Alex Epstein: The Truth About Net-Zero CO2 and the Anti-Human Ideology Fueling the 'Green' Movement

American Thought Leaders

"What we're told the experts think can be murderously wrong—not just a little long wrong, but murderously wrong," says Alex Epstein, author of "Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less."

"We should never make the mistake of thinking that a specific set of experts in a specific field can dictate policy. Policy always depends on multiple fields. And it depends on your particular values," says Epstein, a philosopher and founder of the Center for Industrial Progress think tank. "The science is being perverted or distorted to advance this set political agenda."

Net-zero CO2—if achieved—would be devastating to human flourishing and deprive the developing world of desperately needed cost-effective energy, Epstein argues.

"Low-cost, reliable energy that's versatile, can power every type of machine, that's scalable, that can provide energy for billions of people and thousands of places—that's literally the difference between poverty and prosperity, between danger and safety," Epstein says. And that's precisely what fossil futures provide, in contrast to "green" sources of energy like wind and solar.

The push to minimize "impact" doesn't merely mean minimizing water or air pollution or unnecessary destruction of natural beauty, Epstein says. It fundamentally means minimizing farms, factories, roads, "everything that makes the world livable for 8 billion people. So they very cleverly masked this anti-human, anti-technology agenda."

"Look at how glorified being green is. But what does green mean? … The ideal 'green planet' is the earth that would exist had human beings never existed," Epstein says.