I know it's not JuRY's style to push the hard questions on guests (unless it's to troll Jen), so I'd like to entertain a few critique's on Epstein. To be fair, I haven't read his book and maybe he has actual data to support each of the unchallenged assertions he made and they just didn't get to them on the interview, but I can only respond to what was said.
Upfront, philosophically I'll admit I disagree. He advocates for a moral case of human flourishing seemingly ignoring harm to all non-human life. Dismissing the suffering of all non-human life is at the very least an incomplete moral framework, but for arguments sake I'll grant the human flourishing moral position is the goal.
He argues that resilience is outpacing climate harm so it's okay to continue using fossil fuels. This is like saying that smoking causes lung cancer and heart disease, but medicine has gotten so much better that your risk of dying from those diseases is lower than ever. Therefore, smoking is actually compatible with human flourishing. No, it just means your better at mitigating the damage so long as you have a costly medicine.
There's also an implicit assumption that the rate of change to climate with increasing CO2 remains linear. While CO2 and warming has a linear relationship, the outcomes are nonlinear because of feedback. The damage from a 100 year temperature increase will skew heavily to the end of the period. Therefore, in order for technology to continue to mitigate the increasing danger, technological improvements must increase nonlinearly as well. While it is well established that increasing temperature will increase extreme climate events, there is no promise that technological progress will continue to accelerate at pace.
He argues that if energy needs subsidies they must not be valuable enough. But there are copious examples of a valuable commodity needing subsidies. We need new antibiotics but their overuse limits their efficacy so we incentivize their creation with subsidies . Nobody is arguing new antibiotics aren't needed because we need to subsidize them. There may also be long term payoffs the market doesn't price in. An analogy for this would be the early Internet subsidies even though we had newspapers. Why subsidize a new information exchange technology when people get along fine with the paper?
It all boils down to, existing policies to prevent harm are bad, so let's just get rid of the policies. Why is it never, fix the policy AND prevent the harm? People drive giant trucks because of emissions regulations? then change the regulations to incentivize smaller vehicles. Swapping energy credits is a bad idea? Then stop the swapping by changing the law! How is this not the obvious answer?
I was going insane listening to the argument that "increasing wealth means changes to the climate are fine". Maybe one of the most shortsighted takes on climate change I've heard in a very long time, totally ignoring the fact that developing countries will benefit massively from implementing things like solar and wind power. That hospital in Africa he was happy to bring up so much? If there was reliable solar power supporting it for the base grid downtimes many of the problems he lists would be solved or at least mitigated. How many subsidies have the fossil fuel industry used over the last 100+ years to get to the point that they are now? And they still demand aid for drilling explorations, how does that meaningfully differ from funding renewable tech development (he did at least mention that a little at the very end but it felt fairly handwavy and both-sides). I can be convinced that there is bloat and inefficiency in the way things are done now but his approach seems wildly out of line from any kind of approach that makes sense for the human race more than a generation or two out from us.
If you care to read Fossil Future he is very detailed on how much cheaper and reliable fossil fuel energy is compared to renewables which he believes exists in a halo of misinformation around their reliability and expense. That’s his thing.
I will read it, thanks for the reminder. I appreciate you bringing him on as a contrasting voice to the common understanding, and maybe some of my annoyance is misplaced. I have experience in R&D for organic photovoltaics so I'm not 100% ignorant of the realities of the economics, I just feel like they're being exaggerated to sound worse than they really are. Keep up the good work Justin!
For anyone who is struggling with Alex Epstein’s arguments and doesn’t want to buy his book to figure it out, he made an AI chatbot of himself regarding energy policy (https://alexepstein.ai/chat/). Consider throwing some of your questions at that first. Then maybe you will be willing to give his position another look (and maybe buy his book at that point).
I just don't understand how he thinks he can compete with the walking ball of energy that is Susan Collins
Good discussion with Alex Epstein.
I know it's not JuRY's style to push the hard questions on guests (unless it's to troll Jen), so I'd like to entertain a few critique's on Epstein. To be fair, I haven't read his book and maybe he has actual data to support each of the unchallenged assertions he made and they just didn't get to them on the interview, but I can only respond to what was said.
Upfront, philosophically I'll admit I disagree. He advocates for a moral case of human flourishing seemingly ignoring harm to all non-human life. Dismissing the suffering of all non-human life is at the very least an incomplete moral framework, but for arguments sake I'll grant the human flourishing moral position is the goal.
He argues that resilience is outpacing climate harm so it's okay to continue using fossil fuels. This is like saying that smoking causes lung cancer and heart disease, but medicine has gotten so much better that your risk of dying from those diseases is lower than ever. Therefore, smoking is actually compatible with human flourishing. No, it just means your better at mitigating the damage so long as you have a costly medicine.
There's also an implicit assumption that the rate of change to climate with increasing CO2 remains linear. While CO2 and warming has a linear relationship, the outcomes are nonlinear because of feedback. The damage from a 100 year temperature increase will skew heavily to the end of the period. Therefore, in order for technology to continue to mitigate the increasing danger, technological improvements must increase nonlinearly as well. While it is well established that increasing temperature will increase extreme climate events, there is no promise that technological progress will continue to accelerate at pace.
He argues that if energy needs subsidies they must not be valuable enough. But there are copious examples of a valuable commodity needing subsidies. We need new antibiotics but their overuse limits their efficacy so we incentivize their creation with subsidies . Nobody is arguing new antibiotics aren't needed because we need to subsidize them. There may also be long term payoffs the market doesn't price in. An analogy for this would be the early Internet subsidies even though we had newspapers. Why subsidize a new information exchange technology when people get along fine with the paper?
It all boils down to, existing policies to prevent harm are bad, so let's just get rid of the policies. Why is it never, fix the policy AND prevent the harm? People drive giant trucks because of emissions regulations? then change the regulations to incentivize smaller vehicles. Swapping energy credits is a bad idea? Then stop the swapping by changing the law! How is this not the obvious answer?
To his credit. The tangible things he is doing include your last two examples even if you disagree with how he got there.
I was going insane listening to the argument that "increasing wealth means changes to the climate are fine". Maybe one of the most shortsighted takes on climate change I've heard in a very long time, totally ignoring the fact that developing countries will benefit massively from implementing things like solar and wind power. That hospital in Africa he was happy to bring up so much? If there was reliable solar power supporting it for the base grid downtimes many of the problems he lists would be solved or at least mitigated. How many subsidies have the fossil fuel industry used over the last 100+ years to get to the point that they are now? And they still demand aid for drilling explorations, how does that meaningfully differ from funding renewable tech development (he did at least mention that a little at the very end but it felt fairly handwavy and both-sides). I can be convinced that there is bloat and inefficiency in the way things are done now but his approach seems wildly out of line from any kind of approach that makes sense for the human race more than a generation or two out from us.
If you care to read Fossil Future he is very detailed on how much cheaper and reliable fossil fuel energy is compared to renewables which he believes exists in a halo of misinformation around their reliability and expense. That’s his thing.
I will read it, thanks for the reminder. I appreciate you bringing him on as a contrasting voice to the common understanding, and maybe some of my annoyance is misplaced. I have experience in R&D for organic photovoltaics so I'm not 100% ignorant of the realities of the economics, I just feel like they're being exaggerated to sound worse than they really are. Keep up the good work Justin!
For anyone who is struggling with Alex Epstein’s arguments and doesn’t want to buy his book to figure it out, he made an AI chatbot of himself regarding energy policy (https://alexepstein.ai/chat/). Consider throwing some of your questions at that first. Then maybe you will be willing to give his position another look (and maybe buy his book at that point).