Joel Bowman, writing one last time from Tivoli, Italy...
Welcome to another Sunday Sesh, dear reader, that time of the week when we take a break from the quotidian march and contemplate the bigger trends driving the markets, mobs and manias animating the world around us.
This week we have a special treat for you... in lieu of our own sesquipedalian scribbles, we present instead a conversation we had with best-selling author and friend of fossil fuels, Alex Epstein.
Alex first made a name for himself with his New York Times best-selling 2015 book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, which infuriated climate alarmists as much as it did delight those of us who are (dare we say) grateful to live in an industrialized world, where climate-related deaths have fallen by 98% over the past century... where absolute poverty has been decimated thanks to petroleum-based fertilizers, pesticides and mechanized agriculture... and where billions of people in countries around the world can enjoy reliable access to cheap energy, much like we in the west have done for 150+ years.
Alex followed his first book up with the 2022 bestseller Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas-Not Less, in which he writes:
Fossil fuels are a uniquely cost-effective source of energy. Cost-effective energy is essential to human flourishing. Billions of people are suffering and dying for lack of cost-effective energy.
~ Alex Epstein, from Fossil Future
A busy man these days, he’s testified before congress, sat down with Jordan Peterson, appeared on John Stossel’s show and even debated energy with RFK, Jr. (the comments under that video are worth reading alone...)
And this week, he kindly agreed to spend half an hour with us to discuss human flourishing, misconceptions about so-called “green energy” and, of course, our fossil future.
Bonner Private Research members can read the entire transcript, lightly edited for clarity, below.
As always, we welcome your feedback in the comments section.
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
P.S. For more videos like this, please consider becoming a member of Bonner Private Research here…
TRANSCRIPT:
Joel Bowman:
Welcome back to another episode of the Fatal Conceits Podcast, dear listener, it's the show about money, markets, mobs and manias, as you know, not necessarily in that order. If you haven't already done so, please head over to our Substack page, you can check us out at bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com, there's hundreds of free articles there on everything from finance, energy, economics, you name it. And of course the whole passing political parade, which we're going to get into discussing a little bit about today with our guest.
I'm delighted to welcome Mr. Alex Epstein to the show. He is, of course, the author of Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas-Not Less, as we've been so vociferously led to believe. Alex, welcome to the show, mate. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.
Alex Epstein:
My pleasure, thanks for having me.
Joel Bowman:
Absolutely. And as we were just speaking off camera about a couple of seconds ago, you're in Southern California, I believe. So we'll start off with a very easy question, you are a fossil fuel advocate and yet you choose to live in California... Why?
Alex Epstein:
Well, I guess the reason I'm a fossil fuel advocate is because they make life much better, and part of what they do is they make the earth a far more livable place. So they take the natural environment and make it into a far superior environment for human life than, say, imagine the environment of 300 years ago compared to today. It's a lot easier for us to have opportunity and flourish in this environment. But we don't have total control over earth's environment yet, so I choose to live in the nicest possible part.
Joel Bowman:
Yeah, I'm just imagining the kind of NIMBY crowd out there in California.
Alex Epstein:
It is a political environment that's suboptimal. That's mostly paying more taxes, and it's very oppressive for people for sure. I mean, it's nice to be a successful author and this kind of thing, so I can afford to live here more easily than most people can afford to live here. It's really, really bad in terms of how they drive people out, how they make it so difficult to do business here that's related to my field. It's just how much they've screwed up energy, the price of gasoline maybe above all the fragility and cost of our grid.
Then there's just a lot of political stuff that's happening all the time that one might not be in favor of, which is outside my field, but like proposals to pay 3 million dollars a person in reparations is not something I agree with. So you have a lot of stuff in this category, but it is a really nice place, and I would say a lot of people are very open to new ideas. So in the complex that I live, people have actually discovered what I do, and a lot of them are sympathetic and interested, and I give them copies of books. And I used to live in San Francisco, which is a lot tougher than Laguna Beach, and even there a lot of people were interested.
Joel Bowman:
Yeah, it's interesting to think how many closeted rational thinkers there might be in these very politically oppressive states. If they just know that there are a few more people out there who are thinking along the lines of the enlightenment, or you mentioned going back 300 years, the relative cornucopia of wonders that we have thanks to fossil fuels today, then they might be a little more open to discussing that. I'm talking to you from a little ways outside of Rome here in Italy, which reminds me of the rise and fall of whole civilizations, when we forget the lessons of the past, or what's brought us to our present. But much like Southern California and my home country of Australia, here in Europe the “green regime,” if you want to call it that, is in absolute overdrive as I'm sure you're well aware.
All the talk about town is of course of “Net-zero by 2050,” and what many of the politicians, or at least the talking heads on television speak about, that by 2030, 55% reduction in carbon emissions is a necessary step to get there. I wonder, in all of your research on this topic, first of all, what does a 55% reduction in carbon emissions in the next six and a half years look like to you? And then what does a net-zero planet in such a tight timeframe look like for the species, now that have come to flourish thanks to the bounty of fossil fuels?
Alex Epstein:
So I have a lot of material on this. If people check out... I have a website, energytalkingpoints.com, I highly recommend subscribing to the free newsletter. And if you search Europe, you'll see tons and tons of stuff. So before we get into what it looks like to reduce 55% by 2030, let's just look at the current situation. Because if you're looking at it from a distance, it's an odd situation, because what's happened is they've passed a set of policies that are in this direction, although not nearly this extreme, and these policies have put them in a very precarious position. We saw this with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we saw this with Germany just being incredibly dependent on Russia, who at least initially could kill a bunch of Germans on demand by cutting off their natural gas. You saw them rush to reverse their policies, including doing whatever they could to import natural gas from friendly countries. You're seeing at least some movement toward being able to produce more domestically, or at least securing better supplies of gas from friendly neighbors.
So you've had this movement to artificially restrict the supply of fossil fuel on the premise that so-called green energy, usually solar and wind, will be able to rapidly replace it. This has worked very, very poorly if you look at what's happened, because solar and wind haven't replaced fossil fuels substantially. They still have this need, but they and others have contributed to a shortfall of supply, with more demand. Demand has even gone up despite the predictions, oh, it'll be replaced by other things. So you have this artificial decrease in the supply of fossil fuel, and then you're also subsidizing massively this solar and wind, because the solar and wind is not actually competing on real markets, there are all sorts of preferences that it gets to be used. So what happens is you're paying more than you need to for fossil fuel, because you've artificially made the supply scarce, and then you're having this other energy.
And part of what's problematic with solar and wind, is they're very duplicative. So they're not self-sufficient forms of energy that just on their own operate like a regular power plant. They're sometimes on, but you don't know how much they're going to be on. And sometimes they're almost at zero, which basically means that for full reliability you need 100% reliable infrastructure plus the solar and wind, so they add a lot of cost to the grid. So it's really this mess where, you make the cheap thing expensive, and then you subsidize another expensive thing, and you're creating this crisis. I mean, it's an energy crisis of cost, reliability and security. And I say it's odd from a distance, because their response is, "Oh, well, let's do much more of this. Let's do it much more quickly."
And by the way, part of this is a hostility toward nuclear energy that has been decades long that we've seen in Germany, but also other places. So what you have is just this suicidal thing in the name of solving the climate crisis that's causing a very real crisis, but they're not questioning at all their policies even though it's causing a real crisis. And then we could also go into, well, the whole climate crisis doesn't make much sense on a couple of grounds. One is, them acting self-sacrificially isn't doing anything to what China's doing, or Russia's doing, or what India's doing, so they're not even moving the world that way. The only way to move the world that way would be to have cost-effective ways of reducing your emissions, but not cost-adding ways, and not everyone is going to adopt that.
And then the other thing is, if you just think in terms of common sense, I mentioned we're much better off than 300 years ago. We're certainly much better off climate-wise than 300 years ago, in terms of how likely are you to die from one of these dreaded climate disasters. That rate has gone down by 98% in the last 100 years. So overall, if you tally storms, and floods, and extreme heat, extreme cold, 98% less means you’re 1/150th as likely to die from one of these things. So it's this bizarre thing where in reality we're actually doing really well climate-wise, thanks in large part to low cost energy from fossil fuels. So everything has gotten better, and yet they've enacted these policies to make everything worse by restricting the availability of that, and the consequences are manifesting, and they're still doubling down on their dogmas. That's why I say it's very, very odd, and it points to a kind of religious element here, where it's a faith because it's not based on reason and reality.
Joel Bowman:
Right. I mean, just going back to the almost cult-like aspect of it. When the doomsday passes, and everybody wakes up and realizes, "Look, the sun came up again." And then they say, "Oh, well, actually we just read the Mayan calendar wrong and the doomsday is actually next September, and you all need to give us a little bit more money between now and then we'll put it off for you."
Alex Epstein:
"And this doomsday is going to be even worse."
Joel Bowman:
Yeah, right. "This time it’s going to be apocalyptic."
Alex Epstein:
And the next one's going to be worse, so it needs even more money and more urgency.
Joel Bowman:
Right. Yeah, exactly. So how much of this do you attribute to the... I don't think propaganda is too strong of a word here. Because I think a lot of people, maybe even just well-meaning people, who look around and they say, "Hey, I'm a surfer. I grew up on the coast of Australia." You're there on Laguna Beach. Obviously we want things like cleaner air, and cleaner water, and just general environmental improvements to be made.”
I think the people who sell us those kinds of green tech unicorns and such tap into that human desire for better living conditions and better living conditions for our... We're constantly hearing about the next generations. But it does seem like they're not getting the whole story when they're told about the wonders and the cornucopia of renewables, so what do you say to that as far as pricing in the total cost of green technologies, for example? Which are I know often overlooked when we get these kind of rosy projections about, "Hey, in 12 years from now we'll all be driving solar-powered cars, and it'll be reduced to a fraction of the cost thanks to the wonders of technology."
Alex Epstein:
Remind me of that last aspect if I forget, because I want to comment on the earlier aspect. Because I think there's definitely something really strong going on with the human desire for a good environment. And one of my basic premises of my work, and it relates to something I'm trying to correct, is this negative association between energy and freedom on the one hand, and then a good environment on the other, because actually, thought of properly, energy and freedom are what make our environment a good place to live. Before we had mass energy use, which means mass machine use, so people using machines to amplify and expand their otherwise very small productive abilities. It allows us to transform the earth, to change things on a much greater scale, if we have energy powering machines. Before that, the state of nature, so to speak, was really bad for human beings. As I talk about in Fossil Future, it's naturally deficient, so it doesn't have a lot of useful available resources, and it's very dangerous.
And so what human beings need to do to overcome that, is we need to be productive, we need to produce new value that makes the naturally barely livable environment into an environment in which we can flourish, like an abundant, safe, opportunity-filled world. And that's really what freedom and energy do. I mean, freedom is your way of discovering and implementing the most cost-effective ways to produce energy so that everyone can have it, and they can have it on a large scale. So if you think about it from that perspective, energy makes our environment far better. And part of it is because the goal is to make it far better. Yes, you don't want to adversely change parts of your environment that you are happy with in the first place, so you don't want to add any more pollution to air than you need to. But by the way, our ancestors are burning wood, that was a lot worse for the air.
Joel Bowman:
Or dung...
Alex Epstein:
Yeah, exactly, and that's kind of the natural state of things. Everywhere is cold a lot of the time for people, so you always need to heat, and so that's your natural thing. So even that's an improvement. But yeah, you don't want to pollute water, but you also want to clean up naturally dirty water. So what you want to do, is you want to be improving your environment and energy. You should think about energy and anything else from that perspective, where you need to change it a lot to make it better, but you don't want to adversely change things. So the way you think of it, if you want to use the term impact, which is the dominant term today, is you want to have massive positive impact, like a human helping impact, and minimal human harming impact. But unfortunately, I don't think there's been, and that's a really pro-human way of thinking about our environment, and energy, and politics.
But unfortunately I don't think we've traditionally been offered that. I think historically what happened is the people who were pro-freedom and pro-energy didn't talk much about our environment, they didn't make clear this idea that energy makes our environment far better. And what happened is the anti-freedom side really monopolized valuing environment. And what they did is they had a hostility toward human impact as such, so that's really been the dominant view, that all human impact is bad. We should just reduce our impact across the board.
But that combines together things like, well, reducing negative impacts on air and water, but also things like the impacts of roads, and factories, and farms, things that are really, really good, or even roads that allow us to go enjoy the water. So it's like this hostility toward human impact has become the environmental dominant view, and part of the way it passes itself off is it tells people, "Hey, you want clean air, clean water, let's minimize our impact." But they don't realize, wait, you're packaging in maximizing all of our human helping impacts, you're denigrating those.
And so I think what's needed is a pro-human perspective that doesn't think of the world in terms of, we should impact it all the time or we shouldn't impact it. That's not the way to think of it. It's, we should impact it in accordance with human flourishing. And that's what I talk about in Fossil Future and my work, is that you need to think of our environment from a human perspective. So you want it to be the best possible place for human beings, and that includes things like loving certain other species, and you want to have a good relationship with them. But you don't want to sacrifice to them, and you certainly don't want to sacrifice to the idea of a dehumanized earth, which I think is really what's driving a lot of this.
The idea that the perfect earth is about the other species, it's just about not us... I think that is a deep hatred of humans. I'm going into that a lot, because I do think that this is really the core of it, it is thinking about our environment in a pro-human way. And once you do that, I think it's quite obvious that fossil fuels are a big environmental good, once you think of it in this pro-human, holistic way.
And then you asked about the green stuff. So what they'll tend to do, is things that impact nature that are actually effective for human beings, they'll focus on human harming impacts, and they'll ignore human helping impacts. So for fossil fuels, they'll talk about, "Hey, if you burn them, it's going to make it warmer and that'll make it harder to grow crops in some regions." But they don't talk about, well, this powers modern agriculture and allows us to feed 8 billion people through fossil fuel fertilizer and diesel fuel.
It's an incredible net good for agriculture, but they make it seem like a net bad by fixating only on negatives and then exaggerating those negatives. But what they tend to do... And I have an article coming, I don't know when this is going to be published, but it'll come out soon on energytalkingpoints.com. It's about how green energy is neither energy nor green. What they tend to do is they attack the thing that works, but then at the same time they pretend to be in favor of this, what I would consider imaginary energy. So today it's solar and wind, where they're like, "Oh, we love this. We will be thrilled to use this, we just want more energy."
But you notice they only look at positives, and they don't look at negatives, even from their perspective until and unless it becomes prevalent. So as solar and wind started to become a little more prevalent, if not cost-effective, you see they're against the mining, and they're against the transmission line building, because their attitude toward energy, at least the leaders, is quite dishonest, because they're not really in favor of energy. Because if you're against impacting the earth, you have to hate energy, because energy is our means of impacting the earth on a large scale. That's what we do with it, it's the capacity to do work on earth. Now, most people who believe in this I don't think are anti-human or disingenuous, but I think the leadership... I really do think of it as an anti-energy movement that is pretending to like imaginary energy to make the destruction of real energy more palatable. I do not think they're actually that enthused by solar and wind, and if they were before, they sure as hell shouldn't be now given the results that we've been seeing.
Joel Bowman:
Right, yeah. I mean, we didn't have 8 billion people until the equivalent of a blink of the eye ago on this planet. And we can now sustain all of these beating hearts and souls with our own individual dreams and aspirations around the world, because we have things like modern industrialized agriculture, because we have things like jet fuel, because we have steel and glass buildings that don't blow over when hurricanes come along, or we can temperature control them, what have you. Things that the ancient Romans just down the street from me would've had no idea about during their day. And the Greeks just across the Aegean, when they talked about human flourishing and the concept of eudaimonia, couldn't have imagined with their greatest flying contraptions onwards. So I guess with all that and...
Alex Epstein:
I like these references, by the way. I think the ancient world gets understudied, and maybe in particular Rome. But I think there's so much great achievement in that era that was unfortunately stopped for a long time, and we regressed for a long time. And I don't want to do that again, but there are a lot of progressive forces right now.
Joel Bowman:
Yeah, that's such a great point. I mean, I have this right in my backyard at the moment, and it's amazing to see that we get used to this idea of perpetual progress, or at least we perceive it through our mind's eye that way. But you really have to go to the old world and look at some ruins to realize how hard won that progress was, and how quickly it can be lost if we neglect reality and we neglect rational thinking. But I realize we're running up on the top of our clock here, so I just want to get your...
Alex Epstein:
Yeah, your questions were too good and I wanted say a lot about all of them.
Joel Bowman:
Yeah. So I just want to get your take at the end here, because it does seem like there may be a little bit of a shift in public perception about some of the issues. And a large part of the thanks goes to you and your work. I wonder if when you see things like the Just Stop Oil, the cult of St. Greta, and I don't want to give any more of these ragtag groups any more publicity than they need, but do you think that you're seeing a little bit of a turn in public opinion? And maybe that's just off the back of the harsh reality that industrialized Europe faced when they were forced into an energy corner, if you like.
Alex Epstein:
I found it a bit heartening to see some of the reaction to Just Stop Oil becoming less sympathetic, and when these thugs are... I mean, man, it is really pleasurable for me to see just self-confident citizens hauling these thugs off without much concern when they're disrupting life. Because I just think it's so immoral just to hear, "I have my cause, and so I just get to ruin someone's day." Who knows what you're stopping. I mean, it could be someone visiting a beloved relative, or getting married, or they need to go to the hospital, or they're just trying to get an education, or trying to succeed at their job. And you just say, "Well, screw you. I believe this global thing, and I need to..." Fill in the blank, destroy the Trevi Fountains in Rome, or ruin this sporting event and stuff.
So I'm glad to see that backlash. And I think part of what's going on there is that... I think there's two factors. One is definitely the global energy crisis where people are seeing the connection. It still needs to be made better, but people are saying, "Wait a second, these anti-fossil fuel policies, maybe they have something to do with why fossil fuel prices have gone up." Maybe it's not that the industry just randomly decided to become evil and charge money. And they never thought of that during the pandemic, when they're all going out of business, like they forgot that strategy. They're like, "Wait a second. Maybe it's because we've been saying no investing in this stuff, no producing, no refining, no transportation and infrastructure. Maybe that has something to do with it, and maybe all these big, new projects that we're paying for, maybe we actually have to pay for them. Maybe they're not actually free. Maybe there is such a thing as inflation, by the way. Maybe you can't just print money and you just get to buy more stuff, because the stuff materializes once you print the money."
Joel Bowman:
Who would've thought?
Alex Epstein:
I know, there's all these these... There's a really good Rudyard Kipling poem, The Gods of the Copybook Headings, which he talks about... If you haven't read it, definitely read it. But it's about the people, what he calls the Gods of the Marketplace, versus the Gods of the Copybook Headings. And the Gods of the Copybook Headings are telling you these very, "If you don't work, you die." Type things. And the Gods of the Marketplace, I don't like that term because I love the marketplace, but they're telling you, "Wishes are horses." This is a digression, but people are seeing this, they're seeing kind of consequences of these bad policies. And some people, like me, who have been warning of these have been saying, "I told you so." Which I think is actually very, very important, and not in bad taste, I think it's necessary.
So that's one thing that's been very helpful. And so when you're having trouble heating your home and paying your energy bill, you're not quite as sympathetic to Greta like commissioning 10 people to take her across the ocean in some stunt or something like this, or saying, "How dare you?" Because it's like, "Well, how dare I heat my home? Well, I dare do that, and I wish I could do it more cheaply." The other thing though is I think, and this is where I am happy to have played I think a significant role, is we now have at least the beginnings of an alternative movement where there are more and more people who are confidently at least anti anti-fossil fuel, but I think more importantly, pro-fossil fuel. I think that's the thing, that's really needed is being pro-fossil fuel.
So if you look at my book titles, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuel and Fossil Future, it's not just saying, "These aren't as bad as you think." It's saying, "These are actually good." And I'm not just saying that, I have a whole set of arguments including just, Hey, we need to look at the big picture, we need to look at the full context. You need to look at positives and negatives of fossil fuels, and weigh them carefully. And I think that that brand of argument and the facts associated with it has started taking off.
And I think my books have been helpful. The resource I mentioned, energytalkingpoints.com, I think is helping take it to a new level, because what we've done there is made for free... A book you have to pay 20 bucks for or whatever your audience uses. But energytalkingpoints.com is totally free and you can search for any topic imaginable, and it'll give you really, really good arguments. So I'm really trying to just create and systematize every single argument imaginable on this issue, and have the answers. And soon we'll have Alex GPT, so there's actually a chatbot of me that can answer everything that's coming out soon, so just make sure you're on my newsletter for that. So having the ammunition, and then having the crisis event that at least opens people's minds up to an alternative, that's a very powerful combination, and I'm definitely trying to cash in on both of those right now.
Joel Bowman:
Well, fantastic, Alex. And again, I really appreciate your time. Your work is followed by all of us at the Bonner Private Research team. I'm going to include the links that you mentioned, both to your Energy Talking Points page and your books, your various other work, Twitter handle, et cetera, in the show notes below so our listeners can head on down there. But again, thanks very much for having a pro-energy and I also think a pro-human approach to this, as one is not possible without the other. So again, thanks for taking the time and hopefully we'll get to speak again sometime in the future.
Alex Epstein:
Thank you. And I also love the pro-reason aspect of this show. So yeah, pro-human, pro reason, pro-energy, it's a life giving combination.
Joel Bowman:
Outstanding. All right, well let's sign off on it there, and we'll catch up later. Thanks, Alex.
Alex Epstein:
Thank you.
Alex Epstein on our Fossil Future