There's much more practical things that we can do to keep people safe from climate change, let's say,

than making everybody poor by making fossil fuels impossible to access.

You know, we have this clear demand that fossil fuels are needed for,

and then we restrict fossil fuels some, and we start getting these big problems

when we were told we would get big wealth.

Well, why would we take off the table

any potential source of innovation that would make energy more plentiful and more reliable?

We haven't even reduced the supply of fossil fuels in the world. We've just slowed the growth.

Right. And we're having all these problems. There's no single town on the planet that runs

entirely on renewables. Poor ones do.

They run on wood and wood. Yeah, well, right. Well, yeah. Even if it creates something like,

you know, an air pollution challenge, it can also create the technology that can filter the air.

And if anyone happens to get sick, and it can also create the whole medical industry.

I really like your emphasis on the nexus between energy provision and human flourishing.

So I had a good fortune to speak again today with Alex Epstein, who I spoke with two years ago, almost to the day.

Alex is the author of two influential books, one, the first one, the moral case for fossil fuels, and the second one, fossil future.

And Alex has been beating the pro-human

energy slash environment drum for some 17 years. And with increasing effectiveness, I would say,

he's one of the people at the forefront of the dawning realization that impoverishing humanity and destroying the industrial infrastructure

of the West while making energy spectacularly expensive and unreliable and simultaneously increasing

our dependency on, let's say, dictatorial governments is not really very wise policy,

all things considered.

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