Can Fossil Fuels Save The World? - Alex Epstein | Modern Wisdom Podcast 324

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)

You're a philosopher. What are you doing talking about fossil fuels?

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.

(laughs)

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.