New video: Fossil fuels are not mankind’s enemy

In this issue:

  • New video: Fossil fuels are not mankind’s enemy
  • Talking points: The economic risks of climate change
  • Best of Power Hour: Robert Zubrin on the future of human progress, aquaculture, mariculture, and genetic engineering
  • The Human Flourishing Project: The most important New Year’s resolution

New video: Fossil fuels are not mankind’s enemy

It’s been awhile since I’ve done a long-form interview on energy. I enjoyed this one, in part because the host read my book very thoroughly. Topics include:

  • Why ours is the best human environment in history
  • Our ever-increasing climate safety
  • Why wind and solar always make energy more expensive
  • Why it’s wrong to call coal “dirty”
  • Why storage is incapable of solving the problem of wind and solar unreliability
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Talking points: The economic risks of climate damage

Greg Ip recently published a piece in the Wall Street Journal echoing arguments that we are already living in “a world in which climate change’s economic impact is no longer distant and imperceptible.” 

I had my team put together a response:

  • Low-cost energy from fossil fuels powers a world that has never been more nourishing, safe, and opportunity filled for its inhabitants.
  • This includes climate livability, which continues to improve: not only are climate-related deaths at historic lows, but climate-related damages continue to decrease as a percent of GDP.
  • The leading cause of the Australian wildfire destruction is green policies that sought to preserve nature (allowing a high fuel load to build up) instead of master nature. 
  • There is no alternative that is close to fossil fuels at providing low-cost energy on a scale of billions, even for electricity let alone heavy-duty transport or many industrial uses.
  • “Climate economics” widely includes the false assumption that human beings cannot adapt to changing conditions. 
  • Rapid restriction of fossil fuel use will disempower billions of people, prevent billions more from becoming empowered, and return us to a more natural–deficient, dangerous, low-opportunity–world.

Best of Power Hour: Robert Zubrin on the future of human progress, aquaculture, mariculture, and genetic engineering

On this week’s Power Hour “best of” episode, I talk to Robert Zubrin, author of Merchants of Despair and president of The Mars Society, about Aquaculture, Mariculture, Genetic Engineering and the role of anti-humanism in slowing down progress for human life.

This is one of my favorite episodes ever. Among other things, it totally changed my view of the ocean.

The Human Flourishing Project: An exploration of expectations

On the latest episode of The Human Flourishing Project, I discuss some challenges I have faced in setting healthy expectations for my work, and ask listeners for ideas or recommended reading on the subject.

Alex