PBPA Matters

Hearts and Minds

 

 

MIDLAND, TEXAS—The membership of the Permian Basin Petroleum Association (PBPA) convened at the Petroleum Club in this city on March 22 for its monthly luncheon, where attendees heard keynote speaker Alex Epstein deliver remarks about “the moral case for fossil fuels.” The talk, which is shared below in its near-entirety, covered Epstein’s philosophical position—a position he has extolled and defended across the country in recent years.

PBPA President Ben Shepperd introduced the speaker with a brief synopsis of his career-to-date:

“Alex Epstein is a philosopher who argues that ‘human flourishing ought to be the guiding principle of industrial and environmental problems,’” Shepperd said. “He founded the Center for Industrial Progress in 2011 to foster offer a positive, pro-human alternative to the green movement. Epstein is the author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. Many of you have read it and we have talked about it. It’s a New York Times bestseller arguing that if we look at the whole picture, human flourishing requires that humanity use more fossil fuels, not less. The book has been widely praised as ‘the most persuasive argument ever made for continuing use of fossil fuels,’ and has won Epstein the award of Most Original Thinker of 2014 from the McLaughlin Group. Epstein is known for his willingness to debate anyone, any time. He has publicly debated leading environmentalist organizations such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and 350.org over the morality of the fossil fuel issue. He has made his moral case for fossil fuels at dozens of campuses, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Duke, his alma mater. He has also spoken to employees and leaders of dozens of Fortune 500 energy companies, including Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Phillips 66, Valero, and others.”

With that, Epstein took the podium and led the assemblage through a Powerpoint presentation and talk. His remarks ran longer than those of luncheon speakers of recent months—lasting, with the followup Q-and-A—for more than an hour. What we share below is only his keynote address—not the question-and-answer session.

The speaker began with a question for the audience.

Alex Epstein: On a scale of negative five to five, how good is this industry at winning hearts and minds?

From the audience: Minus five.

Alex Epstein: I got some votes for minus five. First let me explain the scale. When we talk about communication, if we rank things on a scale of one to ten, which is traditional, I think that’s misleading, because [if you] think about conversations you’ve been in, in any kind of relationship…, [well] sometimes we open our mouths we actually make things worse, [laughter] and often we accomplish nothing. So I like negative five to five, because it captures the possibility that we could actually be doing more harm than good. And when it comes to winning hearts and minds, this is something that, as Ben mentioned, is top of mind for many in the oil and gas industry, and has been for quite some time. It’s something that billions and billions of dollars have been invested in, and yet as the “negative five,” as voices suggested, indicated, there’s some discontent with that.

So…

What I want to do is, I’m going to count down from five. Five is, like, if the industry were like Steve Jobs to Apple supporters. Then [going on down], I’ll go to zero, and then that means nothing. Then negative five means you make things worse. so… Many people thought this was the case, for example, with Tony Hayward and BP Oil. So [starting with 5], if you think that this is like Steve Jobs then raise your hand, and if not so much then raise your hand at a lower number.

Five. Four. Three. Oh, we got one tentative three.

Two. [got 2]. One. Negative one. Nope, sorry. You passed the test. Zero. so…. Zero means everything has amounted to nothing.

Now we’re going to go to worse than nothing. Negative one. Negative two. Negative three. Negative four. Negative five.

Certainly for this industry, but I believe for humanity in general, this is a big problem, if the people producing part of, at least, the fossil fuel industry, which produces over 80 percent of the world’s energy, which means that 80 percent of the time someone uses a machine to improve their lives, this industry is involved. If this industry can’t explain to people why what it does is valuable given what we’ve seen with the amount of opposition, this is a really big problem.

One reason I’m here today, and one reason I was asked to speak about the topic of winning hearts and minds, is that for a set of reasons that were very surprising to me, I became very, very good at turning non-supporters of fossil fuels into supporters. The first person I turned from a non-supporter to a supporter was myself. And not just a supporter, I would say, but a champion or even beyond that. So I just want to show you a little video that gives you an indication of how I feel about this issue. This is the People’s Climate March of 2014, which is the biggest anti-fossil fuel rally in history, and there are 100,000 people in the video in the middle of New York City arguing that fossil fuels are evil, and then I was there too. [laughter]

From the video:

Epstein, on camera: Do you hear what they’re saying? “Hey hey, ho ho, fossil fuels have got to go.” I have a very different opinion on the matter. Let’s go see if we can engage.

[Laughter from audience]

Someone from audience: He’s like swimming upstream.

Video is stopped, then:

Alex Epstein:   You’re probably wondering what happens. [Laughter] At the end of the talk, I’ll give you an easy way to get in touch with me, including [the fact that] I’ll send you certain resources, and then links to the videos are among them, but it’s pretty interesting and pretty entertaining. Now, that just shows you the extent to which I have come to be passionate about this issue. Like you see, I have an “I love fossil fuels” pin, but in that situation that wasn’t sufficient, so I had to get the shirt, and the “I love fossil fuels” sign.

But I think what makes my experience relevant to today is that I’ve had a lot of success turning other people into champions like I am, at least to a significant extent. One way to think about winning hearts and minds is that there are three things that we need to do. One is we need to neutralize attackers, we need to turn non-supporters into supporters, and you need to turn supporters into champions.

So I’ll just give you an indication of the kind of email that I get from different people telling me, ‘Hey, just like you think about this differently now, I think about this differently now as well.” [Referring to Powerpoint:] This was a person who heckled me and then became a big supporter. This was a kid from Harvard who, as you might expect, started out anti and then changed his mind. This was somebody who was a mild supporter, worked in the industry, but wasn’t really sure [inaudible], and then read The Moral Case, which is my book, helped him a lot.

Also I’ve done some studies, a little bit of polling, just to kind of see what is the impact that what we call the moral case for fossil fuels has on people. We see, in particular, that members of the general public feel much more confident in turning non-supporters to supporters. These are members of the general public, not people in the industry. They’re way more eager to champion the industry. They feel like they understand the positive impacts of the industry, particularly on our environment, and they understand how many of their concerns are exaggerated. We ask industry members similar questions, and in particular the biggest difference—one of the big differences—was how confident they felt turning non-supporters into supporters.

There’s something going in my experience that’s allowed me to have a lot of success at something where the actual industry is spending billions and billions of dollars, and I’ll just give you a hint of it. The industry is reacting to a conversation that is framed against it, and I’m reframing the conversation. There’s something very wrong about the conversation that I noticed, and that [realization] led me to become passionate about the issue, and then to persuade others other than myself.

“I often get asked, ‘Why are you doing this, or how did you get into this?’ There are two things that really got me into this. The first was a realization that seems obvious, but that I don’t think most of us grasp, and that I certainly didn’t grasp even though I supposedly went to some of the best schools in the country, which is that energy is the fundamental industry. Energy is the industry that powers every other industry. What that means is that a good decision about energy is going to be leveraged and affect every other aspect of life positively. That’ll mean that there’s more food, more manufacturing, more construction, better medical care, and, ultimately, more time and care for things like education and research. If we make a bad energy decision, energy becomes the opposite of cheap, plentiful, and reliable—it becomes expensive, and scarce, and unreliable, and then everything starts to contract. That’s because our whole standard of living is just based on one thing, which is that we figured out a way to get machines to do our work for us. We have 100 machine servants working for us as individuals at any given time, and all those machines require energy, so when the energy shrinks, the machines become scrap metal and we can’t do anything. If we can expand the energy, the machines become more powerful, and we become more powerful. That really made me interested in energy.”

Then there was one more aspect that gave me a very different perspective, which is that when I was 20 years old I decided that I was going to go into what is considered the least useful profession in the world, which is philosophy. [Laughter] Usually in life if you have a problem you don’t say, “Oh, let’s call a philosopher and he’ll solve the problem.” In fact, I was in the Senate a year and a half ago, and Senator Boxer heard my testimony and she certainly didn’t think that it was worth hearing a philosopher. I’ll show you this. No I won’t, because that is … Somebody put in the wrong video… so I’ll have to dictate. I’ll have to give you how it actually went, but I won’t try to do my Senator Boxer imitation. Basically it went like this: I gave this whole testimony, tried my best to explain my case, and she said, Mr. Epstein, are you a [inaudible] scientist? I said, “No, I’m a philosopher.” She said, “A philosopher? That’s just like those crazy Republicans to bring in a philosopher. Who needs that?” I said, “It’s to help you think more clearly.” [Laughter]   She didn’t really ask me, but that was my chance. She said, [inaudible] and then she said, “Well, I don’t need you [to help me] to think more clearly.” I said, “Well, I think you do.” I do. I do think she needed help thinking more clearly, but more broadly, I think that our whole culture is thinking very non-clearly about this.

I’m going to explain this image in a couple minutes, but I want to put it up there. As I explain, maybe you can think about it, but the image is just to give you a hint. There are cobras [inaudible] at the top, and there’s a [hydra] at the bottom, if you’ve heard the story in Greek mythology.

I want to tell you how I’d observed what was going on. Remember, I’d become really passionate about energy. As a philosopher, I think this… A philosopher is a REAL JOB [inaudible], whether they [inaudible] or not, [and it’s] to help people think clearly about the most important issues in life. That’s the actual job. Then I realized, wow, energy, is one of the most important issues in life, [so] we better be getting it right. Then I started looking at the thinking in energy, and I thought, “Wow, the thinking is so bad.”

Often when someone from … Oh, I didn’t even tell you where I’m from. I’m from Chevy Chase, Maryland, just a Northeast type place in the Washington DC area… Often when you say thinking is bad, people from that area will say, “Oh, it’s because of all these dumb people.” They’ll probably say [people ]from Texas, which is wrong and insulting. People in the Northeast are really arrogant. They’re like, “Oh, smart people read the New York Times. We think, but they don’t.” It’s the opposite. It’s that the problem wasn’t that smart people were thinking about it really wrong.

The thing that was just most blatantly obvious once I started looking into the thinking, was how biased the energy conversation was. In particular, there were three forms of energy that almost whenever we talked about them, we could only see bad things. Then there were two forms of energy that when we talked about them we could only see good things. The forms of energy where there was just always a focus on the negative were fossil fuels, nuclear, and hydro. Then for positive, it’s solar and wind.

Let’s take an example where bias is just completely obvious. Let’s say there’s a coal mining accident, and you’ll see that in the news, and some people will say, “Well, this is just another reason why we have to get off dirty coals and replace it with renewables, because coal is not safe for workers.” You start looking into workers’ safety, you see that what’s the most dangerous form of working you can do in the energy industry [is this:] It’s mining for the materials in solar panels and wind turbines? How is it that we can talk about the dangers of one, but not the greater dangers of another? That’s [inaudible]. Now, this doesn’t mean that overall coal is better than wind and solar, or vice versa, but if we are not looking at both sides, how are we supposed to get to the right answer?

One rule of thinking is, we need to be as evenhanded as possible, and if we’re biased we’re not going to get to the right answer. It’s like if somebody is deciding on whether and how to vaccinate a child and they only look at the potential negatives and not the potential positives. [In such a situation] they can’t make the right decision.

Another problem is that the discussion is really sloppy. We want to be even-handed, we want to look at both sides, and we also have to take a look at them really carefully. To take a vaccines example, if you’re deciding on the vaccination issue, you have to look at, How big are the potential positives? How big are the potential negatives? Because some people will tell you—I have no opinion to share here, this is just how I think about it—some people will say the potential positives are lifesaving, and some people say they’re very little. Some people say the potential negatives are a rash, and some people say full blown autism. You have to know how big the positives and negatives are to make a decision.

So, when I was investigating these forms of energy, I wanted to know the same thing. I wanted to know, how big are the positives? How big are the negatives? I couldn’t get a straight answer, so I’d ask, for example, “How much warming do fossil fuels generate, and how significant is that for human life?” Then I’d get a response, “Oh well, 97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is real.” That’s not what I asked. I don’t want to know is something real, I want to know how significant it is. Because if you’re telling me that we should be outlawing most of our fossil fuel use, I have to know why I’m doing that. Is that really justified? For instance, Al Gore tells me that there are going to be 20-foot sea level rises in a few decades, and the UN report tells me there will be 2 feet in 100 years. That’s a really big difference. What you see is that people are really sloppy, and in particular, they’re always exaggerating the potential negative of fossil fuels, and then understating the potential positives. As somebody who just wants to know the truth, it was really, really difficult to find.

Here’s the question: Why is it that there’s bias against fossil fuels? One kind of answer would be, we’re just so concerned about climate, we’re so worried about rising sea levels?  [inaudible], but then why is it that an arguably equally or even more unpopular form of energy is nuclear power? Which is by far the most reliable way we have of producing non-carbon electricity [inaudible].

Then on top of that, after nuclear, the most opposed form of energy is hydro, hydroelectric power, which is also a non-carbon form of energy. Why is it that our bias is specifically against the three leading forms of energy, and really the only three forms of energy in the entire history of civilization that have ever been able to produce energy for even 100 million people? This is in a world of seven and a half billion. Why is this? This is an important question, and I don’t think … It almost never gets asked.

This was where philosophy was really useful to me, because I could see that there was a certain commonality in the opposition among those three that explained really the whole anti fossil fuel [sentiment], but did not explain climate change, or pollution, or anything else. There was something else. It had to do with, what is their core argument against each technology? The most revealing one is hydro. We’re a world where people say the biggest problem in the world is CO2 emissions. We want to stop them. It’s so important. We have to be willing to sacrifice fossil fuels. One of the ways we have to produce non-carbon energy is by building hydroelectric dams [inaudible], which is an incredibly efficient technology in geographic locations where it works. Yet, the biggest opponents are the Green Movement, the people opposing fossil fuels. When you ask them questions about it, you say, “Why are you against this?” They’ll say, “Well, it interferes with this fish or that fish.” You say, “Wait a second, you’re saying that the world is going to end if we don’t reduce CO2 emissions. This is an obvious way of doing it, why are you not supporting it?” They’ll just see, “We need free flowing rivers.” I say, “So it’s more important to you than having free flowing rivers, than stopping the world from ending?” They’re usually dodging that point, but that IS what’s happening.

The core argument that they’re giving is, the core thing that they’re doing, is they are prioritizing unchanged nature above human life. That’s what’s happening.. They’re saying the key priority is to not change nature, and that takes precedence over human life. You see the same thing in nuclear. You say, “Why are you against nuclear?” They’ll say, “Oh, I’m afraid of it… It’s so dangerous. It’s not safe.” I say, “Well, I’ve investigated the safety. It’s actually the safest energy technology ever developed, and I can explain the physics of it and why that’s the case.” They’ll say, “No.” They’ll say, “What about the waste?” I’ll say, “What about the waste?” They’ll say, “Well it’s bad. We can’t have that waste.” I say, “Why not? There are ways of recycling it, but also this is something that we have ways of storing. This is not one of the things that threatens your life. I’d rather be near a pile of … I mean, it’s safer for me to live a mile away from a pile of waste than it is for me to live next to a street in terms of safety. That’s not actually a mortal threat.” They’ll say, “Well no, it’s bad.” It’ll be around a long time, but if it’s not harming us, if we’re going to store it, why is it so bad? They have no answer except that it’s bad because we made it. It’s bad because we made it. Again, what are they doing? They’re prioritizing unchanged nature above human life.

Most people’s number one objection to fossil fuels is climate change. Notice the terminology, ‘climate change.’ If our focus was really human life, we wouldn’t be talking about climate, we’d be talking about climate danger, climate livability. We’d focus on the climate’s impact on humans. People just have an idea that it’s wrong to change climate, so there’s just an idea that if we’re changing climate at it all, it must be bad and it should be stopped. To which I say, nothing could be more wrong than that. We’re engaged in indoor climate change right now. Indoor climate change has dramatically increased life expectancy and quality of life. Outdoor climate change we’re not very good at yet, but certainly shouldn’t we be able to… shouldn’t we want to be able to, prevent things like Hurricane Harvey? Shouldn’t we start to aspire to stop many of the calamities that exist in any era?

Again, when we’re thinking about fossil fuels, we’re prioritizing unchanged nature over human life. In philosophy, the issue here—and this is the core of everything—is the issue of ‘What is your standard of good?’ In every discussion, in any thought process, whenever you’re making a decision, you have a standard of, How do I measure good? How do I measure bad?’ If you’re thinking of a vaccination, for example, I would hope that the standard was, ‘I want my child’s life to be as healthy as possible.’ But some people have a standard of, ‘I want to have the most natural solution possible. I want to do what’s natural, even if it’s not the best for my child’s life.’ That’s what’s going on here.

“In energy, the standard by which we’re judging energy choices as good and bad is by how green they are, and green means not changing nature. Minimizing impact on nature. This is a really, really bad kind of standard to use.”

Just to apply it: If we really want to be green, should we have done this: Should we have turned a patch of dirt and trees in northeast United States in New York City? If Sierra Club had been around back then, would they have given thumbs up or thumbs down to the development of New York City? Thumbs down.

All right, what about this? I have three sisters. I’m the oldest. I was born in 1980. My parents had the decision of having one child, then another. The last two are twins, so I guess they made the decision three times. If Green Peace had been around advising them would they have said the best thing for the planet is for you to self replicate one of more times? To make new humans? If we want to minimize our impact, should we self replicate one or more times? Thumbs up or thumbs down? Big thumbs down. The worst thing you can do if you want to minimize your impact is create another one of you. If human impact is bad, how can another human be good? If we wanted to minimize bear impact, we’d kill all the bears and stop letting them procreate, right? If we want to minimize human impact, that’s the logical conclusion. We certainly shouldn’t be having children. Sierra Club tells young women that if you’re considering having a child, you should know that every child will increase your carbon legacy, which is your carbon footprint over time, by a factor of six.

Think about this, how many people judge themselves … For how many people their standard of how good a person they are is how big their carbon footprint is? That’s what we’re supposed to talk about. Even when the oil and gas industry brags, a third of the time it’s about how it lessened our carbon footprint. Not how we helped billions of people live, but how we lessened our carbon footprint. This is a BAD standard. Like really bad.

One final example. Which of these countries is more moral in terms of the planet? Is North Korea better, or South Korea? Who would get the thumbs up? Besides Kim in North Korea, who in North Korea would get the thumbs up? Yeah, North Korea, right? Heroic as far as unchanged nature goes. Now here is an interesting question, which country has a better environment to live in, North Korea or South Korea?

From the audience: South.

Alex Epstein: That’s interesting that we’re taught that we need to be Korean, we need to appease this movement, we need to try to get its approval, we need to use its terminology because we care about our environment, and then somehow being green is related. Maybe even they’re extreme. We call them extremists. If we take their ideas seriously and we minimize our impact on nature, we try not to change nature, we have a bad environment, because unchanged nature is a bad environment for human beings. Human beings need to transform nature to meet our needs. This idea of unchanged nature is just a bankrupt idea.

Well, before I knew anything about fossil fuels, almost 10 years before I learned about this movement, I understood that the so-called environmentalist movement was really an anti-human movement, and I hated it so deeply because I just always believed from the time I was young that human beings did amazing things, human beings were great, and I wanted to do great things myself. And it offended me that there was a movement that said that we shouldn’t impact anything, because impacting things is how we do great things. I was completely anti-green from the time I was 18 years old. I just didn’t realize how it had infected energy.

Let me go back a couple slides. Here’s what happens in the energy debate [in light of this image] [inaudible] energy. Often people think of anti-fossil fuel stuff as a bunch of cobras, that is a bunch of individual attacks. Just vicious people doing one different thing after another. If we have a cobra problem, we have to solve it sequentially. Which means just kill the first cobra, kill the second cobra, killed the third cobra, and hope you run out of cobras, or you hired enough cobra killers. But I don’t think that’s what’s happening at all. I think we’re dealing with a hydra problem. A hydra is a multi-headed beast, and what happens when you cut off the head of a hydra?

From the audience: It grows back two.

Alex Epstein: Yeah, two grow back. A hydra problem cannot be solved sequentially, it can only be solved fundamentally. You need to identify the heart of the hydra.

The heart of every attack on the fossil fuel industry is one thing that it always says: ‘We need to get off fossil fuels and replace it with green energy. We need to get off fossil fuels and replace them with green energy.’ Notice that choice of words. Green energy is the ideal, because green is the standard. Remember, this anti-human standard, that’s the standard. Think about how bad a standard this is. What if I said, ‘Well I don’t want the best computer, I want the most renewable computer.’ There is no renewable computer, so you couldn’t have a computer? Or, ‘I don’t want the best phone, I want a renewable phone’? Then it’s like two paper cups and a burlap string. [laughter] What about in medicine? You say, ‘I don’t want the medicine that will save my child’s life, or that has the best chance, [but rather] I want the most green medicine.’ You recognize this as anti-life, but in energy we allow this to be the standard, literally. To say, ‘We want the form of energy that has the least impact on nature,’ that’s completely incoherent, because the nature of energy is its capacity to do work, and the place we do work is nature. To use energy means to impact nature.

What it allows, though, is… No form of energy doesn’t impact nature. Solar and wind have massive impacts on nature. What you really do, once you get this idea of being green, it’s just a tool that you can attack anything that you don’t like, and you can undercut the confidence of the people producing it. That’s what’s happened in the fossil fuel industry. The Green Movement has said, “You agree that it’s good to be green, and you’re not green enough. Look at this impact. Look at this impact. Look at this impact.” Then the fossil fuel industry says, “Oh no, but we’re not as bad as we used to be.” It’s just the wrong way of thinking of it.

So, a way I think of this, is… I call it arguing to 0 versus arguing to 100. Everything in the discussion or the debate depends on what standard did you set. If you set the standard of being green, green energy, and then you say the opposite is more fossil fuels, you lose.

What happened in the hydraulic fracturing debate is that … The person who framed the debate was Josh Fox, who came out with the gas GASLAND [inaudible]. What he said is, “To start with, we all agree that fossil fuels are bad. Right? Everybody knows that fossil fuels are bad.” This is a really short thing, but I’m going to walk [over] here. Imagine this is negative 100, so this is evil, and this is positive 100, this is good. When he says, “We all know fossil fuels are bad, and then on top of that this is polluting the water and causing earthquakes and cancer clusters.” How does the industry react? They say, “You’re exaggerating about the cancer clusters, and you’re exaggerating about the earthquakes, and you’re exaggerating about the water.” Under this approach, what’s our best case scenario?

Speaker: Zero.

Alex Epstein: This is called arguing to zero. If you let the other side frame the debate, all you can do is argue that you’re not as bad as they say, or you can go the other way. They’ll say, “100, that means we … Let’s sign the Paris agreement, because that’s heading us in the right direction. Let’s pass solar subsidies.” Oops. No, actually [inaudible]. There’s a little bump here [inaudible]. “Let’s pass the wind subsidies.” Then what can you say? You say, “The wind subsidies are … Maybe there’s too many birds killed, and the solar things, there’s corruption, and the Paris thing, that’s the best thing for the United States right now, or it doesn’t punish China enough.” Again, what’s the best case scenario? They’re arguing, we’re doing the right thing. They’re going to 100, where do you argue? Zero. You could either argue up to zero or down to zero, but it’s the same thing because the person who frames the debate wins the debate. The way you frame the debate is with the standard.

This is what to do. The right thing and the effective thing is to pick the right standard, and for me the standard is, and I think for everyone it should be, human flourishing. The reason I like the term human flourishing is because it captures [the idea] that human life is a rich phenomenon. It has mental components, physical components, we care about things like a good environment, but it’s ultimately because we want to individuals to flourish, to enjoy their lives, to live long, to be happy. That’s what I believe. Every decision we should be thinking of [using] that as the standard.

In energy, forget green energy, we want the best energy. Best means best for human beings. That includes environmental quality, but environmental quality is something we want because it’s good for human beings. Environmental quality means it’s in a state that’s good for human beings, not that it’s in a state that human beings didn’t change. Some things we leave unchanged because we think that’s the most beautiful, or that’s the best, and a lot of things we change. Get rid of this idea of unchanged nature as a standard. At most, it’s a means to an end, and the end is human flourishing.

The core thing going wrong is that it’s being framed by an anti-fossil fuel, and ultimately [anti-] human, standard, which is unchanged nature. And the solution to do the right thing and to be effective is to reframe it with a pro fossil fuel, but more importantly pro human standard. That’s really what the book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, does. It’s really just the human flourishing case for fossil fuels. What it does is it just says, if human flourishing is our standard, and we look carefully at positives and negatives, how should we evaluate fossil fuels? What are the right kinds of choices?

I’m just going to give you a little bit of the data. At the end I’ll give you a way to get a lot more resources on this, hours and hours of content that you can listen to. Here’s some key points. One is, it’s really important that fossil fuel use is still growing, and that it’s by far the leading source in the world. If you’re not a conspiracy theorist who thinks that for some reason Japan is using oil for no good reason in terms of self interest, you have to recognize there’s something good that this industry is doing. The short answer is, it’s the only industry ever that has been able to produce cheap, plentiful, reliable energy in every needed form on a scale of [inaudible].

If we’re thinking about making decisions about this, we have to recognize there’s only one industry in the world who can produce [sufficient] energy for everybody. If we restrict it, then we’re making some people’s lives worse. Guess whose lives we’re going to make worse? It’s the people who can least afford energy. We have three billion people in the world who have almost no energy—over a million who have no access to electricity, plus 2.7 billion who are heating and cooking with wood and animal dung.

Think about how little our energy conversation cares about just these people, let alone everyone else. Nobody cares that there are three billion without energy—in terms of just the mainstream discussion. Energy and its impacts on climate—this is a daily discussion in the news. [But] How often does the New York Times cover the issue of energy poverty, and what might happen to people if energy prices go up, if radical restrictions on fossil fuels [come about]? Nobody cares.

Why is it that nobody cares? The reason is because our standard for the energy conversation is not human flourishing. It’s unchanged nature. Who cares about three billion humans? We’re just focused on ‘Let’s not make it one degree warmer.’ That’s the highest moral priority.

If you really want to see how powerful a standard is, think about this, almost nobody cares about three billion human beings who have almost no energy, but what does almost everyone care about in our national debate? There’s another set of beings that we’re deeply sympathetic to, that we cry about, that we make advertisements about, and those beings are polar bears. Think about that. Just think about how much public sympathy there is for polar bears, and how much there is for human beings. Now, we don’t have to be anti-polar bear at all. We can love them, and they’re beautiful, and what not, but it should because we enjoy them as part of human flourishing, not “We care about them, we don’t care about three billion people.” If you have the wrong standard, you don’t even look. You don’t even think about human life.

I’ll show you another way in which almost nobody has thought about human life, even in the industry. Bottom line in terms of the positives of fossil fuels is that if we free fossil fuels versus restricting it, that’s billions of people that have energy who otherwise wouldn’t. Now because the goal is not to be pro fossil fuels, it’s to be pro human, we need to look at the different concerns. In The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and in some of the materials I share, I go into depth on all of these, but the one I want to focus on is the climate one, because I think that is by far the most prevalent one right now, and it’s the one where the thinking is the most anti human.

Remember I mentioned before that we talk about climate change, but climate change is not a concern of mine. Change is neutral. What I’m concerned about is climate danger, and it’s because my goal is not to preserve a perfect climate, my goal is the most livable climate ever. It’s hypothetically possible that the best climate for you and me is going to be five degrees warmer on average over the next 100 years. I don’t know, but we have to be open to that possibility. We can’t just assume that any change we make is bad, or that we inherited the exact perfect climate. There’s basically a 0% chance that we inherited the exact perfect climate.

What I want to know is, what policies are going to make the climate most livable? Then if I study [the question of] how do fossil fuels affect the livability of the climate, I have to look at three things, and here’s where almost nobody looks at the right thing. One thing we have look at that everyone looks at is what they call the greenhouse effect, which is how much does CO2 warm the planet? That’s one thing, we have to look at that.

Another thing that people almost never look at, but some do, but most don’t, is greening. How much does adding more CO2 to the atmosphere green the planet? Because if we care about human life, shouldn’t plants’ climate matter? Because we depend on plants, and if plants go to a CO2 level that’s not that far below what we have today, all of life dies. Certainly we should be open to the possibility that adding more CO2 is good for plants, and therefore good for us. That’s one thing, because we have an anti human standard we don’t even think about what it is that we can change nature for the better, because if our standard is unchanged nature we think it’s impossible to change nature for the better. If standard is human flourishing, we’re excited about ways to change nature for the better.

This goes to the last one. There is one other impact of fossil fuels on climate livability, which is fossil fuels allow us to produce a lot more energy than we otherwise would, and we can use that energy to protect ourselves from the climate through things like heating, and air conditioning, and building infrastructure, and drought relief.

You might ask, how much do these matter?

I’m going to show you a statistic that changed my life because I did not expect it. It’s a statistic measuring how many people die from climate-related causes: heat, cold, flood, etc. My expectation—because I had heard so many ominous predictions about climate, and because people today say it’s the worst climate ever, and they’ll say ‘This many people died’—well, [my expectation was] it’s getting worse, but not nearly as bad as people think, and it’s nowhere near as important still as having more energy. I thought maybe two million people a year were dying from climate-related causes, and it was getting a little worse, but that two billion people would die if we passed the green policies, but I was completely wrong and it exposed a flaw in my thinking. [Points to chart] As we use more fossil fuels, climate-related deaths go down. Like, way down. As we’ve used more and more fossil fuels the last 80 years, deaths are down by a rate of 98 percent. In the ’30s, you had several years where, if adjusted for population, 10 million people died a year from climate-related causes. When my book came out, the latest date available was 2013, and you had 30,000. So you go from 10 million to 30,000. Some people said, “You just got lucky because it’s gotten really bad since then.” [Since 2013.] But if you look at the latest data—and the latest I could find was 2016—it was 6,416 deaths, internationally. It’s going to be ‘lumpy’ every year because nature will change every year, but in general we’re going from millions to thousands, or hundreds of thousands to thousands. That’s amazing. The only explanation of that is that the thing that matters most with regard to climate and energy is not, I think, the relatively small impact we can have with CO2 emissions. It’s that having more affordable energy allows us to take a dangerous climate and make it safe.

Nature doesn’t give us a safe climate that we make dangerous. It gives us a dangerous climate that we make safe. We need to make safe, and fossil fuels help us do that….

This is a little data [refers to screen] about putting it in context. The warming just isn’t that much. I think there’s some human cause of warming, but we have to be precise, and it’s not that much. Then if you look at, in the context of the globe, it’s just not at a high level of temperature or CO2, so we’re not in unprecedented territory.

If you look at something like sea level rise, sea level rise is actually really slow. People just have the idea that if we’re increasing sea level rise even a millimeter here, that’s bad. Again, the standard is unchanged nature, not human flourishing, because from my perspective, I’m happy to increase it a millimeter more per year if it means that many more people can live and can have better lives.

Then here’s the [Korean] part.  [Slide?]

To wrap up this point, creating fossil fuels actually is necessary for safe climate.

We’ll have a more dangerous climate if we restrict fossil fuels. All this comes from the human [flourishing] standard, and this the upshot of it. If our standard is human flourishing and if we look at the pros and cons, we should use more fossil fuels, not less. Everything comes from the issue of having the human flourishing standard.

The way this translates to winning hearts and minds … I’m spending so much time on the standard, because once you’re clear on that it’s really straightforward often, is … The thing you have to do in every conversation is, first, you have to get people to agree on the standard, and I’m going to show you some resources that will help you do that. Logically, that has to happen. You can’t talk about facts until you’re clear on your framework. The key to the framework is the standard, because the standard determines how you process all the facts. Then once you have the standard agreed upon, then you just say, “Hey, I think if we look at all the facts, this option is the best. What do you think?” You just very calmly discuss the pros and cons. It might seem too simple. It’s not always easy, but… Simple is not always easy, and this is something that’s fundamentally simple once you realize it, but just think in terms of, “I always want to get clear on the standard, and then make the argument that mine is the one that is best by that standard.”

I mentioned some resources, so here are three ways that I can help you to… I apologize, we don’t have too much time for questions. We have an extended period tonight, so I hope as many people as possible come tonight. Number one thing I want to make sure is that you’re just aware there’s some resources that you can get that are available for free that have taken years to create, and I really want to you use them because this is the heart of the energy industry really in the world right now. People say “Don’t preach to the choir,” but I think we need a much louder choir, and a more informed choir.

I have three things that I think you can do, anyone can do, and the more influential you are, the more you can do it. One is that I think that you can take human… There’s ambassador training, which is this thing people talk about today, but basically two things you need to [inaudible], the value of the industry, and then how to communicate it to others. Long story short, in the last couple years I worked primarily with Valero [inaudible] to create something, a live training, which then we made into an online training. Because I wanted everyone to use it, I’m now making this, at least to audiences I speak to, accessible for free. At the end you’re going to have a link, a place to email me, and just email resources, and then you’ll get this. This is a four hour training, and it teaches all the fundamentals of energy, and really specifically how to have conversations. I’m trying to make it as easy as possible to have a really good choir.

Another thing, this is more for people in communications … If you’re interested in this just put “messaging” on the email. We’ve started creating custom messaging for different kinds of companies and clients, and basically there’s always a way to reframe everything in a human flourishing way. Can’t get into all that now, but if you’re interested in that I’ll just give you some examples, like just creating custom messaging to address pretty much anything, and we’re building up more and more [inaudible]. If you want help on that just let me know.

This is just some examples of stuff we’ve created.

Then the final thing is sharing resources. The main thing I’m going to send out is some resources that I’ve found really, really effective in turning non-supporters into supporters. In whatever place you are, you have access to a lot of people, and maybe the fastest way to influence them is not even by having much of a conversation, it’s just by sharing something that works. I think you could just create revolutions by sharing. We have different videos, like a talk I made at Google [inaudible], some five minute videos, intro my book, just stuff that we found works over and over and over. What this allows you to do is just become a really [inaudible].

There’s one category of sharing that I ask particularly those of you who know influential people. Even though in [Midland] you’re pro fossil fuels, you know a lot of people who are very much on the fence that are influential. One of the things that you can do to share that I’m certainly grateful is if you know of people who hold high level events, particularly outside the fossil fuel industry, recommend me as a speaker. I can give this, but a different version that’s more [inaudible]. I found that the best way for me to reach people is not even with my book. If I can get 100 people, or 200 people in a room, and they’re all there and I explain this framework to them, I’ve never not at least moved people significantly. If you have any recommendations, any people you’re willing to refer me to, that’s something where you can personally be responsible for say, me influencing a Facebooker [inaudible] or something like that. I’m very grateful that.

I usually have cards to hand out. We don’t have those today. Easiest way to get in touch with me, I have a very easy email if you can remember my name, Alex@AlexEpstein.com. No matter what, if you email me I’ll send resources, but if you’re interested in our messaging just put “messaging,” and if you have any referrals mention that. No matter what, I hope you take advantage of it, because the success I’ve had is nothing special about me except that I’m really, really clear on my standard of good, and I’m really clear on how it applies to the energy issue, and I have a little bit of practice giving speeches and having conversations with that. Once you get that kind of internal clarity and share with others, you’ll be shocked, and easily be able, to influence hundreds of people not just locally, but through social media, through email, through [inaudible] wherever you go.

It was about winning hearts and minds today. Hopefully you agree with me that the fundamental thing is the standard. Hopefully you’re motivated to use it. Thank you for having me.