Caplan and Hanson Interview Alex Epstein
Atypical questions about Fossil Future
A couple weeks ago, Robin Hanson and I interviewed Alex Epstein about his Fossil Future. Though Robin and I are both fans of this stunningly good book, we focused on our top objections and biggest doubts. Enjoy!
I like the focus on being pro human but I think Alex misses the point when talking about sacredness and it also loops back into the discussion about marginal instead of yes no distinctions.
I think many people would trade some human flourishing for some protection of nature even if they never benefit from it. Like I think for many people they might be willing to pay a dollar to make sure polar bears do not go extinct even if they will never see a polar bear.
I agree that environmentalist some time make absurd tradeoffs between the sacred and the human but when I introspect at least at some margin I am willing to make modest tradeoffs.
I liked Robin's sketch of a pro nature pro fossil fuels person. Here's a comment I made I couple days ago "Robin Hanson at one point tries to describe such a view, with it roughly being that increasing human capability (through fossil fuel usage and such) enables humans to do more stuff including seeding the oceans, or increasing the amount of nature in Siberia, or limiting the negative effects of drought etc. I think the best response to this would be, as a matter of fact would humans actually do these things with increased capabilities instead of doing "bad things", and I think the best response to that would be that it might make more sense to organize an environmentalist movement which such aims as opposed to letting current environmentalist movements do other "bad things". This is only a basic sketch of the argument but you can see what a more fleshed out version would look like."
I didn't like that Alex seems to dismiss marginal thinking (I think its because of some weird objectivist moralistic aversion to taxes and regulation and such, even if he doesn't advertise it), there are ways of steel manning this by saying stuff such as on the marginal tax/regulation is way too much and such but Alex doesn't seem to be engaging with that sort of thinking.