Because this Fossil Future is pretty “great”

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2022/10/fossil-future.html

But on the recommendation of my colleague Bryan Caplan, I’ve just read Alex Epstein’s contrarian new book Fossil Future. And my overall review is that, on the big issues, he’s basically right: CO2 induced planetary warming is going slowly, doesn’t remotely threaten extinction, and its harms will be more than offset by gains from our growing fossil-energy-powered wealth. It would be crazy to actually try to end fossil fuel use by 2050, as many are now “committing” to do; fossil fuels will likely remain our most cost-effective way to do many useful things long after that.

Unmentioned: that human suffering will result from continued fossil fuel use; that while extinction is unlikely from climate change, civilization disruption is almost inevitable and that will change whatever naive “progress” graph Hanson is drawing; and that there are other issues from carbon emissions (ocean acidification, geopolitical) besides climate change. Hanson blithely considers the lives of billions to be superfluous as long as it is not “extinction.”

How does Hanson arrive at this conclusion? A strawman:

Most fundamentally, Epstein diagnoses the key problem well: the main emotional energy behind climate activism is the desire to stop humans from having any substantial impact on nature. In my terminology, they see nature as sacred, and thus as eternal, pure, not in conflict with other sacred things, and to be sharply distinguished from, not mixed with, and not at any price sacrificed for, profane things. We are not to calculate such choices, but to intuit them, aesthetically.

Note the original book that this is a “review” of does not frame any of this as “sacred” that’s Hanson’s term, the major objections to “burn it all” have to do with the lack of scalable solutions to atmospheric climate, that any projection of future economic value will necessarily miss all the people who die in these situations and Hanson completely ignores any “long tail” or complications from the largest mass migration in human history (i.e. resource wars).

Epstein is right that our elite academic and media systems focus on a few celebrated and oft-quoted climate expert/activists, who are not that representative of the larger world of experts. And these activists are opposed to nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, and hydroelectricity, all of which avoid CO2 warming. They even sympathize with those who oppose new solar and wind energy projects, and any land developments, that have substantial impacts on nature. It seems that, thought they may deny it in public, what they really want is a smaller human world, with fewer people using less materials and energy.

The first bolded section should be sneeerworthy on its own, given the nature of media coverage on climate change and the overwhelming support the IPCC reports have among climate scientists. The second is mildly true, but then Greta Thurnberg herself just pointed out that Germany should keep its nukes running instead of restarting coal. And there are deflationary or minimal human strains of near-ecofascism, but they are absolutely in the minority, but that all population models show a reduction of human population as developmental levels increase. Hanson is married to the “infinite growth” model ideologically, as in it’s a philosophical axiom for his longtermist beliefs, and despite his work on xeno-sociology and ET modeling, he weighs the complexities of interstellar life without any consideration of the details.

We see a lot of the Yudkowsky dudes here, but Hanson is probably one of the most sneerworthy people alive right now.