This review is a wonderful model of clear and comprehensive thinking. I will re-read it several times, learning more and savoring it each time. It will influence how I structure my talking points when I discuss things with my friends, many of whom are intelligent but reluctant to evaluate critically what has become the standard climate interpretation. Thank you for this post!
> “But what about X?” Trust me: For almost any X you have in mind, Fossil Future has answers.
What does Epstein say about particulate air pollution from burning coal? (It seems to me like coal is pretty clearly anti-human because of its immediate health effects, in a way that's not true of fossil fuels or CO2 production in general.)
You are missing his entire framework to evaluate the options and tradeoffs. Epstein clearly supports environmental regulations, as it is a societal good to have clean air. In no way does he just blanket state that a place like the US should go hell bent for leather with coal. However it might be the best option best for a less developed country that doesn’t have the ability to set up a gas or nuclear system because electricity is modernity.
If I were at a physical bookstore or library holding this book, I'd open up the index and then skim a few passages to try to answer the above question, since I think it's pretty informative as to whether or not it's worth reading more.
[I agree with your point that it may nevertheless be the best solution to a particular problem, and elaborate that taxes are better than bans because they allow for discovering those solutions, but it seems pretty important whether he thinks the main cost to coal is the CO2 production or other forms of pollution.]
His analysis framework in the book acknowledges both CO2 and pollution as coal side effects, while also evaluating the benefits that coal provides (available, inexpensive, easy to store and transport, dispatchable, etc.)
To be clear, that final argument is more of an argument against any total replacement, not an argument against the total replacement being nuclear.
I agree we need to temper the "absolute zero carbon in the near future" expectation, though the fact that the extreme is ridiculous is not an argument against more reasonable versions of the "less fossil fuels" crowd.
To be clear about the prior beliefs I'm arguing from: I think we do need to get off carbon-emitting fuels as quickly as possible, but I think we've already reached the maximum transition speed and the people arguing for more radical change are unrealistic.
Going back to nuclear, I'd note that with a more agile regulatory environment, new designs could be created which are both significantly more powerful and significantly cheaper to construct. Still not enough for a complete conversion by 2050, but then again, we don't need a COMPLETE transition by that time.
And then there's the fact that in some places, existing power plants can be retrofitted with advanced geothermal... if only we were better at digging holes.
I think the idea of comparing “expert” consensus on climate change to “expert” consensus on slavery is really disingenuous. Slavery’s existence is purely a moral question, not a scientific one. Of course there are always trade offs that require moral reasoning in science, but to explore those questions we need as deep an understanding of the objective facts as possible. I feel like the slavery comparison is used solely because of the emotional resonance it carries, and this type of appeal immediately turns me off to whatever else he says. Eugenics is a little bit better of a comparison, but I still think to most people the yuck factor of racism is all they know about that era.
However, it would seem we would agree that the “knowledge system” is tainted such that most of the “communicators” have a clear ideological position on fossil fuels and any presentation of the “science” is obviously tainted by their ideas of the future. These people see climate change as a means to fundamentally reorganize society in a way that would almost certainly leave us considerably worse off than before. Like many others have reported, COVID completely shattered any shred of faith I had in government institutions to handle large scale complicated challenges. After seeing how that was handled, I do not want these people anywhere near climate change. Before COVID I would have been much more skeptical of a book like this.
I think it’s clear where Bryan stands on this given his immigration stance, but I’m curious how the book deals with the obvious implication that climate change would inevitably be much more destabilizing in developing countries. The tragedy in Yemen is, at its core, driven by a severe shortage of water. What happens when severe drought and environment crisis hits other parts of the middle east and Africa? Hopefully these questions are thoughtfully explored in the book, otherwise I have a hard time taking him seriously as a thinker.
Yemen has many problems, the most acute: the war the Saudi Crown prince launched at it. Putin-style, I'd say. - Near universal addiction to khat is another. General political instability is another (euphemistically speaking). Pretty poor place, obviously. It has MUCH MORE water than Saudi Arabia. Just the Saudis have plenty of super-cheap fossil energy (and solar). Which makes life in Saudi very cushy, indeed (worked there 5.5 years) - despite a "climate" as brutal as it gets. (Till I had a car, I walked with two water bottles - one for drinking, one for pouring water over my head. 15 minute walks.)
Yeah the khat thing is insane, that accounts to almost 50% of their water use! I’m not sure where/how youre measuring that Yemen has “more water” than SA. Perhaps Yemen has more fresh water (per capita), but their aquifers are certainly depleting much faster. SA gets over half their water from desalination, I’m pretty sure they lead the world in this regard. Apparently due to the geography, desalination in Yemen is extremely impractical. The cost of pumping desalinated water from the Red Sea to the high elevation population centers would be insane, over $10 per cubic meter just for the pumping.
Right, still: KSA has no river (except a short one in the capital from waste-water). And rainfall is a rare thing: People go out to watch. 3 times a year in Riyadh, maybe, some drops. Not filling up any ground-water. - Yemen is hit by monsoons, that partly why people settle in the mountains. "Does Yemen have monsoons? In the summer months, the monsoon from the south-west brings the highest rainfall in the whole of the Arabian peninsula: with annual totals of 750 to 1,000mm (roughly 30 to 40 inches), about the same as many parts of the UK". Neither Darfur, nor Somalia nor Yemen are doomed by water-scarcity. It's politics.
In what I believe is the spirit of the article and book it is based on I would ask, is the water issue in Yemen more about climate change or more about the country being poor? What is the better hope for Yemen and places like it, that we stop any future climate change (or as implied by your point, reverse any that has happened) on a global scale, or that Yemen can be a more prosperous country, almost certainly with the aid of substantial fossil fuel consumption?
While it may have exacerbated things, I don’t think climate change was the main driver of the water crisis in Yemen. It’s main driver is simply the fact that there is barely any sources of fresh water to begin with. The ground water is the only source and it’s rapidly depleting to over a km deep in some places. I was more so using it as an example of what it looks like when essential resources are so scarce.
If nothing is done to curb fossil fuel use, and anywhere from the moderately bad to worst case climate predictions end up being correct, you’re looking at large swaths of the Middle East, Africa, and other areas becoming so unbearable in the summer that it will be inhospitable to humans in 75 or so years. All of the wealth these countries built on fossil fuels will have to be invested in finding ways to cool down their cities and make them habitable (you see this already in Qatar). Sure I can imagine a scenario where they get it together a develop a solution that allows them to continue thriving, but I think it’s much more likely that we have s huge humanitarian crisis on our hands. One that could have maybe on some level been prevented if we would have invested more $ in carbon capture/clean energy in 2022.
Again, hopefully he addresses this possibility in the book. I know there are complicated trade offs here, especially for developing nations. But I think the “potential upside” discussion of climate change is kind of insane. It’s the positives of fossil fuels vs the negatives of climate change, not vice versa.
Not allowing poor countries to develop using fossil energy is an ongoing catastrophe that is happening RIGHT NOW and it is far worse than 2C warming in 2100 by pretty much any IPCC estimate (even the unrealistically high scenarios of 4.5C).
What is obvious to almost all modern people about racism was not always so obvious- it took time to develop ways of thinking that prioritized individual liberty and root out that awfulness. Plus, humans were only able to technically eliminate slavery and maintain living standards once enough primary energy was available to stop using people as slaves to do work- it is not a coincidence that the end of slavery and the burning of coal and steam engine development overlap. I’m sure there were “experts” back then giving all sorts of reasons to perpetuate race based slavery, and that is the point he is making.
In What We Owe The Future, Will MacAskill argues that abolishing slavery actually didn't have much to do with the economics of it. Britain ended its slave trade while it was still extremely lucrative for them—and spent a bunch of money forcing other countries to stop too. Sounds like it's a topic of debate among historians.
> always excluding nuclear energy and usually excluding large- scale hydroelectric energy
This is blatantly incorrect. Many environmental activists include hydro and nuclear in “renewable” energy. Nuclear energy was recently declared renewable by European Commission.
I searched for other works of Epstein. Now an "ad hominem argument"; I found an essay of Epstein et al. (2006) with a strange application of Randian philosophy against Just War Theory ("Just War Theory” vs. American Self-Defense). A few quotes:
„The requirements of 'proportionality' and 'discrimination' are deadly to the nation that takes them seriously. A nation [...] must be morally confident […] of the rightness of killing whomever in enemy nations it must to preserve the lives and liberty of its citizens. [...] may well require killing more of the enemy's citizens than the enemy has killed of ours. [...] break the spirit of a foreign people [...] This often requires killing civilians, and in some cases even targeting them, [...]“
"Insofar as the innocents ['such as dissidents, freedom fighters, and children'] cannot be isolated in the achievement of our military objectives, however, sparing their lives means sacrificing our own; and although the loss of their lives is unfortunate, we should kill them without hesitation."
„Given that a nation's civilian population is a crucial, physically and spiritually indispensable part of its initiation of force [...] it is a morally legitimate target of the retaliation of a victim nation. Any alleged imperative to spare noncombatants as such is unjust and deadly.“
„Doing whatever is necessary in war means doing whatever is necessary. Once the facts are rationally evaluated, if it is found that using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran's nuclear facilities or flattening Fallujah to end the Iraqi insurgency will save American lives, then these actions are morally mandatory, and to refrain from taking them is morally evil.“
“[...] the strategists recognize that the freedom of an enemy country is at most a means to an end for the innocent nation, never an end in itself. [...] our leadership, political and military, is crippled by the morality of altruism, embodied in the tenets of Just War Theory.“
This indicates to me that his work is probably at least "somewhat unreliable", if not "extremely". Changed since 2006?
Your average person (and nearly all of us in most domains) can only reason empirically. They touch a stove, they learn not to do it again.
Sometimes they can vaguely apply the stove lesson to similar concepts, but the further away you get the harder it gets.
A big downside of this is that people usually need to screw up when facing novel new stimuli in order to learn. The question is how much damage will be done during the learning process. Sometimes the answer may be "quite a lot." Especially if the lead time or relation between action and outcome are long and tenuous.
What expertise is suppose to do is help you to navigate novel stimuli without having to touch the stove. By using those big brains to master the abstractions to guess what will happen when you touch the stove without touching it.
But the big brain people have their own incentive structures and failings (they learn empirically too). Often they are quite willing to dupe others and even themselves.
A consequence of recent times is hopefully people learning to mistrust experts whenever they make claims that require large sacrifices from society at large in the hopes of avoiding theoretical dangers.
"In my terminology, they see nature as sacred, and thus as eternal, pure, not in conflict with other sacred things, and to be sharply distinguished from, not mixed with, and not at any price sacrificed for, profane things. We are not to calculate such choices, but to intuit them, aesthetically."
You could apply this to most areas we are failing today. Education is sacred. Diversity is sacred. Etc. (even immigration is sacred for Bryan)
----
Epstein acts as if the only force strong enough to resist pressures from seeing nature as sacred is seeing something else as even more sacred. And for that Epstein picks: human flourishing.
----
When people ask me what I want to maximize for I usually say human flourishing, as it at least prevents from zeroing in on a single value and maximizing it at the expense of everything else.
The question though is what exactly is "human flourishing". It can never have a concrete answer we will all feel 100% satisfied with.
----
"He treats that as so sacred that not even mild taxes on fossil fuels can be tolerated. As an economist I’m sad to think we can’t make a more reasonable choice in the middle, where everything we value gets traded off via conscious calculation mediated by mundane prices. But, alas, I don’t know that Epstein is wrong on this key sacredness point."
----
I think its mature to accept we need some sacredness to function, and then focus on what the best kind of sacredness is.
Tyler Cowen's review (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/01/alex-epsteins-fossil-future.html) is disappointing. There is some sort of mental block people have, where for example Cowen doesn't present an argument but simply announces "we cannot simply keep on [emitting carbon]" as if this is obviously self-evident. But why though? The world is an unpredictable place, but humans are incredibly adaptable. One could imagine humanity keep burning fossil fuels for centuries until the supply runs out, all the while progressing rapidly at developing all the technology we need to thrive in a much warmer world -- advanced agricultural technology, aggressive forest management, weather-resilient infrastructure, etc.
Ad hominem in extremo: Any person called "Epstein" will be sidelined from the media discourse, at least in a positive perspective. Since Jeffrey E., 2005-2019. - Anyone saying what Alex E. wrote, will be widely ignored anyway. Lomborg, Ridley, Gates: "oh, those (2/3 alt-right) cranks".
Still: as "A. Einstein", Alex might have a chance. Can't names be changed? Any Adolphe Hütler would be helped out even by German bureaucrazy.
I have not read these books yet, but they are next on my list. I feel both sides of the argument have valid points, and I do believe as humans we need to strike a balance between fossil fuels and renewable energies, they are both integral and necessary to human existence and expansion. However, the one argument, I do not seem to hear at all is that climate change as they put it, is part of the cycle of our planet and the solar system. I think we sometimes get lost in our focus on the planet, that we forget how the planet is impacted by its rotation, on its axis, and in the solar system.
And have there been any worthy critiques or responses? It's worth looking at those as well. Simply trumpeting ones philosophical background is not sufficient for good philosophical reasoning . . . .
This review is a wonderful model of clear and comprehensive thinking. I will re-read it several times, learning more and savoring it each time. It will influence how I structure my talking points when I discuss things with my friends, many of whom are intelligent but reluctant to evaluate critically what has become the standard climate interpretation. Thank you for this post!
> “But what about X?” Trust me: For almost any X you have in mind, Fossil Future has answers.
What does Epstein say about particulate air pollution from burning coal? (It seems to me like coal is pretty clearly anti-human because of its immediate health effects, in a way that's not true of fossil fuels or CO2 production in general.)
Don’t just throw pot shots. READ THE BOOK.
You are missing his entire framework to evaluate the options and tradeoffs. Epstein clearly supports environmental regulations, as it is a societal good to have clean air. In no way does he just blanket state that a place like the US should go hell bent for leather with coal. However it might be the best option best for a less developed country that doesn’t have the ability to set up a gas or nuclear system because electricity is modernity.
> Don’t just throw pot shots. READ THE BOOK.
If I were at a physical bookstore or library holding this book, I'd open up the index and then skim a few passages to try to answer the above question, since I think it's pretty informative as to whether or not it's worth reading more.
[I agree with your point that it may nevertheless be the best solution to a particular problem, and elaborate that taxes are better than bans because they allow for discovering those solutions, but it seems pretty important whether he thinks the main cost to coal is the CO2 production or other forms of pollution.]
His analysis framework in the book acknowledges both CO2 and pollution as coal side effects, while also evaluating the benefits that coal provides (available, inexpensive, easy to store and transport, dispatchable, etc.)
To be clear, that final argument is more of an argument against any total replacement, not an argument against the total replacement being nuclear.
I agree we need to temper the "absolute zero carbon in the near future" expectation, though the fact that the extreme is ridiculous is not an argument against more reasonable versions of the "less fossil fuels" crowd.
To be clear about the prior beliefs I'm arguing from: I think we do need to get off carbon-emitting fuels as quickly as possible, but I think we've already reached the maximum transition speed and the people arguing for more radical change are unrealistic.
Going back to nuclear, I'd note that with a more agile regulatory environment, new designs could be created which are both significantly more powerful and significantly cheaper to construct. Still not enough for a complete conversion by 2050, but then again, we don't need a COMPLETE transition by that time.
And then there's the fact that in some places, existing power plants can be retrofitted with advanced geothermal... if only we were better at digging holes.
I think the idea of comparing “expert” consensus on climate change to “expert” consensus on slavery is really disingenuous. Slavery’s existence is purely a moral question, not a scientific one. Of course there are always trade offs that require moral reasoning in science, but to explore those questions we need as deep an understanding of the objective facts as possible. I feel like the slavery comparison is used solely because of the emotional resonance it carries, and this type of appeal immediately turns me off to whatever else he says. Eugenics is a little bit better of a comparison, but I still think to most people the yuck factor of racism is all they know about that era.
However, it would seem we would agree that the “knowledge system” is tainted such that most of the “communicators” have a clear ideological position on fossil fuels and any presentation of the “science” is obviously tainted by their ideas of the future. These people see climate change as a means to fundamentally reorganize society in a way that would almost certainly leave us considerably worse off than before. Like many others have reported, COVID completely shattered any shred of faith I had in government institutions to handle large scale complicated challenges. After seeing how that was handled, I do not want these people anywhere near climate change. Before COVID I would have been much more skeptical of a book like this.
I think it’s clear where Bryan stands on this given his immigration stance, but I’m curious how the book deals with the obvious implication that climate change would inevitably be much more destabilizing in developing countries. The tragedy in Yemen is, at its core, driven by a severe shortage of water. What happens when severe drought and environment crisis hits other parts of the middle east and Africa? Hopefully these questions are thoughtfully explored in the book, otherwise I have a hard time taking him seriously as a thinker.
Yemen has many problems, the most acute: the war the Saudi Crown prince launched at it. Putin-style, I'd say. - Near universal addiction to khat is another. General political instability is another (euphemistically speaking). Pretty poor place, obviously. It has MUCH MORE water than Saudi Arabia. Just the Saudis have plenty of super-cheap fossil energy (and solar). Which makes life in Saudi very cushy, indeed (worked there 5.5 years) - despite a "climate" as brutal as it gets. (Till I had a car, I walked with two water bottles - one for drinking, one for pouring water over my head. 15 minute walks.)
Yeah the khat thing is insane, that accounts to almost 50% of their water use! I’m not sure where/how youre measuring that Yemen has “more water” than SA. Perhaps Yemen has more fresh water (per capita), but their aquifers are certainly depleting much faster. SA gets over half their water from desalination, I’m pretty sure they lead the world in this regard. Apparently due to the geography, desalination in Yemen is extremely impractical. The cost of pumping desalinated water from the Red Sea to the high elevation population centers would be insane, over $10 per cubic meter just for the pumping.
Right, still: KSA has no river (except a short one in the capital from waste-water). And rainfall is a rare thing: People go out to watch. 3 times a year in Riyadh, maybe, some drops. Not filling up any ground-water. - Yemen is hit by monsoons, that partly why people settle in the mountains. "Does Yemen have monsoons? In the summer months, the monsoon from the south-west brings the highest rainfall in the whole of the Arabian peninsula: with annual totals of 750 to 1,000mm (roughly 30 to 40 inches), about the same as many parts of the UK". Neither Darfur, nor Somalia nor Yemen are doomed by water-scarcity. It's politics.
In what I believe is the spirit of the article and book it is based on I would ask, is the water issue in Yemen more about climate change or more about the country being poor? What is the better hope for Yemen and places like it, that we stop any future climate change (or as implied by your point, reverse any that has happened) on a global scale, or that Yemen can be a more prosperous country, almost certainly with the aid of substantial fossil fuel consumption?
While it may have exacerbated things, I don’t think climate change was the main driver of the water crisis in Yemen. It’s main driver is simply the fact that there is barely any sources of fresh water to begin with. The ground water is the only source and it’s rapidly depleting to over a km deep in some places. I was more so using it as an example of what it looks like when essential resources are so scarce.
If nothing is done to curb fossil fuel use, and anywhere from the moderately bad to worst case climate predictions end up being correct, you’re looking at large swaths of the Middle East, Africa, and other areas becoming so unbearable in the summer that it will be inhospitable to humans in 75 or so years. All of the wealth these countries built on fossil fuels will have to be invested in finding ways to cool down their cities and make them habitable (you see this already in Qatar). Sure I can imagine a scenario where they get it together a develop a solution that allows them to continue thriving, but I think it’s much more likely that we have s huge humanitarian crisis on our hands. One that could have maybe on some level been prevented if we would have invested more $ in carbon capture/clean energy in 2022.
Again, hopefully he addresses this possibility in the book. I know there are complicated trade offs here, especially for developing nations. But I think the “potential upside” discussion of climate change is kind of insane. It’s the positives of fossil fuels vs the negatives of climate change, not vice versa.
Not allowing poor countries to develop using fossil energy is an ongoing catastrophe that is happening RIGHT NOW and it is far worse than 2C warming in 2100 by pretty much any IPCC estimate (even the unrealistically high scenarios of 4.5C).
What is obvious to almost all modern people about racism was not always so obvious- it took time to develop ways of thinking that prioritized individual liberty and root out that awfulness. Plus, humans were only able to technically eliminate slavery and maintain living standards once enough primary energy was available to stop using people as slaves to do work- it is not a coincidence that the end of slavery and the burning of coal and steam engine development overlap. I’m sure there were “experts” back then giving all sorts of reasons to perpetuate race based slavery, and that is the point he is making.
In What We Owe The Future, Will MacAskill argues that abolishing slavery actually didn't have much to do with the economics of it. Britain ended its slave trade while it was still extremely lucrative for them—and spent a bunch of money forcing other countries to stop too. Sounds like it's a topic of debate among historians.
I am reminded of Thomas Sowell's quote: "There are no solutions, only tradeoffs"
The book is on its way, thank you.
> always excluding nuclear energy and usually excluding large- scale hydroelectric energy
This is blatantly incorrect. Many environmental activists include hydro and nuclear in “renewable” energy. Nuclear energy was recently declared renewable by European Commission.
I searched for other works of Epstein. Now an "ad hominem argument"; I found an essay of Epstein et al. (2006) with a strange application of Randian philosophy against Just War Theory ("Just War Theory” vs. American Self-Defense). A few quotes:
„The requirements of 'proportionality' and 'discrimination' are deadly to the nation that takes them seriously. A nation [...] must be morally confident […] of the rightness of killing whomever in enemy nations it must to preserve the lives and liberty of its citizens. [...] may well require killing more of the enemy's citizens than the enemy has killed of ours. [...] break the spirit of a foreign people [...] This often requires killing civilians, and in some cases even targeting them, [...]“
"Insofar as the innocents ['such as dissidents, freedom fighters, and children'] cannot be isolated in the achievement of our military objectives, however, sparing their lives means sacrificing our own; and although the loss of their lives is unfortunate, we should kill them without hesitation."
„Given that a nation's civilian population is a crucial, physically and spiritually indispensable part of its initiation of force [...] it is a morally legitimate target of the retaliation of a victim nation. Any alleged imperative to spare noncombatants as such is unjust and deadly.“
„Doing whatever is necessary in war means doing whatever is necessary. Once the facts are rationally evaluated, if it is found that using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran's nuclear facilities or flattening Fallujah to end the Iraqi insurgency will save American lives, then these actions are morally mandatory, and to refrain from taking them is morally evil.“
“[...] the strategists recognize that the freedom of an enemy country is at most a means to an end for the innocent nation, never an end in itself. [...] our leadership, political and military, is crippled by the morality of altruism, embodied in the tenets of Just War Theory.“
This indicates to me that his work is probably at least "somewhat unreliable", if not "extremely". Changed since 2006?
https://ari.aynrand.org/issues/foreign-policy/self-defense-and-free-trade/just-war-theory-versus-american-self-defense/
Your average person (and nearly all of us in most domains) can only reason empirically. They touch a stove, they learn not to do it again.
Sometimes they can vaguely apply the stove lesson to similar concepts, but the further away you get the harder it gets.
A big downside of this is that people usually need to screw up when facing novel new stimuli in order to learn. The question is how much damage will be done during the learning process. Sometimes the answer may be "quite a lot." Especially if the lead time or relation between action and outcome are long and tenuous.
What expertise is suppose to do is help you to navigate novel stimuli without having to touch the stove. By using those big brains to master the abstractions to guess what will happen when you touch the stove without touching it.
But the big brain people have their own incentive structures and failings (they learn empirically too). Often they are quite willing to dupe others and even themselves.
A consequence of recent times is hopefully people learning to mistrust experts whenever they make claims that require large sacrifices from society at large in the hopes of avoiding theoretical dangers.
It's worth linking to Robin Hanson's review:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2022/10/fossil-future.html
This is good:
"In my terminology, they see nature as sacred, and thus as eternal, pure, not in conflict with other sacred things, and to be sharply distinguished from, not mixed with, and not at any price sacrificed for, profane things. We are not to calculate such choices, but to intuit them, aesthetically."
You could apply this to most areas we are failing today. Education is sacred. Diversity is sacred. Etc. (even immigration is sacred for Bryan)
----
Epstein acts as if the only force strong enough to resist pressures from seeing nature as sacred is seeing something else as even more sacred. And for that Epstein picks: human flourishing.
----
When people ask me what I want to maximize for I usually say human flourishing, as it at least prevents from zeroing in on a single value and maximizing it at the expense of everything else.
The question though is what exactly is "human flourishing". It can never have a concrete answer we will all feel 100% satisfied with.
----
"He treats that as so sacred that not even mild taxes on fossil fuels can be tolerated. As an economist I’m sad to think we can’t make a more reasonable choice in the middle, where everything we value gets traded off via conscious calculation mediated by mundane prices. But, alas, I don’t know that Epstein is wrong on this key sacredness point."
----
I think its mature to accept we need some sacredness to function, and then focus on what the best kind of sacredness is.
Epstein also discusses his book in an hour and a half long interview here: https://reason.com/video/2022/05/20/alex-epstein-despite-climate-change-the-future-needs-more-fossil-fuels/.
This is a good and important post (and book). I make similar arguments in Losing My Religions, specifically in the chapters:
Climate activists are to blame for some of the suffering caused by climate change
Greta Thunberg’s misery is the result of child abuse.
Extinction Is No Big Deal
https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
(PDF is free)
OK Bryan, I'll buy it.
Tyler Cowen's review (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/01/alex-epsteins-fossil-future.html) is disappointing. There is some sort of mental block people have, where for example Cowen doesn't present an argument but simply announces "we cannot simply keep on [emitting carbon]" as if this is obviously self-evident. But why though? The world is an unpredictable place, but humans are incredibly adaptable. One could imagine humanity keep burning fossil fuels for centuries until the supply runs out, all the while progressing rapidly at developing all the technology we need to thrive in a much warmer world -- advanced agricultural technology, aggressive forest management, weather-resilient infrastructure, etc.
Ad hominem in extremo: Any person called "Epstein" will be sidelined from the media discourse, at least in a positive perspective. Since Jeffrey E., 2005-2019. - Anyone saying what Alex E. wrote, will be widely ignored anyway. Lomborg, Ridley, Gates: "oh, those (2/3 alt-right) cranks".
Still: as "A. Einstein", Alex might have a chance. Can't names be changed? Any Adolphe Hütler would be helped out even by German bureaucrazy.
I thought Ronald Coase had settled this everywhere for all time, long ago....
I have not read these books yet, but they are next on my list. I feel both sides of the argument have valid points, and I do believe as humans we need to strike a balance between fossil fuels and renewable energies, they are both integral and necessary to human existence and expansion. However, the one argument, I do not seem to hear at all is that climate change as they put it, is part of the cycle of our planet and the solar system. I think we sometimes get lost in our focus on the planet, that we forget how the planet is impacted by its rotation, on its axis, and in the solar system.
And have there been any worthy critiques or responses? It's worth looking at those as well. Simply trumpeting ones philosophical background is not sufficient for good philosophical reasoning . . . .