Debate: Fossil Fuels - Good Or Bad? [updated]

Tune in live today at 1pm NZ time (that’s 4pm Pacific Time) to watch leading environmentalist Bill McKibben (left, above) debate Center for Industrial Progress founder Alex Epstein:

WATCH LIVE AT 1PM!

[UPDATE: Here’s the YouTube recording of the event below, which unfortunately is missing the first two minutes of Alex’s opening. Broadcast-quality version “is in production.”]

This is “the ultimate environmental debate.” Environmentalist icon Bill McKibben is, concedes Epstein, “the world's most powerful opponent of fossil fuels.”

Environmentalist icon Bill McKibben is organizing a movement to demonize and dismantle the fossil fuel industry--the industry that produces over 85% of the cheap, plentiful, reliable energy that makes modern life possible. McKibben believes that "we need to cut our fossil fuel use by a factor of twenty over the next few decades."
    In the most influential energy article of the year, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” McKibben called the fossil fuel industry “Public Enemy Number One.”
    Bill McKibben has been called “the nation’s most important environmentalist” for a reason. He is revered by liberal intellectuals and he is a master activist; in 2009, he organized 5200 simultaneous anti-fossil fuel protests--"the largest global coordinated rally of any kind."

Epstein challenged McKibben to debate to help promote the real truth about fossil fuels and our environment.

If McKibben’s new movement to turn the American public against fossil fuels is successful [says Epstein], it would be a death-blow to our already-teetering economy, and to environmental health around the world.
McKibben is dead wrong about fossil fuels and our environment. If we take an objective, scientific look at how fossil fuels have impacted the human environment, including our climate, the overall result is amazing--we live in the greatest environment in human history. The countries with the worst environments--with the most filth, disease, crop failures, low life expectancies--are the ones that use the least fossil fuels.
    That’s why I challenged Bill McKibben to a public debate when no one else would--and that’s why we should all be so excited that he accepted. On November 5, at Duke University, McKibben will be arguing the widespread fallacy that “fossil fuels are a risk to the planet.” I will be arguing the truth--that “fossil fuels improve the planet.”
This debate is a game-changing challenge to the environmental establishment…
    This is the first debate ever where a world-class environmentalist will be challenged by the powerful environmental case for fossil fuels.

The Fossil Fuel Debate is on! Watch live at 1 o’clock!

Here’s Alex warming up:

And here’s a preview of his case:  Challenging Bill McKibben and the Green Establishment: The Environmental Case for Fossil Fuels

99.9% of discussion of fossil fuels and our environment ignores the single most important fact about fossil fuels and our environment:fossil fuels have made our environment amazingly good.
        The difference between a healthy environment and an unhealthy environment can be summed up in one word, and it’s not “CO2” or “climate” or “temperature.” It’s “development” …
    Consider  Bill McKibben, “the nation’s leading environmentalist” according to The Boston Globe, who blames certain increases in malaria, dengue fever, cholera, and salmonella on “CO2-induced climate change.”
    What about a lack of development, of proper sanitation, and, above all, of the wonderful synthetic malaria-killer that is DDT? More broadly, what about a lack of the cheap, reliable fossil fuel energy that has underlain all of Western industrial and technological development?
    It doesn’t even get a mention–let alone the starring role it deserves in any discussion of improving our environment…