#207: Alex Epstein (Center for Industrial Progress) - Why Canadian Energy Enables Human Flourishing

Yeah, my pleasure. I know you are in demand as a high-value speaker and you get a lot of requests, so I appreciate it. It's also my birthday today, so this is a great day.

Um, you know, I would call myself like an energy philosopher. So my focus is really how do you think in a rational and pro-human way about energy issues, including the associated environmental issues. At the moment, my focus is very heavily on creating really good new energy policies. So in that sense, at the moment I'm maybe primarily a policy architect, but a lot of it always comes down to philosophy and thinking methodology and underlying assumptions and values that people don't always think through. And I find that if you can get clarity on those, it helps your own thinking, then it also really helps you persuade others.

Well, we have a new administration coming up in the United States, so I've spent the last more than a year now working on something I broadly call the Energy Freedom Platform, which is a comprehensive and very detailed set of policy proposals for pro-freedom elected officials in the United States. And I knew there was a decent chance that we would get a pro-energy president and also pro-energy Congress, and it's pretty much shaped up that way. So I wanted to be prepared for that with a lot of very specific proposals of what to do. I think sometimes people have specific proposals and I think they're just wrong, so that definitely happens. But I often think people with the right ideas generally are often too abstract and they can't really give you, here's exactly what to do about nuclear, here's exactly what to do about pollution, here's exactly what to do about electricity, and you just really dilute your power by doing that. So one of the philosophies behind what I do in the United States and increasingly Canada, we call it Energy Talking Points, and it's a project, and the basic premise is let's make it easy for pro-freedom politicians to pass great energy policies. So I just try to do everything I can in terms of if people need talking points that are really clear and easy to understand, actually writing policies for them if they need it. I mean, we have a team of lawyers and a lot of really smart people doing that kind of thing, helping them with messaging for any situation.

So they have energytalkingpointsmemo answers from the equivalent of me, you know, the AI equivalent of me. And then for the offices themselves, we offer basically unlimited free custom consulting. So, you know, at this point hundreds of different offices use us in terms of asking us questions about messaging and policy and that kind of thing. So at the moment we have in the United States, I mean, we've got an administration that's going to be doing a lot of things, so I'm trying to share good ideas with them insofar as they're interested. And then also we've got a new Congress that's very interested in energy. And we don't need to get into this for Canadian purposes, but in the US we have this process called reconciliation, which is a special process that involves very specific rules, and they're looking at doing some energy stuff via reconciliation in the next month or two. I mean, not the next month because you won't have the new president in there, but in the next couple months. So it's just a super, super busy time in terms of having people that are very open to good ideas and then giving them as many as possible, as specifically as possible, you know, to maximize the chances that they'll run with good ones.

No, it was interestingly, do you know this guy Mike Rowe? Have you ever heard of him? He's in the United States. He had this show called Dirty Jobs, which is really glorifying industrial people. He's kind of very well known in the United States. Anyway, I was on his show last week and he convinced me that I was disagreeable, and that that was a positive thing in the sense of I'm not super motivated or affected by people thinking that I'm an idiot or brilliant, or like strongly disagreeing or agreeing. I'm very affected by what I think is true and by strong arguments either that I'm right or wrong. I mean, even more urgent to look at the strong arguments that you might be wrong about something. But so I just don't... I lived in San Francisco for a while, which is much more left than where I live in Southern California, which is Orange County, which is actually quasi-Republican, but then Laguna Beach is a little left, that's where I live in Orange County. But I don't know, just people agreeing with me or disagreeing with me on politics just in and of itself doesn't have much effect. And I find that statistically the people who talk to me more agree with me. I mean, when people spot me in public, which is not always, but you know, maybe happens 20 times a year at airports and this kind of thing, like it's almost always positive. I can't even remember a time when somebody's like, you're an idiot, you're destroying the planet, you know. So A, I'm not too bothered by kind of mindless negative feedback, and B, I get a lot of positive feedback. And the reason I stress this is I want to encourage people to speak up, and there are a lot more rewards to it than you think and a lot fewer downsides than you think. And I talk about this, in fact, in chapter 11 of my latest book, Fossil Future. I just want people to not think that you have to be a martyr to speak up, to speak the truth. There are a lot of advantages to it, including socially.

Okay, yeah, as long as we get to discuss Canada. I definitely want to discuss the Canadian situation, what I think the opportunities there are.

So I was studying philosophy and computer science. Philosophy was my major, computer science ended up being my minor. Yeah, so kind of I would think of it as I was a math-science person, like that was my sort of default as a kid. I went to one of the top 10 math-science high schools in the United States. I planned to study engineering at Duke and then specifically computer science, but then I really fell in love with philosophy as a subject. The reason I liked philosophy is actually that I think it's very practical. People often think, oh, philosophy is impractical, it's just people talking about random things and never accomplishing anything. But really what philosophy is at its core is you're trying to think very logically and carefully about the most important issues and questions in life. And one of the most important questions, which is a pretty broad question, which is just how do you think rationally? Like you're thinking rationally about thinking rationally, but how do you think rationally? And one way this comes up in energy is like it comes up in a bunch of ways actually. So one is part of thinking rationally is you want to question your assumptions about how the world works. You realize that when you have a thought process, like when we think about anything, so you're thinking about what are human beings doing with respect to climate, you know, most people just sort of jump into that and hear things and come to conclusions. In a philosophical approach, one thing it'll tell you to do is like, okay, what assumptions am I operating under? Because whenever we're thinking, we're always thinking from a starting point. We're not a baby, you know, I have a six-month-old now, so it's like he can't really think yet, right? He's just perceiving things and has sensations and this kind of thing. But when you get older, you operate with all sorts of assumptions, which are things that you're taking as this, I believe this is true, and then I'm building on that. So one thing that people with climate believe that's true, which I think is false, is what I call the nurture view of nature and climate. And this is the idea that climate exists in this very delicate balance that will nurture us unless we impact it. So it's this idea of, oh, the climate that we inherited from, you know, before the Industrial Revolution, this was this very nice, stable, safe, and generous climate. And then as soon as we started putting CO2 in it, that threw it out of whack, and now it's angry at us, and now it's super dynamic and it's dangerous, etc. And people have this view of the Earth too, like the Earth was our nurturing mother, but if we impact it and we sin against the Earth, then the Earth is going to punish us. So people believe this of all things. I mean, religious people, non-religious people, like I just find this all the time. That's an assumption people have. So when they hear the idea that, hey, fossil fuels are contributing to, quote, climate change, so fossil fuels are having an impact on climate, that assumption leads them to expect, oh my God, it must be a catastrophe, right? We're going to make the climate unlivable. And a lot of people are operating with this assumption. But if you question this assumption, it doesn't make any sense. Like, was the climate a delicate nurturer? If you look historically, climate was just this incredible force that people feared. I mean, people would come up with different religions to, you know, appease the rain gods. Like, climate used to be a menace. We used to be living in a perpetual climate emergency where climate was endangering us, and also we couldn't count on climate for things like ample sunlight and precipitation for things like growing our crops, or even making our local environment, you know, abundant for hunter-gatherers and that kind of thing. So if you just really recognize, oh wait, climate isn't a delicate nurturer, I call it wild potential. So it's this very chaotic thing that has a lot of potential to be good, but we need to tame it. If you recognize that's true of climate and nature, then you have a totally different view of human impact on those things. You're open to the possibility that human impact could be good. Good doesn't necessarily need to be bad, and it certainly doesn't necessarily need to be catastrophic. And I think if you have this wild potential view of nature and climate, you start to realize, oh wait a second, in general, industry and in particular fossil fuels have made the Earth a much better place for human beings. Like they've made it a much more abundant, safe place. And with respect to climate, we're far safer than ever from climate because we're so resilient to climate. And then our effects on the climate itself have been not nearly as interesting as people think. Like raising the amount of CO2 from 0.3% of the atmosphere to 0.4%, yeah, that has some effects, but it's not like it made this perfect climate into a devil climate or something like this. You know, it makes it a little bit warmer, a little bit more tropical. That might affect precipitation in certain places, but in general, we had a dynamic and dangerous climate before, we have a dynamic and dangerous climate now, but now we're incredibly resilient, and so our lives are much better. And in general, we had like a dynamic and dangerous Earth before, and also a deficient Earth, one that didn't give us a lot of resources, and now we made it into a place that feels stable and is safe and is more than sufficient, it's abundant because of our activity. So that's just one example among many of how using philosophy, thinking about things rationally, and in this case questioning assumptions can help you. You know, it's a superpower really. Like the false assumptions I'm talking about afflict some of the smartest people in the world. Like people, I'm sure if they took like IQ tests, are probably not that great an indicator of anything, but like whatever, like they'd probably score higher on something than I would, or certainly than many people who have these views. But functionally, their assumption makes them an idiot on this issue, right? Because it's like if you think the climate is this delicate nurturing force and human impact can only ruin it, like you are just totally clueless about how the world works. And yet so many smart people are totally clueless. Many other examples of this, but that's what appealed to me about philosophy, that you had this thinking superpower where you could just make way better decisions and come to way more accurate conclusions, and then hopefully help other people do so as well.

Well, I mean, I would say it was more like as a teenager. So I'm not really much of a school person. I mean, I went to, I guess, a prestigious school and stuff like that, but I learn much better on my own. And I think if I were younger, I just wouldn't have even gone to college. I would have just learned on my own. I mean, right now the learning tools we have are just absolutely staggering on your own. I mean, I just got ChatGPT Pro, which is the one, it's just unbelievable how good this thing is. I mean, you can save hours talking to lawyers and accountants, and you can learn about things so quickly. And it's just, it's tricky whether you should go to... this is a whole subject actually. We were mentioning before, you were talking about Peter Thiel, whom you're a fan of. You know, he's become famous for discouraging people from going to college and then giving them these fellowships to innovate on their own. And for a lot of people, I think that's really good. For some people, I think university can be good, particularly in the more technical subjects. But my general view is if you really know what you want to do and you're a good thinker and you're a good critical thinker and you're good at taking in negative input as well as positive, it's often way more efficient to just learn on your own with the modern internet and kind of everyone accessible. So I got into this sort of as a teenager, then in college, but most of my influences were just not even stuff I got in school, it was just reading on my own and thinking on my own.

Well, not really. Well, I mean, I was really clueless about the energy piece of this for a long time because part of the background is this often happens with more math and science types. You know, and also I grew up in a very politically liberal area called Chevy Chase, Maryland, which is in the DC area. So I was exposed to nothing really about energy and certainly nothing positive about fossil fuels and quite a bit negative about fossil fuels. So I, yeah, I mean, going into, I mean, it's, I guess, 27 when I got started on this, I was suspicious for various reasons of the environmental movement, including that they had this delicate nurturer assumption. I also think they have a hostility toward impact in general where they think it's just wrong for humans to impact nature. And I think that's a really anti-human idea because we really survive by impacting nature. So like I had a, I was very suspicious of that movement, but I wasn't knowledgeable at all about the benefits of fossil fuels and I had some real fear about fossil-fueled climate change. So it was really only under some random circumstances starting to learn about the benefits and really unique benefits of fossil fuels that then it kicked into me that, wow, the way we're thinking about this is so distorted. And in particular, we're ignoring all these benefits of fossil fuels to human life on this planet and we're really exaggerating the negatives of it. And then that I had context in terms of, oh yeah, the people who are really against fossil fuels, this environmental movement, a lot of the leaders don't really like humans and that's part of what's going on. It's not that they're like, you look at the benefits of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels through natural gas fertilizer and diesel-powered machinery allow us to feed 8 billion people. We have no near-term replacement, and yet people who should know better tell us, let's rapidly eliminate fossil fuels, even though it's going to be a catastrophe. How can they possibly do this? And part of it is their focus is not 8 billion people should survive and flourish on Earth, their focus is the Earth should have as little human impact as possible. And in fact, they want a lot fewer people and certainly making a lot less impact. And so I knew that once I started learning about the benefits of fossil fuels, it was pretty clear to me that the leaders who were telling us that there are no benefits to fossil fuels or ignoring these benefits, a lot of them had a kind of anti-human motivation, but the public was just ignorant. The public just didn't realize for the most part, oh my gosh, these things make the world amazing. Like everything, almost everything you like about the world, including your ability to enjoy nature, your safety from climate, like all of these are related to having this uniquely low-cost, reliable, versatile, and scalable source of energy that we just don't have any near-term replacement for. And so then I became very interested in first understanding the truth about fossil fuels and then spreading it.

Wait, Elon said this? I gotta show me that quote because he's improved a lot lately on these kinds of issues, but for quite a while he was definitely promoting this delicate nurturer type view. It was always very weird because he was promoting the view that at once, hey, using technology and our ability to master our environment, we can make Mars habitable, but then he's also trading on if we don't limit warming to two degrees, the Earth is going to become uninhabitable. So like those ideas are in tension with one another. I think recently he's become more consistent in terms of he keeps walking it back and saying, okay, yeah, you know, I think that we're not going to all die or anything like this, and but you know, maybe we should get this under control by 2050 or 2060 or something like that. But if you look at, go back and watch his video when he was announcing the Powerwall, back in something 2016 maybe, and I think it was around that, and it's just like, it's just like the Earth is on fire, fossil fuels are choking us. It's just he's changed a lot, but I would love to see that quote from him because I think that fundamentally his views in terms of, he'll often call it, I forget how he puts it, he's like there's the extinctionist versus the... and I don't know what the pro-human one he uses is, but it's pretty good. But it's basically like there's, do you know what he calls it? Pro-human versus... yeah, but it's the extinction, I think it's a single word, extinctionist versus something, maybe expansionist or something like this. But like his core philosophy in terms of believing in technology can improve human life is totally consistent with my philosophy and with really viewing fossil fuels as just about the most beneficial technology we have had and still have. Like that's really viewing, having a real pro-technology philosophy, you understand fossil fuels are one of the greatest net beneficial technologies ever. But publicly he has not fully embraced this yet. In the past he's embraced the opposite, but I do think that the core philosophy that he advocates is consistent with my view. So maybe at some point he'll wear an 'I Love Fossil Fuels' T-shirt, which I'll send him.

Oh yeah, no, I know. Yeah, those are great. I love that. I love that. You know, one thing Canada's done better than the United States, perhaps because the political situation has been even worse, is there's a lot more grassroots pro-Canadian oil and gas stuff. I mean, just seeing it at restaurants, granted I'm in Calgary, but I'm not there normally, but when I go there and just seeing like a pub with an 'I Love Canadian Oil and Gas' thing, that's not a usual, you don't even see that at gas stations in the United States. So I know, I know, like, I guess Cody Battershell does a lot of that stuff. I think he does a lot of good stuff there. And that's there. So I think there's a lot we've done in the US that can be replicated in Canada, but I think Canada's also, there's also some stuff you guys have done that we can do better in the United States.

Well, it's interesting. I've never put it that way. I think it's pretty accurate to say it's upstream, although even to call it upstream is a little bit indirect because it's really the powering of all of these things. I think the maybe way to think of it is just think about related to this delicate nurturer versus wild potential idea, like how livable was Earth 200 years ago for a typical person 200 years ago, and then before was even worse, but how livable is it now? And if you look at something like life expectancy being, let's say, you know, around 30 back then, maybe a little higher by then, but in general historical life expectancy 30, historical GDP per capita, you know, less than $500. How have we gotten to this place where we have far more people, which many people thought would lower the standard of living because they think the Earth is this finite pool of very limited resources, and yet we have far more people, and yet they enjoy a world of unprecedented abundance and safety, manifested in very high life expectancy and very high GDP per person, and continues to increase for the most part, particularly increases in the worst parts of the world. I mean, you have more and more places coming up in the wealthy world. I think we're screwing up some stuff. So in the United States, for example, like our life expectancy is not increasing at the moment, which we could get into, but is a little alarming. But in general, we have this amazingly better world, and what we should really be interested in, what makes this possible, and there's almost no interest in this question in part because people are duped into believing that the world is actually worse than it used to be. So they have this view of we screwed up the Earth. Well, if you think you've screwed up the Earth, then you're not going to be interested in how did you make it so good for life. But we actually did make it so good for human life.

And I think the key, there's many perspectives you can talk about in terms of what caused it, but a key one is definitely that the productive ability of the average human raised radically. And this is important to realize that the only way for Earth, given its natural state, to be an abundant and safe place for humans is for humans to radically increase our productive ability. Earth is not a Garden of Eden. It's not something that gives us abundance and safety left to its own devices, certainly not for 8 billion people or even 4 billion people, but even for, you know, 100 million people, it doesn't do it. And anyway, we have 8 billion people and none of us want to die. So you really need to understand that the only way this planet is at all good for anyone, let alone everyone, is to the extent we have productive ability, which means that we can take the raw materials of nature and make them far more valuable to us than we otherwise can. So things like, you know, we can take the land and various chemical elements and make them into farms, right? And then we can take various rocks and other things like that and make them into highways and transportation systems. And ultimately we've created this, and I mean this as a compliment, this incredibly artificial environment where we've made the Earth unnaturally livable by producing this incredibly abundant and safe world. But the only way we're able to do that is by dramatically amplifying our productive ability and expanding it, like in terms of we can fly planes that we couldn't do before and that no amount of manual labor could do, and we can have incubators. And the key thing there is machines, right? That human beings on our own are very physically weak and have very low power output. So we cannot, I mean, that's basically the same thing, and we can only store so much energy. So left to our own devices, even with good hand tools, we cannot be very productive. So what we need to do is we need to delegate the task of most of our productivity to machines that can both do far more physical work, like they can maybe do a thousand times more agricultural labor than a human, every machine can, a given machine like a combine harvester. And then also we need to expand our productive ability, so have things like incubators and airplanes that no number of human beings can do on their own or with tools. And that's what we've done, right? Is we have a world where machines, like in the United States, machines use 75 times more energy than we do, right? So we have machine servants. So the whole world you enjoy is basically us directing a bunch of machine servants to make the world amazing for us. And guess what machine servants require? They require food just like we do. So that's what energy is, right? Energy is machine food that allows this machine labor, machine servants to produce this amazingly abundant and safe and progressing world. And the lower cost and more reliable and more versatile and more scalable energy is, the more we have this, the more we can use machines to power this world. And the less abundant, you know, energy is, the less we can do these things. So it's really just think of it as machines are doing all this work for us to make the world an unnaturally amazing place. We need energy to be as cheap as possible and as reliable as possible to power as many of these machine servants as possible. And then you look at the world like, oh my gosh, it's all amazing because of energy. And imagine we had five times more energy, how much better the world would be. And imagine what it would be like to be one of the 3 billion people who uses less electricity than a typical US refrigerator, or what would it be like to even be one of the 6 billion people who uses an amount of energy that we in the US and Canada would consider totally unacceptable. So you really start to think, wow, energy is everything, because with enough energy you can do anything, including you can solve the problems created by uses of energy. So for example, even if you cause some climate challenges using energy, you can also neutralize climate challenges. It's like if you cause some drought in some place that you didn't want it, well, you can also irrigate it and you can bring crops to it, and eventually we're going to be able to figure out how to manipulate the local weather in much better ways. So like energy solves everything, including problems energy causes. And if you get that, you start to look at fossil fuels, oh my God, they have made the world amazing and they can solve any problems they create, versus, oh, they made the world terrible and the only way to solve them is to get rid of them and to use very little energy or to pretend that somehow solar and wind are going to replace them in 30 years and we can have the exact same lifestyle just with never burning anything.

Yeah, I've come across it. I mean, the thing, the most interesting thing about it and the most alarming thing about it is that what you're seeing with societies like the US and Canada is it was going up in kind of a linear way and then it's starting to tail off. And some people say, oh, that's a good thing, that our energy use is tailing off because we don't need as much energy. But I think a lot of it has been that the modern environmental movement that's very against human impact on Earth, including development, has dramatically slowed our progress in what Thiel would call the world of atoms, right? Like he says that's one of his points I think is really right, like the world of atoms is experiencing all this stagnation and regress. And you look at, well, how long does it take to build a mine in the United States? I mean, in Canada is in some ways better, some ways worse in different situations, but in both cases, like development is glacial compared to what it was 100 years ago. And that's just invisibly destroying so much progress that we would otherwise have. And we see it in different ways, like the planes don't get any faster and the roads are getting less convenient, certainly in the United States and populated cities and more. Like we're just regressing in all of these ways, we're stagnating in all of these ways that when we had property rights and no anti-human, anti-development environmental movement, we would rapidly have industrial progress. I mean, my group is called Center for Industrial Progress in part because there's this idea of we're having industrial stagnation and regress and we need industrial progress to make everything better, including, by the way, our environmental quality and our ability to enjoy nature. So yeah, there's a really good book called Where's My Flying Car that talks about that scale and it really sounds the alarm about we're not increasing our energy use. And now AI is sort of bringing this to the fore. This is, I talked about this in Fossil Future, which came out quite a bit before the current concern, but it really makes this point that when you think about how much we can use machines to amplify our mental abilities, which is really what AI is doing, it's really amplifying intelligence, not like so much a new...

intelligence, we don't really have any limit in terms of our need for that, particularly if you think about life-saving cures. Like if you could, if you can run these different LLMs and or offshoots of them and use to cure diseases or to expand life, like people are going to be willing to pay a lot of money to do that, and that's that's really good. But we we we're just seeing even with that, there's no limit to the amount of energy that we could benefit from. But in order to be able to benefit from it, it needs to be cheap so we can use a sufficient amount of it, and we need to have the freedom to do so. And both of those are threatened by what I call the anti-human environmental movement.

Well, I don't know who's debating that. I mean, it's it's more like I think the way to think of it is a free society is the catalyst for a wealthy society, and a key mechanism of wealth is cheap energy. Like there's no wealthy society with truly expensive energy. There's no wealthy society without high energy use. So yeah, you have to think of it as, yeah, the freedom, because what the freedom does is it allows a sort of a maximization of the potential, like maximum actualization of the potential productive ability of the humans in the society. And the way it does that, productivity ultimately comes from thinking, right? We ultimately think about ways to rearrange our environment in in more productive ways. And what a free society does is it allows individuals to think freely and then act quickly, uh, via primarily the mechanism of property rights, right? Where they they actually have a physical sphere, because we're in a physical world, like they have a physical sphere in which they have full domain to act exactly as they judge best, you know, provided they don't over interfere with other people doing the same. And so property rights also protect you; they protect your rights from endangerment by others, but then they they protect your rights to action. So in general, in the society, it's property rights. What happens is over time, the the smartest people with the best productive ideas, uh, they are free to use them, and they either accumulate the most property or other people will let them use their property. That's what happens. So it's it's really energy is an aspect of that, right? Where the most productive people then will buy up the most potentially productive oil deposits and rights of ways for pipelines and all sorts of things. And so it's the brilliance of millions and millions of people is actualized through property rights. But but energy is the universal mechanism by which this is always happening, because it's it's almost always that there are machines. Like your productive achievements and thinking is always through machines. It's not like, oh, we're going to, you know, use a backhoe or something like like a hand tool or something like this. So energy is part of it's really the free society is the wealthy society, and energy is kind of is the fundamental driver. I mean, I would say energy and then the money, like energy and finance are the two fundamental drivers, because one is energy is the mechanism by which all the productivity occurs and is amplified and expanded, and then finance is the mechanism by which the capital flows to the most promising productive ideas.

Okay, well, he's this they can add that to the list of things I think he's wrong about.

Yes, so that's that's a really, you know, that that's a that's another that's another aspect of philosophy is crucial here. Yeah, so if you're deciding what to do about any product or technology and you're you're concerned about the side effects of it, you really need to carefully weigh the benefits that come along with the side effects, and then with the side effects, you need to carefully weigh both negative and positive as well as, I guess, neutral effects. So with with fossil fuels and climate, because climate is the main side effect people are concerned about with fossil fuels, there's also of course potential air pollution, water pollution, that kind of thing. But but the main thing people are concerned about with is climate. So with fossil fuels and climate, you need to look at, okay, one is when we emit this CO2, what are the what are the general benefits we get from the energy that we wouldn't get if we weren't allowed to use fossil fuels? You have to look at that, and I've argued, well, that's things like 8 billion people being fed or not. So I really think it's it's a livable world depends on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future, right? So that's a benefit you have to consider when you're thinking about the side effects. And then you also need to consider what I call the climate mastery or climate resilience benefits of fossil fuels. So if fossil fuels allow a lot more energy to be available, how does that allow us to master both nature's climate dangers, but then also any human-created climate danger? So I use the example of drought. Like, okay, if we're creating more drought, which is in general kind of unlikely, because if you make the world warmer and wetter and have more CO2, that doesn't generally lead to more drought. Generally means more tropical. But in any case, like you you could take heat waves or anything else, right? Like let's say heat waves. So do we have a higher incidence of heat waves in certain places with a warmer world? Okay, but then we also have the ability to have air condition and shaded areas and all sorts of things. So we have like uh lots of you always have to look at what's our ability to master climate, because the more mastery you have over climate, the less any climate change can be a problem.

So you have to factor in the broad benefits of fossil fuels, the climate mastery benefits of fossil fuels, and then with the side effects, you also need to look at positive. So what are the benefits of more warming, not just the harms? And especially Canada is insane that you guys ignore this. Like it's the coldest place in the world, I think, overall, and you guys act like, oh my gosh, if it warms another degree, we're all done for. It's like it might be a little bit, maybe more people will live there if you warm another degree. So you have to look at, and the way warming works is is concentrated more in cold places during colder seasons and colder times of day. So it's even more that you need to be open to positives of warming. And then with CO2, CO2 is plant food, so there are going to be a lot of positives for crops as well as, you know, other aspects of the biosphere. And then of course negatives, so you have to look at negatives as well. So you have to look at things like increased heat waves, how does it affect sea level rise, how does it affect precipitation potentially. But with all these things, you need to be precise, and with the negatives, you need to be very aware of what are the offsetting climate mastery abilities we have. And I think when you when you look at fossil fuels from that perspective, as I said, it's just the most amazingly net beneficial technology because it adds all these benefits, it sort of solves all the basic problems of life, creates all these new opportunities, and can solve any of the climate problems that it creates. It also, by the way, solves problems in the sense of it makes possible new alternatives. So insofar as we can have superior alternatives in the future, I think these will probably be nuclear-based. Fossil fuel creates the free and abundant society that can actually lead to innovation that will eventually surpass fossil fuels, versus if you impoverish everyone by trying to eliminate fossil fuels before you have a viable replacement, that's not going to lead to a thriving alternative energy industry. That's going to lead to a poor world where everyone is suffering. And uh like we didn't get in general, you see with the innovations, right? The innovations like nuclear and solar and wind are mixed because they they haven't yet become self-sufficient. Uh but let's say at some point you get self-sufficient solar and wind, if you have ample storage, like that's going to come from the wealthy society that fossil fuels made possible. It's not going to come from regressing backwards uh into abject poverty.