Answers to student questions on philosophy, STEM, pollution, debates, and more

I recently had a discussion with members of a high school robotics team who were familiar with my work.

We covered:

• How philosophy provides the thinking methods, values, and assumptions essential to judging energy and climate claims,

• Why fossil fuels’ enormous benefits outweigh their side‑effects—and how their benefits can actually cure their side-effects,

• Why rising CO2 should be viewed as a slow “tropicalization,” not a crisis,

• The limits of solar and wind without ultra‑cheap storage and the need for technology‑neutral energy freedom,

• The promise of ultra‑dense nuclear as an eventual successor to fossil fuels.

Here’s a video and anonymized transcript of the conversation, edited only for clarity:

Instructor:

This is our [robotics] team, and they learned a lot about you. When we found out that we had this connection, it was very exciting. So I think I will start, and we’ll continue asking questions.

I’m interested in learning about how you have a background in philosophy—right? And then, you moved into influencing policy and energy: to me, two different fields. But I’m sure there is a connection there, and we would like to probably learn more about it.

Alex Epstein:

Okay. Well, happy to answer that. What’s your overall goal? In general, how can I be most helpful to you?

Instructor:

Yeah, so I think the goal is—the team has to learn about STEM. We talk to different experts in the STEM field, and because the theme is archeology we thought, “Oh, oil, right?” We found you from your book, the fossil fuels book. We didn’t even know about the energy “arena” that you’re involved in. Originally, you wrote the book in 2014, and then the next one in 2022, I believe?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, you got it.

Instructor:

Yeah. So that’s how we first got introduced to you. But then, you had gone beyond that. Just studying oil, and all that, as a fuel source.

And you went beyond the, I guess, the science behind it, and you went to, “How do I influence to make the world better, or the Earth better, or the overall economy?” and so on.

So I think it’s more for the students to just open their horizon about how STEM affects so many areas. It’s not just science, right? We learn about science to improve our world, to impact our world.

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, that’s good context. I’ll give an answer, and then, definitely want any of the students to be able to ask anything, or share anything.

Instructor:

Thank you.

Alex Epstein:

So maybe it’s helpful to share about my background. I’m not sure how much this has come out in what you’ve read, but my basic background was what they now call a STEM background. It wasn’t really called that back then, but I was always interested in math, science, and computer science.

I went to one of the top, probably 10 math science high schools in the country, Montgomery Blair Magnet program, in the DC area. We’d routinely have winners of the, I guess it’s the Intel Contest now, the Westinghouse contest, that kind of thing. So when I was in high school, I was mostly exposed to that stuff.

And toward the end of high school, and particularly, the beginning of college, I realized that I was even more interested in philosophy than in math and science. But in part, because I think of philosophy as actually more practical than math and science, which most people would consider crazy.

But the way philosophy thinks of itself, it used to be called the queen of the sciences. So you could think of philosophy as the fundamental science, because it’s beneath science, in a certain way.

So philosophy studies, for example, “thinking methods”, which is a big thing that you study—which is basically, “how do you come to truth in any realm?” And then there’s specifically philosophy of science.

So there are things like the hypothetical deductive method as one method of reaching truth, and that is studied a lot in philosophy of science. You have scientists who are practicing, but then, part of the role of the philosophers of science is to step back and say, “hey, the scientists that are actually discovering real things, how are they functioning?” And then you’ll get people studying the hypothetical deductive method, but also the role of induction, generalizing from specifics. And you have people like John Stuart Mill and Bacon, to some extent, who are studying, “Hey, what are the universal good ways of thinking in science?”

That’s a way in which, often, people in science, particularly practitioners, they might have inherited a way of thinking, and they might think a certain way, just as the default. But maybe they don’t step back and think about, “hey, how am I thinking this? Do I even agree totally with this method? Might there be a better method?”

And in everything, philosophy should have this quality, where you’re stepping back and thinking about, “why am I functioning the way that I’m functioning?” So you can of it as, “what are my thinking methods?” That’s one big question.

And in the energy realm, I focus a lot on, “are you being balanced in your thinking? Are you looking at both the positives and negatives of different sources of energy? Are you weighing them carefully, versus are you being biased?” That’s another kind of “thinking methods” thing.

Another kind of issue in philosophy is the realm of value. What am I treating as good, or what am I assuming is good, when I’m functioning? So I’ll just use examples from the energy realm, but it applies, like “Hey, when we’re thinking about the Earth, and making the Earth better, are we valuing the Earth as a better place for humans, where we can live a longer life, and have more prosperity, and have more opportunity, and of course, also enjoy beautiful things, and clean air and clean water?” Are we thinking about the Earth for humans? Or is our goal an Earth with no impact by humans, which some people think the perfect Earth is one where we have very little footprint, very little presence. Those are two very different goals.

And imagine you’re a scientist, and you’re deciding, “Well, I want to study climate science,” for example. Well, it makes a big difference if your focus is, “I want an Earth that’s really safe and good for humans,” or “I want an Earth that has had no impact by humans.” Because it could be that we use fossil fuels, and we make ourselves very resilient, and we impact the climate a little, and overall it’s way better for humans. And one climate scientist says, “That’s great, because we’re so much better overall.” And the other says, “It’s terrible. We shouldn’t be impacting anything, and if you’re impacting anything that’s evil.” So the thinking methods determine how you use science, how you apply science. The values determine how you apply science.

And often, another thing in philosophy is assumptions. What are your basic assumptions about how the world works? For example, we probably won’t get into this, but do you believe in a supernatural world, do you believe in a Creator?

You look at different people who have different kinds of views on things like evolution, and sometimes, people have views on evolution, I think, that are based on their religion. I am not religious. So I find arguments about creationism and stuff to be very unpersuasive, but I think it’s because I don’t have that context. So there are all sorts of assumptions.

In my field, in energy, people have an assumption that the Earth is what I call a delicate nurturer. So it exists in this delicate balance, and anything we do to impact it is going to destroy the balance, and us with it.

And I consider that an unreal assumption, but a lot of scientists function that way. A lot of people go into climate science, and they think the Earth is fragile, and if we impact it it’s bad, and everything’s going to get destroyed. And that shapes their interpretation.

The three things I would say about philosophy are, it’s studying your thinking methods, your values, and your basic assumptions. And that’s going to determine so much about how you practice science, how you practice engineering, et cetera. So that’s why I think the philosophy is so practical.

And then, for me, it was very natural to find a field that was a technical field, because I had a technical background, in terms of energy, where the philosophy I thought was the key to improving it, because I thought the thinking was wrong, the values were wrong, the assumptions were wrong, and I thought that I could make a difference by bringing my own different way of thinking to this issue.

And then, I guess what happened was I persuaded a lot of people, but it was frustrating to me that the policy wasn’t changing, so then I became interested in, “well, how do I actually work with politicians to change the policy?” Because if you’re just writing books and giving speeches and nothing is changing, then I feel like I’m just an entertainer. But in part, because I have an engineering business type background, I actually like building things, so the way I build things is I change the policy. That’s my answer.

Instructor:

Yeah, that’s fantastic, yeah.

Alex Epstein:

Would love any questions from the students.

Student 1:

Okay, I have a question. You talked about how fossil fuels should be used because they’re necessary for humans, but what about the negative impacts like pollution, have you talked about that in your book?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, yeah. And so, by the way, if any of you want a copy of my book, your teacher can just send me an address and I’ll happily send them, I’ll sign them too, if you want any copies, because this is a very core thing.

So the premise I have about fossil fuels, if we go back to philosophy, is I think the goal when you’re thinking about these global type issues is I want the Earth to be a better place for humans, so I think of negative and positive in that context. And then, I don’t assume the Earth is perfect without humans, I think it’s very imperfect without us impacting it, nor do I assume that we can’t impact it badly, we can.

So that’s my values and my assumption. And then, my thinking method is we have to be very even-handed and balanced. So if you ask “what about negative side effects?” Well, basically every activity has negative side effects. So the number one thing is to be thinking about what are the positives, how significant are the positives and the negatives.

If you take something like fossil fuels, my argument is, at least for a couple of decades, nothing is close to fossil fuels in terms of being able to provide energy to eight billion people. If we can’t use fossil fuels, or we’re restricted, that literally means billions and billions of people are going to have far less energy, which means that they can use far fewer machines to improve their lives, which means that their standard of living is going to be much lower.

They’ll produce less food, they’ll produce less clothing, they’ll produce less shelter, they’ll have less medical care. In some cases around the world, people can’t have incubators, babies die because they don’t have energy.

This is very stark to not have it and it’s very good to have more of it. So on the one hand, my calculation is there are these enormous benefits, and then there are side effects as well. I think historically, the most concerning side effects are air and water pollution. So if you put a certain amount of particulate matter in the air, it can be unhealthy to people.

What we’ve found with those is technology and innovation have dramatically reduced those kinds of side effects: they’re much, much lower than they were in the past—I think it’s definitely worth the trade-off there or anywhere in the world, as long as you have responsible policies, which not every country does, but that’s a political issue, like some of the stuff in China.

The real issue people have is climate, and I think the most interesting thing about climate and energy to think about is that energy cures climate problems, and this is something that’s an unusual kind of benefit, because if you take a drug, you look at, hey, what are the benefits of the drug and what are the side effects of the drug.

So let’s say you sometimes give a child a vaccine, which—I’m generally very pro-vaccination—but then the child will get a rash as a side effect of the vaccine, or sometimes even more adverse, hopefully not. But if the vaccine has a side effect, the vaccine’s benefit doesn’t cure the side effect, even if it inoculates you from polio and has a side effect, you still have the side effect. But the interesting thing about energy—and so, the cost-benefit is usually worth it.

But with energy, what’s interesting is energy can actually cure side effects that energy causes. For example, if using a lot of energy from fossil fuels changes the rain patterns and you have a little more drought, well, fossil fuels can also power the irrigation systems and they can also power the transport of crops from one place to another.

So it’s this very interesting thing, because energy is so universally useful, because it just powers machines, it allows us to use more machines, more versatile machines.

Whenever you think about the pros and cons of energy, you have to think about “how does energy solve the problems that it creates” and that’s one of the things I love about energy that almost nothing else does. It can solve the problems that it creates, and it’s why I’m so in favor of more energy, even though that has side effects to it.

Student 2:

So you said that we should be balancing how much good we do with how much bad we do as well, right? I think you said?

Alex Epstein:

Well, I wouldn’t say that as an individual. If you’re thinking about activities: particularly industrial activities have some drawback to them and some risks. So if you take something I’m also really interested in, like AI stuff, that’s very top of mind right now: there is risk, even just with computation, computation increase or digital computation added a lot of risks that didn’t exist by definition.

Anything new that you do is going to add risk, like energy-related added energy risks, harnessing fire added fire risks, having kids has risks to it, including your kid might turn out badly and do something bad.

So it’s just important that when we’re making decisions about right and wrong, we realize that there is this quality of “things have risks, things have side effects, things have drawbacks,” and we can’t make the error of saying, “I’m only going to do things that are perfect,” because then you don’t do anything, and that’s the worst thing of all, because then you die.

So I just want to clarify, I don’t think of it as, “oh, on one day, I go help somebody out, and the other day, I kick someone in the face, and I do some good and some bad,” it’s not like that. Any follow-up about that?

Student 2:

Well, also, what are your stances on renewables and stuff like that as well?

Alex Epstein:

So I try to focus on what the policy should be versus trying to dictate what the technology is. People are getting confused about this, because I wrote these two books defending fossil fuels, but the reason I wrote these two books defending fossil fuels is because the policy was trying to get rid of fossil fuels, and so I thought I needed to defend it against an anti-freedom policy. But I don’t have some particular love of fossil fuels versus other forms of energy inherently, except that fossil fuels so far are the best form of energy.

So in terms of what you’re calling renewables, that spans a few different things. So people are usually referring to solar and wind, but it also refers to hydro, it also refers to geothermal, and if you look at the track record of those and the results of those so far, by far the most beneficial has been hydro, because hydro has been—it requires a lot of scale for most of it and it requires certain locations, because you can’t build it everywhere, but where you can build it, it’s really an incredible, incredible source of energy, and I wish the world had more places where it was easy to build hydro and you could do even more stuff. It’s obviously a very clean source of energy and it has a lot of things.

One of the main qualities is what they call in energy: dispatchability or reliability, so can you use it on demand, can you get exactly as much energy as you need when you need it—and that’s been really the problem with solar and wind, is that the fuel source itself is not dispatchable, it’s an intermittent flow of energy.

So the nice thing about it is the fuel is free. And particularly now the collection technology is getting cheaper and cheaper, particularly with solar panels. It’s cheaper to collect the flow. But the problem is what humans need is we need energy on demand. So the problem is how do you change something intermittent, even if you could collect it more and more cheaply, how do you then make that into an on-demand thing?

And what we found is that the amount of batteries are just so expensive that that doesn’t work nearly to the point where you can have an affordable, self-contained solar and battery system or anything like that.

The main way we account for the intermittency of solar and wind is by using fossil fuels. But then that creates problems because you almost build as much fossil fuel capacity as you would if you didn’t have the solar and wind.

So one of the areas for innovation is, hey, are there ways in which you can take advantage of the fact that the solar and wind doesn’t have a fuel cost and you have a pretty low collection cost. Can you integrate that with the more dispatchable things. One of the things I do in my work is I try to advocate policies that allow that to be discovered, that facilitate that discovery.

But I think historically the focus has been let’s just ban fossil fuels and then promise to replace them with solar and wind and that’s been a total disaster. Or let’s subsidize solar and wind, or let’s give some other special preference. And I’m against that.

What I’m really for is freedom for all of these sources to compete. And I think it’s been really bad that people have had an overall way too negative view of fossil fuels and overall way too positive view of solar and wind in terms of their actual energy abilities.

Student 3:

So you said earlier that using fossil fuels can actually solve side effects caused by fossil fuels. So what about if you keep using fossil fuels over and over again, wouldn’t that also cause an increase in pollution as well every single time? Or is there a solution to that too?

Alex Epstein:

Well, so it depends what you mean by an increase in pollution. I mean, anything that has a side effect, if you do it again, it’s going to have the same side effects.

Let’s just take something like a natural gas stove that I have in my house. We burn natural gas for the stove in the oven and that emits a tiny amount of particulate matter. Now, I don’t think it’s enough to matter, that it’s not like an old coal stove or something like this, but what happens with most kinds of things like that is it does the same thing over and over, but the pollution doesn’t accumulate, it just dissipates.

Now, what happens particularly with the greenhouse gases is quite a bit different because with the greenhouse gases, they actually accumulate in the atmosphere. You don’t just emit CO2 and then it just disappears or just totally gets absorbed by the biomass in your environment, it starts to accumulate.

So we used to have 270 parts per million or so, and now we’re above 400 parts per million. So .027% of the atmosphere and over .043% or whatever it is. But there’s a question of do you consider that pollution? Because it’s a change in the system, but it’s not pollution in the sense of it’s something that physically harms our bodies. We can handle way, way more CO2 in the atmosphere just fine in terms of our bodies.

So the question in that case is what is the accumulation of CO2 due to the global climate system, and then what does that do to us? And in my book, I talk about this a lot in terms of chapter seven, eight, and nine. That’s a legitimate thing to explore, but I think basically the short version is it makes the world gradually more tropical.

So it makes it warmer and particularly more tropical around the Earth. So in the periods of the Earth when there’s a lot higher temperatures and more CO2, the Earth is more tropically distributed. It’s not that the equator gets super hot, it’s that you have less of the kind of Arctic stuff going on. Now this is very slow and we’re very far from where we’ve been in the history of the planet and stuff like that, but I think people shouldn’t use the pollution model.

It’s not that you emit more CO2 and then it’s harder and harder to breathe. It’s that you emit more CO2 and if you don’t change it, then the Earth gradually becomes more tropical and then you can think about what you want to do about that.

One thing you can do is you can say, well, I accept this. This is fine. There are benefits and negatives, but it’s fine. Another thing you can do is you could say, well, let’s try to find a cheaper source of energy so we don’t have this byproduct. That’s a very long-term thing.

Another thing you can do if you’re really concerned that it’s happening too fast is you can deliberately cool the atmosphere, which people don’t like to talk about. But if you had a warming problem, that’s the obvious way to deal with it, is you actually need as an engineering thing to deliberately cool the planet. And it’s not as hard as people think because it gets done by volcanoes, there are ways of doing it. People have this idea that we shouldn’t impact the Earth. So there’s a lot of hesitancy to even exploring it.

Now, I don’t think we have a big warming problem, so it’s not super urgent in my mind, but I think it’s important that if we did have a warming problem, you need to solve it directly through engineering, that you need to be able to solve it that way.

To try to solve it by banning fossil fuels, which we have nothing close to producing that much energy—that’s just an absolute deadly thing that will not happen. It’ll be harmful, but there’s no way China, India, et cetera, are doing that until there’s a cheaper replacement and that’s many, many decades away.

So it’s not at all like “we’re all going to choke”. It’s like, “we’re going to have a more tropical world, what do you want to do about that? You have a few options, the worst one is try to get rid of fossil fuels really soon”.

Other questions? Anyone new have a question?

Student 4:

Do you see in the future, at any point, something as effective as fossil fuels as an energy source coming up?

Alex Epstein:

Well, what we want is something a lot more effective. I mean, that that’s really what, if you think about fossil fuels compared to what came before—so there’s kind of two schools of thought here and one I’m much more partial to, but they’re interesting.

So one school of thought, which the one I’m more partial to, is that the superior form of energy will be something that’s very naturally dense and stored, which means some sort of nuclear energy. So if you look at the evolution of energy, what we’ve generally gone from is less dense and intermittent sources of energy to more dense and stored sources of energy.

So we from used to use wind and solar a lot. We used to be 100% renewable in the past, and we do it for farming and windmills to grind grain and stuff like that, and even water to some extent, but water’s less intermittent, but not fully dispatchable in many cases.

But in general, it was a huge thing to discover these chemical deposits that stored a very large amount of energy in a small amount of space, and then all you have to do is burn it and you can release all this energy whenever you want. That was a huge breakthrough.

So then if you think that the density and the stored quality matters a lot in addition to the abundance, then you need something that stores a lot more energy in a small amount of space than the chemical energy and fossil fuels, which is hydrocarbons. So then that brings you to all the forces holding together the nucleus of an atom.

So that leads to the direction of “we’re going to harness the power of the atom in more effective ways.” Now the thing that trades against that is, there’s more complexity in doing that. So that’s part of what I hope engineers work on, which is: “Can you resolve that complexity in a way that’s cost-effective and of course safe?” So that’s one kind of direction, and it’s the one I’m most fundamentally optimistic about, that people will harness.

The other kind of direction, which I’m less optimistic about but people should still feel free to pursue, is to try to take the more intermittent sources, particularly solar, and try to live with the intermittency, but deal with it in a way where you’re trying to make the collection cheap—and then you try to make the storage cheap.

If you can make the storage of batteries 100 times cheaper, that becomes really, really interesting. Because if you can really compensate for the intermittency and the lack of natural storage by having really cheap collection and really cheap storage, that’s another way that you could go.

Now, nobody has made that work yet in terms of actually powering anything with just that. I think as an intermediate step, people will figure out how to use that as part of their system, but in terms of what I think will lead to something that’s 10 times better, my guess is it’ll be the more dense and stored starting point. But politically, I want us to be free to try both. Right now, there’s not a lot of freedom to try nuclear.

All right. I got to go in a minute, but any other questions anyone has? They’ve all been good so far.

Student 2:

So have you done debates and things like that?

Alex Epstein:

Yeah, a lot of them.

Student 2:

And in these debates, do you learn a lot of new things from them? Or how have your stances changed from attending these debates?

Alex Epstein:

Well, so debates are one way of learning, and they’re good. One of the benefits of the debates is often in the preparation for them because is if you’re going to be prepared, you have to learn the best arguments of the other side. And it’s a good, honest way, because you’re going to have somebody who’s not sympathetic and who knows a lot about the specifics.

Like you guys are smart, but obviously not energy experts. So maybe you’d hear me and something I say is persuasive, but you don’t know, hey, there might be some other guy who just has a different view and maybe he could crush me, but he’s not here, there’s always that. So for the audience it’s good, but also for me it’s good to see, hey, who are the best people, and can they challenge me?

I feel like I learn from that, but I learn just as much from hiring a team of people who are very strongly encouraged to challenge me. So I’d say I learn more from internal debate from my people than from external debate, particularly because the people who want to debate me I think, I don’t think they’ve ever been able to make a case on the basic issues.

I don’t think they’ve ever been able to really defend why they have so much bias against fossil fuels. I think they have views of climate catastrophe that are really hard to justify. They have optimism about solar and wind replacing fossil fuels that I don’t think has much of a basis.

So they make good points sometimes, but I find it’s the people that I work with and are more allied with that more challenge me on stuff. I talk about it a little bit in the introduction of my second book about some of the stuff I learned.

But I would say just culturally, if you ever run a business or have a culture, one thing I think is really important is you want to reward people for negative feedback, not punish them, even if it’s wrong.

So even if somebody criticizes me, and let’s say they’re totally wrong, I don’t want to shut them down and make them look bad. Because it’s much harder for people once you’re on a team or you’re employed by somebody, it’s much harder, there’s a lot of friction in criticizing them.

This happens in politics. You criticize a political figure, somebody criticizes their boss, that’s considered very dangerous. The best kind of boss is somebody who says, “I want your criticism. As long as it’s honest, I want that.” Because they’re actually doing you a favor.

Even if the critics are badly motivated, they’re actually doing you a favor because they’ll point out weaknesses in your position or they’ll save you from making mistakes. So yeah, I learn a lot from the debates, but I would say more just from having colleagues who are very happy to criticize me.

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