Alex Epstein Quotes

We don’t want to “save the planet” from human beings; we want to improve the planet for human beings.

Net-zero policy, if actually implemented, would certainly be the most significant act of mass murder since the killings of one hundred million people by communist regimes in the twentieth century—and it would likely be far greater.

The more opportunity you have to do what you want with your time, the more opportunity you have to be happy.

The open secret of our relationship to climate is how good we are at living in different climates thanks to technology.

The Earth is not a naturally nurturing “delicate balance” but rather a naturally (1) dynamic, (2) deficient, and (3) dangerous place that we must massively impact if we are to survive and flourish.

Have you ever, in any mainstream discussion of “climate change,” seen any concern expressed about whether restricting fossil fuel use might increase climate danger by decreasing fossil-fueled climate mastery

I think human beings have evolved to appreciate narrative, in the same way that we have evolved to learn language. What is narrative, after all, but a kind of super-language, where stories, like words, are ways of encapsulating information?

But as reasonable as it is to expect our climate knowledge system to be good overall and accurate on questions of science, this is demonstrably not the case.

A climate knowledge system that denies the possibility of the massive plant-growth and warming benefits of CO2 is a system that cannot be trusted.

when seeking out expert knowledge, reject experts and sources operating on the anti-impact framework and find those who are operating on a better, pro-human framework.

The amount of raw matter and energy on this planet is so incomprehensibly vast that it is nonsensical to speculate about running out of it.

Decline in U.S. Air Pollution Source: U.S. EPA National Emissions Inventory Air Pollutant Emissions Trends Data

let’s be clear: If fossil fuels have catastrophic consequences and it makes sense to use a lot less of them, that would be an epic tragedy, given the state of the alternatives right now.

Mankind’s use of fossil fuels is supremely virtuous—because human life is the standard of value, and because using fossil fuels transforms our environment to make it wonderful for human life.

If we are to make even remotely rational decisions about energy going forward, the reality of today’s unnatural level of nourishment and its dependence on fossil fuels need to be widely understood.

There are two lessons here: First, weather, climate, and climate change matter—but not nearly as much as they used to, thanks to technology. Climate livability is not just a matter of the state of the global climate system, but also of the technology (or lack thereof) that we have available to deal with any given climate. Second, having that technology is useless unless we have the energy to run it.

three crucial, undeniable facts about the benefits of fossil fuels that hold true to this day—and yet are ignored by our knowledge system when it advocates for the rapid elimination of fossil fuels. These facts are: Fossil fuels are a uniquely cost-effective source of energy. Cost-effective energy is essential to human flourishing. Billions of people are suffering and dying for lack of cost-effective energy.

Think about how many times you hear that 97 percent or some similar figure thrown around. It’s based on crude manipulation propagated by people whose ideological agenda it serves. It is a license to intimidate.

That’s the anti-humanism of seeking to eliminate human impact. When designated experts talk about present and future catastrophe, they are often evaluating increases in human flourishing as morally catastrophic.

The examples of machine learning and Bitcoin are particularly clear refutations of a widespread (and disastrous) fallacy: that progress in energy efficiency will lead to the need for far less energy in the future.

On a human flourishing standard, we want to avoid not “climate change” but “climate danger”—and we want to increase “climate livability” by adapting to and mastering climate, not simply refrain from impacting climate.

Note that most people don’t even think of the state of poverty when they think of the “livability of the planet.” That’s how anti-human a perspective the anti-impact framework and its vague environmental terminology give us.

the public discussion is prejudiced by an assumption that human impacts are bad, which causes us to fear and disapprove of the idea of affecting climate, even though climate is an inherently changing phenomenon that has no naturally perfect state.

As bad as the denial of fossil fuels’ unique cost-effectiveness is, an even worse failure of our knowledge system is its utter trivialization of the benefits of cost-effective energy as such and of ultra-cost-effective fossil fuel energy in particular.

We are told that rising CO2 levels will cause a “sixth mass extinction”—a species extinction so devastating that we literally won’t be able to live. Given that previous mass extinctions involved phenomena that blocked out massive amounts of light and warmth, like the giant asteroid that left a ninety-three-mile wide, twelve-mile-deep crater 66 million years ago in what is now Mexico, there is an incredibly high bar to claim that an increase in a warming and fertilizing gas will cause mass extinction.

Another reason we buy into Green is because we as a culture have never been fully comfortable with human industry. We’re taught that the pursuit of profit is wrong, that capitalism is wrong, and that we should feel guilty for our wealth and way of life.

if you go through the multi-thousand-page IPCC synthesis reports, you will not find any quantification of climate-related disaster deaths. And if you review the world’s leading source of climate disaster data, you will find that it totally contradicts the moral case for eliminating fossil fuels. Climate-related disaster deaths have plummeted by 98 percent over the last century, as CO2 levels have risen from 280 ppm (parts per million) to 420 ppm (parts per million) and temperatures have risen by 1°C.[6]

The single thought that can empower us to empower the world: Mankind's use of fossil fuels is supremely virtuous-because the human life is the standard of value, and because using fossil fuels transforms our environment to make it wonderful for human life.

There are two major ways in which our knowledge system’s method of evaluation can go wrong—often catastrophically wrong—which we must be constantly vigilant for: (1) using an anti-human “standard of evaluation” and (2) failing to consider the full context.

We take the materials around us and make them more valuable; that’s how we went from starving in a cave to producing a cornucopia of food that we can enjoy in comfortable homes. The thought leaders did not sufficiently consider these virtues of human beings.

Just as fossil-fueled resource mastery led to more fossil fuels, it also led to more of every kind of resource being available—including the gold, mercury, silver, copper, zinc, natural gas, and petroleum the Club of Rome had predicted would have run out by now.

when we are thinking about our environment and our world, the main term we use is not “saving” or “protecting,” since we recognize that these things are naturally deficient and dangerous, but rather “improving”—which requires massive, intelligent, productive impact.

I live in the United States, in Southern California, which is naturally a near desert where I would have died of drought (or not lived here) in previous generations. But thanks to irrigation, air-conditioning, sturdy homes, and other technological advances (especially high-energy transport, which enables me to trade with people far away for goods I could not create under the local circumstances), this is one of the most wonderful places on Earth to live: I can enjoy warm, temperate, low-humidity weather without the downsides of the desert.

Those who speculate that CO2 is a major driver of climate have, to their credit, made predictions based on computer models that reflect their view of how the climate works. But fatally, those models have failed to make accurate predictions—not just a little, but completely.

Fossil fuels are superconcentrated ancient dead plants. When we burn/oxidize them, we increase the amount of CO2, plant food, in the atmosphere. Thus, on top of getting energy, we should get a lot more plant growth—including growth of the most important plants to us, such as food crops.

We often talk about Mother Nature as if it is really our mother—a being that deliberately nurtures us and has our best interests at heart. But it isn’t, and doesn’t. Nature, including the climate, is a wondrous background that gives us the potential for an amazing life—if we transform it.

Whatever the IPCC’s motives for omitting the fact of plummeting climate-related disaster deaths, one thing is certain: when the world’s most influential synthesizing institution does not include a crucial variable, what we are told the “experts” think is inevitably and significantly distorted.

Technology enables us to live in practically any climate. Consider that in the United States, a large country, we are home to every type of climate imaginable: from polar Alaska to desert California to swampy Florida to scorching Texas. And yet in each state we have a life expectancy of over seventy-five!11

because of the effects of large dams on wildlife and watersheds, the Club does not support large-scale hydropower.”[40] Once again, we see that the “green energy” movement is not about energy—even cost-effective, non-CO2-emitting energy—it is about sacrificing energy and other human values to the idol of unimpacted nature.

Knowing that our knowledge system consistently denies temperature mastery is crucial context to keep in mind whenever we hear claims about “catastrophic” temperature changes in the future; there is a very good chance those claims are based on climate mastery denial, and that without such denial catastrophe would be implausible.

I call the phenomenon of transforming unusable raw materials into usable resources “resource mastery.” Just as designated experts ignored fossil fuels’ massive climate mastery benefits when predicting climate catastrophe, they also ignored fossil fuels’ massive resource mastery benefits when they predicted resource catastrophe.

If we pursue the environmental goal not of “protecting the environment” or “saving the planet” from human beings but of “improving our environment” or “improving our world” for human beings, we can have it all—the best of what exists naturally and the best of what we can create—including the time and ability to enjoy what exists naturally.

If we look at history, an incredibly disproportionate percentage of valuable ideas have come in the last several centuries, coinciding with fossil-fueled civilization. Why? Because such a productive civilization buys us time to think and discover, and then use that knowledge to become more productive, and buy more time to think and discover.

The reality of solar and wind around the world is that they are not outcompeting fossil fuels in the realm of electricity; they are making electricity generated by fossil fuels and other controllable sources of electricity (nuclear and hydro) more expensive. This reality leads to a frequent, additional negative consequence: declining reliability.

The fact that, during the most miraculous decline of extreme poverty in human history, contributed to by ultra-cost-effective energy from fossil fuels, college-educated adults can think the rate of extreme poverty is getting worse due to fossil fuels shows just how completely our knowledge system trivializes the benefits of fossil fuels and of cost-effective energy as such.

To the extent a grid is committed to using solar and wind, whenever sunlight or wind increases, the grid has to cycle down controllable power plants, and whenever sunlight or wind decreases or disappears, it has to cycle up controllable power plants. Rapidly cycling power plants up and down is an efficiency killer, just as stop-and-go-traffic kills your car’s fuel efficiency.

The cost-effectiveness of energy has four dimensions: Affordability: How much money does it cost relative to how much money people have? Reliability: To what extent can it be produced “on demand”—when needed, in as large a quantity as needed? Versatility: How wide a variety of machines can it power? Scalability: How many people can it produce energy for and in how many places?

Actually it is the top environmentalist intellectuals who lack climate wisdom. Because they are unwilling to think in an unbiased way about the benefits and risks of fossil fuels according to a human standard of value, they are blinded to the fact that the fossil fuel industry is the reason they’re alive and not “helpless at the mercy of that wind in the middle of some such plain.

Given the term “ocean acidification,” you’d expect current pH levels to be well under 7. But in fact, mainstream estimates of the average pH of our current oceans are about 8.1—estimated to have declined from 8.2 in preindustrial times—very much in the alkaline range. Thus we are witnessing very slow ocean “neutralization,” not “acidification”—acidification is a completely unscientific term used to scare us.

new catastrophe claims will involve the same distortions as the catastrophe claims I’ve debunked so far. They will (1) ignore the fundamental benefits of fossil fuels, (2) especially ignore the environmental mastery benefits of fossil fuels, and (3) wildly overstate the negative side-effects of fossil fuels. Thus, when confronting the latest catastrophe claims, we want to be on the lookout for these distortions.

We don’t want to “save the planet” from human beings; we want to improve the planet for human beings. We need to say this loudly and proudly. We need to say that human life is our one and only standard of value. And we need to say that the transformation of our environment, the essence of our survival, is a supreme virtue. We need to recognize that to the extent we deny either, we are willing to harm real, flesh-and-blood human beings for some antihuman dogma.

these extremely positive plant effects of CO2 are scientifically uncontroversial yet practically never mentioned, even by the climate-science community. This is a dereliction of duty. It is our responsibility to look at the big picture, all positives and negatives, without prejudice. If they think the plant positives are outweighed, they can give their reasons. But to ignore the fertilizer effect and to fail to include it when discussing the impacts of CO2 is dishonest.

My reading of the evidence is that there is a mild greenhouse effect in the direction human beings have always wanted—warmer—and a significant fertilizer effect in the direction human beings have always wanted—more plant life. I believe that the public discussion is prejudiced by an assumption that human impacts are bad, which causes us to fear and disapprove of the idea of affecting climate, even though climate is an inherently changing phenomenon that has no naturally perfect state.

Just like us,” says Bill McKibben, “our crops are adapted to the Holocene, the 11,000-year period of climatic stability we’re now leaving . . . in the dust.”10 This argument does not reflect reality. First of all, the Holocene is an abstraction; it is not a “climate” anyone lived in; it is a summary of a climate system that contains an incredible variety of climates that individuals lived in. And in practice, we can live in pretty much any of them if we are industrialized and pretty much none of them if we aren’t.

There are some quotes from a story in the Los Angeles Times called “Fear of Fusion: What if It Works?” Leading environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin: “It’s the worst thing that could happen to our planet.”13 Paul Ehrlich: Developing fusion for human beings would be “like giving a machine gun to an idiot child.”14 Amory Lovins was already on record as saying, “Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.”15

We need a rigorous, big-picture examination of fossil fuels’ impact on climate and other environmental issues. We must clearly hold human life as our standard of value, or if we don’t, we must make clear that we are willing to sacrifice human life for something we think is more important. With that standard, we must look at the big picture, the full context. And we must use experts as advisers, not authorities, getting precise explanations from them about what is known and what is not known, so that we as individuals can make the most informed decision.

our designated experts cling to the delicate nurturer assumption to disguise their anti-human goal to themselves. Very few human beings can admit to themselves that they are fundamentally anti-human—even if their whole lives are devoted to stopping the high-impact productive activities that make human flourishing possible. The more one clings to the belief that Earth is “delicate,” and that we’re always one impact away from collapse, the more one can convince oneself: I don’t hate and want to destroy humans, I just want to save human beings from themselves.

allegedly outweigh it so much with “too much” heat. This is dubious, given the observable increase in plant growth under conditions of increased CO2 and given that the heat predictions are failures. What’s also striking is how, even though we all know that plants live on CO2, almost no one in the culture thinks of potential positive impacts when he thinks about his “carbon footprint.” This is prejudice—the belief that man-made impacts on our environment are necessarily bad, that the standard of value is nonimpact, and that there’s no possibility of improving on Mother Nature.

The main obstacle to using machine labor is lack of cost-effectiveness: machine labor consuming more value than it produces. I call this the “private jet problem.” Travel by private jet is an amazing thing. If you have a private jet, you can save a lot of time in your traveling, and you can travel to all kinds of great places at the drop of a hat. So why don’t the vast majority of us travel by private jet? Because despite the value of the time private-jet labor produces, the enormous amount of resources consumed via private-jet labor makes it cost-prohibitive for the vast majority of us.

A prime example of such infrastructure is the Netherlands, which protects its people from floods despite being near or below sea level. Fifty percent of the Netherlands lies less than three feet above sea level, and roughly one eighth of the country is at an elevation below sea level—in some cases as much as twenty-two feet below sea level.[37] Today the Netherlands has flood-protection infrastructure consisting of thousands of miles of dikes, dams, and electronically operated storm walls and gates. Much of the system has been designed to withstand floods that have a probability of occurring once in ten thousand years.

I stress again, as I did with climate, that the designated experts were catastrophizers, not that all researchers were. There were other experts in resources, such as MIT’s M. A. Adelman and University of Maryland’s Julian Simon, who predicted correctly that fossil fuel resources and other resources would expand. But just as with climate, the mainstream knowledge system chose to designate the catastrophizers as experts. (This was not due to their superior qualifications—while Adelman and Simon were resource economists, Paul Ehrlich’s primary background was in the study of butterflies. I will explain what it is due to in chapter 3.)

In one sense, the answer to “Why do we believe the wrong thing about fossil fuels?” is simple. Lack of education. We haven’t been taught all the right facts. We aren’t taught in school how energy makes our climate safer, only how CO2 emissions supposedly make it more dangerous. We aren’t taught in school how energy makes our environment better, only ways (usually exaggerated) in which fossil fuels make it dirtier. We aren’t taught in school how the fossil fuel industry is a resource-creating industry; we are taught that it is shamelessly exploiting dwindling natural resources. If only the truth were taught, the world would be a different place, right?

the mainstream knowledge system, especially its disseminators and evaluators, is fundamentally distorted by the anti-impact framework, which causes it to consistently ignore fossil fuels’ fundamental benefits to human flourishing and to catastrophize fossil fuels’ thus far masterable side-effects. Its catastrophizing includes, as we saw in chapter 2 and chapter 4, wildly and negatively distorting the various environmental side-effects of fossil fuels—including by elevating the minority of specialists with the most extreme negative views to the status of designated experts. And in the previous chapter we saw pervasive climate mastery denial that makes all catastrophe predictions we hear from our knowledge system suspect.

The environmental thought leaders’ opposition to fossil fuels is not a mistaken attempt at pursuing human life as their standard of value. They are too smart and knowledgeable to make such a mistake. Their opposition is a consistent attempt at pursuing their actual standard of value: a pristine environment, unaltered nature. Energy is our most powerful means of transforming our environment to meet our needs. If an unaltered, untransformed environment is our standard of value, then nothing could be worse than cheap, plentiful, reliable energy. I’m saying that if fossil fuels created no waste, including no CO2, if they were even cheaper, if they would last practically forever, if there were no resource-depletion concerns, the Green movement would still oppose them.

The proper attitude toward human activity and climate is expressed in the 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Consider the following passage, where industrialist-philosopher Francisco d’Anconia remarks to steel magnate Hank Rearden how dangerous the climate is, absent massive industrial development. The conversation takes place indoors at an elegant party during a severe storm (in the era before all severe storms were blamed on fossil fuels). There was only a faint tinge of red left on the edge of the earth, just enough to outline the scraps of clouds ripped by the tortured battle of the storm in the sky. Dim shapes kept sweeping through space and vanishing, shapes which were branches, but looked as if they were the fury of the wind made visible. “It’s a terrible night for any animal caught unprotected on that plain,” said Francisco d’Anconia. “This is when one should appreciate the meaning of being a man.” Rearden did not answer for a moment; then he said, as if in answer to himself, a tone of wonder in his voice, “Funny . . .” “What?” “You told me what I was thinking just a while ago . . .” “You were?” “. . . only I didn’t have the words for it.” “Shall I tell you the rest of the words?” “Go ahead.” “You stood here and watched the storm with the greatest pride one can ever feel—because you are able to have summer flowers and half-naked women in your house on a night like this, in demonstration of your victory over that storm. And if it weren’t for you, most of those who are here would be left helpless at the mercy of that wind in the middle of some such plain.

Thus, while in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s the disastrous anti-fossil fuel proposals of benefit-ignoring, side-effect catastrophizing designated environmental experts—proposals that would have prematurely ended billions of lives—were mostly mitigated by the knowledge system’s valuing of energy, that protection is now missing in the mainstream knowledge system. We can see this today in the fact that our designated environmental experts are the number one shapers of energy policy. For example, the fossil fuel elimination policies of going “net zero,” “fossil free,” and “100 percent renewable” were just a decade ago considered idealistic if not crackpot policies most prominently advocated by designated expert Bill McKibben and his organization, 350.org. Today they are the dominant policy idea in the world.

How, then, can Apple claim to be 100 percent renewable? It purchases a fraudulent “100 percent renewable” status from electricity producers. The basic way this works is that Apple pays utilities to give it credit for the solar and wind that others use—and to give others the blame for the coal, gas, and nuclear that Apple uses. It’s as if Apple CEO Tim Cook were traveling with nine other people on a yacht powered 90 percent by diesel and 10 percent by a sail—and Cook claimed that he traveled just using the sail, while the others traveled using the diesel. This energy accounting fraud is shameful and destructive, because it leads us to think that we can have innovators like Apple without the uniquely cost-effective energy we get from fossil fuels. Even worse, leading company after leading company, including Facebook, Google, Bank of America, and Anheuser-Busch, is claiming to be 100 percent renewable.[18]

I believe the answer is that the delicate nurturer assumption is a way for anti-human designated experts to disguise their anti-human goals to both pro-human audiences and to themselves. I

The popular climate discussion has the issue backward. It looks at man as a destructive force for climate livability, one who makes the climate dangerous because we use fossil fuels. In fact, the truth is the exact opposite; we don’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous; we take a dangerous climate and make it safe. High-energy civilization, not climate, is the driver of climate livability. No matter what, climate will always be naturally hazardous—and the key question will always be whether we have the adaptability to handle it or, better yet, master

Thus, my claim about the current benefits of fossil fuels is radical in two respects: I am claiming (1) that today’s world is unnaturally livable, not, as our knowledge system portrays, unnaturally unlivable, and (2) that the role of ultra-cost-effective fossil fuel energy is not incidental or even just important—it is fundamental.

As Paracelsus put it over five hundred years ago, “All things are poison and nothing [is] without poison; only the dosage determines that something is not a poison.”[11]

In 2007, US Attorney for South Florida Alex Acosta worked with the FBI, then headed by Robert Mueller, and Epstein’s lawyers, Alan Dershowitz (who went on to defend Donald Trump) and Ken Starr (who had previously prosecuted Bill Clinton), in a plea deal to give Epstein a mere eighteen-month sentence for soliciting, molesting, and raping underage girls. Epstein never spent a day of his sentence in prison, and in 2009, he was granted early “release” from his pseudo-confinement. He

Most scientific research today is funded by governments. To justify this research, the officials running the government must believe that the research has value to voters or to their own agendas.

How do I rely on experts responsibly? How do I gain the crucial benefit of acting on expert knowledge while avoiding becoming one of the many people throughout history who supports something very wrong because they were told the “experts” endorsed it?

The global climate system is near historic lows in CO2 and temperature. We have no near-term mechanism of reaching even one fourth the historical high of CO2. Life on Earth thrived at far higher CO2 levels and temperatures in the past. Planetary warming is concentrated in colder parts of the Earth—it is not truly global.

I believe the evidence is clear that nuclear is the safest energy technology

The one thing a human-focused response to a major climate danger would not do is try to save ourselves by pursuing solar, wind, and biofuels. These are the worst-performing sources of energy we have, and if we were truly in desperate straits, we would go with something that works; we wouldn’t force everyone to use the worst and hope for the best.

All things are poison and nothing [is] without poison; only the dosage determines that something is not a poison. —Paracelsus, sixteenth century19

in the 1870s, according to Daniel Yergin’s The Prize, some five thousand people died annually in kerosene explosions from the lamps in their homes.8 Gasoline is more volatile than kerosene, yet we drive our cars without any fear of explosion.

As citizens, we hate to see even one coal mine accident, one spill of hazardous liquids, one example of industry corruption, but we must use that feeling to advocate for proper laws and best practices, not to drive us to outlaw crucial technologies.

Clearly the doomsayers are not really focused on minimizing CO2 emissions. Clearly human life is not their operating standard of value; nonimpact is.

I’m saying that if fossil fuels created no waste, including no CO2, if they were even cheaper, if they would last practically forever, if there were no resource-depletion concerns, the Green movement would still oppose them.

If any element of the greenhouse fear turns out to be false—if CO2 emissions don’t cause dramatic warming, if dramatic warming doesn’t cause harmful climate change, or if human beings can adapt well, then CO2 emissions are not catastrophic.

Climate Model Predictions vs. Reality Sources: Hansen et al. (1988); RSS; Met Office Hadley Centre HadCRUT4 dataset; RSS Lower troposphere data Note in particular that since the late 1990s, there has been no increase in average temperatures. Hansen and every other believer in catastrophic global warming expected that there would be, for the simple reason that we have used record, accelerating amounts of CO2.

Figure 4.3: Climate Prediction Models That Can’t Predict Climate Source: Christy, Climate Model Output from KNMI, Climate Explorer (2014)

because people have been led to believe that CO2 somehow causes climate change in addition to, not as a consequence of, global warming, it seems plausible to blame individual hurricanes on CO2, even though the temperatures haven’t increased. It is disingenuous for climate activists to blame every storm on climate change when there has been so little warming so far and when storm trends are so unremarkable.

It especially doesn’t make sense to be biased against man-made things, because they are deliberately made by a human mind, usually to promote human life. While man-made things can be bad, it is perverse to single out the man-made as bad per se. To be against the man-made as such is to have a bias against the mind-made, which is to be against the human mind, whose very purpose is to figure out how to transform our environment to meet our needs.

The entire modern enterprise of catastrophic climate change predictions, the enterprise that threatens our energy supply, is based on equating a demonstrated scientific truth, the greenhouse effect, with extremely speculative projections made by invalidated models.

One internationally renowned scholar I spoke to recently was telling me about how disastrous the greenhouse effect was, and I asked her what kind of function it was. She didn’t know. What I told her didn’t give her pause, but I think it should have. As the following illustration shows, the greenhouse effect of CO2 is an extreme diminishing effect—a logarithmically decreasing effect.23 This is how the function looks when measured in a laboratory. Notice that we are just before 400 ppm (which means CO2 is .04 percent of the atmosphere), where the effect really starts tapering off; the warming effect of each new molecule is not much. This means that the initial parts per million of CO2 do the vast majority of the warming of our atmosphere. The image below shows how, all things being equal, the heating effect of each additional increment of CO2 is smaller and smaller. Figure 4.1: The Decelerating, Logarithmic Greenhouse Effect Source: Myhre et al. (1998)

It can literally be deadly for a scientist to spread a hypothesis as fact. Take the realm of nutrition. For years, the government spread the gospel, treated as nutritionally proved, that a low-fat diet was healthy—a campaign that coincided with record obesity. I’m not going to claim that I know the perfect diet. The point is that, at this stage, no one appears to—and when scientists with speculative theories feel licensed to disseminate them as fact, it is the most irresponsible scientists who will often garner the most praise.

One such scientist is Paul Ehrlich, who writes: “Scientists need to be direct and succinct when dealing with the electronic media. One could talk for hours about the uncertainties associated with global warming. But a statement like ‘Pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere could lead to large-scale food shortages’ is entirely accurate scientifically and will catch the public’s attention.”42 Is such a statement “entirely accurate scientifically”? What about the fact that were it not for the industry that necessarily emits greenhouse gases and were it not for the fact that Ehrlich’s proposals to dismantle it were not followed, millions or billions would have died of starvation?

OUR NATURALLY HAZARDOUS CLIMATE There is a widespread idea among climate commentators, including climate scientists, that the global climate system, absent human CO2 emissions, is safe. There is an unsophisticated and a sophisticated version of this argument. Unsophisticated: John Kerry, when speaking to Indonesia, a nation that has dramatically increased its well-being in recent years through the burning of coal, tells them to stop burning coal: “But, ultimately, every nation on Earth has a responsibility to do its part if we have any hope of leaving our future generations the safe and healthy planet that they deserve.”9 But that “safe and healthy” planet is incredibly precarious for anyone outside high-energy civilization.

Industrial progress, mechanical improvement, all of the great wonders of the modern era have meant little to the wealthy. The rich in ancient Greece would have benefited hardly at all from modern plumbing—running servants replaced running water. Television and radio—the patricians of Rome could enjoy the leading musicians and actors in their home, could have the leading artists as domestic retainers. Ready-to-wear clothing, supermarkets—all these and many other modern developments would have added little to their life. They would have welcomed the improvements in transportation and in medicine, but for the rest, the great achievements of western capitalism have redounded primarily to the benefit of the ordinary person. These achievements have made available to the masses conveniences and amenities that were previously the exclusive prerogative of the rich and powerful.6

Why do so many of us engage in many of the same irrational methods of evaluation as our knowledge system when we should know better?

As a philosopher who has studied the history of ideas extensively, I have long been haunted by the fact that some of the worst ideas in history (such as slavery, racism, and eugenics) were successfully spread as the consensus of “the experts.” This fact has motivated me to think extensively about the questions: How do I rely on experts responsibly? How do I gain the crucial benefit of acting on expert knowledge while avoiding becoming one of the many people throughout history who supports something very wrong because they were told the “experts” endorsed it?

As of 2021, we have CO2 levels at 420 parts per million (ppm), or 0.042 percent of the atmosphere. At 120 to 150 ppm CO2, most plants die. Since ultimately all animals live on plants (carnivores live on herbivores), CO2 levels that low are apocalyptic—and today’s CO2 levels are quite low from a plant-preference perspective.

A TV show is its characters. When you describe a TV show, you’re describing the characters and the situation they’re in.

Quiero señalar otra cuestión importante sobre las 29.404 muertes del año 2013. El clima ya no es una de las principales causas de mortalidad, gracias sobre todo a los combustibles fósiles. En cambio, todavía hay mil trescientos millones de personas que viven sin electricidad y una gran mayoría de ellas sufrirán una muerte prematura, un problema que sólo podría resolverse usando más combustibles fósiles. No sólo estamos ignorando la cuestión de conjunto cuando convertimos el cambio climático en la obsesión de nuestra cultura, sino además nos hemos propuesto «combatir» ese cambio climático rechazando el arma que ha reducido su peligrosidad de manera espectacular. (...) No hemos recibido un clima seguro y lo hemos transformado en algo peligroso; hemos recibido un clima peligroso y lo hemos convertido en mucho más seguro. La civilización de la energía, y no la metereología, es el eje impulsor de la habitabilidad climática. Pase lo que pase, el clima siempre será peligroso por su propia naturaleza, y la pregunta clave siempre será si poseemos la capacidad de lidiar con él o, mejor aún, si somos capaces de dominarlo.

This became apparent when it emerged that Alex Acosta, then-serving as Secretary of Labor in the Trump administration, had disclosed to the Trump transition team that he had previously signed off on Epstein’s “sweetheart deal” because Epstein “had belonged to intelligence.” Acosta, then serving as US attorney for Southern Florida, had also been told by unspecified figures at the time that he needed to give Epstein a lenient sentence because of his links to “intelligence.” When Acosta was later asked if Epstein was indeed an intelligence asset in 2019, Acosta chose to neither confirm nor deny the claim.