By Alex Epstein
Question from his speeches.
Q: I think many of us have seen videotapes of polar bears, the ice floe breaking up and they don’t have any place to go. How do you respond to that kind of imaging?
A: Well, it’s an interesting thing. I’ll say how I’d respond to it in a second—but it captures my point that people aren’t really thinking of the world from a human perspective when there’s a lot more focus on, “This polar bear lost his piece of ice,” than three billion people have almost no electricity. It’s an interesting focus that that’s the thing. Most people have no intention of ever seeing a polar bear, don’t know anything about polar bears. In other languages they’re called water bears; they don’t just need ice, they’re in water all the time.
The whole thing with polar bears, one is valuing human beings above polar bears is morally problematic. The second thing is, insofar as human beings value polar bears, having a high-energy world that is slowly warming is way better for polar bear populations than having a slightly colder world with no resources. The more resources we have, the more we can preserve and protect any species that we care about.
There’s this meme—I don’t know if you’ve seen this meme, but it’s a good meme that flows around, and I forget the exact numbers—but it’s Al Gore. it’s a polar bear and Al Gore. He says, “When Al Gore was born, there were 5,000 of us. Only 25,000 remain.”
They’re a dramatically increasing population. This is the thing, of course they don’t give you that context. So the easy thing is, yes, we’ve had more polar bears, but the more important thing is when you have energy, fossil fuels enable you to do virtually anything you want to make the world better, including if you care about polar bears, to increase polar bear populations.
Again, I don’t think most of the people opposing fossil fuels really care about polar bears. It’s a symbol of “evil human beings had an impact on nature.”
See picture in article
Sometimes there is a man-made change that on its own is adverse, but we could counteract it. Other times, at least in my understanding with for example the caribou, and it certainly often happens with marine life, is often other life likes us.
One of the fallacies of “human impact is bad” is that human impact is always bad for the rest of nature. That’s a ridiculous bias. Why would you assume that? In general, human activities, what do we do? One of the conspicuous things they do is they create warmth. The world is too cold for almost everything. When things are warm, organisms go to them. By the way, we create warmth and we create a lot of new raw material, and often raw materials are in short supply. You’ll see birds will use our material and other things use our material. Even things like waste, what we consider waste, many forms of life thrive on it.
If you’re thinking about parts of non-human nature that we value, which I think all of us do in various ways, you need to think about 1) energy allows us to pursue all of those things much more than we otherwise could, and 2) you cannot assume that our impacts, even our inadvertent impacts, are bad. You have to look at it clinically.
Again, with polar bears, people just assume, “Oh, we made it warmer. Obviously all the polar bears died. I don’t even need to look into the numbers,” versus, “No, actually there are more of them than in a long time, and actually people are having a lot of problems with them.” And guess what? The people who claim to care about them are not remotely concerned about the problems they’re causing.
https://alexepstein.substack.com/p/answers-to-questions-about-the-social
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