Randy Boring

“He was uneasy. He was afraid of two claws—the police and the justices. To be afraid of the magistracy, it is sufficient to be afraid, there is no need to be guilty. Ursus had no desire for contact with sheriffs, provosts, bailiffs, and coroners.”
― Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs

“new catastrophe claims will involve the same distortions as the catastrophe claims I’ve debunked so far. They will (1) ignore the fundamental benefits of fossil fuels, (2) especially ignore the environmental mastery benefits of fossil fuels, and (3) wildly overstate the negative side-effects of fossil fuels. Thus, when confronting the latest catastrophe claims, we want to be on the lookout for these distortions.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“Given the term “ocean acidification,” you’d expect current pH levels to be well under 7. But in fact, mainstream estimates of the average pH of our current oceans are about 8.1—estimated to have declined from 8.2 in preindustrial times—very much in the alkaline range. Thus we are witnessing very slow ocean “neutralization,” not “acidification”—acidification is a completely unscientific term used to scare us.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“the mainstream knowledge system, especially its disseminators and evaluators, is fundamentally distorted by the anti-impact framework, which causes it to consistently ignore fossil fuels’ fundamental benefits to human flourishing and to catastrophize fossil fuels’ thus far masterable side-effects. Its catastrophizing includes, as we saw in chapter 2 and chapter 4, wildly and negatively distorting the various environmental side-effects of fossil fuels—including by elevating the minority of specialists with the most extreme negative views to the status of designated experts. And in the previous chapter we saw pervasive climate mastery denial that makes all catastrophe predictions we hear from our knowledge system suspect.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less