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
And they've used all these false models that people like me spend a lot of time debunking. But then they just ruin the grid because what they're really getting is they have the right to sell unreliable electricity with no reliability guarantee. Right. At the same price and, in fact, with subsidies, a far greater price than reliables.
And so this would be the equivalent of the government passes a law and says, you know, rental car companies have to charge the same for a car that works all the time and a car that works a third of the time and you don't know when.
And actually you have to pay, actually we're going to subsidize the car that works a third of the time and you don't know when, which then actually is going to take money away from the reliables, which has happened on our grid is we give, you know, whatever pool of utility payments and stuff we have on the grid, more and more of that goes to solar and wind in part because of subsidies, because they can always bid.
if they want a negative price, because they can basically say, I'm going to pay you to take our electricity because we're giving them so much as taxpayers. So even if they pay the grid, we pay them way more than that. So it's just this totally screwed up system. But I'm not one of these people who says we should just not consider solar, we shouldn't consider solar and wind, but we need real work.
But with the grid, what we have is we have a monopoly situation. So you have to think of it in that context. Now, I think long term, we could argue that we don't even need to have a monopoly with the electricity grid. But in anything resembling the near future, when you have government monopolies and you
are not exactly markets they're more like government pricing schemes you need to orient those so that they reward reliability and they really value reliability and right now they don't so you want to so people talk about like all of the above which i think is a pretty bad term because you don't and no no thing do you just want everything because it happens to exist like we don't want animal dung right we don't want wood that those are part of the above you really want best of the above
And that's what you get in a real market. So with electricity, we need to create the closest approximation we can with a monopoly system of a real market where the lowest cost, most reliable solution is allowed to emerge and rewarded.
Well, that's going to be one of them. Let me lead into this, actually, by saying the way in which I think I'm part of this change in the culture, because it sort of relates to the relationship between my work In the past, in my work right now. Yes.
So I think of, if you think of the moral case for fossil fuels and fossil future, they're really, you know, it was really designed to sort of create the ultimate guide to evaluating energy sources. That's really, like, fossil fuels just happen to be the conclusion that this needs to be our dominant form of energy because there's nothing close in terms of
cost, reliability, versatility, and scalability for the foreseeable future. But it's really about how do you evaluate our energy situation and potential side effects of energy, including climate side effects, which is the main thing people are concerned about, in a pro-human way. And the basic idea is that you need to be very even-handed.
So you need to very carefully weigh both benefits and side effects. Of fossil fuels, particularly with climate and within side effects, you need to be even handed. So you can't just look at negative climate effects. You also have to look at positive effects. And part of being even handed is you need to be precise. Like more plants.
Things like that. Yeah, exactly.
And we talked a lot about that. that last time, but then also, of course, open to things like more heat waves and expansion of water and sea level rise. And the idea is you need to be very even-handed. And so that's one of the core methodological things that I think I've encouraged people to use and that I think you're seeing more and more of.
And people like Bjorn and Schellenberger and Kuhn, I think, have also done this. And then the other thing, which is a little bit deeper, is that we have to evaluate them in a pro-human way and be aware that most people are either deliberately, I think in most cases inadvertently, evaluating fossil fuels from an anti-human perspective.
And then within that, again, we talked about this last time, but just the sort of key ideas are, one is, when we're thinking about the Earth and what our goal for it is— We need to be clear, our goal could either be to advance human flourishing on Earth or to eliminate human impact on Earth.
And that the dominant goal guiding our policy is this goal of eliminating human impact, as evidenced by the fact that the number one cultural political goal in the world right now is democracy. is eliminating our impact on climate. That's what net zero means. So like our whole focus with the earth is how do we eliminate our impact on it in general and particularly with climate?
And my argument is that's an anti-human perspective in the same way that if our goal were to eliminate bear impact, you'd think that's an anti-bear. perspective.
That's what that's the logic. There's too many of those damn bears. Exactly. That's obviously what this is trending. Although they don't say that, right? They used to say it, but they don't say it as much anymore. They used to say we're against population growth and we're against technology, but that didn't go over well. So then they said, we're just against climate change.
We're against climate impact. And then you sort of fill in the blanks. Oh, wait, the way to get rid of that is regress technologically. And have no people. And have no people, right. So there's this moral perspective of what I call your standard of evaluation. So is your standard advancing human flourishing on Earth or eliminating human impact on Earth? And of course, I'm on Team Human here.
And then I think the part you were most interested in, which is your basic premise about the nature of humans and our environment, and what I call the delicate nurturer view, which is the main view that the Earth, that basically the unimpacted Earth is this nurturing utopia. Yeah, it's this nurturing mother that's stable, so it doesn't change too much. It's safe. It doesn't endanger us.
Showing 101–120 of 366 · page 6 of 19
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