#26 Alex Epstein - The Global Energy War

We are currently in the middle of a global energy war. Alex Epstein joins us to discuss what the implications of the current Green Initiative will be, how China ties in and stands to benefit in a world where the US now depends on them for energy, and how the benefits of fossil fuels have been completely ignored for years. Alex Epstein is a Fossil Fuel Philosopher, author, and industrial and energy policy commentator. He is the founder and president of the Center for Industrial Progress, a for-profit organization in San Diego, California. Alex speaks with Shawn about his latest book “Fossil Future” and the negative impacts of the current energy war, our climate, and the unique benefits of fossil fuels to human flourishing—including their unrivaled ability to provide low-cost, reliable energy to billions of people around the world, especially the world’s poorest people. Pre-Order Fossil Future NOW from the links provided below: https://amzn.to/3MtCx6h Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website - https://www.shawnryanshow.com Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/VigilanceElite TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@shawnryanshow Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/shawnryan762 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:46Speaker 02

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• 0:50Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 0:53Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not the first then.

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• 1:30Shawn Ryan?

  As the national average of gasoline approaches $5 a gallon, I thought it would be a good idea to have our next guest on, Alex Epstein, who is a fossil fuels philosopher. Guys, we are in an energy crisis. This is actually a global energy war. This is tying into why inflation's running rampant. It's tying into a lot of things. In this episode, we discuss how China is involved, talk about the Green New Deal, Green Initiative, what that means, how it affects us, all that good stuff. Guys, if you want to pick up Alex's new book, which is already an Amazon bestseller, and it hasn't even been released yet. Releases on the 24th of this month.

• 2:15Shawn Ryan?

  Links below. Also, I've talked about it many times. We are having problems reaching the audience. I don't even know how much time I have left on this platform. So, what we're doing... Doing an email newsletter. We don't spam. We only release the newsletter when there's a new SRS episode. I'd appreciate it if you sign up. If you want to be notified, you don't want to miss an episode, sign up.

• 2:40Shawn Ryan?

  Like I said, it's only like two emails a month. Anyways, and if not, that's cool too. But hey, this is an important episode. Hope you guys like it. I love you all. Thank you for all the support. And if you can, leave us a review on iTunes. Love you.

• 2:57Speaker 05

  Excuse me.

• 2:59Speaker 05

  Excuse me, this is private property.

• 3:07Shawn Ryan?

  Right now, the United States is in an energy crisis, a bad one. This is a global energy war that's happening right now. We're losing, and the only country that's going to benefit out of all this is China.

• 3:21Speaker 05

  The energy industry is the industry that powers every other industry. To the extent energy is cheap, plentiful, and reliable, human beings thrive. To the extent energy is unaffordable, scarce, or unreliable, human beings suffer. It's so bad, the United States should learn from the failed experiment. Instead, our president is doubling down on it. And just as ominously, he's calling for even the poorest countries to use unreliables instead of reliables. This in a world where 3 billion people have almost no access to energy. But since unreliable energy can't be relied upon, it has to be propped up by reliable energy, mostly fossil fuels.

• 4:04Speaker 05

  The solar panels and wind turbines are an unnecessary and enormous cost to the system.

• 4:10Speaker 06

  Mr. Epstein, are you a scientist?

• 4:13Speaker 05

  No, philosopher.

• 4:14Speaker 06

  You're a philosopher?

• 4:15Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 4:16Speaker 06

  Okay. Well, this is the Environment and Public Works Committee. I think it's interesting we have a philosopher here talking about an issue.

• 4:24Speaker 05

  It's to teach you how to think more clearly.

• 4:26Speaker 06

  Well, you don't have to teach me how to think more clearly. You don't have to. Try running for the Senate on your platform.

• 4:31Speaker 05

  I think you should be grateful, and I think it is a crime, a moral crime, that you are damning anyone by association. And I wish Senator Whitehouse were here, because what he is doing to the free speech of those companies and anyone associated with it is unconstitutional, and I think he should apologize or resign.

• 4:53Shawn Ryan?

  Alex Epstein, welcome to the show, man.

• 4:56Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 4:57Shawn Ryan?

  So I believe there is somewhat of an energy war going on in between throughout the world. And with the with the rising prices and fuel and electricity and everything that basically that has to do with fossil fuels, which is also driving inflation. I thought you would be the perfect guest to come on and speak about this. So you are an energy theorist slash philosopher. You're the author of two books, newest one coming out, May 24.

• 5:31Speaker 05

  You got it.

• 5:31Shawn Ryan?

  Fossil Future. And so go pick up a copy of this. And you're the founder of the Center for Industrial Progress. So again, welcome to the show.

• 5:47Speaker 05

  Thanks. I'm really looking forward to this. I think it's like we're at the perfect moment to discuss this issue. I happen to have a book coming out, but I think it's really that there's just a pivotal moment in terms of our country's history as it relates to energy.

• 6:01Shawn Ryan?

  Did you time this perfectly?

• 6:03Speaker 05

  No, no.

• 6:03Shawn Ryan?

  Or is this just a coincidence?

• 6:05Speaker 05

  Which my publisher would be the first to tell you is I they would consider me a perfectionist. I would just say I had a certain vision for the book. And I kept thinking it would be three months away for a couple of years.

• 6:17Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 6:18Speaker 05

  Well, originally, I was going to revise my first book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. And then I just thought, well, I've learned 10 times as much. I know much more about the issue. Everything has changed in the world. So I'm just going to totally redo it and do something much better. And yeah, so it ended up, it was supposed to take two months at the beginning, and then it took three years. So it happens to be that everything I was predicting when I was writing the book turns out to have come true. So the book has a lot of warnings about, you know, look, if you follow these bad policies, you're going to have an energy crisis. But now it's coming out during the energy crisis that it talks about. So it's even more it makes it even more clearly true to the reader because

• 7:00Speaker 05

  there's no speculation. What I predicted and what I talk about is already happening in Europe, and it can clearly get much worse.

• 7:07Shawn Ryan?

  How long have you been working on this book?

• 7:10Speaker 05

  So I've been working on the issue for fifteen years. So I really think of it as, I mean, a book is just, that's just a way of communicating something. I've been thinking about this issue of energy and how to think about it in a pro-human way, which is, I think, something that will come up. But like, how do you think about it in a way that's really focused on advancing human life around the world? Which I think actually most energy thinking is not focused on, even though it pretends to be. And then also, how do you look at what I call the full context? So looking, when you're looking at, say, fossil fuels and alternatives, you look carefully at the benefits and the negative side effects. Whereas I think there's a tendency today to just look at the negative side effects of fossil fuels and nuclear, for that matter. And then only look at the benefits of solar and wind.

• 7:52Speaker 05

  So that's, that's why I think it's relevant that I'm a philosopher by background is I'm very obsessed with, before I start thinking about something, what's the method and like what I call the framework that I'm gonna use to think about the issue? And I think if you, my basic idea is if you think about it in a pro-human way and you really look at the full context, it's actually obvious that the world needs more fossil fuels, even though that's one hundred eighty degree opposite to what we're told.

• 8:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. And I can't wait to dive in, but first, every guest gets a gift.

• 8:25Speaker 05

  I already got some gummy bears.

• 8:27Shawn Ryan?

  Well, any guesses?

• 8:31Speaker 05

  Any guesses to what's in here?

• 8:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 8:33Speaker 05

  Is there a different gift for every gift? Oh, there's a custom gift.

• 8:37Shawn Ryan?

  You never know what it's gonna be.

• 8:39Speaker 05

  Hmm. Well, I don't think you knew that I was into jujitsu when you would have procured a gift for me.

• 8:44Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 8:45Speaker 05

  Uh, it doesn't feel like oil.

• 8:46Shawn Ryan?

  I do know you're into fossil fuels.

• 8:49Speaker 05

  You do know I'm into fossil fuels. Okay. Is it a fossil?

• 8:53Speaker 05

  A bit of fossil, let's see. Oh, my God. More gummy bears.

• 8:57Shawn Ryan?

  More gummy bears. Those are probably the last ones of the stash.

• 9:01Speaker 05

  Oh, my God.

• 9:02Shawn Ryan?

  You know, for at least for a while, but.

• 9:04Speaker 05

  This is gonna, I gotta consume these after the book tour, cuz I'll be, I'll be dysfunctional, but I like them so much, I'll just eat all of them. But, uh, wow, thank you.

• 9:12Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you're welcome.

• 9:13Speaker 05

  Of course, the packaging made of fossil fuels.

• 9:15Shawn Ryan?

  That's right. That's right. And they were delivered.

• 9:19Speaker 05

  All right, where do I put, where do I put my box?

• 9:21Shawn Ryan?

  Just gonna, just throw it, yeah, just throw it behind you, wherever you want, wherever you wanna put your gift.

• 9:27Speaker 05

  All right, thank you.

• 9:28Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, all right, so, once again, Fossil Future, it's already an Amazon bestseller and it.

• 9:38Shawn Ryan?

  It's good. It's already creating controversy.

• 9:42Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 9:42Shawn Ryan?

  Washington Post already personally attacked you, tried to get you canceled. What, what was that? You wanna go into that at all?

• 9:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's just, I, I, it's, I think it's useful for people to be able to put themselves in the position of this. So just imagine, I know most people aren't authors, but imagine, you know, you write a book. And it's like, okay, your publicist sends the book to, uh, different outlets, right? And the Washington Post is a major outlet. So of course it makes sense that they're gonna do that. What you don't expect is I got, I woke up one Monday morning and my publicist says, hey, look at Wash, the Washington Post just sent us an outline of a piece they're gonna release on Wednesday. This is Monday. And they, they're saying as a courtesy, they'll allow you to comment. And so the piece is a, is an outline with quotes accusing me of being a racist. And saying that because I am a racist, you shouldn't listen to my views on fossil fuels.

• 10:36Speaker 05

  So I knew I wasn't a racist. So, and also, is that how you argue against a book on fossil fuels? It's like you call someone a racist. Like I knew this was a hit piece, right? And then I look into it and it's what they did is they, they work with a group called Documented. And Documented is not about documenting, it's about destroying. So what they do is they try to look up your whole past, everything you've ever done or created, and then find something controversial. So in my case, when I was a freshman and sophomore at Duke University, I wrote some very individualist articles, I wanna emphasize individualist articles, about the issue of culture. And I said specifically that I regarded Western culture as superior

• 11:17Speaker 05

  because it is the culture that valued individuals regardless of skin color and gave them freedom. And I argued that everyone around the world should emulate this. But in the Washington Post's warped worldview, this is racist, even though it's the opposite of racist, and I was very clear. But what they did is they took, they took various things and then they got some academics to say, yes, this is racist. And so then the idea is imagine, you know, it is not good, it's really bad to be called a racist in general, but by the Washington Post, one of the most powerful media institutions in the world. Like that could easily get pressure put on the publisher to cancel the book. Resellers can say, hey, I don't want to sell this, a book by this racist, right?

• 11:59Speaker 05

  And so, once, once you have a story that the Washington Post is saying you're racist, and literally using that language, that is a very dangerous thing to have out there.

• 12:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 12:08Speaker 05

  And I, for an hour or two, I was like, what am I gonna do about this? Because I, I thought, okay, what, what happens if I, if I comment to the author? And it's like, well, clearly, this story is intended to destroy me. They didn't want to understand me. And so, if I give them a comment, they'll either ignore it, or they'll just mangle it and distort it like they distort everything else. So, I knew that wouldn't work. And what if I say, no comment? Then they say, oh, we reached out to Alex Epstein for comment, and he had nothing to say. And then, I'm also endorsing the story. So, like, no matter what I did in the conventional way of responding, I would be endorsing the story. So, I thought, okay, the only thing I can do is I'm going to publicly comment preemptively. So, I'm gonna tell the world, hey, there is a hit piece that is falsely going to smear

• 12:51Speaker 05

  me as racist, intending to cancel me, and the Washington Post should fire the author, and they should apologize to me, and they should explain why they're never, how they're gonna reform, so they don't do this again.

• 13:03Shawn Ryan?

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• 15:31Speaker 05

  So I created a one-hour video where I just, I don't know if you saw this thing, but like I refuted this idea, this piece beyond what anyone could ever do. Like you could not watch this video and think there was any, any credibility to this piece. And it got, it was pretty viral, it got 2 million impressions on Twitter. My friend, Michael Schellenberger, who's running for governor of California, with, with my support, by the way, he mentioned it on Joe Rogan's show, so it got a lot of attention there. And Wednesday came, when they're supposed to publish the piece, wasn't published, that was interesting. It's like Thursday, it wasn't published Friday. So they published a version the next Wednesday, but it was stripped of about 90% of the bad stuff, including there was no references to racism. So I really considered it a victory because I was able to preempt this hit piece that was

• 16:15Speaker 05

  really gonna try to cancel me. And it really took almost all of its power away. And so the lesson I took was, you know, when you get, when somebody's trying to do a hit piece and you get wind of it, don't comment privately and don't fail to comment, comment publicly and preemptively if you're in, if you're in the right. So that, that's, that's what happened. I guess there's the question of why are they doing this? And I think because they're afraid.

• 16:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. That's, that's good knowledge for everybody to have is.

• 16:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 16:44Shawn Ryan?

  You know, being canceled is becoming more and more of a thing.

• 16:46Speaker 05

  It's part of why I spent time on it, because I had seen other people with the, so sometimes someone gets canceled and they did a lot of stuff wrong and that's a different kind of situation. But here, like, I was a hundred percent clear, I did not do what they said and this was totally unjust. And I know that happens to a lot of people and they just sort of wait for the story to come out and they try to fight it or they sue the people. Once it's out in a huge institution, it's out. It's really, they're, were they gonna print a retra- retraction on page thirty in a month? Or on some obscure portion of their, their website? Yeah, so I wanted to, to try this idea and fortunately it worked. And so, yeah, I did, I, I wanted to provide a model for other victims of these unjust cancellation attempts.

• 17:25Shawn Ryan?

  You're the only person I know that's beaten that. That's incredible. Um, the other thing I wanted to bring up is I found out that, so the Chinese have contacted you and they wanted, they.

• 17:40Speaker 05

  Not all of them.

• 17:41Shawn Ryan?

  They, they wanted to, they wanted you to redact a lot of the stuff in your book, correct?

• 17:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I got a, I got a, a quote unquote generous offer from a state-owned Chinese publisher. And so the way it works is, uh, well, first of all, I was reluctant to publish in China at all because I was asking like, what can the government, like, the government's gonna look over this and they can change stuff and what's, but the, the state-owned publisher beat me to it because they had several sections of the book. Guess what? The sections that were critical of China and called it a dictatorship that doesn't respect rights and in some cases called it a threat. And they said, like, basically, we suggest deleting this.

• 18:22Speaker 05

  And I just said, no, I said, I'm not publishing with you, and that's it.

• 18:28Speaker 05

  And you know, you just think about how the only notable about this, because I think it's pretty straightforward. Right? That you don't want to participate in a regime that is engaged in the censorship of ideas. What's unusual, what's the only notable is that it's so rare that people do this. Because we have so many businesses that are just that have no. There's no real. Set of principles to them, I guess, because like if you're in the business of ideas. Like I ideas only work if you're allowed to express them openly and discuss them openly. It can't be that somebody gets to say, no, this aspect, I don't want to talk about it. And then you think, oh, I could make a lot of money and they won't be getting all the ideas.

• 19:10Speaker 05

  But just like, no, I want to be clear, this is not an acceptable way to run a government. And this government in particular is, I believe in many ways hostile. Now, there are, I praise China in certain ways for doing more rational things on energy than we do. So I think it's very possible the book could have become a massive best seller in China. But I just want to be clear with the people of China, like those of you who want, and there are many good people in China. Those of you who like care about freedom and certainly the people in Taiwan, like I stand with you. I do not stand with this government.

• 19:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's a good way to put it. Man, I can't, I just can't believe how many waves this is creating already.

• 19:48Speaker 05

  Well, this is just, this is just, it hasn't even come out.

• 19:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 19:51Speaker 05

  Right? So it's the theory, I don't know, there's this kind of interesting issue of why did this happen? Because the Washington Post, like they invested a bunch of resources to do this piece on me, right? And so, and a lot of people watching this, probably most people watching this have never heard of me. So it's like, why are you going after, it's not like they're going after Jordan Peterson or something. I mean, I'm sure they have or would in different ways, but it's not, it's not an obvious person to go after a famous, famous congressperson. But I think what, what they've started to pick up on is I've been having a lot of influence in the world of energy that that's starting to become known nationally. And in particular, I work with a lot of elected officials and staff. And there have been a couple of stories about how my messaging has been used by them

• 20:36Speaker 05

  and how I'm trying to influence their policy and having some success. And I think that's great, you know, I want those stories out there, I think. Because this is part of my life's work is I'm trying to have better thinking about energy, better ways to talk about it and better policy.

• 20:52Speaker 05

  So that's great, but what worries the existing side is I come at it from a very like logical and pro-science perspective. And part of my perspective is I do believe that fossil fuels CO2 emissions impact climate. And they want to cast everyone who opposes them as a so-called climate change denier. Whereas my view is that the benefits of fossil fuels far, far outweigh any negatives of their climate impacts. Just like, you know, a good prescription drug, the benefits far outweigh the negatives of any side effects. And they don't have an answer to that. That's the bottom line. Like, when you actually look at the full context of fossil fuels, they're incredibly positive, and they don't have an answer to this. But their whole identity is around fossil fuels being evil. So what

• 21:37Speaker 05

  they really hate is somebody who's logical and pro-science and articulate, and starting to be influential, like, they don't want that. And that's why they pulled the racism card.

• 21:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it's just, that's like the go-to play on everything that they don't agree with.

• 21:53Speaker 05

  And the other one is science denier, right? So they, the problem is they couldn't use science denier very well, because I'm clearly not that. So, but yeah, that, so racism, like, oh, this guy wrote something, and it mentioned skin color, so maybe we can twist it somehow to be, but as, like, once you point it out, it's absurd. So, but, but if you don't point it out, and you let them do it, and you react, then again, it's, it's a problem.

• 22:19Shawn Ryan?

  Well, moving on, you were talking about, I want to go into the Green New Deal, the Green Initiative, and help me and my audience understand that a little bit better. And I'm sure you can give a great explanation on that. Then we'll move into the benefits of fossil fuels and all the stuff that that, that initiative is overlooking. So, could you just give us an overview of Green New Deal, Green Initiative, Build Back Better?

• 22:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, for sure. So I think that like, the Green New Deal is a term that sort of captures the current leading global energy agenda right now. And I think the, the broadest way to put it is it's the rapid elimination of fossil fuels. That's really the goal. And, and you want to put it a little bit more precisely, it's, it's the rapid elimination of CO2 emissions, or greenhouse gas emissions, but I'll just say CO2 emissions, because that's the main greenhouse gas. So, involved here. So. The basic view is CO2 emissions from fossil fuels are quote destroying the planet through catastrophic climate change, and so we need to rapidly eliminate them. So that's kind of step one.

• 23:33Speaker 05

  It's then interesting, I want to highlight step two, and this goes to the green in Green New Deal. Step two is we need to replace them specifically with solar and wind, right? It's overwhelmingly solar and wind, specifically with green energy. I just want to highlight that for a second because you could believe that we faced catastrophic climate change from CO2 emissions and you could be open to all alternatives, regardless of whether they were classified as green or not. For example, you'd be open to nuclear and hydro, which nuclear is almost never considered green and hydro these days is rarely considered green. So I just want to point out this, this is should strike people as weird that we care so much about CO2 emissions and yet we insist on just the sun and the wind.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:17Speaker 05

  Right, we're not willing to split the atom or dam a river. And what I just as a, as a preview, like what I think is going on there is for them, green is a religious idea. It's, it's the idea that our impact on the planet is immoral and so we should eliminate all of our impact on the planet. That's really what green means at the core, like minimize or eliminate impact. And I think that's, they think of the sun and the wind as natural. And so what it's really about is a more natural world. It's not, it's not about, it's not specifically about eliminate the problems caused by fossil fuels, but still have really good energy. It's really about a more natural way of life. And I think that's, that's the only thing that can explain why they're so hostile to

• 24:59Speaker 05

  nuclear and hydro, which don't emit CO2 and are much more practical and, and successful in practice than solar wind. But the, the basic, sort of the core of it, so it's like you're eliminating the CO2 emissions and then, and then you're replacing it with overwhelmingly solar wind. And so when you saw the Green New Deal in the US, this was exactly what they did. It was all about, we're going to eliminate our emissions, we're going to eliminate around the world and we're going to build up this solar and wind economy. And they particularly like AOC specifically excluded nuclear in their original documents. So there are different diluted versions of that, but. The thing to highlight is this is the dominant energy agenda in the world right now.

• 25:40Speaker 05

  I mean, at least the kind of long-term energy agenda, if you look at everyone's plans at the moment, pursuing this agenda has led to a total disaster. So right now, everyone is scrambling for fossil fuels.

• 25:50Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 25:51Speaker 05

  Like Joe Biden ran on, I guarantee you, we will end fossil fuel. But this is just a couple of years ago. Now he's begging every dictator in the world for fossil fuels, and he's pretending that he's done nothing against fossil fuels, like he's, because people are upset about gasoline prices. So there's this short-term change to focus on fossil fuels, but still every government says by 2050, which is just 28 years from now, we need to eliminate our emissions and replace and mostly replace it with green energy. So it's important that this is the number one energy idea in the world. And just to take one step further, it's actually the number one moral idea in the world right now. So if you take, say, any big company, like I would challenge you to name a company that does not have a net zero by 2050 goal.

• 26:36Speaker 05

  Apple, Google, Facebook, car companies, oil companies have net, I mean, you could ask how that is possible, but

• 26:43Shawn Ryan?

  I that's the one I do want to ask, is how is this possible? How, do they actually have a realistic plan on how this is going to happen?

• 26:50Speaker 05

  No. So let me just say one thing about the, so it's just, it's universal. Everyone believes this. Or not everyone believes this, but the leading institutions and many of the leading thinkers in the world say that our number one priority of any area in the world is to rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions and replace it with green energy. And so to answer your question, you might think, oh, wow, they must have an amazing plan. But no, I don't think there's any plan. In particular, the oil companies are, uh, it's particularly farcical that they will do that. I mean, one of the ways they do it, the dishonesty of this stuff is really staggering. One way they do it is they, they only look at the emissions they cause,

• 27:34Speaker 05

  but not that their consumers cause. And they say, we're net zero. So they're like, oh, well, so producing oil, the energy it takes to produce oil. Is a lot less than the energy it takes to consume oil. Like, most of the emissions that come from oil are from us using oil, right? Like, to drive cars and other vehicles and to make petroleum products and bags for your gummy bears and stuff like that, right? That's where most of the emissions come from. Drilling for oil has some emissions, but not as many. So what they'll say is, well, we're gonna, we're gonna use somehow, we're not gonna admit as much drilling for it, and we're gonna plant some trees somewhere, which is called offsetting, which we could talk about that. But they're ignoring the fact that their whole product is emitting a lot of CO2. So it's just one example among many.

• 28:18Speaker 05

  There are all these different deceptions that companies do to claim that they're close to net zero now. But I would argue the reality is eighty percent of the world's energy is fossil fuels. Fact one. It's growing, particularly in the places that care most about low-cost energy, such as China. And then the next fact is, the world is still very poor in terms of energy. So there are three billion people in the world who are using less electricity than one of our refrigerators uses. So again, fossil fuels, eighty percent, growing in an energy-starved world. So the idea that we're gonna get off that, and by the way, solar and wind, three percent,

• 29:00Speaker 05

  totally dependent on fossil fuels or some other reliable power because they're what's called intermittent, right? They don't go consistently, so they need hundred percent backup system. So the idea that this is gonna, so what's weird is the number-one moral idea in the world, on its face, should seem completely impractical.

• 29:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 29:20Speaker 05

  And I would argue it is.

• 29:23Shawn Ryan?

  How can, I don't understand how anybody can think that only solar and only wind is going to, is gonna power the entire, everything. I mean, we just saw the catastrophe last winter in Texas, I believe that was last winter, right?

• 29:39Speaker 05

  Yep, in 2021.

• 29:40Shawn Ryan?

  And that was, solar wasn't working, wind turbines were frozen, and people, a lot of people died.

• 29:49Speaker 05

  Well, so it's interesting. So let's talk the broader idea they have is there are kind of two broader ideas. And the important thing to say about both of these ideas is these have worked in exactly zero places. So these are all, I would say, wild speculation about the future, but they're at least speculation about the future. And again, we're 28 years away from what they say is going to is this happening, right? So this is, again, this should be, my view is if you really look at all the facts, this should be viewed as a crackpot idea that you're going to do this. But their argument is, one is, we're going to build enough batteries to, so that you can, you can build so many solar panels and

• 30:30Speaker 05

  wind turbines, and then so much battery capacity, that when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing a lot, you charge up the batteries. And then when you go through lulls, when there's not much sunlight or not much wind, then you, you know, you deploy the energy from the batteries. So

• 30:47Shawn Ryan?

  Who's, who's making all these batteries?

• 30:49Speaker 05

  Well, obviously China. But that's, that's whoever makes them, even like at, you know, the slave labor that's involved in a lot of today. So I ran the numbers on this because Elon Musk, whom I have a kind of mixed relationship with, because I admire a lot about him, but he's also, he also says a lot of false stuff. And he's also, I mean, he blocked me on Twitter for saying something very true, which is that his car is a good fossil fuel car, which is what a battery car is. But, yeah, so he said, he said, you know, oh, the whole world could be powered by solar panels and Tesla batteries. And I'm like, he said, it's easy. He likes to say things that have never been done are

• 31:30Speaker 05

  easy. And so I just ran the numbers on what would it take for, for three days of backup for the world, which you would want a lot of backup because you can have whole seasons where sun and wind are low, relatively speaking, like say, winter in Germany will have a lot of those lulls. And it's $400 trillion in of Tesla mega packs. So that's many times more, and that's that last 10 years, right? Because the batteries wear out. So that's like $400 trillion is many times the all the income of the entire world. So that's just for batteries. That doesn't even get so it's just a total crazy thing. There's no. And then the other thing that people have is they have this idea of we're going to interconnect

• 32:13Speaker 05

  every region of the world in a giant, they'll often call it a smart grid. So the idea is that, oh, the they'll say the sun is always shining somewhere. And the wind is always blowing somewhere. So we're just going to massively overbuild solar and wind everywhere in the world, and we're going to link it all up via cables. And so then, you know, there's a lot when we have a drought of sunlight and wind in the US, some other place halfway around the world's get. But again, this is just totally made up. This has never worked at all. It's prohibitively expensive just because you don't need to build so much infrastructure. And by the way, with both of these ideas and all the other green ideas, there's one other variable, which is that the green movement is anti-development.

• 32:53Speaker 05

  So they have their whole solution involves a crash program of unprecedented mining and development, and it's part of a movement, an infrastructure, I would say. And it's part of a and both those involve development. And it's an anti-development movement. So if you look at the US, it'll take, if you're lucky, 10 years to approve a lithium mine. But we're going to make thousands of times as many batteries. So it's it's what all of this should show is that there's something very unserious about the claims of replacing fossil fuels. And so what I would argue is this movement is much clearer about what it wants to destroy than what it wants to create.

• 33:34Shawn Ryan?

  Well, they also, the new administration is claiming that we can go energy independent if if we go all green, correct? But I don't understand how. They're claiming that when all our batteries are gonna come from China, they're mining li- they just took Afghanistan, you know, that's huge lithium deposit Africa. They're doing it in Mexico. They're producing all our batteries. I believe they're gonna produce all our solar panels. And and then you just said those batteries are good for ten years. So to me, that doesn't, it's not energy independence at all.

• 34:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, so this is a is a great example. It's another case in which this is a totally unserious argument. Because above all, what China controls, the entire, I wanna stress this, the entire supply chain of solar, wind, and batteries, China can bring, can stop at any time that it wants. And the number one thing it controls, so when you have this supply chain, there's the mining, and China does a lot of mining, and they're increasing their mining interests. But the number one thing they do is controlling the processing of these elements. So these these facilities that can process the mined materials into useful materials. And they just control basically every element there. And so they've, so the idea that that's that's the opposite of independence, right?

• 34:59Speaker 05

  It's literally, they can shut it all down.

• 35:04Shawn Ryan?

  Whenever they want.

• 35:05Speaker 05

  Whenever they want, and we're talking about becoming relying on this. Now, the main problem with this is it's not a cost-effective way to power a society. So that that's kind of problem number one. But so so the, but but also, yes, it has an unbelievable increase in our dependence on hostile foreign powers.

• 35:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 35:27Speaker 05

  And whereas, take fossil fuels. Fossil fuels, we are masters at getting, and we have an unbelievable amount of the material, the raw material on earth. So we have a very obvious way to deal with, say, hostility from Russia or somewhere else with respect to energy, which is we can just double down on our own energy production. So the people who claim to care about energy security, and they claim that the thing that we can double down on is insecure, and the thing that we depend one hundred percent on China for is secure. Again, they're much, all their quote solutions are not thought through at all, but yet they're proceeding full steam ahead with the destruction of fossil fuels. And just to give one final example with Biden, notice what Biden did.

• 36:12Speaker 05

  It would be one thing to say, hey, I'm Joe Biden. I've got this amazing vision. I mean, the idea of Biden having like a vision is weird, but like I've got this amazing vision for a grid and it's gonna, it's gonna work so well. And I have all these solar panels and wind turbines and batteries and let me build it. And then once I validate it, then we'll, we'll shut down those fossil fuels. Right that, I would listen to that, right? At least he has an idea, but what's the first thing he did? No Keystone XL pipeline, no drilling on federal land. So his first acts were acts of destruction of America's energy production ability, not acts of replacement. And so I think one, one thing I want to keep highlighting is that this green movement is really clear on what it wants to destroy.

• 36:56Speaker 05

  And what it wants to create is a complete fraud that it's not willing to prove before it outlaws fossil fuels.

• 37:06Shawn Ryan?

  I also, I don't underst-

• 37:08Speaker 05

  I like how many of your questions, by the way, I think this is good. It shows that you're thinking about it, which most people aren't. But I like how many of your questions begin with, I don't understand. Because I would say there are so many, everyone should be not understanding. And almost no one does not understand, even though these things make no sense.

• 37:27Shawn Ryan?

  The minute you said Biden had a vision, I was like, oh, boy.

• 37:32Shawn Ryan?

  But anyways, um, the, the other thing that I do not understand is he keeps blaming our, our, our, our gas and oil shortages on, on the, on the drilling, right? On the people that-

• 37:47Speaker 05

  On the companies.

• 37:47Shawn Ryan?

  On the companies. And, but he already said that he was going to shut them down. So why would they, how much does it cost to, to do this? The whole, how much would it, would one of these companies have to invest to start drilling and producing oil?

• 38:03Speaker 05

  Well, you know, depending on the scale, but multimillion dollar, I mean, many, many millions, tens of millions. I mean, this, it's a huge capital intensive industry, which involves, so the way you, once you put it the way you put it, it's sort of obviously wrong. Because the way you put it is you're blaming the companies. I mean, I would think of it as you're blaming the companies for not drilling enough. And yet you have threatened them with massive punishment.

• 38:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 38:29Speaker 05

  For drilling.

• 38:31Shawn Ryan?

  That's kind of what I'm saying is. You want, you already showed your cards.

• 38:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 38:36Shawn Ryan?

  Your, your vision is to shut them all down.

• 38:40Speaker 05

  Right.

• 38:40Shawn Ryan?

  And completely go away from fossil fuels. So why would they continue to invest? Multi million dollar.

• 38:50Shawn Ryan?

  Deals to, to. To extract the fossil fuels when they know. As soon as, as soon as it smooths out with this, with the, with the shortage right now, then he's gonna, he's gonna shut them down again. Immediately. It would, it would just be throwing money in the garbage.

• 39:05Speaker 05

  So what they want to pretend is that they haven't been waging, that they haven't been giving these threats and basically waging war against the fossil fuel industry. I mean, Biden had the, the, you know, the gall to say that he had done nothing to restrict domestic production. Uh, it's like my administration has done nothing. And part of their argument though is we haven't had enough time to do everything we wanted. But, but what that's evading is that they're part of a global movement that has been doing this for the last fifteen plus years. So in the U S and around the world, the green movement has been pushing three things. The uh, elimination of investment in fossil fuels, production of fossil fuels and transport of fossil fuels.

• 39:50Speaker 05

  And the Biden administration has been involved in all of them. It has a lot of threats against companies and financial institutions for investing in fossil fuels. Has a lot of restrictions on production and has a lot of restrictions on transportation, like the Keystone XL pipeline, stopping that. But it's important, this is a global movement and it's been going on for a long time, including in the U S, including under the Obama. Biden administration, but they, they want, basically when you look at it the way you're looking at, it's obvious, it doesn't make any sense. But they want to pretend all of that didn't happen. And what they're looking at is they're just looking at the fact that the producers aren't producing as much. As people want right now. And they're treating it as, oh, they're just being greedy, right? They just want profits. That's so bad. But.

• 40:36Speaker 05

  That's not true at all. If you are a company, companies want to invest profits. Like, companies want to grow in the future. That's what leads to a higher stock price if people are optimistic about your future. But for the reasons you gave, a lot of these companies are not optimistic about drilling in the future because they know that they will be punished sooner or later. They can't have long-term confidence. So if you can't have long-term confidence in reinvesting your profits, you are morally and legally obligated to give those profits to your shareholders. But the administration is basically saying you should violate your fiduciary obligations and your moral obligations to your shareholders so that we don't look so bad because people are mad about gasoline prices. That's really what their position amounts to.

• 41:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. The one, one other thing that I want to hit is back to energy independence, which they keep playing, I mean, we're going to get if we go green, even though we're not because we're getting all our batteries and solar and, and all the materials.

• 41:32Speaker 05

  And is that really energy independence if the energy doesn't work?

• 41:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. And on top of that, it doesn't work. It doesn't work all the time. It does work some of the time, but.

• 41:42Speaker 05

  So just one thing, it doesn't work ever.

• 41:44Shawn Ryan?

  It doesn't work ever.

• 41:44Speaker 05

  No, I mean, there's no, there's no grid that just is, nothing that we would recognize. But that's just like solar panels and wind turbines and you just access, I mean, the way it works is it's just physically the way the technology works. It needs to be constantly supported by reliable electricity. So there's, there's no, there's no freestanding solar wind and battery grid in the world. So I just want to make that point. It's, it's not, and even it, it's just nothing resembling what we know of as electricity is possible. And again, like the number I gave, $400 trillion, I mean, that's, that's like, that's just bankrupting everyone in the world. And so we'll all starve, right? So we can make some batteries. So I just want to, like, economically,

• 42:28Speaker 05

  it's nowhere in the universe of a viable replacement for, for fossil fuels. And the, the thing to stress about energy is the cost of energy is crucial because that determines the cost of everything that involves machines because energy is just machine food, right? So. If when we increase the price of it, we don't just want energy at any price. We want low cost energy because if the price of energy goes up, we're seeing this right now. Right. The price of food goes up, the price of clothing goes up, the price of shelter goes up, the price of medical care goes up. So if these things even remotely happened, life would just become catastrophically expensive compared to what it is today. And we're, we're already seeing this with just price inflation and a lot of that connected

• 43:12Speaker 05

  energy. But this is just with, you know, you could say like three percent, four percent of the Green New Deal agenda is like what Europe has done. And that's it's, and what we've done, it's, it's just, it really, I can't stress this enough. Like to actually do what they're saying, I believe, would be like just global mass murder and mass starvation.

• 43:33Shawn Ryan?

  Well, look what's happening in Europe right now. They're completely dependent on Russian oil.

• 43:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 43:38Shawn Ryan?

  And you do, do you want to go into that at all?

• 43:41Speaker 05

  Well, sure. I mean, I think it's, it's pretty straightforward. Right. It's, this isn't what, what I, what kind of I like about where you're coming from is you're, I think you're looking at the essentials of these issues. And the thing is, the essentials of these issues are pretty simple. The problem is the people who caused the problems want to overcomplicate them because the simple and true explanation indicts them as the obvious cause. So you take the situation in Europe. Europe needs huge amounts of natural gas to function because it uses natural gas for heat and it also uses natural gas for electricity. And Europe has had this idea that we can rapidly replace fossil fuels with solar and

• 44:23Speaker 05

  wind. So that's been their idea, but solar and wind, as I said, cannot exist at all on their own. They need natural gas in particular. Natural gas is basically like an amazing natural battery that's very cheap. So it can ramp up and down very quickly, like a jet engine to accommodate the massive fluctuations of sunlight and wind. So actually, when you, when you do a lot of sunlight and wind, you don't become free of the need for fossil fuels. You become particularly dependent on one fossil fuel, which is natural gas, or technically you can substitute oil, but usually gas is a lot cheaper. So they use gas. So in effect, it's, they're hugely dependent on natural gas. But they had this idea that we're going to restrict investment, production and transport of fossil fuels. So what did they do when fracking developed?

• 45:07Speaker 05

  Like fracking is the best broadly shale energy technology. That's the, that's the most. Revolutionary energy development of the last 20 years. As soon as Europe saw it, they preemptively banned it. So they banned it in France, banned it in the UK, banned it in Ireland, banned it in Spain. Right, they banned it all over the place. And they did nothing to secure reliable sources of energy from free allied countries like the US. Because they had this idea, we're going to rapidly replace fossil fuels with solar and wind. But that didn't work. So they reduced domestic production. Domestic, so what, what happens? They, they depend on foreign production. It's that simple. If you, if you try to rapidly replace fossil fuels with solar and wind, which doesn't work,

• 45:52Speaker 05

  then you become more dependent on foreign sources. If you don't produce it domestically yourself. So it's just, it's very simple. But everyone wants to pretend it's something else because it's. But the, the, what's great about this moment is the public is really starting to see. Cause they, they know that for decades, people have been saying, we shouldn't drill. We shouldn't invest in this stuff. This is bad. And then they see, wow, the prices are going up and we didn't get this magical replacement. And they're starting to blame the people who were against fossil fuels. It's part of why I'm excited to have, to, to get attention on this issue now. And, and I happen to have a book right now that's telling the full story of, of energy today and in the future. Because I think people are uniquely open to it because we're witnessing a crisis now.

• 46:33Speaker 05

  It's, it's, it's a lot easier to, for people's minds to open when they see the problem in front of them. Versus when it's a speculated problem a few years in the future.

• 46:44Shawn Ryan?

  We're, we're in the middle of an energy war. I mean, it's, it's, it's green versus fossil fuels. And it's also China watching everything that's going on, taking all the lithium deposits in the world, mining them. And they're going to produce it all, which means they control everybody's energy. Even if we were to go all green.

• 47:05Speaker 05

  So I haven't been using that term, but I think it's a really good term. So I'm probably going to start using it because it is. You know, the way I've always thought about it is war depends on energy. Like World War I, World War II, we're both won by the side with the longest term secure sources of oil because oil is historically the fuel of mobility. And, you know, advances in mobility are how you win, often how you win wars. You can get to places more quickly, et cetera. You know, you can drop large bombs, that kind of thing. I mean, now we have nuclear energy, which is another thing we should be pursuing more of. But, so it's crucial in military conflict, that's one aspect of it. But another point is it's just crucial in any kind of, like, I was asking a guy I mentioned

• 47:49Speaker 05

  to you before the show, a guy I really admire named Palmer Lucky, who's basically invented modern VR, sold his company for a lot of money to Facebook, and then started a modern defense company that's very, very pro-America. And I asked him, I recently got to talk to him, I said, like, what's your biggest, what's the biggest threat to the US? And he said, like, and he said something that wasn't what I expected, which is my biggest threat is that we stop becoming an economic superpower. Because when you're not an economic superpower, you're so much more vulnerable, it's harder to wage war, you can't engage in the, you can't engage in the production. And what scares the hell out of me is that the EU, China, is taking all of its actions to become a dominant economic superpower.

• 48:31Speaker 05

  And America is either just obsessed with, like, gender pronoun type things that are not nearly as important, or we are actively waging war against ourselves, like this Green New Deal anti-fossil fuel movement. This is overwhelmingly a domestic movement that, in America and in Europe, there are some, there's some evidence of, say, Russia sponsoring some of it, and maybe China encouraging it, but it's mostly domestic intellectuals. So China is very strategically taking over critical industries, and of course, securing all the fossil fuel that they can. And it's And we are actively making ourselves less secure. So it's really, that really scares me because I just feel like everyone's going to look back in

• 49:16Speaker 05

  history. If we don't reverse course, they're just going to say, what the hell were they doing?

• 49:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 49:21Speaker 05

  China said, we want to be the world's dominant superpower by 2049. That was their goal. They secured the entire like modern technology supply chain, including the elements of solar, wind and batteries. The US was just obsessed with these weird domestic things as the number one issue. And they actively destroyed, tried to destroy their own energy system, which is the key to being an economic superpower and militarily prepared.

• 49:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I, I think they're seeing the direction and they're jumping on the train. They're going to control it and they're smart. You got to hand it to them. They are smart.

• 49:55Speaker 05

  They're, it's interesting because the government, yeah, the government is strategic and our government, I would say is anti-strategic. I mean, I don't, I don't think we've, it's hard for me to think of a president, Republican or Democrat, who has like a real long-term foreign policy and really thinking about these things. I mean, I think some are better and some are worse, but the advantage we have, if we take advantage of it, is we have 330 million people who, if left free, can come up with amazing innovations that make us a superpower. And then that incredible productivity and innovativeness can be leveraged if we have a remotely strategic government.

• 50:38Speaker 05

  So the Chinese government's more strategic, but their productive ability, all things be equal, is not going to be what ours is because we have far more freedom and far more innovation in many ways. But problem is we're undercutting it with a strategy, with, with a lack of strategy, but we're also undercutting it with the green movement being anti-development. So because. To innovate and to be productive, you need to develop nature. You need to impact things. Like a factory has an impact, a farm has an impact, mining has an impact. If you just take mining, which is, everyone now realizes is key to any kind of energy future. But in the US, mining is almost illegal. You can take 10, it can, it can be impossible to get a mine approved.

• 51:22Speaker 05

  It can easily take 10 years. What that does is that limits, it makes us a not free country. And in many ways, we're not as free economically as China is. Because while China has a lot of evil anti-freedom stuff, they have, they have much more freedom of development than we do. And without the freedom to develop, most of what, most of production cannot occur because most of production is physical.

• 51:46Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. Let's take a quick break. When we come back, I want to talk about, you, you give a great rundown on how fossil fuels benefit us every day. Nobody talks about that. And I'd like to dive into that.

• 51:58Speaker 05

  Awesome.

• 51:59Shawn Ryan?

  Cool.

• 52:01Speaker 05

  I tried the gummy bears.

• 52:02Shawn Ryan?

  You did?

• 52:03Speaker 05

  That was really good. Uh, I was a little worried because I couldn't lie to you if I didn't like them.

• 52:10Speaker 05

  But I really wanted to try them. So yeah, that, I knew they would be fine as soon as I've been good, even more than fine. I felt them because you can, I don't like the ones that are overly hard.

• 52:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 52:20Speaker 05

  And you don't want them overly soft either, but I felt them like, oh, this is gonna be good.

• 52:24Shawn Ryan?

  They got a nice texture.

• 52:25Speaker 05

  I took in like 25 of them.

• 52:27Shawn Ryan?

  Hey, let me know if you need some more. We got.

• 52:29Speaker 05

  I got a good.

• 52:30Shawn Ryan?

  We got plenty of them.

• 52:31Speaker 05

  I had a good supply.

• 52:33Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, well, we just got back from the break and so it seems like everybody that's behind the green initiatives, none of them ever talk about any of the benefits from fossil fuels. And you do a great explanation on how they affect and benefit our, our everyday lives. And there's some phenomenal charts in your new book that we talk about. Um.

• 53:01Shawn Ryan?

  Upping energy production and how that actually saves lives versus, we'll get into it. But when we talk about individuals that are in there that who are saying we should all be dead.

• 53:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we got, so just highlight what I said before, so again, eighty percent of the world's energy, so you think of energy as machine calories or machine food, so this is what our machines need to operate, again, eighty percent of that comes from fossil fuels around the world and it's growing. And as I also said, billions of people have very little energy, use very little energy right now. So I use the data, the statistic of three billion individuals using less electricity than one of our refrigerators. So you just let that sink in, what would that be like if you had to, you know, decide? Like, obviously, you can't just use a refrigerator, right? So you have the lights, you have the refrigerator, you have all sorts of different appliances, like, do you want to use a washing machine?

• 53:57Speaker 05

  Do you want to use a dryer? Do you want to use a computer? Do you want to charge yourself? And like, these are just, and then it's not just you at home doing this, maybe even more significantly, it's industry. Like, if industry can't use a large amount of electricity, then you can't have a very productive country. So with that in mind, you would expect that the best thinkers, the leading, let's say, the leading thinkers in our society, when talking about, say, rising CO2 levels from fossil fuels CO2 emissions, you'd expect them to look at not just the negatives of that, but you'd also expect them to look at, well, what are the benefits of the energy that we get with that? So when we burn fossil fuels, it emits CO2, yes, we could talk about what are negatives,

• 54:42Speaker 05

  also what are positives to that. But the elephant in the room is energy, that's why we're burning them in the first place, is to get a lot of energy. And again, it's, it's the overwhelming source of the world's energy. I would also add, there have been competitors to fossil fuels for well over a century, most of these technologies have been around for well over a century in one form or another. So there's something very special about fossil fuels, and so I think it should seem very odd that we don't talk about the benefits and that are, but in particular, that what I call our designated experts don't talk about the benefits, because

• 55:16Speaker 05

  Have you heard this refrain, "Listen to the scientists" before? Yeah. It's like a common type of thing, like, "Listen to the scientists." You know, I remember George Clooney, I mean, lots of people say this, but I remember him saying like, "You know, if I wanted to know what to do about a medical condition, I would, I would listen to my doctor. And if I want to know what to do about climate change, I'm gonna listen to the scientists," right? Now, one fallacy there is, the climate expert isn't an expert on the benefits of fossil fuels. So it would be like a doctor who didn't know about the benefits of an antibiotic, only the negatives, right? So that, that would be, or at least only the, the, the side effects. It's, there's something, but, but maybe, maybe the climate, you would expect, okay, maybe the climate people,

• 55:59Speaker 05

  or whatever, whoever we're designating as the scientists, the experts, I mean, it's, I call it designated expert because it's the person we're turning to. We're told to turn to for here's the person who can provide you guidance, informed guidance on what to do. So you take one of the leading designated experts on what to do about energy, which is a guy named Michael Mann, who's a professor, he's a climate scientist and activist. And I point, I document this in Fossil Future. He has a book on energy and climate called "The Madhouse Effect", and it's all about how fossil fuels are allegedly having a harmful impact on climate. That's a fine thing to study, you should study, you should study the impacts on climate for sure. But one thing that really struck me is he talks about agriculture and he says,

• 56:42Speaker 05

  "Rising CO2 levels are gonna have these, cause these challenges for agriculture." I said, "Okay, that's fine." And then I'm looking through the book and I'm like, "Okay, but where's he gonna talk about the benefits?" Because the benefits of fossil fuels for agriculture are literally the ability to feed eight billion people. Like, the fertilizer we have, we're seeing this now with rising fertilizer prices. Fertilizer is derived physically from natural gas and it's produced using natural gas energy. It's just totally dependent on natural gas and natural gas prices. That's in large part why the prices are going up, because natural gas prices are going up. So there's that. So the literal fertilizer that makes the earth as fertile as it is, so we can grow enough food for eight billion people, that depends on fossil fuels.

• 57:25Speaker 05

  And then all the machines that produce the energy, rather, all the machines that use energy to allow us to produce far more food than we otherwise could. And so one example I like is, a modern combine harvester can reap and thresh 1,000 times more wheat than a really good manual labor.

• 57:45Shawn Ryan?

  One thousand times.

• 57:46Speaker 05

  One thousand times. So you become like, if I'm not, I'm not a really good manual laborer for that kind of thing, but I imagine I could be trained to be, I could be trained to be fairly good. So, but if you put me on a combine harvester, I can just sit there and produce, you know, five hundred, a thousand times more. So what, that's why we have very small percentage of people in agriculture, in the countries that have, you know, are using low cost, reliable energy, and the ones that aren't, you have very high percentages of people in agriculture. So, you know, that's, that's, it's just, so this is just one example, but it's a huge example of literally, I, I once in a debate with a guy named Bill McKibben, another designated expert, I said, you know, if Bill McKibben came here and said, we should eliminate, you

• 58:27Speaker 05

  know, ninety-five percent of the food, you'd think this guy's a maniac. But he said, we should eliminate ninety-five percent of fossil fuels, which are the food of food. And literally, like, because they feed the machines, right? And they provide the fertilizer. And yet, in this whole bestselling book by Michael Mann, the designated expert, we are supposed to listen to, he does not once mention the benefits of fossil fuels to agriculture. So th- this is a madman, like, in effect, right? Because he's telling us, you should be concerned, we should get rid of fossil fuels, and it'll help agriculture, because it'll get rid, like, we won't have to worry about this warming in some region. But he's telling you to get rid of the thing that makes agriculture possible.

• 59:11Shawn Ryan?

  Is there any validity to that at all? Is there anything that getting rid of fossil fuels would help with agriculture? Is there any aspect of it?

• 59:20Speaker 05

  You mean, the climate part of it?

• 59:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 59:22Speaker 05

  Well, but the thing is, you, everything is a package. So, we could talk about, so there's two questions. So, overall, getting rid of fossil fuels would destroy agriculture, and you'd have mass starvation.

• 59:33Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:34Speaker 05

  A hundred percent. But there's a question of, so, so I just want to focus on, that's the number one point here, is just, this is an example of how our leading thinkers, you know, our designated experts, so the people we're told to listen to, and stake our lives on, and stake our security on, are making a very, very basic error of they're evaluating something by only looking at its negative side effects, and not its benefits. And so by the same method, when the polio vaccine came out, you'd say that's evil. We shouldn't use it. Because they say, oh, it has these side effects and it's bad. Let's get rid of it. And it's like, but wait a second, it stops polio. What about that? Well, fossil fuels stops hunger.

• 1:00:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:15Speaker 05

  Right. It stops starvation around the world. So we can talk about the CO2 part of it. But what is for sure is there is nothing resembling a danger. Uh, that's on the level of the danger of getting rid of energy. And I think I would just say,

• 1:00:31Speaker 05

  as an intro to the issue and how to think about it. It's also revealing that people don't talk about the benefits of CO2 very much. So fossil, we burn fossil fuels, it emits, well, it emits a bunch of things, but it emits water vapor, emits energy, it releases energy, emits CO2. Sometimes there are certain pollutants that are emitted, particularly with coal and to some extent, oil. But okay, it emits CO2. So that's a side effect. But the, the main thing is the energy benefit. But then the CO2, why do we think that the CO2 is so bad? It's so bad and it's all bad. The all bad is particularly revealing. Cause if you just, if you had somebody who didn't, who didn't have a bias against humans and human impact.

• 1:01:14Speaker 05

  They didn't think that we were unnatural, which I think is a very common view, like our impact is bad. That's the view, that's why we're so against mining and development, because people view our impact as just, it's a wrong thing. But if you didn't have that bias and you decide, okay, humans are part of nature. Often what we do is really good for us. Sometimes we make mistakes, but there's certainly nothing to be hostile to in our impact. In general, we want to have a lot of impact. Cause that makes the world an abundant and safe place. And when we didn't have much impact, the world was pretty terrible for the average person. And the more successful people often got around it by enslaving the less successful people. Because we didn't have machines to do work for us. So if you didn't have the bias against human impact and you heard CO2 is going up.

• 1:01:59Speaker 05

  Would you think it was bad? I'm not so sure. I think you would think at least it would have some obvious good things. Number one, plant growth. More CO2 in the atmosphere means more plant growth. That's very, very significant. We're talking about agriculture.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:11Speaker 05

  Crops benefit very significantly. Um, but warmth as well. I mean, warmth, five times or more people die in the world from cold right now than heat. Right? And so that's a big thing. A lot of people want to live in warmer climates. And the way warming is supposed to work and in practice has mostly worked is it tends to be, have more warming in the coldest regions of the world. So it's not evenly distributed. It's not like the same at the equator and the same at the poles. It's more particularly in the northern part of the world. That's why people are so focused on the Arctic. But that's actually a good thing. Like, we would prefer to have warming concentrated in colder places than equally spread around the world.

• 1:02:51Speaker 05

  We also know that the world has been 25 degrees Fahrenheit warmer, uh, like, what is it? 14 degrees Celsius, I think it is, um, warmer. So we're at a pretty cold point in the planet's history. So there's nothing to, there's a lot of good of it. And then you would also say there are some negative things. Particularly in the place, even if, if the places aren't getting super warm, they're getting warmer. And you'll have increased incidence of heat waves and that kind of thing. But even with the heat waves, you'll have more air conditioning, which can totally more than offset the heat wave. So I think it's legitimate. I think there would be some aspects of rising CO2 levels that on their own will be negative for agriculture in some places.

• 1:03:34Speaker 05

  I don't think it's plausible that overall they'll be negative for agriculture in particular. Because in general, a warmer, more CO2 rich and wetter, this is another aspect, a warmer world is a wetter world. Like, that's all good for life. That's why we had these, think about the dinosaurs and the amazing, you know, these, these huge dinosaurs eating huge amounts of plant food. Like, that's in a natural world that has so much CO2 and more warmth than is a more tropical world. So in general, what global warming means, like climate change, you can translate it to a slightly more tropical world. That's its objective meaning.

• 1:04:10Shawn Ryan?

  When you're talking about the warming and how and all the benefits, what about? The thing you hear all the time is the rising oceans, it's gonna

• 1:04:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:04:17Shawn Ryan?

  The glaciers, the, the, it's all melting, it's raising sea level. Everything's gonna be underwater. Supposedly.

• 1:04:25Speaker 05

  Right, right. So, so that is, I would say, rising sea levels is the most plausible uh, danger of rising CO2 levels, because I think there's a lot of reasons to want it act, the world to be quite a bit warmer. Than it is today, all things be equal, and certainly not any kind of crisis. Again, we have far more cold related deaths than heat related deaths. And then to take some of the other examples, first, you know, with six storms and floods and this kind of thing. It should seem very bizarre that those all are supposed to get worse and like way worse. Because if you think about climates as a, a very integrated system, so why would it be that us changing something makes everything worse? You never hear about, oh, we avoided this storm today because of fossil fuels. You only hear, oh, this storm with, everything is worse.

• 1:05:10Speaker 05

  That, that, it's really a, a, like, they're really treating the nature as a god. And it's really like we angered the god by impacting it, and so the god is punishing us. Because it's, it's, it's, it's, it can't be a scientific perspective that everything gets worse.

• 1:05:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:25Speaker 05

  In a system like that, when you, it just doesn't make any sense. And, but the, the plausible thing that could get worse is sea levels, because sea levels are particularly sensitive to our previous investments. So we have civilizations that are built uh, near the sea for very good reasons, a great place to live, you know, commerce, that kind of thing. And so if sea levels rose quickly enough, that could be a, a challenge. It could be a disruption. It's not going to be a catastrophe or the end of the world or something like that. But it's worth looking into, but as long as we do what we've been focused on, which is you always have to look at the benefits of fossil fuels. That will be lost if you oppose fossil fuels. So if you recognize fossil fuels today and for the foreseeable future, that's literally what's feeding the world.

• 1:06:10Speaker 05

  That's what makes it possible for us to have shelter, mobility, things like education, which takes a lot of time. You know, research, medical, like, all these things totally depend on low cost, reliable energy. That only fossil fuels can provide on a global scale for most people for the foreseeable future. Like, if you look at that. You would totally be willing to accept quite a bit of sea level rise along with that versus get rid of the energy and then everything is terrible. So it's, we always have to look at the benefits, but then the sea level rise is kind of crazy because if you look at what the current, I, I'm, I'm just, I don't want to know your view. I'm wondering what you would guess from the media. How fast do you think the average person would guess the sea level is rising? Like how many feet per century? Based on the media?

• 1:06:57Shawn Ryan?

  Two feet.

• 1:06:58Speaker 05

  Two feet a century? Oh, that's, that's, I wish they thought that. I mean, Al, in Al Gore's movie, he talks about 20 feet.

• 1:07:05Shawn Ryan?

  20 feet.

• 1:07:06Speaker 05

  As if it's imminent. It's like, oh, well, this, this ice sheet can melt. And if that happens and you get the sense of this is all, if you got the sense of it was happening over thousands of years, it wouldn't be so alarming, right? But he, he talks about 20 feet and he's not very specific, but it, it seems like this is decades away. Which that would be really scary, right? But no, so, so actually it's, it's, right now it's one foot a century.

• 1:07:28Shawn Ryan?

  One foot a century.

• 1:07:29Speaker 05

  That's the current rate. And then the, here's the crazy thing, the extreme, extreme speculation is about three feet a century. And so to put that in context, we have a hundred million people around the world who already live below the sea level at high tide. So think about that. We are very good as a species at dealing with higher sea levels. You have places in the Netherlands, you know, where people live well below sea levels. And this is with technology that existed before. So, and we're talking about this is over a century. And of course, we have no specific confidence that it's even going to happen. So we can wait and see what happens. But this is a very slow moving thing. This is nothing resembling, and this is the official UN projection that in, on the extreme end,

• 1:08:14Speaker 05

  that's three feet. And so what, what people are not getting is that if you look at the real benefits of fossil fuels, even the kind of extreme projected negative side effects that are very speculative are nowhere near the benefits of fossil fuels, like not even close. And then the, the final thing I'll say about that is, This is particularly true because one of the huge benefits of fossil fuels is it enables you to master climate danger. So let me just explain that. I've used the example of a prescription drug. You need to look at the benefits and the side effects. So if it saves your life, but it causes a severe rash, you would still want for, you know, a week, you would still do it. But the interesting thing about fossil fuels is they can do something

• 1:08:57Speaker 05

  a prescription drug can't because a prescription drug, the benefits can outweigh the negative side effects, but they can't cure the negative side effects on their own. You'll still get the rash, but fossil fuels can cure their own negative side effects. So for example, let's take, um, let's take something like drought. Let's say fossil fuels caused more drought, which I, I generally doubt because it makes a warmer, wetter world, which makes less drought. But let's say they caused more drought in at least somewhere. Well, okay, but they also give you the ability to irrigate an area to totally neutralize and overwhelm the drought. They also give you the ability to bring food from a region of the world that isn't having a drought into the region that is so that the end product, you're much better off drought wise, right? So even if they had a harmful side effect, they would

• 1:09:42Speaker 05

  cure that side effect and they would actually overwhelm it. And this is what we see with drought, if fossil fuels are N D negative, because drought related deaths are down 99% over the last century, and it's largely all these fossil fueled machines, irrigation, transport that are protecting us. So when, whenever we think of climate, we need to always remember that whatever negatives fossil fuels are causing, there's a very high likelihood they can also cure and then some. And the number one statistic I like to share about this is that we actually have numbers on how many people die from climate related causes like storms and flood and heat and cold, extreme heat, extreme cold. And before I started researching this, I thought,

• 1:10:24Speaker 05

  I thought that these were obviously getting worse. We're having more climate-related disaster deaths, but that it was being exaggerated and the benefits of fossil fuels were underestimated. But it turns out these climate-related disaster deaths have gone down by a rate of 98% over the last century.

• 1:10:41Shawn Ryan?

  You have some good graphs on your book on this.

• 1:10:43Speaker 05

  And I repeat them because it's, but that, that should just be, I don't want to curse, but mind blank. You know, that should be the experience that people have, right? Like, that's what happened to me because I thought, you know, the model everyone is operating on is fossil fuels took a, a safe climate and made it dangerous, right? And the real thing is that, no, it took a dangerous climate and made it safe. And it's like, the, here's the crazy thing. The thing that fossil fuels are supposed to harm most, as in the livability of our climate, are one of the things they've most improved.

• 1:11:18Speaker 05

  And so that's really like, that, that just really struck me when I realized it. Cause that, that means we're going to be, not only are we going to starve if we get rid of fossil fuels, but we'll also be far more in danger from the climate because climate is naturally dangerous. And if we don't have the ability to protect ourselves using all these amazing machines to build shelter and heat and cool and irrigate and transport, then we are totally screwed by the natural climate.

• 1:11:44Shawn Ryan?

  Is this what you meant by avoiding a storm of fossil fuels? We've mentioned that a little bit earlier.

• 1:11:49Speaker 05

  Avoid it, what did I say?

• 1:11:50Shawn Ryan?

  Could we avoid a storm because of fossil fuels?

• 1:11:53Speaker 05

  Oh, I forget exactly what I said, but, but you can, I don't know if you can neutralize a storm with fossil fuels. I mean, you can, so, so the fact that, the fact that climate-related deaths or climate-related disaster deaths in particular are way down. And you can see all the different ways, and I gave a lot of them, in which fossil fuels caused that. What that really means is that fossil fuels have a, have a huge climate mastery ability that they facilitate. And what that means is it's very, very hard to think of anything that could happen in the future as a side effect of fossil fuel use that would actually be a problem climate-wise. And I mentioned, I thought the most plausible Was rising sea levels, but they're super slow. I mean, way slower. I have another graph of this in the book.

• 1:12:38Speaker 05

  This, this is the graph Wikipedia uses, which is super biased against me for that matter, but everything fossil fuel related. They're very biased against, and yet they still admit that, you know, if you look at the history, like our ancestors 10,000 years ago, they have a sea level rise like this. And then it goes like this. And so the question is just, is it slightly less flat? But it's, it's still super slow and we have a lot of time and it's speculative. The idea of, of de-energizing the world in an energy poor world to avoid this is just, it has to be you're denying the benefits.

• 1:13:15Shawn Ryan?

  We're going backwards.

• 1:13:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:16Shawn Ryan?

  We're going backwards.

• 1:13:18Speaker 05

  With many fewer people, if you really did it. So the, the thing is, I want to stress, or I should say, the, the Green New Deal net, what's called net zero agenda, fossil fuel elimination agenda. There is no chance it is going to happen in that the whole world is going to totally do it like lemmings. But the danger is that even if you do it a small fraction, it's deadly. And in particular, it's deadly for our security, which is part of the reason why I was particularly excited to talk to you. Because what the US is doing is, you use the term energy war, which I like, like we're leading the energy war against ourselves. So we are disempowering. I call it unilateral disempowerment because we are destroying our own ability to produce energy.

• 1:14:03Speaker 05

  While others, above all China, are increasing their ability to produce energy and making us dependent on them. And that is very, very scary because it's China. Do you expect China to follow net zero?

• 1:14:16Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 1:14:17Speaker 05

  I mean, they're about 85% fossil fuels. So we're told, oh, they're eating our lunch. They're also like, this is nonsense. They're producing our solar and wind using cheap coal electricity, uh, low environmental standards. Some, quite a bit of slave labor, it turns out. And then actually a lot of. At least temporary subsidies by the government. They're making this stuff, but they're making this stuff using fossil fuels. And they're mostly powering their world using fossil fuels. And of course, they're not going to do this. So, but the US, which is a much more honorable country in many ways. And in this case, that works against us because we're much more likely to honor these commitments to rapidly eliminate fossil fuels. So, so much of the world is obviously pursuing a fossil future.

• 1:15:02Speaker 05

  But even though they claim that they're all producing, they're all pursuing a fossil fuel elimination future. But what that means is the freest countries and often the most honorable countries are going to disempower and they're going to leave themselves in a, at a totally new level of vulnerability.

• 1:15:18Shawn Ryan?

  I just don't understand how, I don't know if they, I, I don't know how this doesn't compute in people's brains.

• 1:15:24Speaker 05

  Well, I think it started, I think, well, I think we're helping it compute. So, so let's just take the thing about the benefits, right? The thing that strikes a lot of people, or particularly this idea of the climate benefits that fossil fuels actually make us safer from climate. I've met, I've talked to tens of thousands of people about this kind of thing. Like, not even one in a hundred thought of it before they learned it from me. And I didn't even think of it myself. I learned it from some other people, right? And so it's, we're taught to think about this issue in a really bad way. And in particular, we're taught to only look at negative side effects and not benefits. But we don't realize that we're doing that often. And I talk a lot about, in the book, about why that is and how that works.

• 1:16:06Speaker 05

  But in any case, that is a fact that we're taught not to, I mean, we look, I showed you Michael Mann, or I explained, like, leading guy just totally evades the benefits of fossil fuels for agriculture, which is its most kind of obvious benefit. So what happens, what's, that's really bad, but I find that when you point that out, when you make it explicit that, hey, we need to look at the full context, the benefits and side effects with precision, people can really start to do it. That they really see it. It's a, it's part of what I try to add as a value is I give people like the thinking tools and everyone agrees, I've never had, here's this, how about this? I've never had one person disagree with me that we need to look at the benefits of fossil fuels. But yet, almost no one does.

• 1:16:49Speaker 05

  And so the more we just make that principle out there, the more people will do it and the more they'll be aware that the other side isn't doing it.

• 1:16:59Shawn Ryan?

  Want to go back to the China stuff.

• 1:17:01Speaker 05

  Good.

• 1:17:01Shawn Ryan?

  Cause it's so important and they have us in so many different aspects. I'm glad we're bringing this up. You know, and so US, we're trying to decrease fossil fuels. This, let's think of this as like a triangle. Right? So we're decreasing fossil fuels. China is upping fossil fuel usage to produce the solar panels and the batteries that then they in turn are going to export to us, thinking that we're energy independent on, on solar and wind.

• 1:17:36Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:17:37Shawn Ryan?

  And then they can just cut it, just cut production, even though it doesn't work.

• 1:17:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, but that's.

• 1:17:43Shawn Ryan?

  So they control our energy, which means they control us and we're seeing the exact same thing right now in Europe with Russia.

• 1:17:51Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:17:51Shawn Ryan?

  In.

• 1:17:52Speaker 05

  China's plan is, is occurring in Russia already. With, with a tiny, like Europe has not done a full-fledged Green New Deal by any means. They're still dominantly fossil fueled in Europe. So even when you pursued, this is part of why I'm motivated. If, if it was just as if you get rid of fossil fuels, it's bad. And, and if you fall, if you go 50%, it's okay. No, it's not okay to go anywhere in this direction because every, every penny you add to the price of energy leads to higher costs of everything. And, and all this increased dependence is a total, is a total disaster. So I think we should be highlighting it. And I think people are realizing, people from both parties happily are starting to see this,

• 1:18:33Speaker 05

  this as a real thing. Like they're, they're a little slower to recognize that solar and wind are not real replacements for fossil fuels. But no, but even an idiot can see where this stuff comes from. You can just look on a map and see where this stuff is made. Like, do we have, are we, we have all these polysilicon facilities? Are we processing all of these materials? We send, even if we mine materials, we need to send them to China to be processed. So it's. And the notable thing is, you know, you hear a little bit of acknowledgement of this. People say, oh, we gotta do more onshore. But they're not willing to give up their anti-development policies because there's this very deep opposition to all human impact.

• 1:19:16Speaker 05

  And so we have all these talk about, oh, let's reshore American industry and let's tax China and this way and this. But as long as you're not allowed to develop in your own country, you are not going to have a real and growing industry. And just to give one stat that shocked me, China has five times our industrial electricity use.

• 1:19:35Shawn Ryan?

  Five times?

• 1:19:36Speaker 05

  Five times. China. This is basically a third world country forty years ago. And, you know, our electricity use has been flat for a long time, in part because we offshore industry. So it what's really needed, fundamentally what's needed is we really need to embrace like human impact done intelligently as a good thing. And then in particular, the freedom to use fossil fuels as a big part of that. But as long as we have this idea that it's wrong for us to impact the planet, we're gonna we're gonna keep, we're just gonna have hostility toward all forms of energy, which is really what the green movement have because they're against fossil fuels. They're against nuclear. They're against hydro, but they're also against solar and wind because they oppose solar

• 1:20:21Speaker 05

  and wind mining projects. They oppose massive construction projects which have a big footprint, right? A big impact. And they oppose the building of these massive transmission lines.

• 1:20:34Shawn Ryan?

  So how the hell are we supposed to get our energy?

• 1:20:36Speaker 05

  You're not, you're not supposed to.

• 1:20:38Shawn Ryan?

  Is this a control thing? What is this?

• 1:20:40Speaker 05

  But it's, it's, there's a control element, but it's, this is why I think I have such an advantage having a background in philosophy and I've been interested in environmental philosophy a long time. So that I think of that as a philosophy of how we relate, the relationship between us and the rest of nature. Like, how are those things? And, you know, I think there are two basic views. The dominant view is that our environmental goal, so you can think of it as a goal of our environment or the world as a whole, is to eliminate human impact on Earth. So that's the environmental goal. That's what it means to be environmentally good, is to eliminate our impact on Earth. And that is deadly. I'm fortunate enough, I learned when I was eighteen, before I knew anything about energy,

• 1:21:23Speaker 05

  like, that's deadly, because we survive by impacting the earth. So if you have a, if you have an environmental philosophy that says it's bad for us to impact the earth, then you are anti-human, whether you know it or not. Whereas my environmental philosophy is to advance human flourishing on earth, which means I want, to me, the earth is a good environment if it is more hospitable to human life. And so that includes clean air and clean water and natural beauty, but it also includes things like farms and factories. And, and I don't think of those as unnatural, because I don't think of humans as unnatural. I think of those as part of our environment in the way a tree is part of our environment. And I judge everything by whether it's good for humans. So like, the malarial mosquito is bad, even though it's natural.

• 1:22:06Speaker 05

  Um, and there are many things that are, that we create, like scientific laboratories, that are good, even though they're quote unnatural. But again, it's not unnatural, it's just man-made or not man-made. But I think that the deep thing that's going on is we've been taught this philosophy that set, that says our impact is evil, and our goal should be to eliminate it. And I think that's,

• 1:22:31Speaker 05

  so there's a question of what's the agenda there, but that is the dominant philosophy, particularly the environmental philosophy in the world today. And that's what's driving us. So that's when you say, where are we going to get our energy? We're not thinking, if your goal is to eliminate human impact, you're not thinking about giving humans energy, because actually, A, it's out, it's not on topic, but B, I, I make this point in chapter three, energy allow, energy is impact. Like, when you use energy, like, think about you have this great studio, like, that took a lot of energy to make all the materials and bring them here and build stuff, right? Like, that's what energy allows us to do. It's literally like the capacity to do work.

• 1:23:13Speaker 05

  To do work means to change physical things in nature. So if you hate human impact, you hate energy. And it's not that you hate, it's not just you hate the negative side effects. So people think, oh, they just don't like the smog. They love the car. But they hate the smog, but no, they hate the car, right? Because they hate the road. They hate the fact that you had to pave something. They hated the mining that went into the car, the transportation that went, like, all of that impacted nature. So the, the whole modern green movement is an anti-human impact movement, which means it's an anti-human movement. And so our whole obsession is how do we eliminate all of our impact? And that's why we ignore the benefits, because our, because they're not, if our goal is to eliminate human impact, fossil fuels have no benefits.

• 1:23:59Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. That's a very interesting way of thinking. I've not heard that before.

• 1:24:03Speaker 05

  It's sort of their way of thinking, but just getting it to the essentials of it. Because they, they, they say to us, you know, be green, don't have an impact. We're like, oh, yeah, yeah, we think that we, we trans, we falsely translate it for them. We think, oh, you just want clean air and clean water. But that's not what they said. They said minimize all impact, all human impact. So it's, it's all, it's an anti-human thing. It's, you have to get, not you, but people have to get out of their head the idea the environmental movement is about loving nature. Because it's, it's not, it's not about like, if you love nature and you want to enjoy nature, like, I live near the beach in Laguna Beach, California, like, that has a hell of a lot of impact involved in living near the beach and enjoying the beach.

• 1:24:48Speaker 05

  Like, including just having enough industrialization where you can live near the beach and you can get resources there, et cetera, et cetera. So it's really about a hatred of human impact in particular. Because do they hate beavers building a dam? No, that's great. A bird building a nest? That's great. That's natural. A human building a home? No, that's impact. That's bad. So all impact is good, except human impact. So the way I think of it is like, every, all impact is good, except the impact of the human race. And so I call it human racism. That is what it is. It's a deep, it's, and it's, it's very analogous to the racism that we think of. Except in a sense, it's worse. I mean, all racism is evil because but it's

• 1:25:33Speaker 05

  the regular racism we think of as somebody is saying like one one, you know, people of different kinds of skin color than I am usually. They are not as human and therefore as good as I am. And so that's evil because it's false. But this is saying that everything human is bad. So you have you have an you hate the whole human race. But that is a real motive. And you see it with some of these designated experts historically who like will say occasionally say things about. You know what? We shouldn't use technology or we need a lot. Sometimes here we need a lot fewer people. Which that means I want to kill a lot of people. Like there's nowhere like Michael Mann, I've been picking on him deservedly.

• 1:26:16Speaker 05

  But he'll say stuff casually such as, yeah, you know, the the world's it really it's carrying capacity, which is a term for like how many people it can or should hold. It's like more like a billion people.

• 1:26:27Shawn Ryan?

  A billion?

• 1:26:29Speaker 05

  A billion people. If I was like, that's like me saying the carrying capacity, we have another person's room. The carrying capacity in this room is one person. It's like

• 1:26:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:36Speaker 05

  One of two of us need to die. But that that we I'm just I'm just pointing out there are these glimmers of this anti-humanism when I'm exposing its essence, but you see these examples also when they say like, you know, humans are a cancer. You'll sometimes hear that we're a cancer. Sometimes you'll see these images of it's an earth. And it's got like a thermometer on it like it's sick, like we've made the earth sick. So again, it's it's the earth is this superior godlike being. And we are the evil that impacted it. What we're supposed to do is leave it the way it is. And and not impacted. And that that is a, you know, I'd say evil idea, anti-human idea, kind of a primitive religious idea. And it is.

• 1:27:20Speaker 05

  But it is a it's the dominant way of thinking about our relationship to our environment in in society today.

• 1:27:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it sounds like they want to eliminate human existence.

• 1:27:32Speaker 05

  I know if if if somebody came to you and said like, hey, you know what? I I I'm part of the green bear movement, so I want to eliminate bear impact. Wouldn't you think they just want to kill all the bears?

• 1:27:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:43Speaker 05

  So I think it's the same with the humans.

• 1:27:47Shawn Ryan?

  Let's go through some of these designated experts that you're speaking of, starting with Paul Ehrlich from Stanford.

• 1:27:55Speaker 05

  There you go. There you go. So, yeah, and the thing I'll say about designated experts, I think, just one thing that's important is, you know, we're told the scientists or the experts say, we need to get off fossil, we're causing climate catastrophe, we get off fossil, we need to get off fossil fuels. It's important to know that we do not have access, certainly, the typical person does not have access to the actual experts in the, in the relevant fields. Like, in this case, it's experts on climate, experts on pollution, experts on energy. And in particular, when I say experts here, I mean researchers. So the people who are actually looking at the data, who are actually studying it. Like, we, we, the, the decisions we are making have to involve knowledge

• 1:28:36Speaker 05

  discovered by thousands and thousands and thousands of actual expert researchers. And so what we need is, we need a system that somehow takes what the best people have found, and then helps put it, you know, synthesize it so that it's more compact, and then disseminate it so that we have access to it, and then somebody helps to help us evaluate what to do about it. So I, in the book, I have this detailed discussion of what I call the knowledge system. And the key thing about it is, this is the system that produces these expert, allegedly expert conclusions. So it starts with the researchers, then there are the synthesizers. So the synthesizers in climate would be something like the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. So they, their job is to take all the climate research

• 1:29:22Speaker 05

  and put it together in an accurate way where the most important stuff is revealed. And it's important that even if all the climate researchers are right, they can do a bad job and give a distortion of that. And that actually happens, uh, which we could go into. And then the disseminators are the people who take kind of those. Syntheses that those can even be thousands of pages and it's the New York Times, the Washington Post, they're the ones who tell us what are the major scientific developments in the field. And then the evaluators are the people or institutions who are helping us decide, okay, now that we know this, let's say we knew that fossil, you know, CO2 emissions from fossil fuels were increasing drought, which I don't think is true, but let's just say we knew that. The evaluators tell us, what do we do about that?

• 1:30:04Speaker 05

  And a good evaluator would tell you, you need to look at the benefits of fossil fuels along with this, right? You can't just look at this negative on drought, you have to look at the positive on drought and the positive of everything else. So the key thing to realize, I'm going in this whole song and dance, is that the system that tells us the expert evaluation of what to do, it can be wrong on, in four ways. So the researchers can be wrong in different ways, but especially the synthesizers can be wrong, the disseminators can be wrong, the evaluators can be wrong. And so what I've argued so far is that the people, people telling us to evaluate things, like evaluate what to do, they've been ignoring the benefits and that's a total failure. So even if they're right about everything else, all their conclusions are worthless because they're ignoring the benefits.

• 1:30:46Speaker 05

  And so to go to the designated experts, the designated experts are really the representatives that the knowledge system selects to help us put everything together, to help us evaluate what to do based on the knowledge of the facts. So take Paul Ehrlich that you mentioned, he is the number one designated environmental expert of the last 50 plus years in terms of the society, his, his status in the society. He, uh, so from the sixties to the present, he is listened to in terms of, hey, what do we do about these issues that affect our environment? And so I, I point out in the book, he's got a 50 plus year track record of being 180 degrees wrong about everything.

• 1:31:27Speaker 05

  So he predicted a population bomb in the sixties as in we had too many people when there were fewer, I think than four billion people. Now we have double that and the world is better fed than ever. But he's predicted pollution would be so terrible or just kill so many people. He was involved in predictions of catastrophic global cooling, then mass death from catastrophic global warming. One of his allies, his close allies, you might ask about is a guy named John Holdren, who was a close collaborator of Ehrlich's and became, he became rewarded for his great scientific work by becoming President Obama's chief science advisor. So I'm being a little sarcastic with great scientific work because in the mid eighties, he predicted

• 1:32:08Speaker 05

  that a billion, up to a billion people would die from climate-related causes due to fossil fuels by 2020.

• 1:32:15Shawn Ryan?

  A billion?

• 1:32:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, and we're recording this in 2022. So from famine, but the world is better fed than ever and climate-related disaster deaths are at an all-time low. So he was 180 degrees wrong. I realized when I was writing this book, we don't even have a term until now for how wrong these people were. Because not just completely wrong, they said the exact opposite of what happened. That's why I call it 180 degrees wrong because they're the exact opposite direction was the truth. But yet, these people are considered the experts. So the system is telling us, hey, listen to these guys, right? They won't lead you astray. And yet, among other things, so the two things about them is they deny

• 1:32:55Speaker 05

  the benefits of fossil fuels and they catast, what I call catastrophize the side effects. So if you take something like warming, what happened there is we did cause some warming, but in general, they predicted way more warming. And in particular, they predicted way more damage from warming and, and no ability of us to master warming. And that was just totally wrong. So these designated experts, this is the point I make in chapters one and two, they ignore the benefits of fossil fuels and they don't just only focus on the side effects, they catastrophize the side effects. They wildly overstate the side effects. And this is why you get these crazy predictions that the fossil fuels are going to ruin the world. You've gotten these predictions for 50 years and they've made the world incredibly

• 1:33:40Speaker 05

  better.

• 1:33:44Shawn Ryan?

  Who's designating these experts?

• 1:33:47Speaker 05

  Well, so it's I call it the knowledge system, which is a there wasn't a good term for what this is. So it's it's the the institutions that are charged with giving us usable expert knowledge as a general public. So for instance, take take Paul Ehrlich, like he will be cited in major newspapers, you know, in the popular media, even as an example, I cite of his dominance. He was on, I think, over a dozen times the Johnny Carson Show, which just shows how, you know, he's this is the New York Times will feature him on something. And, um, you know, the it's the people that we hear, we hear from a lot. But it's it's really the the system of in usually that particularly now, there's a whole reason why. I think it's more uniform than it used to be.

• 1:34:29Speaker 05

  And my my theory about this is that it's because government controls so much of knowledge today, particularly research, so much research academically is funded by government. And that tends to lead toward a monopoly type of thing versus competition. So whereas in the past, we might have had more competing knowledge systems, there's really one mainstream knowledge system. That's telling us that's why everyone in lockstep is saying, let's go net zero.

• 1:34:54Speaker 05

  That's that's there's this global knowledge system and let's all listen to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on climate change and we all agree on this. So it really shows that there is this establishment. And you look at all the corporations, the financial institutions, the governments, there there are all these unanimous type conclusions. And it really shows this this monolithic thing. And it's why in this book, I I spend a lot of time showing that the knowledge system and its designated experts are totally bankrupt. Because it's very legitimate for people to want to rely on these things because expertise is very important. You know, you're, you know, just think about military expertise, like you need real experts there.

• 1:35:37Speaker 05

  Just imagine it's just like Joe Blow, you consult him about what to do about weapon. It'd be totally insane, right? You need expertise. Um, but there's this whole challenge of how do you get really good expert guidance? And it's a very hard problem. But but people respect expertise and I respect expertise, but it's always possible that the system is malfunctioning. And I spend a lot of time proving, and I think I've proven a hundred percent that the system is malfunctioning, because above all, the system ignores the benefits of fossil fuels. And that, and yet the benefits, I make the point, the benefits of fossil fuels are literally a livable planet for humans, because without fossil fuels, not many people can use machines to improve their lives and be productive and prosperous.

• 1:36:22Speaker 05

  So without that, we have to live on a natural planet, and the natural planet is not abundant, it's very deficient in terms of resources, including food and water. And it's not safe, it's dangerous. So basically, fossil fuels have taken a naturally deficient and dangerous planet and made it unnaturally abundant and safe. And if you, if the price of energy goes up enough, then you start to regress toward a natural way of life, where you, where most of the work is being done by manual labor, instead of by what I call machine labor, having all these machines produce all this value for us, which is the only way to live, is having machines do a lot of work for you.

• 1:36:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I'd like to go into nuclear.

• 1:37:05Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:37:06Shawn Ryan?

  And talk a little bit about nuclear, but let's take a quick break real quick.

• 1:37:08Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:37:15Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Alex, we're back from the break, and we're gonna go into nuclear, but one thing I did wanna ask is when did global, when did global warming become climate change? When did that switch happen?

• 1:37:28Speaker 05

  This is not as much of a smoking gun as people think, although it's, it's, it's interesting in the popular language, because the, in, in the academic world, climate change was around for a long time, so the, the main group that's supposed to synthesize, that's supposed to synthesize all the knowledge is called the Intergovernmental on Climate Change, and it's been called that since the mid eighties.

• 1:37:48Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:49Speaker 05

  Uh, but, but, so, but there has been a switch in the popular terminology, right, from global warming to climate change, and I think part of it was there was a period where warming had slowed down dramatically, and so what they wanted to focus on was

• 1:38:04Speaker 05

  The alleged other negative consequences of of warming such as, you know, storms and floods and all the and as I said before, it's very implausible that everything would get worse. But nevertheless, that that's so climate change evoked a fuller, a fuller range of negative things versus global warming, it's not even clearly negative. Right, because it could be, it could be positive depending on how much it is. So I think in general, we've seen and and here's where the real, I think evil is, is that we've gone from climate change to climate emergency, climate crisis. And that's, that's particularly dangerous because what they're trying to do is they're

• 1:38:47Speaker 05

  trying to build into the words that we use a certain evaluation that is controversial and that is actually false. Because if you say like, imagine we're just talking about the situation, we say, hey, like, Sean, hey, what do you think about the climate emergency? You've already, you've already, you're already assuming that there is a climate emergency and you don't have to argue for it. But as I've pointed out, we're 50 times safer from climate related disaster deaths, you know, than we were 100 years ago. How can that be an emergency?

• 1:39:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:18Speaker 05

  Is there any emergency where you're 50 times better off?

• 1:39:21Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 1:39:21Speaker 05

  No, so it's, it's, it's actually, I use this term in fossil future, it's actually, we're actually in a climate renaissance. So if you, if you want to argue that it's going to get worse in the future, that's hypothetically plausible, right? But you can't say it's worse in the present. And one, one thing to think about is anyone who uses the term climate crisis or emergency to describe the world now is ignorant of the present or in denial of the present. Or, this is what I really think is happening, they're not looking at the present from a pro-human perspective. They're looking at it from an anti-human impact perspective. So they think the climate is terrible today, not because it's deadly, because it's less deadly overall, but because we impacted it.

• 1:40:04Speaker 05

  So there, again, the goal is not advancing human flourishing, because if that's your goal, then climate is better than ever today. But it's eliminating human impact, in which case your goal, your view is that it's worse. Even though we're better off.

• 1:40:18Shawn Ryan?

  You have a chart too that that shows how it's safer fifty years later than it was.

• 1:40:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, over the last hundred years. It's just like you start here this decade, this decade, this.

• 1:40:27Shawn Ryan?

  I wanna, if you have that, I wanna put it up.

• 1:40:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, we have all of them, so I'm gonna send you just all of the charts in the book and you can use any of them.

• 1:40:34Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect.

• 1:40:34Speaker 05

  Uh, that you want. Yeah, so it's, it's very, so, so the, the, I would say that the, the climate change thing. The other thing about climate change that's bad as a term is it's not, is it's not, it's, it's a deliberately ambiguous term. So it's not clear about the cause of it. Is it manmade or is it not manmade? It's assuming that it's, people are using it as manmade, but it's not clear it's manmade. But the main thing is it's way too vague about degree because climate change as such isn't even necessarily bad. We could have a good climate change and it could also just be a modest climate change, even if it was negative. That was pretty trivial to deal with if we can master climate. Like, let's say you had, you know, ten percent more hurricanes.

• 1:41:17Speaker 05

  Just think, okay, that's a change, but it's not that big a deal. But what they wanna do is they, they use climate change. They want it to be, okay, it's definitely manmade. But the worst part is they want us to equate it with catastrophic climate change. But that wasn't working well enough, even though it was working way too well, in my view. That's why they started with climate crisis and climate emergency. And you have this, these organizations, like I think Scientific American was one of them. And they're like, we're just gonna use the term, I forget who's them, there's a lot of organizations that do this, and the Guardian does this too. We're gonna use the term climate emergency. So it's, it's really devious.

• 1:41:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it is. You, you had mentioned eighty percent of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels. What is the other twenty percent?

• 1:42:03Speaker 05

  So you've got high, so fossil fuels are oil, coal and gas in that order.

• 1:42:12Speaker 05

  So those, that's eighty percent, you know, among those. And then you have hydro. And you have nuclear. Those are the big ones after that. And that are the other one that goes along with that, but it's a little more controversial is biomass. Uh, so biomass is like from recently living biological, is it matter? So you can think of it as wood, animal dung, but also things like ethanol, like any form of recently. Usually it's, usually it's a plant, although it can also be something like animal dung. Um, but that is, a lot of that is in the um, poor world and it's very low quality. And the reason that that's used a lot is because when you're really poor and you want energy,

• 1:42:57Speaker 05

  what you do is you just take whatever is lying around. And just like primitive people did for, you know, forever. But the problem with those forms of energy is the scale of them is very, very limited. So you think about if you're just relying on your local forest for heating, let alone electricity, like, right? You're just gonna run out of wood, which is what happened historically, which happens in these places. Or you're relying on the local animals, like their dung is gonna, that's not gonna power very much, leaving aside the fumes and how disgusting it is. And you know, the one third of the world is using wood or animal dung. You know, as a major source of fuel for heating and cooking. So this just shows how much more modern energy. But yeah, so hydro and then hu- and hydro is great and it's for electricity in particular, that's what it produces.

• 1:43:42Speaker 05

  But it's location limited. So you need the right bodies of the water, the right type of land to have. So if you're in Washington state, that's great. But if you're in Nebraska, it's not great. It doesn't work. So the thing about nuclear, even though I think right now statistically, it's, it's a little bit after hydro in terms of percentage. It has the potential to scale around the world because the raw materials involved in nuclear, namely, it's usually some form of uranium, but it can also be thorium. Uh, those can, there's so much of that stuff and the way the plants work, they can be used anywhere, basically. So nuclear is the real alternative that has the most ability to scale around the world. That can actually produce reliable slash on-demand electricity.

• 1:44:26Speaker 05

  Solar and wind are in a different category because they don't produce reliable electricity. They produce intermittent unreliable electricity. So they, given today's technology, are necessarily parasites on these reliables. So that's, I often call them unreliables, which those, those activists hate that term. Just like they hate human racism, but they hate it because it's, it's, it stings because there's truth in it.

• 1:44:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Should we be looking more at nuclear?

• 1:44:52Speaker 05

  Yeah. So the great thing about nuclear, we know.

• 1:44:56Speaker 05

  One, so if we think about why are, there's this really good question, why are fossil fuels so good? Why do we use these things? We use eighty percent of the world's energy. They've had a hundred-plus years of competition. Why are we still using these things? And one of the basic reasons is the nature of the material is quite distinctive. So fossil fuels, they have these attributes, they're naturally stored, concentrated, and abundant sources of energy. So by stored, I mean, like, you think about, this is true of a piece of wood as well, but of oil. It just sits there and then it, it's like a natural battery and you can just deploy it on demand. Whereas with the sun and the wind, you don't control them.

• 1:45:40Speaker 05

  You just have to react to whenever they are available. And if you want to control them, you need something like a battery. But then you have to build in that storage system. Because solar and wind don't have natural storage, but fossil fuels have natural storage. So that's really conducive to reliability and to low cost. On top of that, they have natural concentration, which means they take a, a large amount of energy and they can put it in a small amount of space. Or sometimes in the case of natural gas, it's not a small amount of space, but it's a small amount of mass. And so oil in particular is what's called very energy concentrated or energy dense. And that's why it's so good for things like cargo ships, airplanes, like things where you need a lot of power in a relatively small amount of space.

• 1:46:22Speaker 05

  And then also they're abundant, because if they weren't abundant, then it doesn't matter how potent they are. You wouldn't have that much of them. So. None of the other materials we think of for energy, the alternatives have this combination of natural storage, concentration and abundance, except for nuclear. In nuclear, actually, it has total storage and it's much more concentrated than fossil fuels, like on the order of a million times more even than oil and, and in practice, like a thousand times more in terms of what we can get from it. And then it's extremely abundant. So it has, it has all the markers of being a really scalable source of low-cost, reliable energy. And we have a track record where it has been used to produce electricity relatively cheaply in the past.

• 1:47:07Speaker 05

  And we know that it has some versatility because we use it on things like aircraft carriers and icebreakers and submarines. So it has quite a bit of versatility. So it's kind of the obvious thing to event, to supplement and then eventually replace fossil fuels because it has fossil fuels core attributes, but even more so. But what's happened is, we've seen this in electricity, is that the green movement, the same movement that claims to care about protecting us from CO2 emissions, has demonized nuclear. So they falsely portrayed it as safe, even though it's objectively actually the safest form of energy, which I can get into, but just take it as they've made it seem unsafe. And they've tried, they've definitely tried to outlaw it and it's, I, I call it criminalized

• 1:47:50Speaker 05

  right now because it's, there's so much regulation surrounding it and so much ability of activists to stop it, that it's, it's a lot like an illegal activity. So you just get the sense of where it used to take four years to get one of these things done, it'll now take 16 years and maybe it won't happen at all.

• 1:48:08Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:48:09Speaker 05

  So you think about, would you invest in, like if somebody said, hey, Sean, I've got, you know, you made this fortune on gummy bears, you want to invest in a nuclear plant? Like maybe if it's four years, you would do that. But if it's 16 years and like Mario Cuomo, you know, in the past, is one of the guys who canceled one of the things, or like, anyone can cancel it? I would never invest in that.

• 1:48:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:31Speaker 05

  So they've made it this essentially criminal enterprise to the point where, and this is a crazy fact, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is the regulatory agency, which came about in 1975. So it's forty seven years old. Since it came into existence, there's not been not one nuclear plant that has gone from beginning to end under the N R C.

• 1:48:52Shawn Ryan?

  Not one, not one?

• 1:48:53Speaker 05

  Not one, and the closest ones are total price disasters. They're completely just off the charts. They're not fully in place yet, but the ones that probably will get approved eventually are like just so far over cost that nobody would would pursue them.

• 1:49:11Shawn Ryan?

  Why are they so against, why are they so against nuclear?

• 1:49:14Speaker 05

  Well, the, you know, the stated reason is the safety, which that I think anyone with common sense should think is absurd because we we know we have a lot of nuclear around the U S. We're not dying from it, right? There are clearly ways to do it safely. And if you're, if you're being told that C O two emissions are a threat, you and are so dangerous, they're going to destroy the world. We've talked about why that's not true at all. But if you thought that, then wouldn't you be willing to to take some risks to do it? Like, why aren't you willing to split an atom? Or for that matter, dam a river? It's a similar thing with hydro. And I think hydro is the easier one to explain because they'll say, well, we can't do hydro because it interferes with free flowing rivers. Which basically mean it, it it impacts the river, it impacts the species in the river.

• 1:49:59Speaker 05

  So again, it's this idea that our goal is not to advance human flourishing on earth. It's to eliminate human impact on earth. And so that gets the priority. So that's why they want to stop the dam because the dam has impact and the goal is to eliminate impact, not to advance human flourishing with the dam. And nuclear is the same thing, but in a slightly different way. It's viewed as unnatural to split the atom. Like just, we shouldn't be playing with these forces. It's like that's, it's wrong of us to do. And in particular, people don't like the waste. The activists don't like the waste, not because it's really dangerous, but because it lasts a long time. And the idea of human beings creating something that lasts a long time is extremely offensive if your philosophy is that human impact is evil.

• 1:50:43Speaker 05

  And should be eliminated. So it's really this anti-impact philosophy that is leading to this hostility, because in practice, nuclear is actually the safest form of energy. And the reason is very simple, because it cannot explode. But that's a huge reason. It's not the only reason, but it's so you look at most of the dangers from energy that can really hurt you if you're operating it or your neighbor involves some sort of explosion or fire, some sudden deadly release of forces that you don't have time to react to. So you know, you can have, you know, natural gas explosion, which this happens unfortunately, and it'll kill a bunch of people, right? Even, you know, solar panels can catch fire and that that causes all sorts of things. You can have like solar-based fires and or

• 1:51:28Speaker 05

  that they can help cause fires. But nuclear is great because it it's this one centralized place and it can, under very adverse, unusual circumstances, it can overheat and that causes what's called a meltdown. But that's a very, very slow process that gives you a lot of time to evacuate and react to. And that's why in the civilized world, we don't have any deaths from radiation, like, you know, certainly among civilians from nuclear and even in Chernobyl, which was a reactor, it was basically like a weapon that they designed, which is has nothing to do, they basically just designed something that we would never allow, we never considered allowing. But even then, you're not talking about even

• 1:52:08Speaker 05

  not even 10,000 deaths by almost any estimate. So it's the consider this is the by far statistically the safest form of energy, even if you included Chernobyl, which you shouldn't, because it's a totally different category. So it's all about this view that human impact is evil and nuclear is offensive because it involves these kinds of impacts. And the other thing, and this guy, Michael Schellenberger, again, a friend of mine who's running for governor in California, he makes the point also that the Greens don't like it because they don't want abundant energy and they don't want abundant and clean energy in the society because they want because they know that'll mean a world where humans have a lot of impact because they don't want us to have all the energy to impact the earth. And so they they

• 1:52:52Speaker 05

  don't, solar and wind is more appealing because that's going to lead to a more natural and poor and poor life.

• 1:52:58Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 1:53:01Shawn Ryan?

  So do you think we should be using, you think we should be using the fossil fuels to go more towards nuclear and hydro?

• 1:53:09Speaker 05

  I would put it as, it is chapter 10 of the book, I think we should, we should policy-wise focus on freedom. Like, I don't think that, I'm not coming with some, I joked before that Biden had some vision for the grid, but I don't believe in politicians or really any individual having a vision for, for like a whole economy. You can have a vision for a company or product, but the key thing there is it should be voluntary. So you can make suggestions, but you actually have to offer it freely. So my view is not that, oh, fossil fuels should be 70% by 2040 and here's my plan. No, I think people should be free to produce and use whatever forms of energy they want, so long as there are reasonable laws protecting us against different kinds of real endangerment from others. So

• 1:53:54Speaker 05

  like different kinds of levels of pollution, but also just certain kinds of accidents and dangers and that. Like you need certain laws for that kind of thing, but basically you want free market competition among all sources of energy. And I think that that includes decriminalizing nuclear. So nuclear is the biggest victim right now of the green anti-impact policies. And so in my own work, I do a lot of work with elected officials, and I'm working on an energy freedom platform later this year, which people, whenever it's out, they can go to the website, energietalkingpoints.com, which has a lot of other resources. They'll see, we've got this platform and one of the major planks is decriminalize nuclear. So for me, it's all about, politically, it's about freedom. And then, energy-wise, it's

• 1:54:36Speaker 05

  about having, I call it ultra-cost-effective energy in the book, but low-cost, reliable, versatile energy for billions of people in thousands of places. And then in terms of like the morality, it's all about advancing human flourishing on earth. So fossil fuels, it's, it's, given the realities of energy, we need a fossil future to have global human flourishing going forward. But the way to achieve that is energy freedom. It's not, I'm not somebody who wants to impose fossil fuels on the world. I want to liberate the world to enjoy all forms of energy and fossil fuels are crucial. And because fossil fuels are attacked now, that's why I was, that's why I'm defending them. If, if we had a free market in energy, I absolutely would not write this book.

• 1:55:19Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I appreciate you coming and educating us on all this.

• 1:55:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, my pleasure.

• 1:55:24Shawn Ryan?

  If you had three people to recommend to come on this podcast, well, who would it be?

• 1:55:30Speaker 05

  Wait, recommend that they come on this podcast? You mean, because you're...

• 1:55:33Shawn Ryan?

  In regards to energy.

• 1:55:35Speaker 05

  Oh, oh, oh, I thought, I thought I meant just who would be a good guest for you. Um, three, on energy?

• 1:55:43Shawn Ryan?

  On one, just one.

• 1:55:44Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:55:48Speaker 05

  You're gonna, you're gonna capture my bias toward myself with this question. I mean, honestly, my favorite person is, um, is, uh, is, I have a researcher in Germany. He's like my secret weapon. He's not that secret anymore, but his name is Stefan Henne. And I met him, I'm a big believer in like, in just getting good at things and not getting credentials. So, you know, my official credentials, I have a BA in philosophy from Duke University and a minor in computer science, which that seems to have nothing to do with energy. And even in philosophy, like a BA is not impressive. But it's like, my goal is, I just believe you should get good at things. And then the world will recognize that. You shouldn't screw around. If, if you can get good at something

• 1:56:30Speaker 05

  and, and you can get a credential and the credential, you're not going to get as good as fast, you should just get good at it. And so Stefan is the ultimate example of that. I don't even know what degree he has. I don't care. I met him in a Facebook comment section in 2011. And I could tell this guy was smart. And so now I hire him full time and his job is just to be on top of everything. And so he knows way more than I do.

• 1:56:50Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:56:50Speaker 05

  About the details. And so he's, uh, and then there's another guy I interviewed. So basically, one of the things I'm good at, I think, is just, I had a vision for what, for kind of what, what book the world needed on energy. And I was smart enough to knew, to know that I on my own could not do it by myself. So I needed this researcher. And then there's a really good philosopher I used to work with. His name is Ankar Ghati. He used to work with me at the Ayn Rand Institute. He still works there. I don't work there anymore. Um, but I got him to help me and got, and he helped, like so many of these ideas, he helped me refine. So those are sort of the two people I, I pick. And then, you know, another guy I would recommend as a third person

• 1:57:32Speaker 05

  is just, I would recommend, uh, Michael Schellenberger. So he knows a lot about energy. It's, he, he focuses on other things. He focuses on homelessness and he's trying to become governor of California. Um, but he, I think he really, he's a really fascinating example of a, of a smart person who changes his mind over time, who seeks information and changes his mind. Cause he started out as a renewables activist. And then he went to be very pro-nuclear, but still pretty hostile to fossil fuels. And then a couple of years ago, he came out and said, and really started challenging climate catastrophe. And he's been one of certainly the top five people in the world who have been really challenging climate catastrophe and, and, and putting forward this view that you can believe that

• 1:58:17Speaker 05

  we impact climate, quote, climate change, but also believe that it's not a catastrophe and that the benefits we get from fossil fuels far outweigh that. So it's a guy I really admire and I think is a good example of a thoughtful person in a sense. I, I was brought up to think that fossil fuels were bad, but I, I was never like a green peace type or something like that. Cause again, when I, I think I said when I was 18, or I might've said this offline, I learned that the green movement's goal is to eliminate human impact on earth and that human beings survive by impacting earth. And therefore I realized the green movement is an anti-human movement and I wanted nothing to do with it. So I had, that's the huge advantage I had coming into this stuff. I still was afraid of global warming slash climate change and I didn't know about the

• 1:59:02Speaker 05

  benefits of fossil fuels until, until basically 2007, I started learning, but I at least knew that this green philosophy was bad. And so I think that's what helped me be skeptical of it and then see, oh my gosh, really everything they're doing is trying to eliminate human impact on earth and none of it is trying to advance human flourishing on earth. And the whole way they're, they're distorting fossil fuels is really just ending up, gonna end up getting a bunch of us killed and then make America in particular, super insecure and really get us overtaken by China. I'm not saying that it will happen, but that's certainly what they're trying to do.

• 1:59:37Shawn Ryan?

  It's definitely a very good possibility.

• 1:59:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, I think, you know, I'm, I'm an activist, so let's, let's stop it. But, uh, it's, but part of stopping it, it's like, if you see it and you take it seriously, then you have a good chance of stopping it. It's certainly not, certainly there are, there's a real set of possibilities where China goes the way it's going, we go the way we're going. Yeah, we could be overtaken and we don't want that world for ourself or our kids.

• 2:00:05Shawn Ryan?

  No, not at all. But how do people find you?

• 2:00:11Speaker 05

  I'm not much of a guy on Instagram yet, unlike you who are a legend on Instagram. So, but I'm Alex Epstein Energy on Instagram. I'm most easily findable on Twitter @AlexEpstein, just my name. Of course, the book is Fossil Future. You can get that anywhere and then, oh yeah, and then this website, energietalkingpoints.com. I highly recommend that. I created that first for elected officials, but now it's available for everyone. So if you have any question about energy, any energy issue, or climate issue, environmental issue, just go there. It has a search function. You can type in basically any word and you'll see really good talking points that you can use and they're all really well referenced. So

• 2:00:52Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect.

• 2:00:52Speaker 05

  That's like, this is sort of like this, this is the synthesis of everything and it's the full master energy education to really arm you. But I also like having these bite sized things that you can just use on demand. You know, you're at the dinner table, somebody brings up something, just go to energietalkingpoints.com.

• 2:01:09Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, perfect. All that stuff will be linked below. And before we head out, everybody pick up a copy of Fossil Future. That's linked below. And man, I just thank you again for coming on. I really appreciate it. That was super informative.

• 2:01:24Speaker 05

  My pleasure. Thanks for having me. And of course, thanks for your service to our country.

• 2:01:27Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. And best luck with the book launch.

• 2:01:30Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 2:01:40Speaker 02

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