The moral case for fossil fuels, it turned out, was a Steven Pinker–esque tribute to the bright side of human progress. "The world is better than ever," Epstein declared, thanks in no small part to energy derived from fossil fuels. Environmentalism is thus anti-humanist. "People are just looking for negatives about fossil fuels," he lamented. "They're not looking for positives." He then drilled the crowd on some useful rhetorical flourishes that he has passed on to policy-makers. ("To paraphrase Atlas Shrugged," he said, "I want them to have the words they need.") When he pulled up the famous "hockey stick" graph showing a dramatic spike of atmospheric carbon levels after the industrial era, he told us that it actually charted a great saga of "human flourishing."
An exuberant question-and-answer session followed. When someone noted that his peers were alarmed by a rapidly warming climate, Epstein took a dig at the Green New Deal championed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, saying, "I think she should be called Venezuela Ocasio-Cortez!" When another audience member invited him to respond to accusations that his acceptance of fossil fuel industry dollars might preclude him from being objective, Epstein steamrolled the question with a John Galt–style show of brio: "I'm that superhero who's coming to help this industry tell the truth."
Epstein's talk drove home the perverse incentives the Objectivist dogma offers to on-the-make intellectuals: Selling out to the highest bidder is not merely condoned; it's deemed a positive moral virtue. It didn't even matter if Epstein really believed his own advocacy; maybe he did, maybe he didn't. What mattered above all is the belief in the sanctity of the transaction. "That was very interesting," one of the young Objectivists murmured to me on the way out.
