Alex Epstein: "by our standards, the world is extremely energy poor"

By our standards, the world is extremely poor, including energy poor, and one point I make in the book is that there are six billion people in the world who by our standards use a totally inadequate amount of energy, less electricity than one of our refrigerators uses.  We live in a world that is energy deprived, and then you learn that fossil fuels provide 80 percent of that energy and their use is still growing, particularly in the parts of the world that care most about low-cost reliable energy.  It is insane to talk about phasing them out rapidly.  The other side has an enormous burden of proof when claiming that we should be phasing out fossil fuels when the value they provide is so needed and they’re clearly uniquely good at providing it.

~ Alex Epstein, "Debunking Fossil Fuel Hysteria: An Interview with Alex Epstein," The Austrian, September-October 2022