Alex Epstein Explains How Fossil Fuels Are Saving the Planet | Real Talk | PragerU

Fossil fuel producers should be proud. They should not be apologizing for using the best technology available to improve human life. Alex Epstein, we have been thinking about fossil fuels and energy as a zero-sum game. You explained that actually using fossil fuels could benefit both the earth and humans. Well, I would say I don't want to save the earth from human beings. I want to improve the earth for human beings. Well, so many people also say that the use of fossil fuels is immoral. The modern environmental movement believes that impact is intrinsically bad. So you could think of it like a commandment. Thou shalt not impact nature is like the first commandment of the environmental philosophy slash religion. It sounds so similar to this post-modernist philosophy that the west is bad. They don't really care about energy. The people leading this charge are anti-human. Alex Epstein, we both love humans and we both love the earth. And we are trying to figure out how do we think through everything. In a non-extreme normal framework so that we actually can serve both humans and the earth. And one of the things I've learned from you is that many of the climate advocates, the environmentalists have become more and more anti-human. You have spent a lot of time thinking about it and I'd love to give our audience exposure to some of these important things that you've been thinking about. But let's start with this concept that there's been this anti-humanism that has been taught to Americans and people in the west. And how has that been impacting us? Well, so yeah, I want to answer this in the context of the framing about, you know, serving us, serving the earth. Because I think there are some misconceptions here, even a bit in your question. So often people think like they'll hear that I advocate human flourishing, right? It's a term that I use a lot. Maybe I've helped popularize it. And it's a great term, but often people make the mistake of thinking, so you're for human flourishing. And so in some way you're against the earth or against the rest of nature. And there's something to that, but it's really not true. Because the real thing is if you're for human flourishing, what you're advocating is that we improve the earth for human flourishing. So we have a certain relationship with the rest of nature, which is a human benefiting relationship. And so I like to use three examples for this. One is sometimes it is adversarial. I want an adversarial relationship with the malarial mosquito, right? I don't want to save it. I don't want to protect it. So when you say something like protect the earth, protect the environment, it's too broad and vague because there are certain things you don't want to protect. There are certain things you want to destroy, right? And at the other end of it, there are certain things we don't just want to protect. We want to nurture. So for example, my dog, Sherlock, in a sense, he's a non-human thing, right? And I've gone to extraordinary lengths to keep that guy alive. He's always getting himself into scrapes. And I've spent a lot of my money, you know, keeping this guy alive because my wife and my son and I really, really value him. So on the other hand, right, to pursue human flourishing, on the one end, we're destroying something. And on the other hand, we're giving it an unnatural chance of success. And then there are different things in the middle like polar bears, which that's my favorite animal aesthetically, but I want it cordoned off from us so it doesn't eat people, which is the kind of thing that it does, right? It's wrong to think of yourself as sort of pro or anti the earth in general. The question for humans is really, what's our relationship going to be? And I think the best concept is the relationship of improvement. So I don't want to save the earth from human beings. I want to improve the earth for human beings, which again can include opposing things. It can mean supporting things. It can mean keeping yourself safe from things. And most importantly, for purposes of energy, it really means transforming it, changing it in a way that benefits us. Does that make sense? Well, when it comes to the issue of energy, which you started talking about and specifically fossil fuel, we have been thinking about fossil fuels and energy as a zero-sum game. And that is that if you use more fossil fuels, you emit more CO2, you destroy the earth. And therefore the earth is losing out while humans are flourishing. And that's the zero-sum game that we've been taught. But you explained that it might not be a zero-sum game and that actually using fossil fuels could benefit both the earth and humans. Well, I would say it improves the earth. Because again, if you say benefit the earth, do you mean the malarial mosquito? Do you mean the polar bear? Do you mean dogs? It's too vague a concept. It's often like people will use the term, you know, the common good, right? And they act like they know what they're talking about, but it's a very vague term. Because it's like, which individuals do you mean? And of course, every pressure group is always saying, the subsidies are for the common good, which means me at the expense of others. So it's a collective term. Now, it's problematic when you're talking about humans, because it's easy to justify, hey, I'm sacrificing some to others. You're not clear about what you mean. But when you're talking about interspecies, it's really dangerous to have a collective noun. Because again, you're combining things that you want to oppose, things you want to support, things you want to transform, et cetera. So with the issue of fossil fuels, the issue is really, do they impact or affect overall the earth in a way that benefits humans or that harms humans? Now, the narrative as presented to us is that it changes the earth in a way that harms humans, because whatever energy it gives us is either not that important or easily replaceable by things like solar and wind. But it has a side effect of increasing the amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And that's leading to an increasingly menacing and catastrophic set of climate changes, right? So that's the narrative that they have. So they're arguing fossil fuels, it's not just zero-sum, that they're actually making the earth a worse place for human beings to live. And then I'm saying that's all wrong, because the energy they provide us is incredibly valuable. It makes everything better, including it makes us more resilient to climate, which is why we're actually safer from climate than ever. It has no near-term replacement. So if you don't have fossil fuels, you can't have a lot of energy for billions of people. And then the side effects are real, but they're quite easily addressed through a lot of energy. So one of the things about all forms of energy people need to get whenever they think about energy is energy can cure its own side effects, which most technologies can't do. So if I give you an antibiotic, not I, I'm not prescribed, but like a doctor gives you an antibiotic, right? He says, okay, this is going to cure your infection, but it's going to give you this rash. You accept probably, hey, it's worth it to cure this infection, but I accept the consequence of the rash. The antibiotic itself can't cure the rash that it causes, but energy can actually cure its own problems usually. So if you imagine, well, fossil fuels, let's say they changed the climate conditions in one location to be 10% more stricken with drought. Well, they can also give you the ability to irrigate, right? To alleviate drought. They can also give you the ability to transport crops. So if you're having a bad harvest, you can get crops from another place. And what we've seen net is we have a 99% decline in drought related deaths over the last hundred years, even though certain people claim that there are drought conditions, more drought conditions in some way. So this is an example of energy can cure its own side effects. And you can't think intelligently about energy unless you keep that in mind. And we'll see, we'll probably talk about a lot of different things, but the whole opposition of fossil fuels is in denial about the true value of energy, including that it can fix any problems that it causes. Well, I would imagine that when you say that you could use fossil fuels to fix the problems that it causes, because you have innovation and you have the ability to then use fossil fuels to re-irrigate, et cetera, people would just still say, well, but that is not natural for the earth. And therefore it is bad for the earth. And therefore it is not natural. It is not natural to then go ahead and use fossil fuels to cure the problem that fossil fuels originally created, right? That's what you're saying. You could use fossil fuels. It might create a problem, but then you can also use fossil fuels to solve the problem. But why use fossil fuels to begin with, given that it creates a problem? And so the same argument applies to technology, right? If you just, let's go, fossil fuels are a type of energy. So first of all, every form of energy is going to cause problems, right? And any capability can be, the one thing is it can be misused, but let's just take even more broad than energy, technology. So think about all the problems that technology causes. So even if we're contemplating something like AI, which I think is going to be a huge benefit to human flourishing, but obviously that could be used in ways that, and I'm not talking about AI taking over, that's not a real thing, but that's a whole other discussion. But just even people misusing it for military purposes and stuff, yeah, or computing technology, all of these things, they cause problems. They cause fewer problems than they solve, but they cause new problems that wouldn't exist without them. Obviously, fossil fuel problems are in some way unique to fossil fuels. Fossil fuels bring about problems that wouldn't exist if you didn't have fossil fuels, but you wouldn't have all the solutions. So by their logic, we should have never harnessed fire, right? It's unnatural to harness fire because sure, it keeps you alive from cold. Sure, it allows you to cook your food. Sure, it allows you to have semi-modern agriculture, but it has smoke and we wouldn't have as much of that smoke without our fire. So it's ultimately an anti-technology attitude, which is really an anti-human attitude. It's saying it's wrong, or I'll call it an anti-impact attitude, saying it's wrong for humans to impact the earth. And so their solution to any problem is to withdraw our technology and our impact and our energy versus use them in more intelligent ways. And I'm totally in favor of the latter. Well, if we think about it, then logically people would say, well, it just depends what the impact is. It comes down to numbers, right? How helpful are fossil fuels versus how harmful are the fossil fuels to human flourishing and to the earth? Do you have those numbers and some examples that can help us reckon? And I would just say it's also in the context of the alternatives, right? So it's like if you need to... So let's say fossil, one question is sort of in general, do fossil fuels positives outweigh the negatives? And then number two would be, well, is there anything that's more optimal? More efficient. Yeah, more efficient. And so, yeah, I mean, the answer to the first is it's just so absurdly large, the benefits compared to the negatives. And the second is, unfortunately, we don't have anything close to fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. Someday we will probably with nuclear, but we're just very far off from that. So, yeah, if you were to just take what are the benefits of fossil fuels relative to the negatives? Well, maybe we can start with the benefits of technology and industrial civilization have obviously been enormous compared to the negatives, as you can see with what we call the... I call them the human flourishing hockey sticks. So you see these charts that look like a hockey stick. So, you know, there's the blade of the hockey stick, right? And then there's, I guess, the shaft and then the blade. They look like this. So life expectancy, right? It's hovering around 30 forever. And then it goes up dramatically. Income per person, like this. And even the population the earth is supporting is like this. So the normal narrative is the more people, the poorer we are, right? But we've shown is we can have way more people. So we've gone from, let's say, 500 million to 8 billion people. And yet our life expectancy has gone from around 30 to around 70. So just think about that. It's more than double the... I won't talk about your age, but I would definitely be dead by conventional life expectancy, right? I mean, it's just amazing how much longer we live and how much more opportunity we have as represented by our income. So the world in general, this whole project of technology, industrial civilization has been amazingly beneficial to human beings. And life used to be terrible when we lived a more, quote, natural, low impact lifestyle. So we need to recognize that. So what's the role of energy in that? Well, my argument is energy is fundamental because what energy has done is it allows us, it has allowed us to use machines to go from a very low productivity species to a very high productivity species. So without machines, we have manual labor and we can't do that much. That's why we were so poor. With machines, what we can do is we can delegate our physical work and increasingly with AI and computation, our mental work to machines to create value for us. My favorite example of this is agriculture, because this is really the thing that just struck me. Obviously, having food is very, very important. And we've just had this amazing transition where we've gone from something like 90% of the world, the people's time, right, is being spent on food, or that's the main profession. And people are generally very poorly fed and malnutrition is rampant and people get wiped out all the time for famines, where we have a very small percentage of the population focused on agriculture and we have totally plentiful food. So the core to that is machines. We have machines that can do way more work than a human. So a modern combine harvester, you could be running a combine harvester. Let's just even take a really good agricultural worker. They can run a combine harvester and as good as they are on their own, they can reap and thresh a thousand times more wheat. So think about that. So it really turns us into superhumans, right? Superman's real power is power or energy. So we basically make ourselves all into Superman, not within our bodies, but by these machines that are extensions of our bodies. So you look at agriculture, we've mechanized agriculture. So in some cases, multiplying our productivity a thousandfold. Now, there's a second thing that machines do. By increasing our productivity in one area, particularly food, clothing, shelter, they free up time. And the more time we have, the more innovation we have. So you may have heard of something called the Green Revolution, which is very different from the Green Movement, which is an anti-human thing. But the Green Revolution was a pro-human thing. There's a guy named Norman Borlaug who made a lot of different discoveries about different kind of crops and genetics and stuff like that. And there were all these technological discoveries that were only possible because human beings had the time to spend on research and development, et cetera, et cetera. So that's the second thing fossil fuels do. First, they give us machines. I call it machine labor. Second thing is they free up time. Now, there's one third thing that fossil fuels do that aren't really part of them being energy, but is very special and we need to acknowledge, which is they give us a very unique set of materials. So if you were to look around this room, I could name 50 things from you that are made of oil and natural gas. So you think about like the laminate on the floor or the ink on my book cover, or this thing on the microphone, like synthetic materials are everywhere and they're overwhelmingly made of natural gas and oil. And it's because what's called the hydrocarbon molecules in those are extremely versatile and can be changed into just about anything. So, so many of our materials, like the paint on the wall, the insulation, so much of our world is made possible by this. In an agriculture, think about how much we rely on modern materials. Just even with refrigeration, of course, that's a use of machines, but also like the plastic in the refrigerator, that's sanitary. The whole plastic is demonized there, which is so bad, but you think about just sanitation of food and how much plastic has helped that. How much we use in fertilizer, we use synthetic fertilizer that makes it possible to feed a billion people, that's derived from natural gas. So fossil fuels as energy, they've given us machines and freed up time. And then as materials, they've given us these unique materials. And so they underlie everything in our world. So you ask like, how good are they? Without them, we would not have anywhere near a 70 year life expectancy because we wouldn't have all the machines doing all the work and we wouldn't have had the time to do all the innovation and wouldn't have had all these amazing materials that make our world so much safer and better. Alex, why has there been such a fascination then with wind and solar and renewables, given these obvious examples that you give? I mean, none of the things that you describe are things that anybody would imagine that wind and solar would be able to produce. Well, people imagine it. They certainly imagine it with the first two. I mean, they imagine, right, is the idea of, oh, instead of taking this stuff out of the ground and burning it in these heat engines. For electricity. Yeah, well, so that's one distinction is people don't have the, they don't realize electricity is a species of energy. It's not all of energy. But if you just think about that, people have this idea of, yeah, we'll just use the sun and the wind and we'll get it from nature. And they think of it as free, like Al Gore calls it free and forever. We don't have to pay for the sun. We don't have to pay for the wind. So people have a kind of loose mental image of let's just sort of take it in. Now, one thing people should question is, if these are so great, why aren't they being used very much? And in particular, why do they demand government preferences? Because I can give you, and I will give you the technological reasons why they fail. But it's very revealing that people are saying, hey, we can do all this with solar and wind. And they'll actually say it's cheaper, right? Here's a study that says it's cheaper. Well, in normal life, if you can show something that is cheaper, you just make it on a free market and you sell it to people, right? Like if you have a better phone. Yeah, but their claim is that you first have to invest in it. You have to create the infrastructure. That's what they're claiming. Well, but they, okay. But well, they say it's cheaper now. And then they say it's cheaper now, right? They'll say, well, once you invest in it, then the prices will go down. So one thing is they conflate, it is cheaper now. And then it will be cheaper according to my study. And you can never run those two together. I mean, imagine you're investing in a product. There's a difference between this works better now and it's cheaper versus I have an argument that it will work better in the future. Those are very different. Now, the general narrative is it works better now, but then you see quickly, then they retreat to, oh, it'll work better in the future because it doesn't actually work better now. But then if you look at what are they demanding? So they're demanding right now, as we're recording this, there's this whole battle over what's called the Inflation Reduction Act. And that has, depending on how you run the numbers over the last, over the next 10 years, between around $250 billion and $900 billion in subsidies, mostly going to solar and wind, just the ones that go to solar and wind. There's arguably up to 2 trillion in general of subsidies. So, and you see, if you see these industries, they're claiming, oh, we're so much better. And we're already, they'll say the solar panel costs have gone down, right? It's so cheap right now. And yet we need these absolutely extravagant subsidies. And at the same time, if you look at what they demand in terms of rules on the grid, they don't want to be required to provide reliable electricity. They want and have gotten the right to sell unreliable electricity for the same cost plus subsidy as reliable. So that's exactly like somebody saying, I have a superior car, but I don't want to be required to make it reliable. It'll just work a third of the time. And I don't know when, and I need a giant subsidy, but it's actually better. Then you might start to think, well, maybe it's not actually better if it's not reliable and you're not willing to sell it on the market. So I just want to highlight to people that obviously they're not succeeding because they're demanding absolutely astonishing government preferences for them. And then that sort of gets to why is that? And I think the key is, key concept I talk about in Fossil Future is just when you're comparing energy, you always need to look at the full process needed to provide reliable energy. So if we just take electricity, we can talk about others, but you have to think about not just what's the cost of the fuel. Because if you just look at the cost of the fuel, you can say, well, solar and wind are the cheapest, right? There's no, you don't have to pay the atmosphere for the wind currents or the sunlight, right? But you do always have to pay for the land, right? And then you have to pay for the machines that harness the fuel. And then you start to have to pay for the transmission lines. But the most important thing you have to pay for is the reliability. Now, one of the advantages that fossil fuels and nuclear and hydro have, those are our most successful forms of energy that have succeeded a lot without subsidies, is they are natural batteries. You can call them naturally stored energy. So they have a whole bunch of energy stored, and then all you have to do is basically release it. I mean, it's technically difficult, but you're releasing it. And that makes it very easy to have on-demand energy. Because if you already have all the energy stored, you can decide when exactly do I want it and how much do I want, much as if you're, you know, your phone, you can turn it on, you can use a more demanding program or not, or app on your phone. But solar and wind are not naturally stored. They're natural intermittent flows. So they come in, when they come in and the quantity they come in is determined by forces outside our control. So for those, the number one difficulty in terms of cost is how do you change an intermittent flow to on-demand electricity? And that's a very, very hard problem. And there are kind of two intuitive answers. One is batteries, right? We'll just have massive batteries to store so that we can take all the intermittent flow in and then we can build up a huge, huge reserve of batteries and then we can deploy it. And that is certainly true if the batteries are very cheap. But the problem is man-made storage, particularly batteries, is very, very expensive. And let's use Elon Musk as an example here. By the way, Elon has been a lot better on energy lately, I should give him credit, and on climate. But he'll still sometimes say, hey, we can power the whole world on just my megapacks and my solar panels. Well, I have two pieces of evidence here. One is if you run the numbers on his website for what it costs to store just one day of energy, which you need a lot more than that if you're relying on solar and wind, that is $100 trillion a day of batteries. So that's all of global GDP for batteries that last 10 years. So three days, $300 trillion. That's one thing. The other thing is Elon Musk is a very large user of energy in an emerging space called the AI space. What forms of energy is he using to do that? Is he putting together new installations of solar panels and megapacks, which presumably he would have world-leading access to? No, he, like everyone else who knows what they're doing, is building new natural gas plants. Why? Because that is the most cost-effective way of doing it. In practice, if we can't use batteries much for solar and wind, what do we use to make them reliable? And the answer is fossil fuels. Well, so many people also say that the use of fossil fuels is immoral. And when you bring up these batteries, the first thing that comes to my mind is, how is that good for the planet? The mining of the batteries and the lithium and all of that. Not to mention the question of, is it more moral to use the renewables than to use fossil fuels? Well, this relates again to your environmental philosophy of like, are we thinking of it as we want to improve the earth for human beings or we want to save it from human beings? So I would say, you can say there's a certain hypocrisy involved where they're saying, hey, my solution, I don't like the impact of fossil fuels, particularly on climate. So my solution is to undergo the, is to initiate the largest mining project in the history of the planet, which if you understand how solar and wind work, that's how it works because they're intermittent. So that's one thing I mentioned. So they're not consistent, right? They're dependent on the weather. The other thing is they're very dilute. So the amount of energy that they generate in a given amount of space is low, which means they have absolutely enormous land use requirements compared to other things, which means that one thing is they need a lot of mined materials and they need to take up a lot of space and thus interfere with a lot of things. And then you wonder, if your goal is to minimize impact, do you really want very dilute sources? Actually, what you'd want is something like nuclear, which is extremely concentrated so it doesn't take up very much space and it uses relatively fewer of mined metals and things like that. But that's not my focus. So my focus is not, I don't think it's wrong to impact the earth. I think it's wrong to do it if it harms us, but I think it's totally fine to do it if it's cost effective. So my main issue with all the mining involved is it's just not cost effective at the moment. And what I want to do is set up the laws and to the extent we have government-controlled electricity markets rules that require everybody to meet the same standards of cost and reliability. And then if you can follow the laws and mine a lot for batteries and you can actually make that work, more power to you. But my issue is they're not willing to compete on a market. What they're trying to do is they're trying to destroy the competition, which is fossil fuels, which is the whole lifeblood of everyone on the planet on the promise that they can replace them, but they're not even willing to compete. So they just want to ban their competition and then they're promising us that they'll fill it. So that's what I consider immoral is that they're destroying the energy that works and they're pretending that they have this solution. And then if you look at it, it doesn't make any sense because A, it doesn't compete on the market and B, the mining requirements are just so prohibitive given anything that's remotely plausible and then the reliability issues. So my conclusion is ultimately the people leading this charge are anti-human on a couple levels. One is just they don't really care about energy because if you cared about energy, you wouldn't say, let's destroy fossil fuels and maybe come up with something because you'd realize we can't live without fossil fuels. So you would never try to destroy it before a replacement. You'd make sure you had the replacement working before you phased out fossil fuels. So they clearly don't value energy and all their arguments they can rapidly replace it are absurd and contradictory. Again, they're not willing to do it on a market so they obviously can't do it. I think underlying that, so you could ask, well, why don't people care about energy? Sometimes is they don't know, but the leaders I think do know. And this also explains why they're anti-nuclear, a lot of the leaders, is the people who really oppose energy think it's immoral because it allows us to impact the earth so much to improve our lives. So they think of it as, you know, I think of it as energy allows us to transform the earth to be a better place for humans, including we can enjoy more wildlife and we can have cleaner technology, we can do all these things through more impact. But the modern environmental movement says impact is bad. The modern environmental movement believes that impact is intrinsically bad. So you can think of it like a commandment, thou shalt not impact nature is like the first commandment of the environmental philosophy slash religion. So they think it's wrong. So I'll give you an example, Bill McKibben, who's one of the leaders of this movement, kind of journalist, quasi-philosopher. And he put it as, he was talking about rainfall and how, you know, humans might've affected the rainfall. And the way he described it as the rainfall was contaminated, not because it's worse for human life, like even if the rainfall is better, if we influence it to be better, he called it a steer, not a deer. Like it was branded. So this is the idea if a human impacts it, it's bad. It's just bad because we do it. So even if we make like a farm, right? We make a farm, we can feed people instead of starving. That's viewed as bad because it has impact. And what energy does is it allows us to impact the earth. So this is, it's a hard point for pro-human people to get, but the core of the environmental movement is not a love of any part of our environment. It's a hatred of our part of nature because it's always about us, right? It's not about, it's just about minimizing or eliminating our impact. So it's the view that we're a uniquely evil species whose impact on the world is bad and needs to be eliminated. That's the only way if you know how valuable energy is, you can be against it. They think it's intrinsically wrong for us to have farms and factories and airplanes and stuff because we're changing the planet to improve it by our own standards. And their view is you have no right to do that. It sounds so similar to this post-modernist philosophy that the West is bad, right? And so you have to hate Western civilization and you have to constantly apologize for being in the West, for being pro-West. It sounds very similar to what we are teaching our kids in schools. Maybe that's why this environmentalism is so attractive to teachers because it's so much in line with that. Well, it's an aspect of it. And you notice it's Western civilization. So really, this is just isolating. There's an anti-civilization thing, but it's against the industrial part of the civilization, which is the energy powering, large-scale industry. I know, you know, like Douglas Murray, he has a good book, you know, The War on the West. And I think he's very good at ferreting out how you always have these superficially pro-human criticisms of the West that are really motivated by anti-human causes. So in my issue, it's like they're like, I care so much about people's safety from climate. Therefore, I hate fossil fuels. I'll say, okay, well, have fossil fuels made us safer from climate or more endangered? Would you rather be alive in today's climate or 100 years ago? Well, if you look at the data, you're 50 times more likely to die of a climate-related cause 100 years ago. So fossil fuels obviously have made us incredibly resilient from climate, and any negatives they've had have paled in comparison. But they claim, they don't say that. They don't say, yes, fossil fuels make us safer from climate, but I hate them because I hate impact because that would never fly. And the same thing when they criticize the West for something like, and this, you know, Douglas makes this point, Ayn Rand makes this point too, that like, they'll criticize it for something like slavery. And then you'll see, but the West is the place that eliminated slavery. Yes, the West had slavery and certainly has had racism, but that's the place that's led it. So why are you focused on the evils of the West to justify destroying it in favor of these other things? Or you take, you know, the Israel situation, right? It's always like looking at what can we find wrong about Israel? But Israel's obviously the most peaceful and freedom-loving place in that entire region. But they don't attack Israel because they'll say, we hate freedom, we hate civilization because that would look bad. They act like attacking Israel is in defense of freedom and civilization, even though it obviously isn't. So this is always a method people use is they look for the negative anti-human movements. They look at the negatives of something by human standards. They focus out of context on negatives of the thing they're opposing by human standards to appeal to people, even though their goal is anti-human. So the goal in the Middle East is, let's just destroy all the real civilization in the Middle East and have a theocracy. Or with civilization in general, let's destroy Western civilization and replace it with all the inferior civilizations. And with fossil fuels, it's, let's just destroy energy as we know it and replace it with imaginary green energy. But the real focus is on the destruction because all the things you could find fault with about fossil fuels, you could find more fault with the alternatives, mainly because they don't work. So what happens now? I can see how the previous administration would fall into this trap of the oppressor versus the oppressed or the attack on Western civilization or this idea that fossil fuels are destroying the earth. It fits their philosophy. What about now? I know that you wrote an entire research paper with specific concrete ideas of what should be done, right? There are 112 steps. So what are the main steps that you're hoping to see the administration actually implement? And are they actually listening to you? Do you like what you're seeing now? Yeah, well, I think there's, it's tricky to say the exact relationship with me. What I would say is, if you look at the energy leadership, they're very aligned with the ideas I've been advocating for a long time and continue to advocate. So I think that I'm by no means an uncritical supporter of the Trump administration and everything they're doing. But in energy, it's largely been extremely, extremely good. But we should talk about tariffs because that is undercutting it. But if you look at, say, the picks for, I mean, even in terms of the people I recommended, not that I decided it at all, but like, you know, Doug Burgum was my number one person that I recommended for interior. And it's because, you know, I know him, I mean, I know him personally, but also I've just seen what he's done. And he's somebody who's very, you know, very skilled business background, very good at management and a lot of impressive stuff in North Dakota and really gets how much the anti-development slash green movement is impeding progress. So I thought that would be a really good person to have there. And then Chris Wright is the one I know best. I've known him for a long time. We've actually been on a debate team together before debating people. And he's the one who just philosophically, we've just been aligned for a very long time in terms of this pro-human philosophy, thinking about climate in a very realistic and contextualized way, not just looking at climate negatives and exaggerating them, looking at them realistically in context. So it's very exciting to have him as secretary of energy, both because of the mandate of Department of Energy, but also because it's a big bully pulpit for communicating with the world, which I think he's done a really good job at. And then Lee Zeldin, I didn't know before, but he's been really impressive in terms of just how aggressively in a good way he's taken on EPA. And of all those agencies, arguably EPA is the one that has been most destructive. So I've talked to him a couple of times, but just seeing what he does, more importantly, they're really trying to take on the most, basically all the stuff I think is bad. So if you look at the stuff that I proposed, a lot of it they're doing, and that's not at all to say that they're doing it because I said it. It's just, it's more saying, I think it's a very aligned direction. And certainly I have a pretty significant team at this point. Certainly I make myself and my team available to help these guys in any way that I can, as long as they're doing pro-freedom things, which in most cases they are. So I don't know if you want me to talk about what I think the priorities are. Well, I mean, if you consume any of the media, then you come out with the impression that the EPA is under extremist leadership right now, where they're shutting down important offices. We're now going to breathe polluted air. People are going to start having asthma attacks. 200,000 people might die from polluted air right now. I mean, it's really overwhelming what's being thrown at us as consumers. You're an outsider. Obviously, they're not going to listen to everything that you have to say, but you can be critical about what they're doing, or you can say, let us know if what you think they're doing makes sense. I'll certainly tell you what I think of them when they're doing good and bad. I mean, as with the terrorists. So is it okay to shut down the Office of Atmospheric Protection or the Office of Air Quality Planning Standards? I mean, air quality, it sounds pretty important. The way I think it's framed right now is, yeah, there are these groups saying, you'll kill whatever 200,000 people, and then EPA is saying, no, that's definitely not true. I would put it much more extremely. If we don't do these changes, we're absolutely killing countless people. How? Because this relates to, I think there are three fundamental changes that are needed right now in our government, and so I'll just talk about the one relevant here, which is the government needs to do cost-benefit analysis with regard to environmental risk. So this applies to nuclear, and it applies to more conventional types of emissions, like air emissions and water emissions. It is absolutely essential. Remember I said how important energy is, like energy solves its own problems. That's more broadly true of technology and industry. Anytime you are restricting the emissions of some form of technology or the risk, you have to recognize that there is a big cost to that because you have to do it in a very precise and thoughtful way. So the example I used is historically of fire, right? If you said, well, fire has particulate pollution, so let's not use that. Okay, well, then everyone's going to die prematurely because of lack of fire. And certainly the way people used fire in the past has infinitely more particulate pollution than anything we're ever exposed to, and yet it was worth it because the life-sustaining technology required that emission. So at any given time, what you have to do is you have to look at what are the benefits of the technology, and then how can we minimize the side effects, not eliminate, you never can eliminate, but how can we minimize it in a way that doesn't do more harm than good? So the charter of zero emissions makes no sense. That is a death sentence. And there's problems with, so I think within the law, EPA is doing the right things. There are deep problems with our laws, particularly the Clean Air Act, that need to be changed by Congress because the Clean Air Act does not really, for the core stuff, allow you to consider the cost of its regulations. But just think about that. So you could say like, I want zero, what's called PM 2.5, particulate matter 2.5. And I can make up a study that says even the tiniest levels are harmful, which is bogus, but let's say you can do that. Well, then you could justify literally killing every American by the logic of the act, right? If you can't consider the cost of a regulation, and you can only consider the quote benefit, you can do infinite damage. And this is what's happened to nuclear, and it's what's happened largely with EPA, is what they'll do, they'll do this two-part thing. One is they'll ignore the cost, either because they legally can, or even where they're required to consider it, they will dramatically understate the cost of the regulation, and then they'll overstate the benefit. So what you're seeing in this claim about 200,000 lives is both of those things. Because the truth is, the cost of these regulations right now that EPA is trying to undo is just unimaginably large in terms of how productive we could be, also in terms of how it affects our national security. Because if you're trying to reduce particulate levels to just, we're way below Europe already, to just, you try to reduce them to minuscule levels, even often below background levels. So there are places where there's just naturally more ozone, and they say nature violates it. Okay, well, what does that even mean, right? Nature violates it, as that basically means you can do no industrial activity in that area. This is just incredibly, incredibly destructive. But EPA in the past has just totally cooked the books to pretend that restricting all this industry has no cost, often just lying that solar and wind can replace it. Well, why would they do that? I mean, it just sounds so extreme. There are that many anti-human people in government. Well, but it's this narrative of the people, the ideologues, you might call it, are, they think impact is bad. So they're always just looking for ways to reduce impact. And guess what? If you wanna get rid of human impact, one of the best things you can do is tell mothers and fathers, hey, your son is gonna get asthma. Yes, it's very scary. But if we do this, yeah, yeah, it's like your son is gonna get asthma. And if we pass this regulation, if we don't pass this regulation, if we do pass this regulation, your son is gonna be healthy. Whereas in reality, I mean, asthma is very multifactorial. Asthma rates have generally gone up as we've had less particulate pollution. So connection with asthma in particular. But the issue is the levels of particulate we're talking about in the vast majority of the US, you cannot really show any health benefit to reducing them even more. But the health harm of restricting them is enormous. What is the number? If you look at these studies, which we've done a lot on PM 2.5 and stuff, they have to just move heaven and earth to try to show some very loose correlation. You know what has an incredibly strong correlation to health, wealth, and having a job? And this is what they've done is they've made us a lot less wealthy and they've destroyed all these industries, which just lead to incredible health problems. But it's in the name of these minuscule air things that do almost nothing. And if you really cared about them, just put an air filter in your house. Like that's how you actually deal with them. We spend most of our time indoors. Just use an air filter. So it's not about the harm. It's about using the fear of harm and the ignorance of the benefits of fossil fuels and other things as an excuse to destroy it. But most people don't realize what's happening. So they think it's protecting us. So we need a holistic view of health where we have to see industry is the best friend of health. That's the core you need to see. And then within that context, yes, you want to reduce any preventable emissions that are truly harmful, but it has to be both of those. You have to be preventable without doing more harm than good. And you have to recognize at certain levels, basically every substance is harmless. Do you think the problem with those offices is because their charter is effectively to bring down whatever the human impact is? Yes. They don't have a holistic responsibility or even point of view. They are just so narrow-minded because they have one charter and one charter only. And then that is to bring down human impact. And therefore they're making bad decisions that ultimately are impacting us. So maybe it's not necessarily nefarious. Maybe it's not necessarily that they're religiously tied to this environmentalism, but they've been told to basically be clerks that are looking at only a narrow version of what reality looks like. That's definitely very insightful. And you can see that with the COVID situation as well, and I think that was much less anti-human, actually. But you see people who are genuinely concerned with the threat of COVID, but then you're asking some of them, like, hey, what should the policy be? But wait a second, if you're an expert in infectious diseases, you're not an expert in what the policy should be. You need to inform the policy, but we also need to know what are the risks of shutting down all of life? Right. What's going to happen to the children? What's going to happen to the schools? What's going to happen to the business? The health? Exactly. So yes, I would say the EPA, the way it was set up was not ideal, and then some of the key legislation, again, particularly the Clean Air Act, is not set up properly. What I would say that Zeldin and his team are doing that's very good is within the confines of the law, they're looking at these issues as holistically as possible and trying to be as precise as possible about the science, whereas I think the predecessors did not look at it holistically, and when they were required to, they distorted it beyond all that. I mean, let's just take one example of the power plant rules, which are defended in this idiotic claim that we're going to have 200,000 people die by 2050 or whatever it is. The power plant rules literally, they required a level of what's called carbon capture, so capturing CO2, that exists nowhere and can't exist anywhere cost-effectively, and they said that if coal plants cannot meet it, they get shut down. So that's about a sixth of our reliable electricity right there where we need a lot more electricity right now, we're already having problems, and that you can't build any new natural gas plants unless you meet that standard. So it was basically outlawing reliable electricity. Now, just think about what a blackout means for a week, right? Think about the absolutely catastrophic cost to human health of not having a reliable grid in terms of blackouts, in terms of the supply chain, in terms of hospitals working. I mean, think about like respirators, ventilators. You think about having somebody tied to an unreliable grid, and they attributed basically no cost to them. They said this regulation is going to do no health damage, but it's going to have all of these benefits. That just shows you how detached from reality when you can say let's ban all coal and new natural gas on our grid, and it's going to have no negative health effects. Well, the perfect example is here in California, right? Where we've been suffering from a lot of these environmental policies and when everybody still uses fossil fuels, but you don't have that many people who are willing to do business when it comes to oil and gas in California anymore. So we have to import it all from outside of California and pay sometimes close to double than the national average. Yeah, in terms of gasoline, but more broadly in terms of industry, like who's starting, are a lot of people moving their data centers to California? Right. Is that, I mean, look at even Elon Musk and other people moving out of California. So you imagine what does that do for our standard? So obviously, yes, gasoline prices are higher. Electricity prices are way higher and going up. And they have it, California hasn't even done anywhere near what the last EPA was trying to impose on the entire nation. California hasn't banned all natural gas yet. Now they're going to try to do it in the future. So just, it's very important that the EPA, the EPA that only focuses on side effects and exaggerates them and ignores the benefits of fossil fuels is the enemy of human health. You just have, people have to get that unless you take what you call the holistic look, which is a good way to think of it. Like if you do not look holistically at industry and health, you absolutely kill people left and right. Do you think the California fires had something to do with global warming or human impact? I mean, that's one of the reasons why they're trying to put more regulations here in California. So this, I find this to be a very disingenuous view. So you said if they have any effect. So, well, I think we have some effect on climate. So it has some effect in some way. But if you look at the issue of fire and safety from fire, I think two things are quite obvious. One is that any climate changes are a fairly minor factor that is totally outside the control of any state. And that there are major factors that we have direct control over. So it's very important. We do not have control over global CO2 levels, even in the United States, let alone in California. So we're about a seventh of the world's emissions. That share is declining as the developing world uses more fossil fuels, which I think is a good thing. But short of starting World War III, far greater and killing everybody, we don't have control over CO2 levels. So everything people are saying in terms of their policies, these are things that are going to affect things, you know, maybe two generations in the future or something like this. So that's not going to solve, if you're worried about your house burning down, that's not a near-term solution for Gavin Newsom to ban fossil fuels and electricity by 2045, or that's more or less what he's done, right? So it's very disingenuous, I think, to focus on the factor that you have no control over. And it's pretty obvious, if you think about how these fires start and how they progress and how they finish, that it's not that it's a degree or two warmer and there's nothing we can do and it's guaranteed. So just look at, like every fire has, there are five things we can obviously handle much better. And let's take the LA fires. So ignition. All fires have to ignite. In Southern California in particular, the vast majority of fires are from human ignition. And in particular, things like arson and then accidents, particularly involving the homeless. And we could crack down on that a lot more than we do. And we're not. So already you're having that. I mean, I was testifying last week about fires and insurance and stuff. And the woman put there by the Democrat side was from, I forget what it's called, but the Clear Lake area and Lake Valley. And the major fire that had destroyed the homes, was it initiated by the evil climate? It was initiated by a faulty outdoor hot tub installation. So it's like crack down on human ignition. That's what you would do. Particularly in Southern California, that's what you want to do. Now, number two, maybe the most significant factor is what's called the fuel load. So this is basically how much burnable biomass is there. And this is where the green movement has just been a mass destruction movement. Because they just allow in all kinds of different areas, the accumulation of brush in different kinds of ways. So they've been against logging, against controlled burns, against mechanical thinning. And as a result, you have all of this dead wood debris build up. And that becomes just this incredibly high energy in a bad sense phenomenon. That's because we have this anti-impact philosophy that says we shouldn't manage it. Whereas the pro-impact thing is like, we got to manage this so that it needs to be a benefit to human life. It can't be a threat. So we don't crack down on ignition. We let the fuel load go out of control. Number three is proximity. We can decide where we build, right? And yet we encourage people to build in very endangered places, in part because we have terrible insurance policies, which underlie all these. Because we basically subsidize insurance. So then we don't have people take on the risk. People don't recognize the risk. So they're not responsible themselves. And they don't hold the government accountable because people are going to pay for their stuff. Then there's number four is fire resistance. So a similar thing. We don't do nearly enough in terms of fire resistance, given the risks that the government has created. And then five, and this was particularly embarrassing with LA, is just having robust response. Where you can respond quickly and we were low on, we didn't have the right water facilities and we're underfunded and stuff. But the ignition and the fuel load and the proximity, you can do so much with those. So to spend any energy on, maybe it was 1% more likely because of the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere which we have no control over. That's totally disingenuous. We know that if we engage in what I call climate mastery, so using our capabilities to make our environment safe with wildfires, we can be safe from wildfires, out of control wildfires anywhere. And we're in a very fire prone place. So we need to be on top of climate mastery and we're at the bottom. I mean, we're worse than the primitive peoples were hundreds of years ago. At least they knew to do controlled burns. They didn't even worship unimpacted nature as much as we do. How do we reverse this? PragerU tries to do, we try to do what we can. All of this environmentalist religion is in the schools. I taught it when I taught fourth grade. I taught Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth. I oftentimes confess, but really I love the earth. So I had no idea what I was doing. And I know you're trying to do what you can do on the policy level. But for people who are listening and are learning about some of these details, and there are a lot of details, so it can get overwhelming. If they're learning about it for the first time and they wanna get more equipped and more educated, where do you suggest that they go? Obviously, there's your book. What are other ways to just learn the truth and then also get involved in and make sure that we get more reasonable about the choices that we make? Well, I'll give resources first, but then I'll give a kind of mindset. So a lot of my focus has been creating easy to use resources. So one of them I have is called energytalkingpoints.com. And the goal of that is to take every issue we've covered today and a million others and give you very digestible talking points that you can use and understand. So everything there is the length of a tweet. And I mean, there's thousands and thousands, thousands of these things all available for free. So that's one thing. And these are used by the government, used by others. I guess number two is, part of that is, well, I have a new thing called Energy Freedom Fund that I set up. But in part, I wanted there to be an advocacy and lobbying group that was supporting pro-freedom policies, not any given industry. But as part of that, and as part of Energy Talking Points, we develop a lot of policies for politicians. So working with the government, when people want our help, we offer it for free. Working on policies and all of those. So if you're in government, email me, alex.alexepstein.com, and we can help you. Number three is there's alexepstein.ai, which I highly recommend checking out because you can have a conversation with that. And it is pretty good. We've invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in making this AI really good. And people like, I won't name names, but very famous people use alexepstein.ai. And we have a pro version for government where it can just write speeches for you, write op-eds, and it's better than most humans at this stage. So those resources are designed, if you want to learn and influence others, to make it as easy as possible. Because I want to lower the friction that people have on these issues. In terms of the mindset though, given what we've been covering, I would really stress just thinking about your own environmental philosophy and how you think of the earth. Because again, like loving the earth, you have to be careful. Like what we really want is to love how humans improve the earth. I mean, we want to love the, in a sense, it's a humanized earth. We make the earth a better place. And to really get that, and to get rid of this idea that our impact is bad and evil, et cetera. I had this energy conference recently, and I guess our capstone speaker was Jordan Peterson. We had a long discussion, he and I, and we had a lot of industry people there. And his focus was really, I think, dead on on how the industry in particular just projects all this guilt. And they have so much guilt. And if you are a low self-esteem industry, you cannot win people over. So, and I find that often with people not, even if they're not in the industry, they have a low self-esteem kind of projection where it's like fossil fuels, they're a necessary evil, or it's kind of guilty versus no, this makes the world better. Like fossil fuel producers should be proud. They should not be apologizing. We should not be apologizing for using, you should never apologize for using the best technology available to improve human life. Doesn't mean you don't want a better one in the future, but you should never apologize about using the best ones. So if you see the earth as, I call the earth like wild potential. It has amazing potential, but we need to make it a lot better. Civilization has made it a lot better and we can do better still. So if you think of it as human beings using fossil fuels are making the world a better and better place to live, that core self-confidence about the earth and about fossil fuels and about humans is very contagious. And it's very neutralizing of enemies versus if it's just fossil fuels aren't as bad as they used to be and I guess we need them, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe the last example is I wrote two books. One is called The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and one is called Fossil Future. Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal and Natural Gas, Not Less. Those are both very positive in your face. What if I had written a book called Fossil Fuels Aren't As Bad As You Think or Fossil Fuels Aren't As Bad As It Used To Be. Would anyone read that? Would those books be bestsellers? No. So often when you're being attacked, if you're in the right, the best solution is to be totally, to have total self-esteem if it's deserved. Not to accept their worldview, not to start from, yeah, we're destroying the earth but not as much as you think. No, we're improving the earth. That's a total, that's like a Copernican revolution in how we think about our relationship. I love that philosophy because it applies to so many other things that are obviously true. Like stop apologizing about being an American patriot, right? That has totally changed the energy in our country or about Western civilization. Or the Israel thing. Like, you know, I mean, people get mad at me for this, but it's like, you know, they're like, oh, Israel's trying to take over the whole Middle East. It's like the Middle East would be so lucky if Israel would try to take it over. Like Israel's obviously superior to the rest of the Middle East. So it's just this view of, but you see this with the Israel issue too. I'm not as much of an expert in, but it's an obvious sort of black and white issue of freedom and civilization being attacked in the name of freedom and civilization. Right, well, being unwavering about the truth is always a winning proposition. And I think at the end of the day, we need to remember that our adversaries are going to make us cower in the face of the truth. But when we don't, that's when we win. And I think you've been doing a great job changing the conversation and the narrative around fossil fuels. So super proud of your work. And I can't wait. Well, thanks for having all these videos. I'm going to have another AI chat with you on your website without you even having to come into the office now. You should. Right. You should. Yeah, that'll, alexepstein.ai. I love it. Well, thanks for coming in again. Hopefully we'll bring you on. We'll talk more about AI next time. All right. Thanks a lot.