Fossil Fuel Wars
The gloves come off ahead of the release of Alex Epstein's upcoming pro-fossil fuel book, Fossil Future
A New Hope
Alex Epstein is an American, pro-fossil fuel advocate, author and philosopher. Mr Epstein’s work is very much a counter-balance against the environmental activist anti-coal, oil and gas narrative in the US, the UK and around the World.
While the ‘activists’ find him to be quite provocative, I have always found Epstein’s work to be extremely thorough and informative. As an environmental scientist who has worked extensively in the oil & gas industry, I find Epstein to be a breath of fresh air in his ability to make positive, philosophical arguments about the benefits fossil fuels have and will (hopefully) continue to provide humanity.
The Establishment Strikes Back
On Monday of this week, March 28, Epstein’s career and reputation all of a sudden came under serious attack.
In advance of the release of Epstein’s highly anticipated new book, Fossil Future, The Washington Post announced that it was about to publish an article, not about the content of the book, but rather to discredit Epstein personally.
After an impressive piece of ‘offense archaeology’, the WaPo found an article published by Epstein when he was a teenager, approaching a quarter of a century ago, which the WaPo claimed exposed his ‘racist’ motives.
Return of the Journo’s
But there was a problem.
Epstein fought back.
Quickly, and ruthlessly.
Calling upon his impressive communication skills, Epstein immediately pulled together a concise and convincing rebuttal to the WaPo’s claims and published it on various social media channels. Not only did he put out a solid rebuttal against the WaPo’s personal smears about him, but he also shone a very bright and powerful spotlight on their tactics to discredit him personally.
You can of course make your own mind up about how convincing Epstein’s rebuttal is; you can see it in full in the Twitter thread or YouTube video (starting at around the 17 minute timestamp) embedded below. But what amazed me perhaps most of all, was the complete decoupling of WaPo’s criticisms to the content of the book!
A remarkable feature of the events of this week was the fact that Epstein didn’t need the corporate power and reach that institutions such as the WaPo enjoy to launch his defense. Many independent journalists, podcasters and commentators rallied around Epstein, enabling his message to reach millions of people within a matter of days or even hours. For example;
Mike Shellenberger, prominent environmentalist and author, discussed the attempted cancellation of Alex Epstein on arguably the world’s most popular podcast with an audience in the many millions, the Joe Rogan Experience, this week.
Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoons, author and commentator with a huge online following discussed this saga from a particularly interesting ‘persuasion/ communication’ perspective on his podcast (watch from around the 26 minute timestamp).
There were many more authors and commentators reaching out on platforms such as Twitter to voice their concern for this attempted ‘cancellation’ of Epstein’s book and, arguably, his career as an advocate of fossil fuels.
The WaPo article didn’t end up being published on it’s target date of Wednesday 30th March.
Threat neutralized… for now!
Will this saga continue?
The attempts to personally smear Alex Epstein will clearly spark a lot of interest in what he has to say! What exactly are the WaPo so afraid of that they would have to resort to such personal smear-tactics to discredit a book about fossil fuels?
Whatever it is, I certainly want to know, as will millions of others who otherwise may not have heard about the book.
Continuing my Star Wars analogies, as Obi-wan says to Darth Vader during their famous Death Star duel in A New Hope:
‘‘You can’t win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine’’ Obi-wan Kanobi, A New Hope
So yes, I have now pre-ordered my own copy of Fossil Future! And if it is of the same quality as Epstein’s previous work, I don’t expect it to disappoint.
The book can be pre-ordered by following the links on the publishers website.
(And in case you are wondering, no, I don’t have any kind of affiliate deal with Mr Epstein!)
Be careful out there, and ‘May the Force be with You’.
-Tristan
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Update: At the time of publishing this newsletter on Friday the 1st April, the piece had not appeared on the WaPo website despite it being scheduled for publishing on Wednesday, 30th March. This could of course change at any moment…