‘Anti-impact is anti-human’: Alex Epstein on zero-emissions targets

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This is just an excerpt from The Ezra Levant Show. To see new, ad-free episodes, which air Monday - Friday @ 8 p.m. ET | 6 p.m. MT, become a subscriber to RebelNews+. This episode originally aired on December 30, 2022.

On last night’s episode of The Ezra Levant Show, Ezra was joined by Alex Epstein, who he regards as the greatest advocate for fossil fuels in the English language. Alex is the publisher of Fossil Future, a sequel to The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. 

Alex explained to Ezra how he approaches debates and conversations in a way that transcends arguing over facts and is more likely to change people’s way of thinking. 

“What I found is when you go into a framework, so the basic ideas that influence everything else, then you can actually move people. So an example I use a lot is when I am having a discussion, I establish at the beginning, ‘hey, if we carefully weigh both the negative side effects and the benefits of fossil fuels versus just looking at the negative side effects.’ And, everyone says, well, of course we should look at both. And yet in practice, people almost never look at the benefits. That's a way of framing the conversation such that people are actually looking much more at the full picture, or as I often call it, the full context, and it makes a huge difference.”

Ezra talked about how so many people in the oil and gas industry are self-hating, and say that what they are doing is morally wrong but necessary. In contrast, he said, Alex isn’t saying that the industry is a necessary evil, but positively good and moral.

Alex explained how flawed the popular anti-impact framework is, which he described as “the idea that human impact on nature is one intrinsically immoral and two inevitably self-destructive.”

“If you believe that our goal should be to eliminate human impact, you have to recognize that we survive and flourish by impact. So this is a fundamentally anti-human idea that our impact is bad. It's just as immoral or anti-us idea as to as a lion acting on eliminating lion impact, or a bear acting on eliminating bear impact.”