Where are some Bitcoiners going wrong in their thinking and arguments about energy? Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, and energy policy commentator joins me to talk about energy use, and why we’re not thinking about it clearly. 

We chat:

• The benefits of energy and fossil fuels
• More energy use is good!
• Renewables are really just unreliables
• Reframing the conversation 

Links:

• Twitter: @AlexEpstein
• Site: Energytalkingpoints.com
• Site: Industrialprogress.com

Sponsors: 

• Swan Bitcoin
• Hodl Hodl Lend
• Compass Mining
• Unchained Capital (code LIVERA)
• CypherSafe (code LIVERA)
• CoinKite.com (code LIVERA)

Stephan Livera links:

• Show notes and website
• Follow me on Twitter @stephanlivera
• Subscribe to the podcast
• Patreon @stephanlivera

Podcast Transcript:

Stephan Livera:

Alex welcome to the show. So Alex, I’m a fan of your work. I found your book in, I think when it came out, I think it was 2014. The moral case for Fossil Fuels.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah. Late 2014.

Stephan Livera:

Excellent book. I was, you know, long time libertarian, always in favor of free markets, but I think your book helped clarify a lot of what I was seeing around wind and solar and renewables versus fossil fuels and nuclear and some of these other, you know, and it helps frame things in a way that was very useful. And I’ve certainly, I’ve been following your work for some time and I’ve been often telling my friends, “Hey, you’ve got to read this guy’s book. It’s really important.” And so I’m really glad to be able to chat with you.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah. Looking forward to it.

Stephan Livera:

So interesting. Isn’t it? Because you know, I’m in the Bitcoin world and I’m out here trying to make educational interviews for Bitcoiners to listen to so they can understand a little bit more about what’s going on out there in the world. Some of that is what’s real fact and what’s the reality on the ground. And then what’s happening in the political level, the political discussions that are happening and the way things get framed. Right? So even the way people frame things as, oh, this is a green technology, right. Solar and wind are green, and there’s nothing wrong with that. And then it’s almost like there’s been a very successful marketing campaign against coal and natural gas. And so on. What’s your view on that?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah. I mean, I think when we get into it, I think if people are inclined to agree with me, they’ll see. There’s — I mean, it’s beyond a marketing campaign. I think that our thinking about this issue has been distorted in ways that are almost impossible to believe in advance. So let me just start out with one thing that I think might be of interest to people. So we’ll probably talk a lot about the value of energy, but if you just think very simply energy is machine calories or machine food. So to use machines, you need energy and to be able to afford to use machines, the energy needs to be low cost, reliable, versatile, global scale. And you know, right now 3 billion people in the world don’t have that kind of energy at all. You know, almost a billion have no electricity, literally no electricity. And then, you know, about 2 billion people have what we in the US would consider a decent amount of energy.

Alex Epstein:

And then 3 billion people have more than zero, but still we would consider like poverty levels. And, you know, our standard of living is directly related to how much energy we can use because, you know, machines are what enable us to have the amount of abundance and safety that we have in a world without machines where we’re using manual labor is a very poor and dangerous world, which we could go into. So that said, you would think that the culture would be interested in at least preserving the cost-effective energy we have today and also dramatically expanding it. And I think it’s very notable that almost nobody talks about using more energy. So, and nobody talks about the 3 billion people who have virtually none. And nobody has the least bit of concern that by rapidly outlawing fossil fuels, as well as in many cases, nuclear, as well as insignificant people be also being opposed to hydro that we might destroy the standard of living for the billions of people who have a decent standard of living.

Alex Epstein:

So it’s just very interesting that in a world that claims to care about everything like everyone claims to care about humanity, the future, I want to make the world a better place. Nobody gives a shit about energy and yet energy is fundamental. And we’ll talk about how fundamentally, but it’s at least somewhat fundamental to the standard of living with people who have a good standard of living and the people who don’t. And nobody cares about the people who don’t and nobody is concerned about us losing it. Even when we talk about abolishing, what turns out to be the one source of energy that provides energy that’s low cost, reliable, versatile on a global scale, fossil fuels provide 80% of the world’s energy. They are by far the leading source for all kinds of transportation that has no equivalent, especially heavier duty applications. And they’re the overwhelming source of what’s called industrial process heat, which is so much of our economy like plastics and cement and steel, and nobody talks about it. So I would just start off with that observation that we’ve got something incredibly important, incredibly needed. Nobody is caring about more of it. And nobody is concerned about these policies that we should at least be afraid, might jeopardize it.

Stephan Livera:

Right. And I see you have been big on this idea of saying we need to also consider before we just kind of only talk about the cost of something. We should also think about what are the benefits of using this thing. And as you rightly point out, we need machines. We need machines to have a nice life, right? The nice life that you and I and other people in the Western world, the life that we enjoy is very much dependent on being able to use, as you say, cheap and reliable and scalable energy, and people jump straight into what are the costs without actually remembering these are the benefits that we need to remember. And as you rightly point out, there are billions of people on this earth who don’t have the same access to energy that you, me, and probably many of my listeners have. Right?

Alex Epstein:

And you know, if you want to put it in a frame that’s often discussed today, people are saying, well, I care about the world so much. And I’m worried about the planet becoming unlivable. Like I want to make sure, you know, my descendants have a livable planet. And my point is, the only reason we have a livable planet is because of what I call machine labor. So machines producing value for us and machines can produce way more value than we can given that we’re very weak, can also produce a lot of types of value that we can’t at all so in my book, I talk about like an incubator and what that means for, you know, a premature baby and in the US babies are saved all the time, every day because of incubators and in places like Gambia in Africa, they die because they don’t have these amazing machines.

Alex Epstein:

There’s no amount of manual labor that can substitute for an incubator. So the whole world we live in is only livable. As we know it, it’s a place where billions of people can be nourished and be safe and have opportunity like that didn’t exist 200 years ago. And it can’t exist without super cost-effective machine labor around the world. And so I would people say, I care about the livability of the planet. If you care about the livability of planet you should recognize it is totally on fossil fuels today. And there is a lot of evidence that it will be in the future. And one point I make is that particularly in the realm of climate, which everyone claims to be so concerned about, well, climate has never been safer. So if you look at climate related disaster deaths, from things like storms and floods and heat and cold, those have been going way down.

Alex Epstein:

People assume if they must be going up because we’ve impacted the atmosphere and that must be bad, and that must be catastrophic. But in reality, the atmosphere is warmed up by about one degree Celsius in the last 170 years. And I do believe we’ve had some impact on that. I don’t think there’s any reason to think that that is catastrophic in the least. And it definitely has a lot of positives with it, including a lot of greening. But in any case, the real thing that’s going on is something is making us way safer from climate. The rate of climate related disaster deaths has gone down by 98% over the last century. And that something is mainly machines. So we use machines to produce all sorts of protections from climate like it’s machines that allow us to have irrigation systems that protect us from drought, which is the historical number one climate related killer.

Alex Epstein:

Machines keep us cool when it’s, when it’s hot, they keep us warm when it’s cold. Which cold related deaths are 15 times greater problems still in today’s supposedly hot world than heat related deaths. So it’s really a warped. So we can talk about why, but I just want to point out on a factual basis, if you care about human life or what I call human flourishing, our ability to live to our highest potential fossil fuels are making possible a world that is completely unbelievable in terms of human flourishing. And yet nobody seems to care about that at all. And nobody seems to care about the people who lack that kind of energy.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. And so you’re right, that people forget the benefits of having, as you said, cheap and reliable energy. And so…

Alex Epstein:

I don’t think most people know, but I think the knowledge institutions, it’s very interesting. Why aren’t they telling us? So I think of, you know, we often tell about the media and stuff. I often use the term knowledge system because really what the media and education, what they’re trying, what they’re supposed to do is give us the knowledge of experts in different fields so that we can make use of it. And it should be telling us from almost day one, Hey, life used to be terrible. The reason your life is really, really good is because you have all these machines producing all kinds of value for you and your ancestors didn’t have that. And so they had to do manual labor and nature is not a very nice place when you only have manual labor to overcome it.

Alex Epstein:

And nature, is naturally deficient and dangerous and dynamic as I like to put it like that should be taught. And nobody knows that. Not even, you know, experts know that. I think most people who are in like climate scientists have become this God-like group in the culture. And they’re definitely important to consult them when we’re talking about energy. If you’re looking at the climate side effects, but they don’t know anything about energy and nobody even seems to care. It’s another example. Nobody cares about energy. What do we say when we’re making pulse, we’ve got to listen to the scientists. We got to listen to climate scientists. Well, why would you only listen to somebody who’s talking about the side effects of something, but not talking about the benefits would only listen to the scientists talking about the side effects of a vaccine, but not the benefits? Of course not. So it’s so warped our whole knowledge system is a total failure with regard to energy, to the point where people think that fossil fuels already have made the planet less livable. And in fact, fossil fuels have made the whole world unnaturally livable, including giving us unnatural safety from climate.

Stephan Livera:

That’s a really interesting way to put it. And I agree with you. And so it seems to me that a common trend, or at least a common theme that I see is people come out with different models and they can be in different spheres. Right? So in the climate world, it’s all look, we’re extrapolating this massive amount of negative impact to humans. And they sort of exaggerate that. Or even in like the COVID, it’s like the COVID models, “Oh my God, it’s going to be millions of millions of people are going to die if we don’t lock down!” And then they exaggerate and for me, it’s not saying, “Oh, there is no COVID” — COVID is a real virus, but I think it’s that they over-exaggerate. And then the government and people who push a certain thing, they push an out of proportion response. Right. And so it’s the same thing. Like overly, they try to overly tamp down. And then in all of their lockdowns, they kind of destroy people’s lives. And in the same world — in like the more energy world, it’s more like, “Oh my God, we need to go to net zero because otherwise we’re all going to die because of the warming” and the everything else. Right?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah. I think that the COVID is an interesting example that has some parallels. And I think it teaches us some lessons that everyone should be able to agree to about the nature of knowledge systems, because we live in a specialized world where we depend on experts and expertise is a great thing, and it is essential, but you have to recognize that there’s a whole system that is choosing, it’s sort of choosing experts. It’s funding experts its doing all these things. And I think we should be able to agree that at least three things where knowledge systems can go really wrong. So the one that people think about most, I think is they think, well, experts, you know, a lot of experts can be wrong about something. Even the majority can. So something like, oh, ulcers, you know, there’s this idea, well, experts were wrong about ulcers for awhile.

Alex Epstein:

And so that’s definitely a category. Now my background is philosophy. So I don’t think I’m usually the most equipped person to say like, oh, the experts are wrong about X. So like, if you take like people predicting making predictions of COVID, it’s going to be hard for me as a philosopher to say, oh, I am sure that this person is predicting too many deaths or too high an R value or R nought value as they call it. But there are other, there are two other co although we have to acknowledge that can definitely happen. It can be hard to fare it out, but there are two other kinds of distortions that I think are much easier to see and very, very prevalent. And so one is the misrepresentation, usually in a catastrophic direction of what the experts in a field actually think. So if you take something like COVID, I don’t have the exact studies in front of me, but the perceptions of the public on the, you know, what they call the IFR, the infection fatality rate of COVID where like, in the, like I saw studies that said, they’re like people thought 5% or 7%.

Alex Epstein:

So people thought like, if you get this you are gonna have a 5 or 7% chance of dying. And so that’s not a case where the experts are wrong. It’s the system. And particularly the, you can call them like the dissemination institutions, like the mass media, where they are totally distorting what experts think. And if you look in climate, you see the exact same thing. The people that we hear about most on climate are the catastrophizers and there’s always two things they’re doing. So and this happened in COVID as well. So one thing is, they’re just totally distorting and exaggerating the physical effects. So it’s the people who predicted like, oh yeah, it’ll be between, you know, there’ll be millions of refugees around the world by the year 2000 or something like that from climate, all these things. and that’s not the majority of climate scientists, but they get designated by the system as the experts.

Alex Epstein:

And the other thing they do is they always ignore human adaptation, or I call human mastery. So they always assume human beings are idiots. And if there’s some adverse change in our environment, we’re just going to go like lemmings and die. So you see this in climate, like people assume, oh yeah, sea levels rise over 80 years. We’re just going to all [drown], not move anything. Right? And once you see when the study actually factor in adaptation, it’s really hard to show any kind of damage from sea level rises because it’s a very slow phenomenon, even in the more I would regard as like the exaggerated predictions. So you have this phenomenon, that’s very, we have to recognize when we’re talking about expertise and what we’re being told experts think there’s a very common tendency, which you see in COVID very clearly for the knowledge system to designate as experts like catastrophists or to just misrepresent them.

Alex Epstein:

So there’s something you’re getting a misrepresentation of what experts think. And it’s often selecting the most extreme people, or just summarizing the views in an inaccurate way. And then the final thing, I think that’s very important is with expert knowledge is you can have wrong methods of evaluation. So you think you see this in COVID where, so let’s say we had an actual accurate, like, kind of the best judgment of, okay. Here’s how dangerous this is likely to be. You know, and actually not overstating it, there’s still the question of, okay, how do you evaluate policies about this? And the striking thing with COVID was what standard were they evaluating policies by like? How are they measuring what’s a good policy, or it’s a bad policy? The main thing was we need to minimize deaths from this virus that was essentially the standard everyone was using.

Alex Epstein:

We need to minimize deaths from one virus. Now that could not stand up to scrutiny at all. It was just, everyone was afraid of it. And it was on people’s minds. And you were shamed if you ever questioned anything about it, but that’s a terrible standard, right? But if somebody is on that standard, so you take someone like Fauci and he feels like that’s his mandate. Yeah. And they’re like, oh, listen to Dr. Fauci. Well, but if his standard is minimizing deaths from this virus, he is going to make decisions that are terrible for most people, because most people will not minimize risk of death from this virus at all costs. Almost nobody would do that, including you see elderly people wouldn’t do that. So there’s a lot more to say about COVID, but I want to stress that knowledge systems can totally miscommunicate expert opinion, and then they can have wrong methods of evaluation that can take expert opinion and and use it to derive bad conclusions. And I think this is exactly what’s happening in energy, where they wildly distort what climate scientists think. And then they totally ignore. They have really bad methods because they totally ignore all the benefits of fossil fuels, including those that can neutralize any climate danger that fossil fuels cause. So what you have is fossil fuels are like the ultimate wonder drug. And yet people think we should abolish them.

Stephan Livera:

It’s absurd. Right? And it’s like, even within the COVID example, it’s like, they would sort of say, oh, look, see we’re following the science look, this is what the health people, the doctors, but then they’re not also remembering that for example, unemployment can lead to suicide. And all of these other things, or that being poor can kill people because of the starvation. And they’re going to tip a hundred million people into starvation. So they need to actually take a balanced perspective. And if you take a solely, I’m just minimizing this one risk. Well, then you’re forgetting that all of the other things that are important to our lives and in the energy context, it’s we need energy to make food and to have incubators for children who are struggling and we need energy to survive for all of these things. Now there are a lot of misleading things, as you were saying that get put out there about things in the energy world, right? So they might say, oh, look, the LCOE the levelized cost of electricity costs, right. For the listeners, oh, the LCOE is cheaper for wind and solar look how good wind and solar is going to take over. And we’re going to transition what’s the reality around that, Alex?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah. So I think that the main distortion, as I said, it’s just a total lack of valuing of cost-effective energy production. So low cost on demand, versatile at global scale. Like that’s what I was stressed as the main thing. We’re not even talking about that. But then as part of the devaluing of it, people just treat it as this side issue. And so people can just say all this stuff about it, but nobody treats it with any urgency. They’re like, oh, what if they’re wrong? Like if somebody tells you to get off a certain form of energy and rely on another and they’re wrong, like you should see that as, oh, that’s mass murder. You just see that as like a Texas is just a tiny little preview of it. So we need to really value cost-effective energy. That’s the main thing. But yeah, within that, there’s all sorts of distortions that people don’t think about.

Alex Epstein:

So yeah. I want to talk about some of the Bitcoin related ones, but yeah, we can do LCOE. So levelized cost of electricity is just this one. You see it on Twitter. Oh, look, I saw this thing on levelized cost of electricity and it showed me that solar was cheaper than natural gas. And you just think like, okay, let’s just think logically a bit. So is electricity produced by solar comparable? Can you measure that on the same scale as electricity from natural gas? Well, electricity from natural gas is on demand, right? You can get it when you need it in the quantities you need it. Whereas solar is not that at all. You get that weather permitting. So you get, and you also, it’s important. We’ll talk about this for Bitcoin. It’s not just you get it or not. You get it in the quantity that happens to be available.

Alex Epstein:

And that kind of thing, as we saw in Texas, you know, with solar and with wind like it can go down by a factor of 20 pretty quickly. So it should be very suspicious that, Hey, we’re measuring the price of something. That one thing is totally on demand and controllable and the other thing isn’t. And we’re comparing those. And so that points to the whole fallacy of LCOE, which is basically it’s trying to price a reliable thing and an unreliable thing. And the only way you can really price these things accurately is to look at their full system cost. So look at what is the full cost of having it. But if you look up the solar, the cost of having it is the cost of all these reliable power plants that are needed to give it life support all the time.

Alex Epstein:

And when you look at that, what you see in a macro — what you see in every case is that these things –they’re not cheaper. They’re actually cost adding because you need almost all the same reliable power plants. And when you try to get rid of them, you have what we’ve had in California, in Texas, where you play this reliability chicken, and you lose. So you basically have to have a hundred percent reliable power plants, enough to be sufficient on its own. And then you add all this duplicative infrastructure, the panels, the transmission, et cetera. And that’s why all these grids that are using more solar and wind add on. And that’s just one example of the massive amount of what I would call energy accounting fraud that happens with solar and wind, because you have these things that are total parasites. And yet we use the language. We use language as if they are actually self-sufficient alternatives. And we’ll see, this happens in Bitcoin as well. There’s all sorts of manipulation that goes on.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. One other point before we get into the Bitcoin stuff there is also the common rejoinder that they will come back with. They’ll say, oh, look, but batteries are getting cheaper. What’s the truth around that?

Alex Epstein:

Let’s just make a free market point. First. Like it used to be — we used to live in a world where if you had a good idea about how to allocate capital, you actually had to prove it. And to say this as an underrated system is to infinitely understate the point. Like you actually have to create value. You have to figure out how to combine inputs in a profitable way, which means you’re adding value so that you can sell something and you can out-compete the alternatives. And so today in energy, unfortunately, electricity is the biggest example of this, but it’s extended to other places like electricity is controlled by the government. So it has this government quote unquote planning element, which I would really call just government dictating. It’s not real planning where just we make up these ideas and people can just make up these crackpot ideas that have no basis whatsoever and have never been demonstrated.

Alex Epstein:

And we treat them as credible so that I would put this battery idea in this category, like, oh yeah, let’s just use a bunch of batteries. And then we can be totally self-sufficient because we can have the solar panels and the wind turbines and the batteries. So I would just say, the first thing to notice about this is nobody does this anywhere. So nobody has, there’s no such thing as a self-sufficient solar and wind installation. Nobody does it. Nobody’s proposing doing it. I mean, these off-grid things you can have, but that’s just for very low energy consumption. That’s not, nobody’s producing steel in something like that, nor is anyone proposing to, nor is anyone doing to my knowledge, any Bitcoin, this is going to be interesting. When we’re talking about Bitcoin, nobody’s doing Bitcoin in their own self-contained thing. Everyone doing Bitcoin claiming to use all this renewable is actually on grids that are largely dependent on reliables.

Alex Epstein:

As I call them mostly fossil fuels. And to some extent, hydro, which most of the renewable people actually oppose and hydro actually doesn’t scale very well. So we can talk about the Bitcoin thing, but you’re ultimately, you’re not like to act — If you pay the grid to give you credit for existing hydro, that’s kind of misrepresenting what’s happening, right? Cause if the grid is already hydro, and then you’ve added a bunch of solar and wind, and then that depends on a lot of natural gas, like you’re actually using a lot of natural gas. You can pay them to say, Hey, Bitcoin used the hydro, but you didn’t really use the hydro. And there’s all sorts of this kind of manipulation. So I just say that the thing I want to point out that everyone can observe is that nobody’s actually doing this.

Alex Epstein:

And then I’m saying as a total crackpot scheme, and I was calling out Elon Musk recently because you just run the numbers on what if you needed three days of storage, which I think would be very conservative if you’re depending on the stuff around the world. And he said, yeah, just use solar panels and a few batteries. And I ran the numbers with his prices, which were way too conservative, given the total install cost, but it still ran to a cool $400 trillion for batteries that run out in 10 or 15 years. So that’s four and a half times global GDP. So it’s just a, it’s just a total.

Stephan Livera:

And that’s essentially what global wealth is. Yeah.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah. So, I mean, it’s just, I want to point out this is a total crackpot idea that is being given currency by people like Musk by all these companies that lie about being a hundred percent renewable. and just to reiterate, the scheme that they do is they’re not running on these self-sufficient solar and wind and battery grids. Those do not exist. What they’re doing is they are paying the grid to say, oh, Apple used all the solar and all, everyone else used all the coal.That’s just a total lie. That’s not actually what happens at all. And then sometimes they add their own unreliable electricity, and then they say, well, we definitely deserve credit for that, but Hey, all the electricity is split evenly among everyone and B) it’s not doing anyone a favor to add a lot of unreliable electricity.

Alex Epstein:

We see some in California where we have way too much electricity during certain parts of the day. And then, and we have to sell that sometimes at a loss and then we don’t have enough when we need it. So yeah, these guys are parasites and it’s really dangerous. I’m just emphasizing this because these, for tech savvy people to be lying about the way energy works is very dangerous. And I think it’s a big mistake as we segue into Bitcoin for people in Bitcoin to just parasitically repeat some of these claims about renewable slash unreliables that seem to be convenient in the moment because this is a, I would just say this state chronically dishonest movement, the whole renewable movement. And it’s an largely an anti-market movement that portrays itself as a pro market movement. So yeah. Be very cautious. Yeah.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. And there’s one other point that I get when I’m out there talking about energy. I certainly, I’m not an expert like you are, but I think it’s one of those things where people will say, oh look, but there were subsidies for some of the fossil fuel and, you know, they were in, they were flourishing and just, they had to start with subsidies too. Like, and I think some of that’s dishonest as well because the level of the subsidies being given for the quote unquote renewables nowadays, and the favorable regulation given for wind and solar nowadays, is so much more than what was given for say coal and natural gas. What’s your view?

Alex Epstein:

Definitely. Oh yeah. I mean, I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about with the past. So if you take like oil. Oil came on the market, you know, as a competitive — it was illumination at the time. So you had these different alternatives, including like oil from plants and, you know, kind of like ethanol today. And then you had you know, using coal to create gas, to create light in certain places. They’re actually a pretty competitive market. Oil came out there were certainly no subsidies. The people who invented it as a commercial thing were basically about to be bankrupt. And, you know, from India, they discovered it in the US the first commercial oil on 1859. By 1861, it was doing really well. And like by 1865, the countryside in America was bright. I don’t know of any instances of subsidies back.

Alex Epstein:

And so that’s just a made up thing. I would recommend as a resource, the website I created called energytalkingpoints.com, and you can look up any topic pretty much, but subsidies is on it. And the point you’re making is important, which is that if you just look at direct kind of subsidies and the government is giving money to one form of energy over another yeah. it’s like, does it, at least dozens of times more are given to the unreliables, but you also mentioned the regulation. I think that’s more significant that either by mandate but we’re either mandated to use these unreliables and that’s like an infinite subsidy, or we have regulations that force people to charge the same for reliable as unreliable. Then, as you mentioned, that makes no sense at all. There should be a huge penalty for being unreliable.

Alex Epstein:

And you see this in Texas where that’s just a nightmare scenario because there’s this thing called the wind production tax credit, which gives you a bunch of money to use wind. So it prefers wind over the reliables. It gives you extra money, but then the grid policies also will treat a kilowatt hour as a unit of energy of wind and pay the same as for one from natural gas or from coal or from nuclear. But those aren’t comparable at all. It’s like comparing rotten oranges to apples. And so there’s the whole thing is totally rigged in favor of unreliables and look, fossil fuels are used everywhere around the world. Why is Japan using fossil fuels? Because they have amazing reserves of oil? No, because — fossil fuels are amazing. And we should talk a little bit about why. The two things they have is they have some amazing natural attributes.

Alex Epstein:

They’re naturally stored. So it’s not like flows of intermittent, sunlight and wind they’re stored. So you can deploy them on demand. They’re naturally concentrated, particularly oil. So they store a lot of energy in a small space, which is really good for transportation. And it’s also really good just for being able to do it anywhere because you can move it cheaply around the world and internationally abundant. They’re just more than 10 times more of all of them than we’ve used in the whole history of civilization. So they have this natural storage, natural concentration, natural abundance, and plus they’ve had, you know, a hundred plus year industry that has mastered harnessing their particular attributes in a cost-effective way. So you can think of it as like, why do we use Silicon microchips? Well, it’s a combination of Silicon has these unique attributes that makes it suitable to being a semiconductor, but then you have this semiconductor industry that has, it’s not just a semiconductor industry, it’s a Silicon semiconductor industry.

Alex Epstein:

It’s mastered using Silicon. It’s created, you know, supply chains it has figured out how to get it. It’s figured out how to do all these things with the properties of Silicon. And if somebody said, oh, let’s go net zero Silicon in 30 years, you might think, oh, that’s pretty disastrous because we chose Silicon for good reasons. It’s got really good properties, not clear if germanium is going to be as good. There’s a reason why we use in the first place, but then we have this amazing, a bit knowledge and infrastructure for producing Silicon stuff really well. And we don’t have that for anything else. And so that’s why I think, the same thing with ‘net zero’ it’s like people have no clue that our whole standard of living depends on these properties of fossil fuels and generations of ingenuity, figuring out how to make them cost effective for billions of people. And we’re talking about solar and wind, which are dilute they’re intermittent, and nobody has figured out how to be self-sufficient with them at all, in anything they’re currently parasites, even in electricity, let alone heavy duty transportation, let alone industrial process heat. So people have no idea how far behind these things are and how, again, how parasitical they’re. So they’re worse than subsidized, they’re mandated parasites.

Stephan Livera:

I love the points you’re making there and let’s bring it to the Bitcoin world. Right. So the whole Bitcoin debate, it seems that you know, people don’t get things in the right perspective. And obviously I’d be keen to get your perspective. Are we just boiling the ocean?

Alex Epstein:

What do you mean boiling the oceans in what sense?

Stephan Livera:

As in are we, Bitcoiners, are just boiling the ocean here. I’m just joking, yeah.

Alex Epstein:

Boiling the oceans has numerous. It could be like — boiling the ocean sometimes means — so today I think sometimes it means like, oh, the oceans are actually going to boil. But I think historically it’s like, it’s too big. It’s like, you’re trying to do a good thing, but it’s too big

Stephan Livera:

And you’re never going to be able to…

Alex Epstein:

You never will. But so which sense are you talking?

Stephan Livera:

I meant in the first sense — I was joking. Right. Yeah.

Alex Epstein:

Oh, right. So we can talk about that aspect of it. Yeah, sure. So I think it’s really important to recognize when we’re talking about, okay, what is the impact of rising? So fossil fuels emit CO2 and it tends to aggregate in the atmosphere. So it’s different from say, you know, smog, or you can think about sulfur dioxide that creates smog. Like you admit that, and if you stopped emitting it for a week, it would pretty much all clear out of the atmosphere. It would be gone, right? So CO2 is different, like CO2 clears out of the atmosphere, but it’s in a very slow way. So if you emit it, it’s going to aggregate. So it’s a very legitimate thing to ask, okay, what happens as it aggregates? And so before human beings started producing it in significant quantities, there’s, you know, about 0.03% of the atmosphere CO2 technically 0.027%.

Alex Epstein:

Let’s just say 0.03%. And now it’s a little over 0.04%. So we’ve added this amount to the atmosphere. And during that amount of time, there’s been about a one degree Celsius. So that means 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit rise in temperature. And if you look at the properties of CO2, it’s, what’s called a greenhouse gas or more technically an infrared absorber. So the very quick version is what it does. Is if sunlight hits the earth. Infrared is reflected and CO2 and other greenhouse gases, including water vapor, slow it down. So it gets a little warmer. So this is, I think this is a true property, so we should expect it to get a little warmer, but there’s a question of how much warmer. So it’s interesting that in 170 years, we’ve had one degree of warming and that’s not to say all of it is due to CO2 or you could, people could argue, well, it would actually have been a bit more, but there were cooling factors.

Alex Epstein:

So maybe the CO2, I don’t think that’s very plausible. People do say that. Okay. But we’re still dealing with amounts of warming that are very small in terms of what matters to humans. And so I think there are a couple of questions to ask about it that are pretty reassuring when they’re answered. So one is, what’s the history of this? Are we actually in unprecedented territory or do we have a history where when we increase CO2, just the world goes out of control and everything burns. Well, if that had happened, we probably wouldn’t have a world. And you look at the history of this and it’s pretty weird because it’s given what you hear ‘oh, unprecedented’. It’s actually CO2 levels are really low given history. So there, I think 10 or more times lower than they’ve, you know, 10 times lower than they’d been in the past.

Alex Epstein:

And those were periods of flourishing of all kinds of life, you know, massive plants for dinosaurs and that kind of thing. And in terms of warmth some of those periods were a lot warmer, but some were not nearly as warm. So you don’t have a direct correlation at all between CO2 and temperature. So I think there is some causal relationship, but it’s not the overwhelming relationship throughout history, but even in the warmest periods of the earth those are not unlivable periods for human beings. So even when we’ve had CO2 10 times higher, and it’s a lot warmer, it’s still, those are not, that’s not unlivable. So what are we so worried about human beings are tropical species, basically warming means the world is more tropical. And the other thing you notice that’s important to note most people don’t know is when the world warms, it warms, mostly in cold places and during cold seasons.

Alex Epstein:

And at cold times sets mostly near to the poles in winter and at night, which are times that we tend to want more warming. So why are we so bent out of shape about the earth becoming a more tropical place? And the amount of CO2 that it would take to get to those points in the past? We don’t have no idea how to emit even if we want it. So it’s a weird thing that everyone is worried that the whole world is going to end over levels of CO2 that are very low for the planet’s history, temperatures that are very low for the planet’s history, in a world where we have 15 times more cold related deaths than heat-related deaths, and we are the most adaptable species in history. So it should strike people as, if you think of it from that perspective, it’s very odd.

Alex Epstein:

And I think the answer — what’s really going on is my field is philosophy so people are looking at these things with very wrong philosophy and usually aren’t aware of that. I’d highlight two things. So one thing they’re looking at is they’re looking at the world that is what I call the delicate nurturer premise. The delicate nurturer premise is the idea that nature absent human impact is a delicate nurturer. So it gives us a stable and sufficient and safe environment. But if we impact it a lot, everything’s going to go haywire. And this is the reason this kind of premise is the reason why, historically, as I documented in The moral case for fossil fuels, you know, I had people worry that we’re going to run out of resources and then we’re going to pollute ourselves to death. And then it’s going to get incredibly cold and it’s going to get incredibly warm.

Alex Epstein:

There’s always this view that, oh, there’s this delicate balance in anything we do is going to destroy it. And that’s just not a true view of the world. I call the world wild potential. So it’s dynamic, it’s deficient it’s dangerous. So it has the potential to be a good place, but it needs to be modified dramatically by human intelligence and physical, and it needs to be physically transformed. So, but this delicate nurturer thing is behind a lot of stuff and unfortunately many scientists buy into it. And so there’s just always this expectation that if we have an impact it’s going to be disastrous. And the other thing that I think is going on is you know, what I call our standard of value. So how are we measuring good and bad? And I mentioned this earlier, like if I measure good and bad in terms of what I call the human flourishing standard.

Alex Epstein:

So what is the effect of something on human beings ability to live to their highest potential. And that includes, I want to look at the beneficial effects of something and negative side effects. I think what you notice with climate is people tend to have this view that with climate a good climate is one that we have an impact. So for me, a good climate is one where we can experience abundance and safety. And that includes a climate where we have a lot of machines to deal with it. Whereas most people view a climate that we haven’t changed, you notice the term climate change is viewed as just evil, wrong for us to change things. And that’s not a human flourishing standard. That’s what I call an unimpacted nature standard. it’s the idea that the good is for us to not impact things.

Alex Epstein:

And this idea is a rampant in the culture, and now it hides itself in more palatable ways. Like it calls itself green, which is just kind of a synonym of… But green means minimal impact. Where we talk about the environment. When we talk about the environment, we usually mean an unimpacted environment. Like we talked about the environment. Although, the environment is this thing we want to protect from us. Whereas I think of it as, oh no, the world is a human environment. It’s our environment. And we want it to be good for us. So a lot of things, we want to change, a lot of things we want to keep the same. And so I think with climate, you’ve got this perspective where we think it’s wrong to impact the climate. Cause we’ve got this standard of unimpacted nature. And then because we’re on the delicate nurturer premise, we expect it to be self destructive. And so we can’t see that, oh no, wait, actually we’re in a climate renaissance, we have a better climate state of affairs than any human being has ever had. And we have every reason to expect that to continue, but because we have, and I really believe it’s a religious, primitive, religious perspective that it’s wrong to impact things. And that impacting things is self-destructive like if we had had that perspective as a species 300 years ago, we’d still be all poor and endangered perpetually.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. And we would not be able to speak online and do all of these fancy things.

Alex Epstein:

No, not even — and this wasn’t even imaginable 30 years ago. So…

Stephan Livera:

Yeah, exactly. And so I think it’s people don’t understand how essential it is that we have, you know, cheap and reliable energy to produce things with and then go and innovate and go and improve our ability to, as you said, correctly, deal with our environment. And so we can have air conditioning and we can have, you know, all of these different things or even deal with natural disasters better. Right? Like poverty means, you know, people in Haiti die, you know, all kinds of natural disasters that in the wealthy nations, you can deal with a lot more easily. Right?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah. We should really be part of the education of the culture is really celebrating our level of mastery over nature and how much that depends on machine labor. And unfortunately, it’s just everything, all these different areas are portrayed as oh naturally it was perfect. And then we screwed it up. So people really think, yeah, we’re more in danger from wildfires than ever. We’re more endangered by storms than ever, we’re more endangered by extreme temperatures. It’s just all empirically, completely false. Like anyone, what I call the empowered world is safer from all these things, but it’s important. Also seeing powerless people who have low cost, reliable energy, but also the unempowered world it’s dramatically better off because of the empowered world. There’s this total mythology that everyone seems to be able to get away with that you take. There’s this idea, oh, the poorest people around the world are the biggest victims of climate change.

Alex Epstein:

And so we should pay them reparations. First of all, the poorest people in the world, are the biggest victims of lack of energy. So if we care about them, we want, and lack of freedom by the way. So they need freedom and they need energy. They don’t need like a climate welfare handout. But the other thing is the standard of living in the poorest parts of the world is dramatically increasing. And why is it it’s overwhelmingly because of the productive ability of the empowered world. So you just think about something like drought relief. Like if there’s a drought in a certain place, we can have a drought relief convoy that’s powered by oil, using crops produced using natural gas. We can prevent people from dying, in my next book, which is coming out next year called Fossil future, like of stories from China. And, you know, even just in the late 1800s and just talking in a news story about yeah, 30 million people possibly dead from this flood. That is life in nature where you just like a flood can just wipe everything out, wipes out your crops. You don’t have any kind of machines to do anything with. It’s just, life is so good in all these ways. And it’s so dependent on the level of energy that today we can only get from fossil fuels and nobody can see it. And so I would say again, it’s because of the philosophy, it’s because when we’re looking at the world today, we’re not looking at it from a human flourishing perspective. We’re looking at it from an unimpacted nature perspective. So we think, oh, we’ve had a lot of impact on the world and we know that’s wrong.

Alex Epstein:

So the world must be bad. One final factor that might be interesting is that, you know, there’s a survey that Hans Rosling, the late Hans Rosling would cite, where you would pull college educated European adults about is extreme poverty. So a percentage of people living on less than $2 a day. Is that going up? Is that staying the same? Is that going down? 55% of college educated adults think extreme poverty has been getting worse over the decades, like 55%, 33%, I believe said it’s the same. And 12% I think said it’s getting better. And it’s gotten so much better that since my birth in 1980, it’s gone from 42% to less than 10%. So 4 out of 10 people were living on less than $2 a day adjusted for inflation. Now it’s less than one in 10, oh, leaving aside COVID policy, unfortunately, but that should be celebrated everywhere.

Alex Epstein:

And nobody talks about it. Even the people who know about it. Why? Because of their philosophy, they’re not on a human flourishing standard. They’re looking at the world as if it’s evil for us to impact. And so they don’t care about the fact that the earth has never been a better place for human life. And what I’m really trying to do is start to get is promote this framework of let’s look at the world from a human flourishing perspective, and let’s not have this dog, whether it’s a delicate nurturer. Let’s recognize that nature is wild potential and that to harness its potential, we need low cost, reliable energy. And that fossil fuels are by far the best source of that for most people for in the coming decades.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. I’ll tell you what I really like about this is it’s like, we need to really reframe the conversation around energy, right? And so even in my world, in the Bitcoin world, we get into these constant debates with the people who are coming in and basically throwing rocks at us about, oh, see, you’re not using enough renewables. You’re doing all these is carbon emissions. Whereas we actually — and then what happens is other people in the Bitcoin world are trying to come out and say, no, look, see we’re actually using 30% renewables or 40% of that energy in

Alex Epstein:

There’s even the 76% stat, which is a total lie which is being repeated, unfortunately by very smart people.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. And I think, I think the truth of that is something like it’s, I think it’s something like 70, maybe it’s 76% of miners are using renewable as part of their mix, but the actual…

Alex Epstein:

Using any…

Stephan Livera:

Right. And so the actual number is something closer to 30 to 40%, but even then, we’re coming at it from the wrong frame of mind. Right? Because as you just said, it be us about trying to kowtow and say, oh no, look please, Mr. Fiat journalists, please don’t go after us because we’re using lots of your renewables — we should just be saying, no, we need reliable energy. Like that’s just…

Alex Epstein:

And yes, I put it on two levels. I agree with you totally about the framing, like as important as it is to refute some of the fallacies, the main thing is the whole framing of this is wrong. So the main thing is like, look, what do we use energy for? We use energy to create value. Energy allows machines to produce all kinds of value that improve our lives. Premise of Bitcoin should be, this is an incredible value. I’m not an expert on Bitcoin. So I can’t say definitively like, oh, X prediction is right. But anyone who’s in Bitcoin that I like their premise is this is an incredible value because it gets us off the evil of Fiat money, which I do. Definitely. I’m sure that’s an evil. And so this, you think about like the ideals that Bitcoin people are fighting for in terms of like an actually free monetary system where we actually get to choose our currency and where it can’t be inflated by people at a whim.

Alex Epstein:

Like that is a huge value to human flourishing. And so should be, yeah, we are proud to use energy to produce this kind of value. And we admire everyone who uses energy to improve their lives. And the sum total of that is a world, the best world that has ever existed. And yeah, we’re proud to use fossil fuels as part of that. And we are also happy to use any alternatives that can do the job as well as fossil fuels. And so we want to innovate in these various ways. Like it should be a total pride in using energy to create value that advances humanity.

Stephan Livera:

I love that. Yeah. And I think that’s something that hopefully some of the listeners are going to take that away instead of trying to come back and say, oh no, please, we’re using renewable. You should just say, no, we’re going to use lots of energy. And it’s a good thing. It’s a good thing for humanity. And we need to like actually reframe the whole Bitcoin energy debate because it’s not in a productive way right now.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah. And it’s just not true. This idea that Bitcoin is going to just cause this renewable revolution. I’ve indicated some of the reasons I’m going to post on Twitter, just my name @AlexEpstein. So the next week or two, I’m going to post a thread with some detail on this. I mean, it’ll be the overall reframing, but then some technical detail. But the short answer is anything that uses a lot of energy. Bitcoin does use a lot of energy. And as far as I know, it intends to use a lot more, anything that uses a lot of energy in today’s world and the world, the future is going to mean using a lot of fossil fuels. So you can do all sorts of accounting gimmickry which people do that is not reality.

Alex Epstein:

In reality, using more energy means using more fossil fuels because the unreliables are not self-sufficient. So they depend usually on natural gas. And if you want to have a competitive thing, you need energy. At least most of the time, the stats I’ve seen say, you know, in terms of like mining equipment is 45% or so of the cost, you cannot have something where it’s like wind turbines. If you saw it in Texas, even before it froze, I posted a lot of graphics. They are just totally craters. Like you can’t have something that’s cratering for days or where you have these solar and wind powered mining equipment. And then it goes down by a factor of 20 for awhile. Like if you think you can go do that without parasiting on the rest of the people on the grid. But as far as I know what people are doing is they’re hooking into grids they’re taking credit for existing hydro, or if they’re building new hydro, I think that’s great.

Alex Epstein:

Or they’re coming up with all these stupid deals where again, the grid gives them the privileged status of renewable and gives others, you know, the Scarlet letter of non-renewal like the Scarlet end. So this is just, if you stand for honest money, you should not be engaging in any of this. And you should not be repeating these and rant. I’ve seen really smart people talk about like the 76% again, 76, it’s like saying 76% of people eat chocolate. So therefore 76% of food consumption is chocolate. No, 76% of the people have some chocolate, but it’s much, much less. Don’t lie — don’t engage in these lies. Don’t apologize. Be proud if you are doing something you think is valuable, you’re making the world a better place as is everyone else who’s using fossil fuels to make their lives better and to make other’s lives better.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. And I guess just to give some context as well for listeners, obviously these numbers will change, right. If we’re all bullish on Bitcoin, we think these numbers are going way higher, but at least the current numbers as I’ve seen from my friend, Hass McCook who has also done some research on this. He has pointed out that current Bitcoin energy usage of the miners on an annualized basis is something like 116, call it 120 terawatt hours per year. And this is globally, we’re talking of 160,000 terawatt hours, energy produced per year. Right?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah. I don’t think this is that good in argument. I know some people do. I have some friends in Bitcoin who think this is some amazing argument, but look, Bitcoin, that is a lot of energy. So one, let’s just say conservatively, like one 1000th worth the energy that is that is a lot of energy. And so they’ll say they’ll compare it to countries. So there’ll be like, oh, it’s this percentage of Great Britain like that is using a lot of energy. Again, the numbers are supposed to go up. So you can’t say like, oh, we’re small. And then I see these ridiculous things. Like they’ll say, oh, you know, 50,000 terawatt hours are waste. And so are you focused on Bitcoin? You can be focused on waste. Really? You really think the world is waste. What does that mean?

Alex Epstein:

They’re wasting 50. Imagine you could save 2000 of those terawatt hours easily. You would be incredibly rich. So when people call it waste, we could go to the technical details. But that should just smell like BS that they’re saying basically a third of the world’s energy is waste. So no, you’ve got to own, it does use a lot of energy and there are people who don’t think it’s valuable at all. I don’t have the sector by sector breakdown. You can take other sectors that people for sure say, oh, Bitcoin uses more energy than this sector. I don’t think Bitcoin is valuable. It’s just a bunch of people speculating, hoping that it goes up. So the point is you want to defend the value that you’re creating and you want to defend the value of energy and the righteousness of you using energy, not saying, oh, we’re just, it’s not that much.

Alex Epstein:

Or make pretending there’s all this waste, or don’t pay any attention to us. Like, no, we are proud to do this. I think that, and there are some really great arguments. I mean, one thing I’m excited about, and the reason why I’ve been coming on disproportionate, or at least agreeing to come on a disproportionate number of Bitcoin podcasts, this is one of the early ones, but I have some more, I agreed to go on. You know, you’ve got people who are really engaging with this issue, honestly. So, you know Saifedean Ammous and Marty Bent and you, and [right] there, I’m really glad to see it. I’m really excited that people in this field that’s very hot are thinking rationally about energy. And I hope that, you know, I’m seeing others sort of buy into this, oh, like let’s max out renewable. And that kind, I mean, not just Elon Musk, but some people I think are of considerably higher character than he is. And I would just — I hope that you and others like you and maybe me less directly can influence them to think about this in a different way and to not be apologetic and certainly not to engage in lying that will easily be refuted by me or by your actual opponents.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah, of course. And so I think it’s a good time for all the listeners out there to start reframing our conversation about Bitcoin and energy usage. It’s time to start being proud. Let’s start there saying, Hey, we want to use more energy and we should be proud that and like openly speaking out against some of the, I think one of the risks, and maybe it’s not a huge risk, but it’s still it’s coming. Right? It seems that there’s more and more government regulation trying to force people into using unreliables. And so I think this is why it matters that we get the messaging right in our Bitcoin world. So for the Bitcoin listeners out there that you’re actually cognizant of what’s going on is that the government and people are trying to lobby the government to make the government have favorable regulation for the unreliables and try to make it look like unreliables are becoming a thing when it’s actually just because of subsidies and government regulation.

Alex Epstein:

I would just say I have such a low opinion of the people doing that. And I really do think that, for example, things like the Texas blackouts, I think that these companies that are lying about renewable usage, they have a huge — I think they really have blood on their hands because it’s such a convincing thing when people are like, oh, Apple can be a hundred percent renewable. Facebook can Google can, oh, so let’s just build a bunch of wind turbines in Texas. Let’s have a growing population, but we don’t need these coal plants. And we don’t need to add too much and it’s just you’re set. And this is just a taste of things to come if we don’t change course, but you know, blackouts are, so when you’re talking about an existential threat, like prolonged blackouts, like that is a real existential threat to human beings anywhere where they exist. And so yeah, you want to be, again, there’s a lot of good Bitcoin people and I think they will win the moral debate. I’m seeing a lot of good stuff, so I’m excited, but yeah, anyone who’s listening join our side. The other side is it’s might be expedient for a moment, but you don’t want to be on a side where you can’t be fully honest and where you’re joining a cause that has already killed a lot of people and will kill a lot more. And that is definitely true of the renewable.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah also I wanted to get your thoughts on nuclear as well. Okay, so what I’ve seen, some people say with nuclear is that, oh, it’s because there’s some regulation that make it difficult for people and because entrepreneurs don’t have certainty, right? That they can’t now engage in long-term projects because they’re worried that if energy becomes a political football, that they might try to invest in some project and then the government basically pulls the rug and says, no, you’re not doing enough unreliables. How are you thinking about that? And how are you thinking about the future of nuclear energy?

Alex Epstein:

Yes. So I think of nuclear as criminalized. And so I’m in favor of decriminalizing it. I mean, so nuclear is very, you know, I mentioned fossil fuels are naturally stored, naturally concentrated, naturally abundant. So nuclear is even more of those things. It’s much, you know, it’s stored, it’s much more concentrated. It’s very abundant. If you look at uranium and thorium in the earth. So it has a great basis for being an amazing source of energy. Now it’s a lot more complex to harness than fossil fuels. You have to factor that in, but we did have in the seventies, you know, relatively cost competitive electricity from nuclear, certainly beyond anything solar and wind have ever achieved. I mean, you can really have almost self-sufficient electricity, at least with nuclear in the longterm. You know, we even see, we use an aircraft carriers and submarines, so it could have portable kinds of applications and it’s good at generating heat.

Alex Epstein:

So it could have industrial kinds of applications. There’s all the reasons in the world to be enthusiastic about its potential. And we know for a fact that because of the anti-nuclear movement, the government has made it virtually impossible to do. And so that includes the uncertainty. They talk about it as a huge thing, because if you know that our project can be shut down at any time, you have to factor that into your calculations, but there’s just at every level. And I’m going to document this more in the future, but at every level it’s just made unnecessarily expensive. And the whole premise is that nuclear is uniquely dangerous and thus it needs to be, it’s basically like everyone engaging in nuclear is a potential mass murdering terrorist. And that’s just not at all true. Nuclear is actually the safest technology. The nuclear material and the way that it’s used cannot explode, which basically every other form of energy can explode, which is the big danger can go out of control, even like a hydro dam.

Alex Epstein:

That can kill a hundred thousand people very quickly if it just explodes. Whereas nuclear, it can melt down, which is very rare. But if it does, you have a lot of time to get away and talk about Chernobyl and nobody even tried that reactor. And even then the death count is still makes it way lower than every other technology. The bottom line is nuclear is the safest source of safest energy technology. And it’s treated as, by far the most dangerous, and that makes it criminalized. And so it needs to be decriminalized. And I’m all in favor of that. But one fact that we have to recognize is that as a slow process, I’m all in favor of it. But as a near term, substitute for fossil fuels, like that’s not happening. I’m all in favor of pushing for the framework that would make that possible, but it’s not happening.

Alex Epstein:

And nobody even knows how the knowledge doesn’t exist about how to do it globally at scale, even for like, like you’d have to get all these people trained and you have to figure out all these things, it’s a shrinking industry in much of the world. So I love it as a technology. And I think it’s totally evil how it’s been treated and everyone who advocates for renewables is being a religious zealot. Like that’s the whole unimpacted nature idea, or let’s be natural, renewable. Like, why are you in favor of renewable? Like if you want low carbon say low carbon, but renewable is a religious term, not an economic or a scientific term. So everyone should embrace nuclear. We should decriminalize nuclear should be very enthusiastic. We should recognize far superior to the unreliables. But it’s like, it’s unfortunately an early stage thing. And so what that means is, and then you have hydro, which is great, but hydro is limited by location.

Alex Epstein:

And so there are more locations you can do it. And a lot of those probably make sense to develop, but it’s still quite limited. And so then that’s, maybe long-term, there’s some stuff in it’s called deep geothermal, but that’s still not commercialized at all. So what that means is you have an energy starved world overwhelmingly run on fossil fuels. If you want a world where more people are empowered, you need more fossil fuels. You need a fossil future. That is the reality. If you want a world with more energy, including more energy for Bitcoin, you need more fossil fuel use in the future. And that’s something we should embrace. And people in Bitcoin should be embracing the idea of more energy use. So Bitcoin is one example, but the world needs to use more energy. That’s going to lead to a better world for more people, and we should be proud of that.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. So let’s say listeners that are out there are onboard, right? They are, you know, pro fossil fuel. Pro-Nuclear, they’re onboard with this idea. Let’s be proud about energy, I guess the final question. Do you have any tips for them out there when they’re trying to advocate or maybe talking to their family and friends? Do you have any tips to share for them in terms of advocating?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, definitely. I mean, the main tip I would say is go onto the website, energytalkingpoints.com and sign up for the email list because I have a list that helps with that. And that website has a ton of resources. So I’d say that’s the main thing to do. And then following my Twitter as well has a lot of current stuff there, but I’ll give one piece of advice that I think will help you in thinking about it and the issue of framing. You really want to think. So a framework is a starting structure. So I know, you know, physical, like a building, like a building has a starting structure, a car has a starting structure. And you want to think about like, how is this conversation being structured? And you’ll get a feel about, is it being structured in a way that’s conducive to us reaching the right conclusion or that’s not?

Alex Epstein:

And some of my work trying to think of a good resource for this, if people just email me individually, if you want some stuff on this, just email me at alex@alexepstein.com and I’ll send you some stuff. But the basic idea is once you understand how conversations are framed, you can do a lot to frame them. So one simple example is I’ll often ask, like you raised this at the beginning, like, Hey, would you agree that we need to look at the benefits and the side effects of all the alternatives? So we can’t just look at the negative side effects of fossil fuels or the benefits of wind. We have to look at the benefits and side effects of all of them, and we have to weigh them carefully, just like we would for a vaccine or antibiotic. And that’s a framing thing where you’re framing what I would call full context analysis, where you’re looking at the full context, not just the negative or the positive, and almost everyone will agree, do that, but almost no one will do it by default. The default is only look at the negatives of fossil fuels only look at the positives of solar and wind. And so that’s just an example where by framing the conversation in the right way, you then enable the other person to get to the right conclusion, much more. It’s much more likely. And so I’m a big fan of doing that in all of my communication. There are others examples that I can send.

Stephan Livera:

Excellent. So thanks very much, Alex. I’ve really enjoyed chatting with you. And of course, before we let you go, where can listeners find you online?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah. So as I said, energytalkingpoints.com and make sure sign up for the mailing list and then twitter.com/alexepstein. And then you can, you can buy my book, which is behind me, the moral case for fossil fuels. Just make sure you buy the first edition there’s currently for weird reasons, a revised edition that actually doesn’t exist. That’s for sale. Hopefully that’ll be taken off in a month or two. You’ll be able to pre-order fossil future but I’d say number one thing, energytalkingpoints.com.

Stephan Livera:

Excellent. Thanks Alex. And I’m looking forward to chatting again soon.

Alex Epstein:

Thanks.