Alex Epstein
speaker
366 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 28 Apr
Alex Epstein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But yeah, so the mastery element, so we can do things like make, you know, a snow... a very snowy area into an expensive paradise like Snowbird, Utah, where I'll go snowboard a lot, right? That used to be a menace, but through climate mastery, it made it a very expensive destination through the, you know, warm buildings and the synthetic clothing and stuff.
So one point about climate people need to get is there's not even really such thing as a climate negative, depending on your level of mastery. Because anything, like if you have enough mastery, you can sort of make use of anything. I live in Scottsdale, right?
Right. Right. Yeah. It'd be a rough place otherwise. And at some point, you know, we'll be able to... People will customize the temperature there more and do all sorts of stuff. And hurricanes, like, if you could harness the energy of a hurricane, you would be thrilled every time a hurricane came around, right? So...
So we have to have that mentality with climate danger, that the higher your level of mastery, the higher your level of resilience, and any given challenge ceases to become a problem, and it can in fact become a benefit. Like the snow can become a benefit, or heat can become a benefit when it was a harm before.
Yeah, but it's not really endless, unfortunately. It's not like being out in space. If it were out in space, then it would be a lot better. Well, then you have to beam it to the ground, right? But it's unfortunately not endless all the time. Otherwise, it would be nice. It would be a lot better. We could make a lot more use of solar, which has certain advantages.
It's really cheap to make the panels, but its fuel source is very problematic. But if we take so mastery, maybe an area to focus on is something like wildfires. Because wildfires is an important area of mastery because it's the one where the green anti-development movement has most impeded us. So with most things, people think we're more endangered from hurricanes. We're less.
They think we're more endangered from floods. We're less. And a lot of that is we've at least semi-allowed ourselves to master our environment. Now, the more governments are... controlling these things, we're leaving a lot of opportunity on the table, including we reward people, we give them free flood insurance, so we reward them for living in disaster-prone areas.
Policies like NEPA prevent you from being more resilient more quickly, so there's all sorts of ways in which we're not mastering our environment and making it climate resilient to the extent we could. I'd say DeSantis in Florida is a good counterexample.
He's very focused on the right kinds of things, like, hey, let's harden our grid, let's harden our infrastructure, let's lower the number of days we have down. He's very good on that. He has that kind of mentality, and that state seems very open to that kind of leadership. But around the country, we don't have that as much.
But wildfires are this very conspicuous thing where, in many ways, they've gotten worse. Like where you'll see, certainly in California, we have these dangerous out-of-control wildfires. And of course people jump to, oh, well, it's mother nature punishing us for our sins.
Like if only we hadn't used those evil fossil fuels, we would have a totally pristine, lush forest that never caught on fire and never endangered anyone. So we just have to make a net zero pledge and then we'll have no emissions, the rest of the world will have no emissions, and then the forest will like us again. That's like Newsom's plan, more or less. Basically, exactly his plan.
But actually, it's pretty easy to deal with dangerous, out-of-control wildfires. There are places that deal with this very well, because really, they are dangerous and out of control if they have a certain fuel load, which is based on the amount of dead wood and stuff that's allowed to accumulate.
Yeah, and you've seen... I mean, there are books going back decades talking about around the country that this is a problem. And the way I think of California is we've engineered...
through like government controlled land federal and california controlled land and these green policies that basically say thou shalt not interfere with nature you've just allowed this huge accumulation of fuel load you have this often un these huge unbroken things of forest which people think are a good idea but that's just the ultimate environmental hazard like the california forest is the biggest environmental hazard of the united states
If it were a company, it would not be allowed to exist because it's such a big threat to just allow all this fuel. It's basically like building a forest bomb, the way we've set it up. So we need to take advantage of fuel load management, including logging, which we used to be allowed to do. That's a hugely important thing. You need to have things like fire breaks.
And we should really think of how do we engineer the forest so that it's really, really manageable. But that requires this pro-human way of... of thinking about things. And I think this is an issue where Trump's definitely on the right track about it, but he recognizes, you know, it's the forest management thing.
We need to be open to a lot of stuff, including ultimately how much of this can, I mean, I don't know if the current administration or Congress will do this, but like how much of this can be privatized or how can you, but you really need to start to think of forest management as an environmental danger. You cannot just allow them to exist.
You can't allow anything in a society to exist in a way that is a mortal danger to the human population.
Right? Yeah. But it's just we have this very, like, religious, unimpacted nature worship attitude toward forests in particular, I think. And that's not what our ancestors had. That's where the unicorns hang out, you know, is in the forest. I guess. I guess. I don't know.
It's just everyone loves these areas like Alaska and the California forest where they don't go, but they really want them unchanged. And they're really willing to inflict a lot of harm on the local residents. Alaska is the ultimate example. Everyone claims to care about the Arctic. I don't know why you're so against development in a place where there's almost no life. Why are you so against that?
Showing 301–320 of 366 · page 16 of 19
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