What do we want? Climate justice! When do we want it? Now!
For years, climate hysteria won most every argument.
This is our World War II.
Transition from the oil industry. Yes.
But now, finally, climate hysteria has diminished.
You're just getting admission after admission that we're not going to do these things.
Alex Epstein has long argued that the world needs fossil fuels.
Hi everyone, this is Alex Epstein.
Here he was with an 'I love fossil fuels' sign at a protest. You know, climate march.
Well, actually, you know, fossil fuels make us a lot safer from the climate.
I don't think he changed many minds that day.
But his arguments have changed some minds. I've done several short videos with Epstein, but he had much more to say. So here's our full interview. I start by pushing back against the title of his latest book, Human Flourishing Requires More Oil. Coal and natural gas. Coal is awful. Filthy.
It's so funny. They say it's filthy. Why is it filthy? Because it's black.
And it comes off on your fingers. And the data show it produces more carbon when you burn it than natural gas.
Well, that's not filthy. Carbon dioxide is not dirty, it just has a warming effect. Yeah. So, I mean, coal has more CO2 per unit burned, and it certainly has more particulate emissions, particularly when you don't control for it. But it's still an amazing technology that is by far the best option in many situations, including often in America, for billions of people. Even 30 years ago, coal was totally worth it given the pollution levels, given the benefit that you get from being able to be cool in the summer and warm in the winter and have industry and have prosperity and ultimately be fed and clothed and housed and all this stuff electricity makes possible. But now it's, you know, 10 times cleaner than it used to be in terms of just the emissions. So it's just—
Worse than natural gas and all that.
Well, but the thing you always have to look at is, well, what's your alternative? It's not that we have a global supply of oil, coal, and natural gas, and we just get to choose one, and then we can leave the rest on the side. Coal is still by far our number one fuel for electricity, because we can scale it in more places than we can natural gas. Natural gas is great, but it is a gas. Being a gas is very, very annoying for purposes of global scalability, because you have a lot of places that don't have gas, and you need to move gas there. Well, you can move it via a pipeline, but you can only do that in certain places. You're not going to have a transoceanic pipeline that I know of that people are going to move huge amounts of gas over the ocean. So we put them in what's called liquefied natural gas tankers, but that takes a lot of energy to do and a lot of infrastructure to do. And it's generally more expensive, say for Asia, than having coal. The fact that something is not the best imaginable thing according to your imagination or even the products that exist on the market does not mean that it shouldn't exist. Because if you banned coal, then everyone would have ruinously expensive energy, because there's no way natural gas fills that gap.
What would happen if you banned burning coal?
A couple billion people would die prematurely. Your best case scenario is that the people, you know, burning coal, they have to do some crazy retrofit of their plants to handle natural gas. And you're talking about doing that on a totally unprecedented scale. So that in of itself is going to take decades to do. But then you're talking about, well, there's no more coal. And remember, natural gas is a minority fuel compared to coal. And we don't have suddenly the ability to double or triple natural gas. So what happens to the price of natural gas? It just goes up by a factor of 10. And only the wealthy people have electricity, and they're rationing electricity.
And we saw this even with the Russia-Ukraine invasion, where you start to have modest disruption of natural gas. What happens to places like Bangladesh when the price of gas goes up and they're bidding against Europe? They're screwed. It just would be the greatest humanitarian crisis that we could even ever imagine just doing that, let alone the net zero thing. So coal is keeping billions of people alive as we speak. The poorer the country is, insofar as you have a global market and the price goes way up, the poor people just can't afford it. So you get bid out by the wealthier people. So the US and in particular Europe, who would be short on gas, they would bid for the natural gas for their industry, to heat their homes, etc. And then what's going to happen to agriculture? What's going to happen to heating your home? What's going to happen to running your industry? You just can't afford to do it in a poor country. So you're just basically giving them a continuous blackout.
We are seeing what climate change is doing with our own eyes. We can no longer be blind to this reality.
Greater storms, greater floods, greater heat waves, extreme sea level rise. All of this is happening far faster than many of us thought possible.
They always say it's happening far faster than any of us thought, but if you look at their predictions, they thought we'd be underwater by now.
Yeah. So the two things are true. The climate is warming and human life is getting much, much better, including there are way fewer deaths related to climate. And so one big reason for this that's very underappreciated is that cold is a far bigger killer than heat. So even leaving aside all the benefits we get from energy in terms of making us resilient to climate, just the fact of global warming itself is expected to save more lives than it takes. And for the lives that are threatened, we have air conditioning and other ways to deal with that. But yeah, people don't realize in the major studies, five to 15 times more people die from cold than from heat. And very crucially, warming occurs more in colder regions, during colder times of day and during winter than summer. So it's more of a global thawing. It's not the equator getting hotter in the middle of the day during the summer. It's more northern regions getting a little bit less cold during the winter at night.
Of course, it saves lives.
We were told we had to go to net zero.
If we want to avoid catastrophe, we have to drastically cut emissions now.
If we want to avoid catastrophe, we need to dramatically avoid net zero.
Net zero emissions by 2050.
It's interesting, because we were told that, and yet nobody actually tried doing it, and the people who tried doing it, maybe a quarter of the way in Europe, had disastrous results. I guess we can say the people who are closest to net zero are the poor countries who were prevented from having more energy. The real net zero countries in the world are the desperately poor African countries. So they've quote achieved net zero, but they don't consider it an achievement. They consider it a trap that they want to get out of.
700 cities in more than 50 countries have pledged to cut their emissions in half by the end of the decade and reach net zero by 2050.
People like making pledges about the distant future that give them praise today, and they don't really care if there's any realism. And behind the scenes, executives have told me who made these pledges, they said, 'Well, if we can't do it, we can't do it. It's in the future and we'll all be okay.' But I assume Obama really believed that this was important to do, and by pushing it we'd get closer to it. It's very surprising to many people how unserious the climate catastrophists were about net zero. And the way you can see this is what's happened with the rise of AI.
We're in the beginning of a new age, the AI revolution.
What does AI have to do with reaching net zero?
AI is more immediate evidence that net zero is impossible and incredibly destructive. If you take the US electricity situation, electricity use was flat for a long time. So if you were Google or Microsoft and you wanted to pretend to be net zero, all you'd have to do is get other people's green electricity, so their solar and wind labeled as your electricity, and then your gas and coal use would get labeled as their electricity. So you just had to do this relabeling scheme to call yourself 100% renewable. But once they need massive amounts of new reliable power in order to power AI, they can't just engage in these labeling games. Somebody has to build new capacity.
And what they found was their actions in advocating for net zero and having policies that made it hard to build new gas plants, new pipelines, etc. created this huge shortage, where now that they're demanding gas infrastructure, they can't get it. And solar and wind, they now realize, or they now admit, can't do the job. And so now they're super frustrated, and as one executive put it, who goes to these different conferences, like two years ago they're saying you can't burn anything. Now they'd be willing to burn bunnies and puppies. They just want to burn anything in their path. What's going on? It clearly was never true that they were as big a believer in existential climate catastrophe caused by fossil fuel use as they claimed to be. It was much more an act.
The climate pledge is to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement 10 years early.
The short-term parts of the pledges were always much less ambitious, so to speak, but those are all getting violated left and right, in part because of AI. So anyone who's trying to be prosperous right now is taking AI seriously, and that means they're reversing it. So you're just getting admission after admission that we're not going to do these things. And what it basically means is these pledges were always completely inconsistent with prosperity, because prosperity always involves being more productive and consuming more. And for both of those things, you want more electricity. So when people are cutting their emissions, because we don't have real replacements for fossil fuels at scale, it just meant they were becoming less productive, often offshoring industries to China, and or less prosperous. They're just consuming less. Like all these places in Europe that can't keep cool in the summer, even though we've had this technology for 100 years called air conditioning. But I think they really believed it.
We must transition away from fossil fuels.
There's this phenomenon of people saying they care about something to a far greater degree than they do, and ignoring the tradeoffs. So do I believe that John Kerry in his heart of hearts is concerned about rising sea levels, or maybe more storm intensity or drought patterns? Sure, I think he cares about that. He's probably had a bunch of negative feelings about it. But does he think that's such a catastrophe to the point that he's willing to totally crater the United States economy and make us all poor? I hope not. So this is actually a good sign that these people did not take this ridiculous view that we should sacrifice everything in order to preserve some imaginary beautiful perfect climate. I'm somewhat known for wearing this 'I love fossil fuels' shirt and holding an 'I love fossil fuels' sign. Everyone educated loved fossil fuels a lot more than they admitted. And now they're just being forced by circumstance to admit it. I mean, they were all using fossil fuels, right? They were all doing it. It was always a convenient overstatement of how much they cared about this issue. So if you take all the Googles, the Metas, the Microsofts, less than five years ago, they were all telling us climate change, existential crisis, got to go net zero.
That's our plan to be the first major company in the world to run on carbon-free energy by 2030.
They've since removed that plan.
I was going to say, I mean, I've been calling out for years Google, Apple, Meta, etc. They've all been just wildly dishonest. They've basically claimed, 'We're net zero now, and we're certainly going to be net zero in the future,' and it's all been energy accounting fraud. There is no net zero anywhere in the world except for desperately poor countries. There certainly aren't any net zero economies around the world. So what they're doing is they're existing in fossil-fueled economies and they're paying bureaucrats and other companies to relabel all their fossil fuel usage renewable. That's just a scam, and it's a very dangerous scam, because it teaches the public falsely that you can be 100% renewable, that you don't need fossil fuels. Because if the world's most advanced companies are 100% renewable, why can't my steel mill be 100% renewable? Well, my steel mill can't afford to pay for the lies that Google can.
By 2030, Microsoft will be carbon negative.
2020. Yeah, right. It's all 2020. But you see this shift of 2020, 2021, 2022. They're all saying we're going to be carbon negative, we're going to be carbon neutral, we're going to be 100% renewable. And now they're begging Congress, 'Can you please get us some more power?' You could be carbon negative if you're a rich person. It just doesn't scale. You just basically set up some—you could say build a nuclear power plant and then devote all of its energy to pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, which is very energy intensive, but if you're rich enough you can do it. The problem is it doesn't scale. The fact that a rich person can do an incredibly non-scalable thing to be quote net zero is useless, because the whole point of net zero is everyone needs to do it. So it's just total symbolism.
I don't think we're going to go back to net zero just because of the recognition of how important AI is and the electricity demand associated. But we could still regress quite a bit. So we could add solar and wind subsidies back, which would be a disaster for our grid. We could continue to have to support net zero policies at the state level or even some bans on fossil fuels at the state level. There's lots. We could make it harder to drill for oil and gas. There's lots and lots of things we can do.
ESG investment has taken the financial and corporate world by storm.
Everyone remembers these three letters, ESG, right? E, environment, greenhouse gas emissions.
S stands for the social side, union rights, diversity, even abortion access. The G stands for governance, even executive pay.
Environment, social, governance.
Good governance. Yeah, governance, which ironically, the environmental and the social stuff means bad governance, because instead of governing your company according to actually creating long-term shareholder value, you are sacrificing profitability and shareholder value to various activist environmental goals and social goals.
They said if you serve the workers and serve the environment, people will like that and your company will prosper. 'The full integration of sustainability factors can actually enhance returns.'
It's like, yeah, if we somehow do these good things, then the environmental and social gods will reward us in some way. But in my experience in studying a lot of people, you just have to focus on how do you create value for a customer and then do that in a way that's efficient so you make a profit. It's not usually, well, if I somehow do a good deed in some people's view by hiring somebody incompetent because they check a certain sexuality box, then somehow I'm going to make money. 'You'll make more profit.' Doesn't turn out to be true. Never made sense and didn't work out.
Without any action, 2.2 million Americans could die from the virus.
All the ESG people, they loved COVID, because COVID temporarily destroyed demand for oil because people weren't moving around. So oil stocks got hammered. So the ESG stocks did relatively well. So they just took that tiny snapshot in time and said, 'Look, ESG makes you money.' But then, of course, oil stocks recover and ESG was a bloodbath, and then they stopped being able to pretend that it was any good.
'All investments are going to be looked through sustainability.' Larry Fink, the head of BlackRock, was basically ordering all companies to go net zero.
Larry Fink can't order companies to do things.
Larry Fink's nickname was the emperor.
He's incredibly, incredibly powerful. I mean, obviously, the more of a company you own, the more influence you have over a company.
The thing is, running the largest indirect investor in the world, they're holding huge chunks of many, many, many companies. Now, properly, they shouldn't be trying to influence these companies, because they're just holding it on behalf of you and me. But because of the way the policy works, they had huge influence on the companies to the point where Larry Fink could write a letter every year and say, 'Hey, if you don't have a net zero plan, you're in big trouble.' And people would be afraid. I was talking to one of the absolute leading people in the oil and gas industry, and on multiple occasions, the number one thing on his mind was Larry Fink did this, wrote this letter, and this is really bad. And I feel basically the person felt impotent, like Larry Fink was that powerful just four years ago.
How could he punish you? What were they worried about?
What they're worried about is BlackRock owns huge portions of a lot of these companies, so they can do shareholder initiatives to make votes to oust executives or board members if they don't follow net zero policy. They also agitated for political policies, particularly under Biden, that basically said the SEC is going to prosecute you unless you have a proper climate plan. And guess what a proper climate plan is? It's not Alex Epstein's climate plan, which is let's be really resilient and prosperous. It's how are we going to go net zero. Now, Larry Fink has abandoned ESG. What does Larry Fink say right now? We need natural gas to power data centers, because solar and wind can't do it.
Here's this quote: 'You cannot have just this intermittent power like wind and solar. The world is going to be short power.'
That felt good to hear that. That felt really good to hear him say that at the World Economic Forum. I got to say it was. So what happened with climate? Did they just all read Fossil Future and become converts of me? Or did they have an incentive switch with the rise of AI that exposed that their support for net zero was something that made them look good and feel good but wasn't a true conviction? So Fink just changed his position because companies need more power now. It wasn't—I assumed he wised up to the folly of the extreme climate change fanatics. This would be a very flattering explanation for me, as probably the world's leading advocate of fossil fuels and rational thinking on this issue. I would love to think that Fossil Future came out in 2022 and then got converted, and Zuckerberg got converted. Even Musk got converted.
Maybe they read your book, but I assume there's a lot of information that was coming in and getting the net zero wasn't working.
It's interesting how that goes, because the net zero wasn't working 10 years ago. It wasn't working five years ago. If you take a look at the trajectory of these things, one piece of evidence for your point would be once Russia invades Ukraine and exposes that quote green Europe is utterly dependent on natural gas and has handicapped itself by, you know, by harming its own natural gas production and is dependent on Russia.
Russia has historically been the European Union's largest gas supplier, which has so far helped Europe overcome its huge energy crisis.
If at that point Zuckerberg etc. said, 'Hey, fossil fuels are good, we changed our mind,' etc., or if they looked at say the climate disaster death data and said, 'Oh, I wasn't aware of the fact that for a hundred years climate disaster deaths have been declining, including declining in the last 40 years'—like if that had been the impetus. But the impetus was clearly AI. You know, once ChatGPT comes on the scene and people can see, wow, there's this magic kind of semi-genius behind the scenes and he can do really cool things, and that probably has a lot of implications for our economy. Then everyone suddenly realizes, wait a second, we need a lot more power, and solar and wind aren't going to cut it. So it's really, really tied to two concrete events. So one is the rise of modern AI and its power demands, and then number two is the election of the new Trump administration.
I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honor of being elected your 47th president and your 45th president.
Now, I do believe that there has been in the background good intellectual work being done by me and others that has put the arguments out there, and if we hadn't done that, it would have been a lot harder to have this transition. But you can't understand what's happening apart from those two events: the rise of AI and the re-election of Trump.
Billionaire Bill Gates argues climate change is not going to wipe out humanity, and says all the money that was spent to try and get rid of fossil fuels has essentially been wasted.
It felt like people are waking up, but they knew this already. So if you study the Bill Gates example, he wrote a book saying How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.
Yes. Well, notice when he wrote that though. So he wrote that in the early 2020s. Now let's look at the shift. AI happens, new Trump administration happens. What does Bill Gates write last year?
'We should measure success by our impact on human welfare more than the impact on global temperature.'
If you look at his views in as much detail as I have, you look at his interviews particularly in unguarded moments, he has admitted that solar and wind are not going to power the world.
A lot of people are very optimistic, as you know, with wind and solar, the renewables cost coming down, the battery costs are coming down. You think that's enough, or do you think—
That is so disappointing. Tell me what battery solution is going to sit there and provide that power.
Let's not joke around. He's admitted that you have to think about this in a human-centric way, but he writes this book on How to Avoid a Climate Disaster because he's an incredibly calculating person. So the fact that Bill has taken the new position publicly to me is a sign that we're in a much better intellectual environment, not that he has had an awakening. I think he's saying the view he's had for 15 years.
He also said sometimes human welfare takes a backseat to lowering emissions, with bad consequences.
Yes. The whole premise of net zero is that nothing matters more than lowering emissions, including human welfare. So that's an understatement. 'Sometimes takes a backseat.' It got thrown off the bus. He's a very calculating guy, like a lot of these guys are. That's why they express so much conviction in net zero and so little conviction now, because they're seeing what's opportunistic in the moment in terms of the next year or two or three. And right now it's opportunistic to put that net zero stuff on the shelf and to focus on getting some electricity capacity so that you can actually have some chance of competing in the AI race.
I'm not so cynical. I think Bill Gates really wants to help the world, and he really believed in the climate crisis, and then saw more data and figured out you were right, it's not such a crisis.
