Music

Hello everyone watching and listening on YouTube or the associated podcast platforms.

I have with me today Alex Epstein, I'm looking forward to this discussion.

He's a philosopher and energy expert who argues that human flourishing should be the guiding principle and the appropriate metric for our energy and environmental policy and our determination of its progress.

He's the author of the new book Fossil Future, as well as the New York Times bestseller, the moral case for fossil fuels, which was published in 2014.

He's also the creator of energytalkingpoints.com, a source of powerful, well-referenced talking points on energy, environmental and climate issues.

Epstein began his work in 2011 with the founding of the Center for Industrial Progress, a for-profit think tank offering insights into the world of fossil fuels and fighting back against the mainstream narrative of so-called environmentalism.

Widely recognized as a master of persuasion and debate on energy issues, Alex has spoken to dozens of Fortune 500 companies and at dozens of prominent universities including Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Duke, his alma mater.

He's also a highly sought after consultant on messaging, working with dozens of major political offices on pro-energy, pro-freedom messaging.

We're here today to talk about the moral necessity of an energy-rich future, one that both must and should rely on the abundant provision of the petrobased fuels so carelessly, currently demonized.

So welcome to all of you who are watching or listening and welcome to Alex.

So maybe we could just start by having you walk through the book. One of the things I found interesting to begin with was your discussion of the motivations, let's say, of some of the more radical people that are pushing what is purported to be a pro-environment stance, people like Paul Ehrlich, who clearly have an agenda that could be more accurately conceptualized as anti-human,

certainly anti-industrial rather than pro-environment. And I think that's something that's worthwhile alerting everyone to, especially given the current state of energy price increase in Europe, let's say, and the consequences that's going to have for the poor around the world.

Let's start with that, though. You wrote this book in 2014. Let's talk about why you wrote it and how you think your prognostications have fared in what's almost an intervening decade.

Well, I think one thing that's relevant, I'm not sure if you know this, but there's a new book, 2022 called Fossil Future, which is the successor or replacement to the moral case for fossil fuels.

So I talk a bunch in that about how the moral case for fossil fuels has fared. And I think in terms of a predictive book, it's not primarily a predictive book, but it has been extremely accurate, because if you look at what people have said in the last eight or so years, the main narratives have been, we're not going to need fossil fuels as much as we used to, they're going to be rapidly replaced by solar and wind primarily.

And that climate impact, the climate impact of fossil fuels is going to be increasingly catastrophic. So we're going to see more and more suffering and death from climate related disasters.

And in the book I talk about that's not going to happen, because one fossil fuels will remain uniquely cost effective, particularly in a world that needs far more energy, which is something that was not stressed in the past and is not stressed enough today.

People are starting to realize most of the world doesn't have enough energy. So replacing fossil fuels is almost impossible, given that you're not talking about just replacing it for the people who use it, but for the people who need it.

So I've been very vindicated on the continuing cost effectiveness of fossil fuels. And then on the climate disaster point, we have documented that climate related disaster deaths are down 98% in the last 100 years, and they've continued to decline.

And the basic reason is because whatever impact we have on climate that is negative, it is far outweighed by our ability to master climb to neutralize all sorts of climate dangers.

And so we're much better off overall climate wise than we were 50 years ago, and certainly 100 years ago.

...