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers and icebreakers, so it would be a real crash effort, but you should at least be trying to do that. But who is against nuclear? The modern environmental movement. It's not the oil companies that are stopping nuclear for the most part, it's the so-called environmentalists. And-
- CWChris Williamson
Why?
- AEAlex Epstein
... what is gonna (laughs) yeah, I know you're gonna ask that. Because it's, again, this... It's more subtle but it's, again, this issue of they impact nature too much. So part of it is, it's viewed as unnatural to split the atom. It's just like, oh, they talk about radiation, like radiation is bad. Radiation's everywhere, but if humans create radiation, it's bad and we just shouldn't be... So it's the human racism again. And particularly when you look at them talk about the waste, it's very revealing because they say like, "Oh no, what about the waste? We can't have this waste." And you think, wait, we don't actually have any problems from nuclear waste. We've been generating it for generations. Like it's not... Nobody is dying of waste accidents. It's actually fairly easy to store safely, it's very compact. Maybe there are better ways of storing it, we can ultimately repurpose it for fuel, but like there's no crisis at all. It's a lot more manageable than solar waste or wind waste from all that huge mining involved in those things. But why, why are people against nuclear waste? Because it's this... They're like, "We created this new unnatural material and it's gonna be around for millions of years." Like okay, but if it's a pretty stable material that we can deal with, who cares? Like that's fine. But no, humans have no right to create something that'll be around for millions of years. So it's, again, this anti-humanism. If you, if you really cared about rising CO2 levels being a crisis for human life, again, hydro and nuclear would be your first... your, your obsession. You would not constrain yourself and really castrate yourself by saying, "Okay, we're only gonna use sunlight and wind," and, and then batteries which are totally made from ph- made using phosphorus. Like you would never make that up, you would use what's proven and tested. It's just a total empirical fact
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Yeah. …
- AEAlex Epstein
that there is nowhere in the world that runs e- on anything resembling solar, wind, and batteries. There's just nothing that does that whatsoever. I don't know if you saw this, but I, I've gotten in this little... Oh, with Elon Musk like whom I really... I was listening to an interview of yours with, um... What was her name? Like Paulina Pompliano or something.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- AEAlex Epstein
Like she is... I love Elon Musk in a lot of ways so I like le- I was... I started listening to that because I'm really interested in him, he's a really brilliant guy. But he really misrepresents the, uh, scalability of what he does and so he said this thing about, "Oh, all you need to power the world..." And you can see this on twitter.com/alexefton if you watch this in the, the near future it'll be, be at the top. Like, "Oh, you can power the whole world on solar plus some batteries." That's what he said. So I ran the numbers at his best cost that he's provided for the batteries and yeah, for those batteries that you need to back up solar for three days which is pretty conservative if you need to run the whole world on solar and, you know, sometimes in different areas you don't have as much sunlight. Like yeah, that's $400 trillion. So $400 trillion is like six and a half times global GDP. That's just for batteries, mind you. That's not, like all these other things and b- So this is... Nobody is doing this. It's a total... It's worse than a fantasy and yet people really think that you can put solar panels, wind turbines and batteries together and that's some amazing thing and it's actually gonna work even for electricity, let alone for industrial heat, let alone for, uh, heavy-duty mobility where w- we don't have these electric plans or even hydro... Like we're talking about destroying our whole energy system for things that have never existed and m- many of which are not close to existing and the entire world has bought into this. Everyone is saying carbon neutral, net zero by 2050 and we're trying to do it while we still criminalize and demonize nuclear and we're stopping hydro all over the place. If that is not a religious cult, I don't know what is.
- CWChris Williamson
What about the problems of risks with nuclear? Spills and explosions and danger?
- AEAlex Epstein
Yeah, I mean I'm laughing and not, not... Because I think it's an i- it's an innocent question but it's not innocent that it, it is a question for the public because the fact about nuclear is it's the safest source of energy, uh, ever created and for a fairly obvious physical reason which is that it cannot explode. So, of course a nuclear bomb can explode, but that deals with a totally different type of uranium than exists in a nuclear power plant. The best comment ever by one of my energy heroes, a guy named, uh, Peter Beckman who's unfortunately deceased. You know somebody said like, "Hey, what happens if we blow up, uh, a nuclear power plant? If terrorists blow it up, isn't that gonna be a disaster?" And he said, "If a terrorist blows up a nuclear power plant, they should win a Nobel Prize because they'll have discovered a law of physics that doesn't exist."
- CWChris Williamson
But Chernobyl blew up.
- AEAlex Epstein
No, no it's not, it's not blowing up. So you can have-
- CWChris Williamson
Not atomically.
- AEAlex Epstein
No. Right. Well that's very important though because people-
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- AEAlex Epstein
... associate it with an atom. So Chernobyl is also interesting because Cherno... Well, so essentially Chernobyl is the only case where you have any deaths due to radiation which is pretty astonishing. There's only one case in all of it. And so what's interesting is it involved a type of reactor that was sort of a hybrid, uh, energy producing reactor but also sort of like a weapon that was never tried or considered in any civilized part of the world. So it's, it's like you can call it nuclear but it's not the same thing. It's just like ev- You can call everything chemical in a sense, but there are certain types of uses of chemicals that are totally benign and that can't do things. So what, what they tried in Chernobyl was not even considered let alone tried where we were and couldn't have been. And e- and on top of that and related to that it was in the Soviet Union which is one of my favorite economies. Economists pointed out like everything in the Soviet Union was deadly.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- AEAlex Epstein
Like imagine how many deaths there were from Soviet toasters. Like a hell of a lot more than Chernobyl.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- AEAlex Epstein
So, so Chernobyl you have a couple dozen documented deaths. You have certain like treatable conditions and that was, you know, that was a disaster but that shows you like even when you have a total disaster by one of the worst regimes in history using something civilized countries would never consider or allow, even then it's limited in its destructive potential. So we should be thinking about nuclear like nuclear is the safest form of energy, uh, ever.... there's, like, solar panels... You know, solar panels, the main problem is they're not very good at producing energy reliably at low cost. But, you could have solar panels have all sorts of issues, like if you have your h- if, if, you know, it catches on fire and the stu- and the sun is still shining, there are all sorts of problems where fire departments can't deal with these houses. Because what you ha- you ha- you have this electrical power plant on the roof of your house, right? And it's connected to batteries, and so it's, it can be hard to shut off and you have all these issues with fires. I mean, and, you know, ho- there are different ways of dealing with this. You have wind turbines that catch on fire and go out of control. You have all the deaths involved in the mining for those things. Now, I don't think solar and wind are particularly dangerous, but empirically, they are more dangerous than nuclear.
- CWChris Williamson
Is that right?
- AEAlex Epstein
The main thing that's dan- Oh, yeah. It's- the main thing that's dangerous about them, though, is that they don't provide energy.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- AEAlex Epstein
And so my, my basic point that I want to stress-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughing) The most dangerous thing is being useless.
- AEAlex Epstein
Yeah. But that is really important. Like, no- no energy is more dangerous than no energy.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- AEAlex Epstein
Because then you have to live in nature.
- CWChris Williamson
I saw a video on Twitter a while ago, and it was a- an animation of this huge sort of Gollum-looking creature stopping a r- a big boulder rolling down a hill, and it's symbolic of nuclear energy. Have you seen this?
- AEAlex Epstein
No.
- CWChris Williamson
I'll try and get... If I can find it, I'll make Video Guy Dean put it over the video here.
- AEAlex Epstein
Okay.
- CWChris Williamson
Um, uh, basically, it's just, it's just a suggestion that, um, Chernobyl and Fukushima were reason enough and sufficiently public to cause a cascading effect that nuclear is now essentially out of the window by people that perhaps know less than they claim to know.
- AEAlex Epstein
(laughs) Yeah, perhaps. Uh, Fukushima, I think, is a perfect kind of, of revelation, 'cause if you look at the situation, like, what do most people associate Fukushima with? What do they associate that situation with? They associate it with, like, a failure of a nuclear power plant. Yet, what happened is, what, a tsunami kills 20,000 people. You were actually a lot safer if you were in the nuclear power plant.
- CWChris Williamson
Were you really?
- 1:00:00 – 1:12:37
I think it's a-…
- CWChris Williamson
before reading your book, to do with thinking towards the future is the misunderstanding of the fact that energy permits technology advancement and future technology can fix many of the problems that the energy consumption is going to cause in the present. Is that a fair way to frame it?
- AEAlex Epstein
I think it's a- it's a very good way to frame it. I mean, it- it- it does it in the future and in the present. So I've focused a bit on the present, 'cause even if you- if you think about like climate, it's very important that climate-related disaster deaths are down 98% over the last century. Like nobody talks about this. Just to show you how biased the system is, the UN IPCC, which has some- that's called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Like you look at all their reports, it's all about how we're endangering climate. They never mention climate-related deaths or climate-related disaster deaths going way down. That is like... I mean, how could you... that's like you're doing a report on like malaria, like if malaria decreased by 98% and you were studying like a malaria crisis, like you would need to point out (laughs) that it's been decreasing. So it- but nobody even talks about this. So we have this blindness 'cause we- we have this belief that it's wrong to impact the climate, that it's gotta be self-destructive. So we don't even look at the numbers. We don't even notice, hey wait, haven't we developed all these good technologies for protecting ourselves from climate, like building homes and heating and air conditioning? And like drought relief is the most amazing, because drought could kill millions of people.... in the past. I mean, you look at, I have some headlines in my next book, Fossil Future, which, um, it's not out now. You can't even get it on Amazon. By the way, I just... Sorry, one note to interrupt. This is a temporary thing, but do not buy the revised Moral Ca- Case for Fossil Fuels on Amazon because it's a fake book. So don't do that. Buy the original if you want it.
- CWChris Williamson
No way. Who's done that?
- AEAlex Epstein
No, no, no. It's, it's not, it's not anyone screwing me. It's just, they messed up. It was basically, my book Fossil Future was originally conceived as a revision, and then I ended up writing a whole new book, but still on Amazon it says revised. And so it just, it kills me that people are buying that book and it's not gonna get delivered. So just don't-
- CWChris Williamson
I'll find the correct link, and it will be in the show notes below.
- AEAlex Epstein
Yeah, just more, the one with the blue cover. The bright blue cover that I sent you. That's, that's fine. So sorry for, for that, but it's just, it's been bothering me, uh, lately. So where did we... Of course, I interrupted myself on, um-
- CWChris Williamson
Talking about technology, the future of technology and you were talking about droughts. Yeah.
- AEAlex Epstein
Oh, yeah. Oh, drought. Yeah, drought. Drought is like... These stories about, you know, just reading about places like China and just millions of people dying from these droughts. It's just so, so tragic to think about what people living in like a more natural world without modern technology, what that's like. And now we have, you know, modern irrigation, a lot of which is high energy. And we have drought relief convoys where you can give, you know, food to people who can't grow food. And, you know, drought-related deaths now go down to like the level of 1000 a year. It's just this unbelievable thing nobody talks about. Like drought, we're so good at mastering drought that I have never heard anyone explain any possible situation that could actually be a drought problem globally. Also true, interestingly it's true for wildfires. Now that seems impossible given what we've seen in Australia and California. But if you look at, like what we have at our disposal in terms of modern fire management, in terms of if you actually thin the forest, if you don't allow these huge fuel loads to build up, if you build barriers, like there's no conceivable scenario where fires could be a big problem. It's all this manmade stuff that actually comes from this whole anti-impact approach where we say, "We're not allowed to clear the brush. We're not allowed to do control burn, control burns. We're not allowed to do logging." And so we basically treat, create the... we make the forest a bomb. But that's a, that's not... Like if, if the temperature rose three or four degrees and we managed the forest properly, we would not have a problem with fires at all. So it's actually really hard to think of anything that even today's capabilities can't deal with, let alone tomorrow's. I mean, the most plausible is like a super rapid sea level rise. So if you talk about like multiple feet per decade, which Al Gore makes us think is gonna happen 'cause he talks about 20 feet in his movie, and he's not very clear about when that's gonna happen. But you know, the, what we've been experiencing is like a foot a century, and then, you know, the, kind of, some of the high predictions are like three feet in a century. That is not even a problem for today's levels, let alone imagine if sea levels were rising and we had an issue. Imagine how many, like smart people could help us deal with that. We already have 100-plus million people living below sea level now. So once you start to really think in a pro-human, pro-technology way about climate, you don't think of it as this religious thing that, "Oh, it was perfect and it's wrong if we impact." If you just think of it as, hey, here's another factor that we want to deal with constructively, it's really hard to think of anything that could be like a big problem with what we have today, let alone, um, the future. And this is controversial, but in the future, we'll, we'll also learn how to improve climate. Um, I mean, that's, that's, that's, that's sacrilege, which shows you that it's a religious kind of thing, but like as this guy points out in this really good book Where's My... I think it's called Where's My Flying Car by this guy named J. Storrs Hall, a really good book. Like he points out, imagine how much people would pay to make their climate like California's climate, which I'm lucky enough to live in California. Like, that would be so much value, people are gonna figure out how to do that. And that just goes to show that our... If we also, if you wanted to, you can, I believe, fairly safely reduce the amount of sunlight coming to the US. Like you can sort of mimic what a volcano has done. Like we know that volcanoes in the past have cooled the Earth. Like you could test that out and mimic it, I believe, in a safe way. I'm not in favor of it now because I don't think it's necessary. But this idea that we're just, we face an existential threat from warming and all we can do is just outlaw all the fossil fuels and mandate unreliable solar and wind, I just want to stress it's a religious perspective. It's not a scientific perspective. None of it makes any sense. I think we should be using more fossil fuels, but even if we weren't, we should be using nuclear, we should be looking at technological ways to deal with it. And we should recognize that the biggest problem in the world is lack of energy for billions of people, not one or two or three degrees warmer.
- CWChris Williamson
You've hit one of the tripwires that I've laid around this conversation, and you just said existential risk there.
- AEAlex Epstein
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
What are your thoughts on Extinction Rebellion?
- AEAlex Epstein
(laughs) I mean, it's, uh, I don't know how many people even know about them. I mean, I know in the UK they're very, very well known. I don't know if you live in the US.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. I mean have you seen, did you see them smashing the windows of, was it Barclays or Santander's headquarters? Do you see this?
- AEAlex Epstein
I see some of it. I mean, like, I'm very kind of US focused.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- AEAlex Epstein
So I follow some British people.
- CWChris Williamson
Dude, I've never seen someone smash a window in a less cool way. Like they literally can't smash windows in a cool way. It, you swing a thing at a big thing and it makes a big crack. But no, no, no, no. They've arrived with this sort of mallet and chisel and with their masks on and a pink beanie, doing all of the four corners. What are you do... Like what are you trying to demonstrate? Is this wanton destruction of glass which presumably is going to need fossil fuels to then redeliver the glass back to fix it? Or are you enacting some sort of rage? Because if that's your rage, I'm not tremendously scared of it. But yeah, so I have, I have a big problem with Extinction Rebellion, right? And it's because I'm a big fan of existential risk. Have you read Toby Ord's The Precipice?
- AEAlex Epstein
No.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, dude. Alex, let me, let me... I'll tell you once we're done. Everyone that's listening has already heard me talk about it a million times. Um-
- AEAlex Epstein
That's interesting.
- CWChris Williamson
Basically, Toby, Toby runs mathematical models. He's a philosopher from the Future of Humanities Institute in Oxford, which is the number one existential risk research lab, basically-
- AEAlex Epstein
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... in the world. And, uh, he runs the numbers, the likelihood of us going extinct, humans, existential risk, so a, um, global irreversible neutering of our capacity to reach our full potential as a civilization is roughly the definition he uses of existential risk. And he notes them all down. And he has the natural risks and then he has the anthropogenic risks as well. Over the next century, the likelihood that climate change is an existential risk to us is one in 10,000. The likelihood of super intelligent, artificial general intelligence that's misaligned is one in 10. Natural pandemics, one in 30. Engineered pandemics, one in 100. Super volcanoes, one in a million. Um, gamma ray bursts, one in a billion, et cetera, et cetera. It pales in comparison. And m- th- this sort of leads me to the problem I have with Extinction Rebellion, which is, whose extinction are you bothered about? Genuinely, w- w- what is the extinction that you're concerned about? It should be existential risk rebellion. If it was that and they were looking at the actual statistics around what is the most likely thing to cause humans to go extinct, that's the question that presumably they're talking about. But it, it gets all conflated with this sort of naturalistic human racism. And well, it's not just about that, it's the animals shouldn't be going extinct either. Okay, cool. Do you know that we need to be able to develop technology to save animals and ourselves from the nonzero number of natural background risks that occur? So, if we were to continue, let's say that we ceased all technological progress now and just went back to being nomads. The human race won't leave the planet, we won't go to Mars, we will die because there is a nonzero existential risk number in the background, whether that be engineered pandemics or natural pandemics. Well, it wouldn't be engineered because those, those labs would have been shut. Natural pandemics, super volcanoes, whatever it might be, asteroids, right? So, we need technology to protect ourselves. We're also, the lions aren't gonna do it for us. So if we stop doing it, they're all dead. Every animal on the Earth will die eventually. Even if you want to roll the clock forward a little bit more, whatever it is, two billion years, the sun's going to expand and the Earth's going to be gone. If you want to save the maximum number of future potential lives, both human and in terms of the animals, the best thing that we can do is focus our attention onto not dicking up the big risks that we have over the next century. One in 10 is the likelihood that Toby, or the, in the epicenter of existential risk research puts on artificial general intelligence being the thing that we could... It's the number one risk, right? The number one risk.
- AEAlex Epstein
I mean, I don't, I don't believe those numbers at all. But I, I, I agree with a lot of the thrust of what you're, you're talking about. I mean, and, and, you know, one way to think of it, you could think of technology and progress from the perspective of, like, what is human being? What are our capabilities? And all things being equal, you know, you want more capabilities going forward to deal with a wide variety of things. So, when I was drafting Fossil Futures, I was writing a part of it, this was before COVID. And I was note- I was noting like, "Hey, here are the things I'm really concerned about." You know, and, and I wish I had said, oh, like, uh, you know, pandemic from a flu-like but more extreme virus. I didn't say that. But antibiotic resistance is definitely one that I... And it's not like existential as in everyone's gonna die, but like, that is a real, there's a real thing that you can see. It's, antibiotics are amazing, but they have these side effects and you see resistance. And like, the more capable you are as a civilization, like, the more you can kind of deal with anything. So, it, it's a very high burden of proof to show we should focus all on dealing with one thing, particularly if it has any chance, let alone I believe a certainty of neutering our capabilities. So if it's like, let's stop using energy, like let's, let's make energy more expensive and less reliable so that we can sort of make nature more friendly to us in this one respect. Like, it, our whole s- I mentioned before, like everything in our society depends, it's like it's a machine, it's produced by a machine or it's produced by the time, human time freed up by machines. You think about we want millions of people, if there's a pandemic, to be able to think about it and deal with it and, and help us treat it. Like, that's only possible with a machine labor civilization. So in general, I totally agree that the more capabilities we, the more freedom you have and the more ability you have to, to make progress, the more you can deal with any of these kinds of things. And so, the, it's notable that often the anti-technology, the people concerned about technologies, you can say, like there's one of two ways to deal with it. If, if you think there's a real threat, you can say, "Okay, let's, let's sort of evolve and figure out how to deal with the threat, or let's just withdraw technology." And in general, there's a very strong attitude of let's withdraw technology. And it's such a bad attitude, and it's also a completely impractical attitude because you cannot control the rest of the world.
Episode duration: 1:24:12
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