My new interview with Jordan Peterson
On the latest episode of the Jordan Peterson Podcast, I analyze the crucial moment we’re at with American energy policy, and break down my “Energy Freedom Platform” to make the absolute most of this moment.
Stream the full interview on Youtube, X, or Spotify, or read the transcript below.
Alex Epstein’s influence on energy
Jordan Peterson:
So I had the good fortune to speak again today with Alex Epstein, who I spoke with two years ago almost to the day. Alex is the author of two influential books. One, the first one, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, and the second one, Fossil Future.
Alex has been beating the pro-human energy/environment drum for some 17 years, and with increasing effectiveness I would say. He’s one of the people at the forefront of the dawning realization that impoverishing humanity and destroying the industrial infrastructure of the West while making energy spectacularly expensive and unreliable and simultaneously increasing our dependency on, let’s say, dictatorial governments, is not really a very wise policy all things considered.
Alex has been an icebreaker in that regard, pointing out to anyone who will listen—and listen carefully—that fossil fuels, all things considered, are obviously and overwhelmingly a net good, and that if we want to move forward into a future of abundance then it’s necessary to get that straight in our minds and stop playing foolish games.
We had an opportunity to continue that conversation today and to deepen it, because Alex has spent the last several years making his knowledge about the energy/environment nexus more and more detailed at the practical level in a manner that enables policymakers to move towards an energy-rich, abundant, pro-human future.
And so he laid out these ideas today in our podcast and in a manner that is at least illustrative of the wealth of knowledge that he has that could be brought to bear for policymakers who are interested in developing exactly that kind of policy framework. And so, join us for that.
The dramatic AI-fueled increase in energy demand
Jordan Peterson:
I thought we might as well begin this by briefly evaluating the change in the conceptual landscape since 2022. I would say two years ago, the stance that you have been promoting, a positive stance towards fossil fuel, was not only, what would you say, controversial, but could we say fringe? And I don’t think that’s the case now. And I think that has a fair bit to do with you actually, which is quite cool.
And so that’s my sense broadly speaking. It’s not like there still isn’t all sorts of work to do to make the case for fossil fuels, but how are you feeling about… If you evaluate the landscape over the last two years, how are you feeling about it?
Alex Epstein:
Yeah. So I’ve been at this 17 years now, and it’s definitely at a peak in terms of enthusiasm and opportunity in this sphere. And I think it’s interesting to break down, so maybe I’ll do my own part last and the part of people who think like me, but there are a few other developments that are notable and they’re all intertwined.
But one of the interesting ones that I take no credit for, but is very fortuitous intellectually, is the dramatic increase in electricity demand that is occurring right now in the world of
Jordan Peterson:
Because of IT.
Alex Epstein:
Yeah, right, exactly. So specifically data centers and within that AI, and in particular where you see it is with the very large digital tech companies and what their role has been in the energy debate so far, and then how it has drastically changed in the last year or two.
So if you look at, even in 2022, what’s the posture of the big tech companies for the past years before that, it’s overwhelmingly a posture of, “We are 100% renewable and you should be, too.” Then politically advocating the net-zero-by-2050 kind of goal, which basically means rapidly eliminate fossil fuels.
Jordan Peterson:
And prosperity.
Why tech companies stopped promoting “100% renewable”
Alex Epstein:
And so you have them and you have to think of them as they’re just an incredible center of gravity in the culture. And where they are is hard to move the culture away from, because there’s just so much wealth and so much influence and people in many ways want to be like them. And I think their posture was part of the Larry Fink era. So Larry Fink, the head of BlackRock… By the way, I’m in DC, whenever I’m in DC this guy is always in DC. I always spot this guy. Hart building and Dirksen building. This guy…
But I think he seems nervous right now, whereas he was on top of the world. So if you take two years ago and especially four years ago, he was called the Emperor. Actually, the first time I had Vivek on my podcast, he was fighting against Fink. This was in about 2020, 2021 maybe. And he’s talking about him as the Emperor.
And you see now, just to give a sense of Larry Fink. Larry Fink went of all places to the World Economic Forum. This is after telling the whole world, you have to go net-zero and specifically you want to be 100% renewable. He goes to the World Economic Forum and says, “Hey, we have data centers, we have AI. There’s going to be massive new demand for what he’ll call dispatchable or reliable electricity. So electricity available on demand.”
Jordan Peterson:
You mean the kind of electricity we got accustomed to with our systems that work?
Alex Epstein:
Right, exactly.
Jordan Peterson:
Before people mucked around with them.
Alex Epstein:
Yeah, exactly. What we used to just call electricity. And he said, “And we cannot power this with solar and wind and we need dispatchable electricity like natural gas.” I’m like, “Whoa, where has this guy been?” This was the leader of net-zero, “100% renewable.”
And you’re seeing it with the tech companies too. Facebook, with Microsoft trying to resurrect Three Mile Island, everyone is admitting it. I mean, Elon, his stance has been really interesting. So he’s been, I think radically improving on oil and gas, radically improving… Very much dampening on any climate catastrophism at this point. I don’t even think he’s a climate catastrophist, which is like if you look at videos of him back when he’s introducing the Powerwall. There’s a lot of climate catastrophism.
So it’s just this fascinating development and he’s using natural gas like a lot of new natural gas to power Grok. So what we had is, there is just the economic reality. Once you need a lot more electricity, you have to run into the reality that you need more specifically natural gas. Unfortunately with nuclear, our policy is so bad. We’ll discuss in a minute how to fix that, but it’s so bad we cannot rapidly scale up nuclear. Solar and wind have limited scaling ability in terms of actually contributing to reliable electricity because
Jordan Peterson:
As we see continually.
Alex Epstein:
Yes, exactly. The storage is just so prohibitively
Jordan Peterson:
Norway’s having a fit at the moment because they’re having to export their electricity because of the treaties they’ve signed. And their power supply is so unreliable that they’re having spot price hike. What spot price hikes of up to $1,000 per kilowatt-hour, something like that.
Alex Epstein:
Yeah, I mean Europe has been a precursor in all of these dimensions. I mean, Germany, they used to tell us it’s the model and now it’s a joke. Now they disavow Germany. So you have everyone going, and it’s because when you really need a lot more electricity, you have to face economic reality. What was the case before is we had stagnant electricity demand and we could accommodate a certain amount of intermittent electricity on the grid and we could get away with shutting down a little bit of reliable capacity, although we were bursting at the seams in terms of the polar vortex, the grid almost crashes. We see a crash in California, we see a crash in Texas, we see warnings across the country. But now we have massive new demand. And what the tech companies had to do is they had to go from… What they did before is they just relabeled the fossil fuel electricity. So they would use the fossil fuel electricity and pay the utilities to label it as green. This is called renewable. Oh, electricity credits.
And unfortunately this is legally allowed, which is one of my recommendations to the new administration is they need to disallow this.
Jordan Peterson:
Explain that in more detail. What are they doing exactly?
Alex Epstein:
You are allowed to claim that you are 100% renewable, which everyone takes to mean you are using 100% renewable electricity if you buy credit from somebody else to relabel your fossil fuel electricity as renewable.
Jordan Peterson:
Is that part of carbon offset?
Alex Epstein:
It’s a similar kind of thing, but it’s a different version of it. It’s specifically labeling yourself renewable. So you take Apple in North Carolina. So Apple is drawing from the grid in North Carolina. When you draw from the grid, you draw an equal percentage of every source in the grid. They all become a homogeneous thing. So whatever, I don’t know the exact state of the grid right now, but it has historically had a bunch of coal, a bunch of gas, a bunch of nuclear, but Apple wants to label themselves 100% renewable. So how do they possibly do that? Well, they pay the utility to say, “Hey, the coal and gas that Apple is using, that’s the responsibility of the home consumers. They’re actually using that.” And Apple gets credit—
Jordan Peterson:
Apple has the special electricity?
Alex Epstein:
Yeah, they just take the portion of the electricity. It’s just a total figment.
Jordan Peterson:
I see.
Alex Epstein:
And you can do different versions of this called power purchase agreements, which Google does a lot of where you’ll buy a certain portion of the wind in Iowa, even if you’re not in Iowa, but you claim that you’re using it. So it’s all a fraudulent relabeling scheme, but you can get away with that as long as you don’t need much new electricity. But once you need new electricity, you’re running out of reliable electricity to relabel as green. And so that’s what’s happened is… And a friend of mine who’s a CEO of a major company was telling me he was at a conference and he was telling me about the shift in attitude on electricity. He said before these tech companies said to us if it’s not 100% renewable to different districts and stuff, don’t even talk to us. And now they said they’ll burn anything from bunnies to puppies to get electricity. That’s the shift—
The unlimited need for energy to expand our abilities
Jordan Peterson:
So can you walk everybody through what’s at the base of the demand for the IT? I know it’s associated with artificial intelligence and these massive banks, computational banks, they’re producing, but I’m unclear about the details. What is it that’s drawing such immense resources of power?
Alex Epstein:
Well, I mean the best person to talk to is an expert in large language models. But I’ll give it to you in the macro and especially I’m very proud that I forecast this in Fossil Future. So Fossil Future was completed in 2021, came out in 2022, and the basic mechanism I talked about is there’s really an unlimited human need for energy. And what energy is, it’s “machine food” or “machine calories.” And historically the major use of energy has been to expand and amplify human physical labor. So by expand, I mean via machine. So we can do things that we couldn’t do. We can power an incubator with energy. We can’t get five humans together and make an incubator. We can’t get a thousand humans and be a plane. So one thing energy and machines do is they expand our productive abilities and then they also amplify.
So the example of, well, a modern combine harvester will make an agricultural worker able to reap and thresh 1000 times more wheat than he could on his own. So that’s the kind of classic thing. So it expands and amplifies the abilities. Historically, it’s been primarily our physical abilities. And what the AI does, and it’s really better thought of as augmenting our intelligence, is it’s figuring out new ways to dramatically expand and amplify our mental ability. As we’re recording this, it’s been about a week since ChatGPT Pro came out. So ChatGPT Pro is a $200 a month product of OpenAI, which for certain businesses I think is going to just be wildly cheap, including mine. So any kind of… I’m in a business including the creating of energy policy and arguments and this kind of thing. And this is something modern AI and specifically these large language models has become incredibly good at.
And with the Pro version, it’s unbelievable in terms of just helping you make decisions, helping you solve problems. So I had a very complex accounting and legal question that I needed because I’m in the world of politics and there’s always a question of what’s lobbying and what’s not lobbying, and do you want a non-profit structure or a for-profit structure? And I can just lay this out and it can give me the equivalent of 10 hours of a lawyer and then I can just run it by an actual lawyer for one hour to vet it and I save whatever it is, $5,000 or something like this. And it’s of course much quicker. The thing is on-demand, it doesn’t get sick, it doesn’t make spelling errors. It’s this thing. But the way in which we do this is the computation involved is incredibly, to call it crude is not quite the right way to put it, but it’s like—
Jordan Peterson:
It’s very energy-intensive.
Alex Epstein:
It’s not nearly as energy efficient as our brains. It’s not even remotely as energy efficient. And basically part of what it does is it just scans the entire sum, at least in terms of words of human knowledge and everything that we’ve ever created to find patterns in these very sophisticated ways. And this is where I’m no longer an expert, but the key thing is to amplify our mental abilities to our maximum capability right now requires this incredibly energy intensive thing that people are very, very excited about.
Jordan Peterson:
So our brains are remarkable not only for the fact that they’re intelligent, but for the fact that they’re insanely energy efficient.
Alex Epstein:
Right. And so we don’t have… There’s a lot of stuff in biology that’s just insanely efficient that we have not been able to replicate with non-biology. And this is the thing. But of course, the great thing about energy is we don’t need to be as efficient as nature at any given point because for a human in the United States, we have 75 times more energy used by our machine servants than we do by our own bodies. But with the AI and with the need for knowledge, what we’re finding is there’s no real end point to our desire to augment our intelligence and in particular in the realm of medicine, and then more broadly longevity. And this is going to be really paid—
Jordan Peterson:
It’s one scientific discovery in general.
Alex Epstein:
But if you think about things like what are billionaires going to be willing to pay for? Well, how much are… If you have $100 billion, are you willing to invest $10 billion with a 10% chance that you’ll get a five-year longer life? Probably. And I think that’s a great thing and that’s going to benefit all of us tremendously. But there’s also just the whole phenomenon of creating, not just advising. Right now AI is primarily an advisor that’s giving us advice on what to do. But as it becomes more of an agent model, then you can do more and more. Of course, nobody knows exactly how successful these will be, how much they’ll proliferate, what their limits will be, what new capabilities they’ll have. But obviously the world is very excited about it, particularly the digital tech world from a security perspective. We view it as existential, which I think is a correct read on it, given the power in every sense of this, including metaphorical—
Jordan Peterson:
And the rate of change.
Alex Epstein:
This is the kind of thing you want to be very much on top of. So for all of these reasons, there is huge urgency in I think, proper urgency in the digital tech world to—
Jordan Peterson:
Well, even to keep ahead of the Chinese, for example.
Alex Epstein:
Yeah, right. And you’re seeing that, and I think somebody like Burgum in the new administration, this is a big focus of his in particular. He’s very sensitive to the national security implications of it.
Jordan Peterson:
Well, so it’s lovely to see that when push came to shove, so to speak, that the big tech companies in the United States returned to their own narrow self-interest and made the right bloody decisions. Yes, really. It’s really something to see—
Alex Epstein:
I’m not even so cynical about that.
I think part of why sometimes populations will have better conclusions than the experts at a given time, although I’m a big fan of consulting experts in a proper way. But you’ll often have something like people will just sort of know it’s not right… Like with the whole anti-fossil-fuel thing, even just in terms of common sense.
The failure of the net-zero agenda
Alex Epstein:
So I mentioned one development is the urgent need for more electricity and the recognition that fossil fuel expansion is necessary for that. But number two, and this is what you were alluding to with Norway, is the very conspicuous failure of the net zero agenda even when only barely implemented.
Jordan Peterson:
Right.
Alex Epstein:
So it’s important—
Jordan Peterson:
Well, one of the scandalous elements of that is that there’s no single town on the planet that runs entirely on renewables. There’s no micro projects proof of concept—
Alex Epstein:
Except poor ones do, they run on wood and dung.
Jordan Peterson:
Right. Well, yeah.
Alex Epstein:
And they don’t really run.
Jordan Peterson:
Well, that’s the problem.
Alex Epstein:
They die.
Jordan Peterson:
Yeah, exactly. And the fact that electricity prices spike toward the infinite as the wind stops blowing and it’s nighttime, which turns out to be a real problem if you happen to be in the winter. And then you need the parallel. The thing that’s so bloody peculiar about that is that because these renewable sources are sporadic and unreliable, you have to have a backup system that has the same capacity as the renewable system when it falls to zero. And so what you have is a new system built on top of the old system being particularly catastrophic in Germany where they shut off their nuclear plants and now use late night fired coal plants to augment their unreliable renewables. I mean, it’s complete insanity. Quadruple the price.
Alex Epstein:
And so this is a case where I think the general public was much smarter than say the New York Times, where the general public was like, “Wait a second, we were told to shut down these reliable fossil fuel plants and they could be easily replaced. And now we have all these electricity shortages and our electricity prices are higher. Maybe these two are related.” And then the New York Times is like, “No, no, no, no, no. There’s nothing to see here. Renewables are actually cheaper. They’re actually cheaper even though we added a lot of them and our electricity got more expensive and less reliable, they’re really cheaper.
And we will make up a number called Levelized Cost of Electricity that tries to calculate the cost of electricity if it doesn’t have to be reliable. And so we’ll tell you…” So there’s all this mumbo jumbo, which I debunk in Fossil Future, like Chapter 6 type stuff.
But this is another thing where the net-zero agenda promised us we would be richer and then even just a very marginal implementation… And I want to stress this because we haven’t even reduced the supply of fossil fuels in the world. We’ve just slowed the growth and we’re having all these problems. So even just a very bare marginal attempt to slow the growth in net-zero has been a disaster. So that’s number two.
And they’re related because we have this clear demand that fossil fuels are needed for, and then we restrict fossil fuels some, and we start getting these big problems when we were told we would get big wealth basically. And then—
The need for technology-neutral electricity markets
Jordan Peterson:
Do you think there’s any utility in the renewable energy sources?
Alex Epstein:
Yeah.
Jordan Peterson:
You do? Okay.
Alex Epstein:
Well, of course I mean, the obvious things are where they’re already used in a free market. So with their off-grid kind of applications and that kind of thing. I think what we need, and this relates to some policy ideas, is insofar as we’re going to have electricity markets, what you really need is some form of tech-neutral reliability or dispatchability standard where you allow the intermittent sources the chance to provide reliable electricity, but you require them to.
So just to give you an example, let’s say in five years Elon thinks, hey, you know what? I can get solar and batteries to the point where I can provide dispatchable electricity. Or maybe it’s I can get solar and batteries and maybe I’ll have a few gas peaker plants as a backup, and I think I have this system to do it. I want to encourage that kind of thinking because you could imagine it could be possible, but you also don’t want to burden the grid with somebody’s incorrect idea. And most people’s initial ideas are incorrect. So the basic way you do this conceptually, the details become difficult, but you basically say everyone on the grid has to meet a certain standard of dispatchability or reliability.
We don’t care how you do it. You can do it with whatever you want. You’re a black box, and we just demand certain standards of performance of the black box. I think that kind of model will allow you to have market discovery if any of these ideas are true. But unfortunately what’s happened is people have made these crackpot claims that we can just power it with solar and a little batteries. And they’ve used all these false models that people like me spend a lot of time debunking, but then they just ruin the grid because what they’re really getting is they have the right to sell unreliable electricity with no reliability guarantee at the same price. And in fact, the subsidy is a far greater price than reliables.
And so this would be the equivalent of the government passes a law and says, rental car companies have to charge the same for a car that works all the time and a car that works a third of the time and you don’t know when, and actually you have to pay… Actually, we’re going to subsidize the car that works a third of the time and you don’t know which then actually is going to take money away from the reliables. What just happened on our grid is we give whatever pool of utility payments and stuff we have on the grid, more and more of that goes to solar and wind in part because of subsidies, because they can always bid. If they want a negative price, they can basically say, I’m going to pay you to take our electricity because we’re giving them so much as taxpayers, so even if they pay the grid, we pay them way more than that. So it’s just this totally screwed up system. But I’m not one of these people who says, we should just not consider solar. We shouldn’t consider solar and wind, but we need real markets—
Jordan Peterson:
Yeah. Well, the fundamental question under that, it’s got to be something like, well, why would we take off the table any potential source of innovation that would make energy more plentiful and more reliable, because we need it?
Alex Epstein:
We wouldn’t. But with the grid, what we have is we have a monopoly situation. So you have to think of it in that context. Now, I think long term we could argue that we don’t even need to have a monopoly with the electricity grid, but in anything resembling the near future, when you have government monopolies and you have insofar as you have these electricity markets which are not exactly markets, they’re more like government pricing schemes. You need to orient those so that they reward reliability and they really value reliability. And right now they don’t. So people talk about “all of the above,” which I think is a pretty bad term because you don’t just want everything because it happens to exist. We don’t want animal dung, we don’t want wood, those are “part of the above.” You really want “best of the above,” and that’s what you get in a real market. So with electricity, we need to create the closest approximation we can with a monopoly system of a real market where the lowest-cost, most reliable solution is allowed to emerge and rewarded.
How to think about energy in a pro-human way
Jordan Peterson:
Okay. So we talked at the beginning here when we were trying to structure this conversation, I remembered that you had written these two books, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and then Fossil Future. And I asked you if you were writing another book, and you sort of said kind of, but you’re not. You’re focusing on energy policy per se, and you wanted to step through the… You have five points—
Alex Epstein:
We have five kind of big objectives.
Jordan Peterson:
Well, I’d like you to go through those. And one of the things I want to return to at some point, because I don’t want to forget about it, is how you view the role of nuclear power in this.
Alex Epstein:
Well, that’s going to be one of them.
Jordan Peterson:
Okay.
Alex Epstein:
Let me lead into this actually by saying the way in which I think I am part of this change in the culture because it relates to the relationship between my work in the past and my work right now.
So I think if you think of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Future, they were really designed to create the ultimate guide to evaluating energy sources. Fossil fuels just happened to be the conclusion that this needs to be our dominant form of energy because there’s nothing close in terms of cost, reliability, versatility, and scalability for the foreseeable future. But it’s really about how do you evaluate our energy situation and potential side effects of energy, including climate side effects, which is the main thing people are concerned about, in a pro-human way. And the basic idea is that you need to be very even-handed. So you need to very carefully weigh both benefits and side effects of fossil fuels, particularly with climate and within side effects, you need to be even-handed. So you can’t just look at negative climate effects. You also have to look at positive effects. And part of being even-handed is you need to be precise.
Jordan Peterson:
You mean like more plants? Positive effects.
Alex Epstein:
Yeah, exactly. Things like that. Yeah, exactly.
Jordan Peterson:
Way more plants as a matter of fact.
Alex Epstein:
Right, we talked a lot about that last time. But then also, of course, open to things like heat, more heat waves and expansion of water and sea-level rise. And the idea is you need to be very even-handed. And so that’s one of the core methodological things that I think I’ve encouraged people to use and that I think you’re seeing more and more of, and people like Bjorn and Shellenberger and Koonin, I think have also done this. And then the other thing, which is a little bit deeper, is that we have to evaluate them in a pro-human way and be aware that most people are either deliberately, I think in most cases inadvertently evaluating fossil fuels from an anti-human perspective. And then within that, again, we talked about this last time, but just the sort of key ideas are, one is, when we’re thinking about the Earth and what our goal for it is, our goal, we need to be clear, our goal could either be to advance human flourishing on Earth or to eliminate human impact on Earth.
And that the dominant goal guiding our policy is this goal of eliminating human impact as evidenced by the fact that the number one cultural political goal in the world right now is eliminating our impact on climate. That’s what net-zero means. So our whole focus with the Earth is how do we eliminate our impact on it in general, and particularly with climate. And my argument is that’s an anti-human perspective. In the same way that if our goal were to eliminate bear impact, you’d think that’s an anti-bear perspective.
Jordan Peterson:
Well, and just get rid of the bears.
Alex Epstein:
Exactly. That’s the logic.
Jordan Peterson:
There’s too many of those damn bears.
Alex Epstein:
Exactly. That’s obviously where this is trending, although they don’t say that, right? They used to say it, but they don’t say it as much anymore. They used to say, we’re against population growth and we’re against technology, but that didn’t go over well. So then they said, we’re just against climate change. We’re against climate impact. And then you fill in the blanks, oh wait, the way to get rid of that is regress technologically—
Jordan Peterson:
And have no people.
Alex Epstein:
And have no people. Right. So there’s this moral perspective of what I call your standard of evaluation: is your standard advancing human flourishing on Earth or eliminating human impact on Earth? And of course, I’m on Team Human here.
And then there’s the part you are most interested in, which is your basic premise about the nature of humans and our environment and what I call the “delicate nurturer” view, which is the main view that the Earth… Basically the un-impacted Earth is this nurturing—
Jordan Peterson:
Utopia.
Alex Epstein:
Yeah, it’s this nurturing mother that’s stable. So it doesn’t change too much. It’s safe. It doesn’t endanger us—
Jordan Peterson:
Harmonious.
Alex Epstein:
Yeah, and it’s sufficient. It gives us enough resources as long as we’re not too greedy. And then human beings are what I call parasite polluters. So we just take from the Earth and we ruin the Earth. And my view is, well, in reality, this is all just nonsense. It’s total pseudoscience, even though many scientists believe it, and in fact human beings are producer-improvers—
Jordan Peterson:
Many people who identify as scientists believe it.
Alex Epstein:
Well, no, I think even many real scientists do, unfortunately, because many specialized intellectuals are in the thrall of bad philosophy because they don’t think about philosophy. So I think we’re producer-improvers, so we add value to the world. That’s why we have this amazing world now that’s abundant and safe, even though the caveman had nothing. If the world were abundant absent us, the caveman would be rich and we’d be poor because there’s so many of us. But it’s the opposite. So we improve our environment in many ways. We’ve gotten rid of all kinds of disease and disgustingness. And then of course, we give ourselves access to natural beauty. We can decide to cultivate whatever species we want. If we love a species, we can make it plentiful.
And then the Earth is not this “delicate nurturer.” It’s actually, I call it “wild potential.” So it’s not stable, it’s dynamic. It’s not safe, it’s dangerous. And it’s not sufficient, it’s deficient. And we need to impact it a lot intelligently to make it abundant and a safe place. And so when you think of fossil fuels in this even-handed way from a pro-human value perspective, and you get rid of this anti-human view of humans in our environment, it’s very obvious that, well, this thing we’ve cultivated called “fossil fuel” is just this incredible net benefit because it just allows us to harness energy and therefore machine labor, all these machine servants like never before. And one of the things about energy is it can solve any problem including the problems it creates. So if energy creates a drought challenge, well, it can also create irrigation, and it can also create crop transport, even if it creates something like an air pollution challenge. It can also create the technology that can filter the air and if anyone happens to get sick, and it can also create the whole medical industry.
Jordan Peterson:
And God only knows how much that’ll be augmented by the electricity-dependent AI.
The Energy Talking Points strategy: ready-made solutions to policy problems
Alex Epstein:
Yes. So it’s, again, it’s energy solving its own problem. So I feel like I got, particularly with Fossil Future, I sort of got to a level where I felt like I had fully fleshed out how to think about this in a pro-human way. And then to amplify that, we created this thing called Energy Talking Points, which people can see at EnergyTalkingPoints.com. And the idea there was: let’s make it easy for anyone to make and understand these arguments. And I basically just broke every issue up into tweet-length points. And our target was politicians. So we wanted to make it easy for politicians to talk about this. And what we saw is once we made it easy, once you make it easy for people to say the right thing, they’ll say it a lot more. So we saw even in this Republican presidential primary candidates like Ron DeSantis and Vivek making points, we’ve had a 98% decline in climate-related disaster deaths over the last century. This used to be a niche point that only people like me were making. And now it’s something that you see it all over the place. So I feel like—
Jordan Peterson:
Right. Well, there’s a good practical lesson embedded in what you just said that everyone should listen to very carefully when they’re considering negotiating. If you want things to move in a particular direction, make it very easy for people to move in that direction. You want to do a lot of the work, a priority that would be necessary to help them move in that direction. If you go to your boss with a problem, it’s very useful to accompany that with a solution that’s thought through and already ready to implement. It’s much more likely to occur.
Alex Epstein:
As someone who employs about 10 people, I’d say you’ll be in the top 99% of employees if you come with solutions.
Jordan Peterson:
Yes, yes, yes, yes. Well, and if you have some idea about what a solution might be, desirable for you, coming armed with the strategy that would make that simply implementable and some indication that you’ve thought through the consequences radically improves your chances of success. Otherwise, you’re just a pain. The kind of messenger that gets shot.
Alex Epstein:
And this is, I feel, and this is going to relate to what I’m doing now, but even in the realm of energy evaluation and messaging, I found it was a huge breakthrough to make it easy to be my ally. That was a breakthrough. And there’s obviously tons more work to do here, but I felt like… I think of myself as either a practical philosopher, an intellectual engineer. I like engineering intellectual products that help people flourish. And I felt like my core work that I wanted to do here, there was less innovation forward than there was behind me in terms of energy evaluation. And of course, I build a team and there’s a lot to do, but I feel like I had really, to my satisfaction, answered all the arguments on the other side, taught people how to think about this. And I was trying to think of, okay, what else?
And it’s going to take a long time for this all to flesh out and stuff, and I’m going to keep working on it, but what’s the next frontier that I’m interested in? And I do think that those of us, I call us energy humanists. I do think we’ve made a big difference. So like Bjorn Lomborg, me, Michael Shellenberger, Steve Koonin, and I think you’ve really taken up this mantle, as well. And it’s really helped a lot. And I don’t want to be complacent because we need massively to spread it, but in terms of what I personally wanted to do, I felt like there was a much bigger gap now to fill and potentially in a very time-limited window.
The true relationship between our environment and economy
Jordan Peterson:
Well, I really like your emphasis on the nexus between energy provision and human flourishing. I mean, partly you can make a pretty blunt case for that from an environmental perspective, even if you’re rather radically environmentally oriented in that if you realize that if you impoverish people, which you certainly will do if you make energy expensive, if you impoverish people, you make them desperate and desperate people are not investing in a green future, that’s for sure.
They’re going to rampage through whatever resources are available to them in very short order. And so I got convinced of this, well, probably 15, 20 years ago when I started to understand the statistical data indicating that if you got people’s GDP up, average GDP up about $5,000 a year, US dollars, that they started taking a long-term view of the future ecologically.
It’s like, well, of course that’s the case. Then I thought that’s so cool, that means that you could work really hard to make energy inexpensive and people rich. And one of the consequences of that would be that people would be much more attendant to genuine ecological concerns, locally and over time.
Alex Epstein:
When I talk about advancing human flourishing on Earth, I don’t draw a distinction really between our economy and our environment. I mean, I think it’s actually all our environment. And I think of environment in a very humanistic way. Take a bird, is a bird’s nest a part of its environment? I would say yes.
So I think a factory is our environment and the beach is our environment. I think we’re just uniquely good at reshaping our environment to be particularly conducive to us. So when you talk about ecological thinking, I really think of that as humanistic, thinking about our environment as in how do we make sure that we—
Jordan Peterson:
Yes, I was still using that dichotomous perspective.
Alex Epstein:
So, you’re looking at it from an advancing human flourishing on Earth perspective. But what you’re pointing out is the more resources you have and the more time you have, the more you can have a broad… you can think about that in a broad way. When you’re just freezing to death—
Jordan Peterson:
Yes, exactly.
Alex Epstein:
You just cut down whatever trees are around you and you burn them. What else are you going to do? Versus you don’t think as holistically about your environment, not because you wouldn’t care about those things, it’s just you have a sense of urgency.
Jordan Peterson:
Yes, yes.
Alex Epstein:
Because once you’re wealthy, you can think about things like, hey, even, hey, what would the ideal climate be? Let’s leave a aside whether we are negatively impacting it. How can we maybe make more places like California? Or how can we optimize the species on this particular island for some particular goal? Or even, we really like, at home, we have a dog, and it’s like, how can we make this dog really survive? Or how can we get rid of these mosquitoes? We don’t like these malarial mosquitoes, the polar bears, they’re beautiful, but we want them cordoned off so they don’t eat us. We’re really engineering the Earth.
So when you talk about ecological stuff, I think about it as this very long-term and broad thinking engineering of the Earth to advance human flourishing. Whereas the anti-impact crowd, that’s not how they think of it.
So if you made that argument to them [about prosperity being good environmentally], they’re like, “No, we don’t want to impact it at all. We don’t want eight billion prosperous people who have nice gardens and clean air. That’s way too humanized in earth. We need back to the Pleistocene as the Earth First I think used to say.”
So that’s just to say, I don’t like this idea of, oh, “from an environmental perspective,” because is it a pro-human environmental perspective or anti-human environmental perspective? If it’s anti-human, they won’t accept anything that involves human success.
Jordan Peterson:
Correction gratefully accepted.
The Energy Freedom Platform: fully worked-out pro-freedom energy policies
Alex Epstein:
Thank you. So let’s go on in terms of what I think the big opportunity is. And so when I’m … I’m very, I wouldn’t exactly say hedonistic, but I’m very much an enjoying-life-and-work person, and I like doing things that are very beneficial to others that I really like doing. I’m not I’m going to be miserable for 20 years and everyone else is going to be happy.” That doesn’t appeal to me much.
So I think I do as much as anyone for energy, but I like to enjoy it. And part of that is I like to … For me, what’s interesting is an unsolved problem that I think would be fun to solve that I’m not convinced anyone else is going to solve unless I work on it, which again, people can say that’s megalomaniacal or whatever, but in this case, I think it was pretty clear there was an unsolved problem.
Which is there was no real pro-freedom energy policy fully worked out in the event of a pro-freedom administration and Congress. And so you look back a couple of years ago, and I learned this particularly, maybe we could start there, on the issue of nuclear energy. Because I’m just a huge … I’ve been interested in nuclear and enthusiastic about nuclear far longer than I’ve been enthusiastic about fossil fuels. I grew up in a liberal environment, I was afraid of climate change and this kind of thing.
Whereas nuclear, I was never really afraid of the nuclear kinds of fears. I know you have your own background in terms of nuclear war, but I didn’t grow up in that era. I was born in 1980, by 1989 we have the fall of the Soviet Union. I didn’t really buy this idea that we’re all going to be three eyed fish and whatever.
Jordan Peterson:
And that’s also a concern that is many ways importantly separate from the issue of nuclear power anyways.
Alex Epstein:
Totally, because the nuclear power plants can’t explode. That’s a very fundamental distinction. The physics make it impossible to explode. But when I say nuclear, my focus is why is nuclear so stagnant? We had this ideal of too cheap to meter, what, back in the forties. The electricity is going to be so cheap, you don’t even need an electricity meter at your house because who cares?
Jordan Peterson:
Be like air.
Alex Epstein:
Yeah, it’s going to be air. Even like data on hard drives. Think about how much that’s gone down in price in the last 30 years. And yet nuclear just, it had this boom in the sixties, and then starting in the seventies and then the early eighties, it just totally starts stagnating. To the point where from the beginning of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in 1975, we went 48 years until 2023 until we had one plant go from conception to completion. And these were these Vogtle plants in Georgia. And they were just seven/eight/nine times over cost. They were just catastrophically expensive.
Everyone who knows anything about nuclear knows the policy is a disaster. You need to fix the policy. And yet I would ask nuclear advocates, okay, what do we do? If you were the president, what would you do? And they’d always say, “It’s nuclear policy so bad, it’s terrible.” I’m like, okay, but what was—
Jordan Peterson:
It’s pretty low resolution.
Alex Epstein:
What would you do? And then I started realizing, this is the problem, is that I don’t really know what to do. And so even if I help people evaluate energy in a better way. Of course there are some things I can know how to do in terms of stop blocking these pipelines and stuff like that. But even at the resolution of, okay, what exactly should the air quality standards be and how do you determine them?
You can say, oh, this recent thing on ozone is ridiculous because it sets the level of ozone below the background level in some parts of the US. So how are you going to possibly meet that? Background ozone is greater than your … But you could see these irrationalities. But there’s a question of, well, how do you actually come to the solution?
And I just kept seeing this with every issue. And I just thought I don’t know the answers. And it’s not that
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