By Alex Epstein
Questions from his speeches.
Energy Fun Fact #1 – Failure Worship
Q: Could it be that the thinking within the Green movement, which seems so detrimental to their own well-being, reflects a form of self-loathing?
A: It is, but I think the key to it psychologically is a lot of people are willing to accept a certain amount of self-loathing if they get to engage in greater amounts of other loathing.
You could watch these videos of me at these climate protests, and these are very unpleasant human beings to deal with in most cases. It’s not very happy and friendly. They would never say, “I’m so virtuous.” It’s much more like, “I’m less bad.”
Their focus is on you guys or me—they’re associating me with a fossil fuel industry. They’re like, “You guys, you fat cats”—sometimes they’ll do it about the 1%, but it’s always people who are successful—they’re like, “You guys are evil. And yes, I’m evil, I’m bad, but you guys are really evil.”
There’s a lot of things that can be challenging and insecurities and stuff like this. One way people deal with that is they find ways to feel better than others. And one way is you can try to have a positive view of the other and an even more positive view of yourself, but sometimes that’s very implausible. So maybe what you can do instead is you can have a negative view of yourself, but an even more negative view of another person. The green movement is the perfect vehicle for this kind of thing because anyone who is successful has an impact, and if impact is evil, then the person who does nothing has less impact than the person who does a lot. It’s a perfect morality for failures to feel superior. So yes, the self-loathing and other-loathing is very important.
https://alexepstein.substack.com/p/answers-to-questions-about-the-social
Energy Fun Fact #2 – Methane
Q: What is your stance on the newer topic of methane emissions?
A: When you burn fossil fuels, it creates these greenhouse gases, and the main one is CO2, then the second most significant one is called methane. It’s a CH4—one carbon, four hydrogens—and that’s basically what natural gas is. But instead of the natural gas burning and generating CO2, it’s basically a natural gas in the atmosphere.
What people like to say is, “It’s 40 times more powerful than CO2” and things like this. But the same basic analysis applies, that the warming effect of methane is not that significant relative to how much is emitted. My basic analysis is the same. I don’t really say anything different about methane because it’s basically if you look at all the greenhouse gases and the amount of warming they cause and are expected to cause, that’s not that big a deal, so you should not be restricting energy based on that.
Just some facts about methane that are important though is people say it’s more powerful, but we emit much less of it and it disappears from the atmosphere much more quickly. Actually the real challenge of CO2, insofar as there’s a challenge, is that it sticks in the atmosphere for a long time. Most things we emit just enter in and out really quickly. Most particulate pollution doesn’t last that long, but CO2 aggregates. Methane gets cleared a lot more quickly.
So in a sense, if you’re concerned about warming long-term, methane is less concerning. You get rid of the “problem” more easily. The main thing is it’s not that much warming, and energy is what matters, not small changes in the climate.
https://alexepstein.substack.com/p/answers-to-questions-about-the-social
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