Alex Epstein Quotes

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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?