Philosophy and Energy by Alex Epstein 

On the topic of nuclear energy, there was a guy called Galen Winsor (who worked in a nuclear power plant for the majority of his youth) that did talks about how nuclear power plants are actually not any more dangerous to the environment than large water boilers. He even ate some 'radioactive' material, to show that it doesn't damage the body, it simply passes through it. Not only that but he also showed how nuclear "waste" can be repurposed over and over again and is actually very valuable. According to him, the ideal set up would be to have mini nuclear power plants in each city, but the energy cartel quickly put a stop to that by feeding fear of nuclear energy into our brains.

Thank you so much for all the work you do, Alex!

Good thing is alex makes this understandable for regular people. Even a phd in climate science is operating on philosophy, not purely science.

This is an incredibly researched, well thought out presentation. The logic is quite compelling. Its dense rapid-fire style was workable the specific audience he was addressing. However, it is true that if he were presenting to a more general audience, slower delivery and more effective visuals would help greatly.

This guy is amazing~

Read your book, thank you, can't wait for you new book.

This is great, but why was it cut short. You interrupted Alex in the middle of his sentence. Please post the whole thing.

Fossil fuels and nuclear power are good. Ecologism is unreason.

There are so few views of this video. Please copy the link and paste it everywhere you can.

It's impossible to understand the climate change activists from their own words: to understand them you need to know the points in this presentation.

There is another thing, also;" Please note that the "solutions" they offer expand the power of government to the point where Ecolotry has become a state religion. This Church, State and economy have been welded into a single, integrated whole. They have also been attacking the consumption of meat for the last 45 years saying that food animals eat plant material that we could be eating if we were pure vegetarians. What food animals eat would be inedible to us AND they convert that ineible material so efficiently that the availability of protein has enabled the growth of the human brain to what it is. Just how expensive would it be to use the land that supports the inedible grass that food animals eat that we use as a source of protein and iron, to grow edibile crops? Even as it is, most of the vegetable material we consume is undigestible and is used for bulk in the intestine. Also how "natural" and "organic" is the phony meat that the Establishment glorifies? Hint: not very. But here's my point about that; making a moral issue of diet is a religious activity that goes back to pre-Biblical times and is just another control mechanism to insert itself in the daily lives of persons Here is a thought: What if the "animal rights" that the speaker described as animal or interspecies equality (a falsehood, my cats were BETTER than them) is a form of projection by which they demonstrate how DE-evolved they are? If they wish to make monkeys out of themselves, who am I to stand in their way?

Excellent!

Cost effective equals profitable, profitable without government subsidy.

I wonder if people can really get into pro-human thinking when deep down they are altruists.

Great talk, horrible cut off…. We need the full thing!

Common sense at its best

ESG and other terrible environmental policies are the reason energy costs are skyrocketing not the fed printing money because it doesn't actually do so. Only commercial banks can.

Because Mann, Erlich, et al have been so wrong, I ask Alex this, why would you even consider that they might be even 10% correct about the impact of increasing CO2?

High T - High Energy philosophy

1:24:30 omg this woman is giving me so much anxiety. Speak your point faster! Ahhhh

The girl in 1:22:43 is very beautiful.

This seems interesting, because a lot of work was clearly done, but a few false premises undercut the very foundation of this talk. For instance, since value here is domain of ethics, the underlying principle of "cost" is not agreed upon. The original fallacy includes an oversimplification of the problem of cost, which supposes that costs are financial when asserting the effectiveness of fossil fuels, yet supposes that costs are more abstract (death and illness) when due to "lack of cost-effective energy". The far more compelling case would also evaluate the more abstract and complex relative costs of comparative energy production means, to include the health effects of scaled human industry, both directly and as it affects the ecosystems upon which we depend. This additional perspective It is not only relevant, absent this type of analysis, the arguments contained within the lecture are mostly unhelpful, in that they do no address the actual environmental catastrophe: the consumption demands of large human populations whose societies prioritize individualism and production at best devalue and at worst disregard values like sustainability of a system, tradeoffs of short and long-term benefits, the relative infancy of our systems of knowledge for biology, psychology, and ecology, etc. Therefore, in presenting a fuller account of costs for the position argued against, and applying less rigor in presenting the costs for the position argued for, Alex either exposes his lack of academic rigor on the subject, or exposes a level of bias which amounts to unscientific.

Alternative energy is false. Like cold fusion.

Some of what is here is worth considering but stating there is no correlation between increased CO2 and "warming" is false...since there is 800,000 years of data in "ice" alone...and that the preindustrial range fluctuated between 180 and 280 ppm. Also the rapid increase of this and other ghg's, especially CO2, exceeds the ability of life to genetically adapt to these changes. To ignore this...defeats the purpose of this exercise, since it too, is a misrepresentation, even though the analysis regarding the "manipulation" of how people think about things and their beliefs is accurate.

It's funny to see objectivists pretend that everything is subjective--including science--except their own axiomatic "objective" claims about reality.

I guess you mislead for free. Being paid by a fossil fuel company is not the same as being funded by the company. For example bill clinton and obama give speeches for money in various countries, that does not mean they are being "funded" by those countries. Oof

What's the point he's trying to make in "relevant fact 3 - billions of people lack cost-effective energy"? We currently have a fossil-fuel dominant society, yet billions of people lack access to energy. So fossil fuel has clearly not been able to save these billions of people. I don't see how this is an argument against moving to renewables. Having said that I don't necessarily buy the argument we should rush to renewable at all costs. One day, we will be able to efficiently harvest solar energy and store it if we let the R&D continue, and then the transition to renewables will be organic.

There are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in Mr. Epstein’s philosophy. Alex has little awareness of his lack of knowledge. This lack is evident in the vagueness of his responses to questions in the question-and-answer period. Yet he believes he possess superior knowledge and a clarity of thinking which is beyond the people he disagrees with. Oh well we all live in our own little world and I’m off to discuss the philosophical meaning of philosophy with my cat.

Absolute comedy. "Four legs good, two legs better." I like my truck and I feel a cultural connection to gas and V8s but nobody should need a philosopher to excuse them for their denial. Not buying a book to congratulate myself for not buying a hippie Tesla

jeff's son

Not a very good presentation. Reading slides is not very effective. See Steve Jobs. Present ideas on a slide, and give your speech word for word.