Book: The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels - Alex Epstein (Part 1/2)
Could everything you know about fossil fuels be wrong?
Sickly-looking environmentalists have been warning us for years that our addiction to burning fossil fuels is dangerous and likely to destroy our world. However, life has been getting better and better by every metric, including life expectancy, access to clean water, and climate safety.
How is this possible?
The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein proposes that this is because we typically hear only one side of the story. We are taught to solely consider the hazards and side effects associated with fossil fuels, rather than their unique capacity to offer affordable, dependable energy to a planet with seven billion people. Furthermore, Epstein contends that the moral importance of accessible, dependable energy is grossly underestimated. Energy is our capacity to enhance all facets of life, including the economic and environmental ones.
When compared to the alternatives, fossil fuel use has a massively positive influence on the globe, making it a much better place overall. For the benefit of our economy, the environment and the individual humans, we have a moral obligation to increase our usage of fossil fuels.
The book.
Most of the source material for these notes comes from the book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, by Alex Epstein. This book exposes the often-ignored, insanely positive side of the use of fossil fuels. Next time your suicidal vegan cousin lectures you about how humanity is a virus and needs to be wiped off the planet, consider gently reminding her through these well documented points how humans have improved the livability of the planet for humans and created a vision of a pure and safe mother nature through our own climate mastery. If she can see her way to the fact that she’d be clinging to a branch, half-starved and full of disease without fossil fuels, then maybe we can all have some hope that common sense will prevail.
But why this book?
So why should you give a hot goddamn about any benefits from the use of fossil fuels? Surely solar and wind are primed to take over after trillions of dollars of investment. Surely they are actually clean and renewable and we’ve considered the entire supply chain. So even if there were benefits from fossil fuels surely we would still want to remove them from our lives so these pristine and “green” energy technologies can release the natural utopia we’ve all been sold.
Well what if the answer is right in front of us. What if after decades of development and trillions of dollars, wind and solar are nowhere near being able to take over from fossil fuels due to the intractable problem of diluteness and intermittency. When you begin to understand how disastrous the implementation of this technology has been and the lies we’ve been told about its real capacity and cost, you’ll begin to realise how utterly amazing fossil fuels are and how they are completely indispensable for an industrialised society.
The book clearly shows how important access to cheap, plentiful, reliable and scalable energy is for any society. It also shows how there are very few energy technologies that can meet these requirements. It will show you how we’ve been misled and managed through the climate emergency debate and it’ll give you back some hope for our future generations.
If you find this sketch interesting, please go get the book and begin understanding why energy is so important and how, if we make the choice to move away from fossil fuels without another energy source that is cheap, plentiful, reliable and scalable, billions will die early and unnecessarily.
We’re going to split this one into two parts. The first part will cover the energy challenge for humanity, why solar and wind aren’t fit to meet this challenge and how incredible fossil fuels have been for improving the lives of humans. The second part will analyse the real impact of using fossil fuels on the environment and present a case for balancing the benefits and costs of this incredible technology.
The history of fossil fuels hidden in plain sight.
Fossil fuels. You hear a lot about them but you probably don’t know how critical they are for almost every aspect of modern life. 87% of all the energy we use comes from one of the fossil fuels: coal, oil or natural gas. And yet we are told that we cannot continue using them. We are told we are burning up the atmosphere, destroying the environment and depleting the natural resources. We are told the only acceptable energy sources are solar, wind and biomass. The debate focuses on how dangerous fossil fuels are and how quickly we can transition away from them. Nearly everyone has accepted the premise that they are a problem. Apocalyptic forecasts and demands for decarbonisation are a daily occurrence in the news despite the fact that the short- and long-term benefits of fossil fuels far outweigh the risks of using them.
For decades scientists have been predicting that we are at the edge of environmental catastrophe. Predictions that were made 50 years ago indicated that we’d all be burned up today if our fossil fuel use continued. Instead of reducing our use of fossil fuels since the 1970s we now use more than ever and we’ve seen a dramatic improvement in our lives, our health, and even environmental quality.
This Story is Not New.
So what is the track record for fossil fuels and the dire predictions that have been made for the past 50 years? Predictions as far back as the 1970s declared that we would run out of oil by the 1990s and islands like England would be mostly flooded. The environment would become more damaging to our health. Picture populations in cities having to wear masks as millions of lives are cut short by poor air quality. There were even claims that carbon dioxide induced famines would kill billions before 2020. Scary stuff.
And believe it or not there were claims of scientific consensus on these apocalyptic predictions as far back as 1989. In the 1990s some scientists were proposing restrictions on carbon emissions that would only allow people to travel in their car a few miles each day and to run a refrigerator. That’s it! No dishwasher, dryer, washing machine, television, computers, phones, appliances or children’s electronic toys!
Instead of listening to them, we started using far more fossil fuels than we previously had, nearly double in actual fact, and it has led to a massive improvement in human life across the world.
More fossil fuels, more human flourishing.
At the time of the book, compared to the 1970s, we now use 39% more oil, 107% more coal, and 131% more natural gas. Experts in the 1970s are on the record stating that the increase that we’ve seen wouldn’t be necessary because solar, wind and energy conservation would come to the table and negate the need for using more fossil fuels. Well 50 years on and this still hasn’t happened.
Solar and wind are both intermittent energy sources. They are sometimes there but often not. So they must be combined with a reliable source of energy, such as coal, gas, nuclear or hydro. Despite the trillions that have been pumped into the wind and solar power technology, no one has figured out a cost-effective and scalable process to transform sunlight and wind into the cheap, plentiful and reliably energy source the world needs to survive and thrive.
The argument for moving away from fossil fuels is nearly always framed as a moral choice. So let’s consider what the moral choice here really is. The moral choice is whatever will promote human life and flourishing. Anything that shortens or damages a person’s life is not moral and should be avoided. What has been demonstrated in India and China, where coal and oil use have increased by at least a factor of five in recent history, life expectancy and average income levels have climbed significantly.
According to the experts, this was not supposed to be possible. What will be shown through this material is the experts have magnified the risks, while ignoring the massive benefits that fossil fuels have unlocked. As we’ve used more fossil fuels, resource, environment and climate situations have improved. Not only have we not run out of oil and gas, but we’ve used more and we now have access to even larger reserves. The experts ignored the capacity for human ingenuity to get access to new fossil fuel reserves through technological development. Our environment, instead of becoming a wasteland toxic to humans, has become much cleaner. Environmentalists assume that nature is perfect until humans interact with it but the truth is we are using fossil fuels to improve nature for the benefit of humans.
And what about temperature? In the 1970s scientists were predicting global cooling. Only a few years later they’d revised their models and determined we now had to worry about global warming. Okay. Got it. Claims began in the 1970s and 1980s that due to the greenhouse effect, putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would result in massive increases in global temperature. Well, again, we haven’t seen this skyrocketing of temperatures around the globe as fossil fuel use increased.
The increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was also supposed to make the climate more volatile and dangerous to humans. But if we look at climate-related deaths (deaths caused by droughts, floods, storms and extreme temperatures) we see that in the last 80 years these fell by 98%. 50 times lower!
Experts as advisers, not authorities.
If we had of followed the advice of experts from the 1970s it would have resulted in the premature death of billions of people. This is how important fossil fuels are to humans. We must carefully consider the risks of fossil fuels going forward but not ignore the tremendous and life-transforming benefits that they bring.
We should consider experts as advisers, not authorities and make sure they are clear on what they know and don’t know. We must strive to understand how they have reached their conclusions. Unfortunately expert voices that present the most extreme conclusions tend to get the headlines and the most clicks. The problem is an interdisciplinary question, and everyone is a non-expert in many relevant issues. We must work together through honest dialog to weigh the cost-benefit of any technology that may benefit humans.
The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.
What should our standard of value be? The answer may surprise you in its simplicity - but it is human life. Fossil fuels have been the moral choice for human flourishing. Implicit in the environmentalists standard of value is that nature is a pristine garden of Eden, and human impact should be reduced as much as possible. This is anti-human, with no regard for human life and happiness. It also neglects the fact that nature for almost all of human history has been a continual and deadly threat to our daily survival. We transformed our environment to survive, and now we are thriving. The standard that one holds for value must be clearly defined and held at the forefront of the energy discussion.
Cheap, plentiful, reliable energy combined with human ingenuity allow us to transform the world around us into a far safer and richer place now and into the future. We are at a fork in the road, between a spectacular dream and a terrifying nightmare and the nightmare is winning.
The Energy Challenge
Cheap, plentiful, reliable energy for 7 billion people.
Energy impacts every aspect of our lives in ways we often take for granted. There is almost nothing that matters more than our access to cheap, reliable and plentiful energy. To illustrate the point here is a story from The Gambia, the small West African country.
THE GAMBIA
June 2006
At 4 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon, I was startled when the lights came on; the lights never came on after 2 p.m. on the weekends. The adrenaline really kicked in when I was invited to observe an emergency cesarean section—a first for me. When the infant emerged I felt my heart racing from excitement and awe!
But no matter how many times the technician suctioned out the nose and mouth, the infant did not utter a sound. After twenty five minutes the technician and nurse both gave up. The surgeon later explained that the baby had suffocated in utero. If only they had had enough power to use the ultrasound machine for each pregnancy, he would have detected the problem earlier and been able to plan the C-section. Without early detection, the C-section became an emergency, moreover, the surgery had to wait for the generator to be powered on. The loss of precious minutes meant the loss of a precious life. At that time, in that place, all I could do was cry.
And later, when the maternity ward was too hushed, I cried again. A full-term infant was born weighing only 3.5 pounds. In the U.S., the solution would have been obvious and effective: incubation. But without reliable electricity, the hospital did not even contemplate owning an incubator. This seemingly simple solution was not available to this newborn girl, and she perished needlessly.
Reliable electricity is at the forefront of every staff members’ thoughts. With it, they can conduct tests with electrically powered medical equipment, use vaccines and antibiotics requiring refrigeration, and plan surgeries to meet patients’ needs. Without it, they will continue to give their patients the best care available, but in a country with an average life expectancy of only 54 years of age, it’s a hard fight to win.
This is what cheap, plentiful and reliable power means. It is the ability to keep a baby alive. It is the ability to monitor vitals on pregnant women. More energy means a greater ability to improve our lives.
There are two facts that are often ignored when it comes to the energy debate:
We need much more energy
It is extremely difficult to produce the energy we need cheaply and reliably.
Let’s dig into this in more detail.
Machine calories.
Energy is defined as the capacity to do work. The analogy can be drawn from humans consuming calories, turning food energy into the ability to think and move. Fossil fuels can be thought of as machine calories. The average human needs as much energy as it takes to run a 100 watt light bulb.
We are naturally weak and the history of humans has been defined by us trying to unlock enough energy to survive to the next day. Through ingenuity we’ve become like supermen. The average American has access to 186000 calories a day of machine energy. This is equivalent to the energy of 93 humans. The unleashing of the power associated with fossil fuels had a large role in eradicating most slavery in the Western world.
Over half of the world’s population has no electricity, or lack access to adequate electricity. 86% of our energy currently comes from coal, oil and natural gas. This is only a few percent less than what we were using back in the 1980s. All other sources of energy have always been supplements to fossil fuels.
So why is so much of the energy not made from alternatives? For something to be cheap and plentiful, every part of the process to produce it, including every input that goes into it, must be cheap and plentiful. Every energy process requires taking a raw form of energy, and transforming it into a usable form. This takes time and resources. It must be a workable and scalable process, and produce cheap and plentiful energy. We must also look at risks and by-products associated with the process, such as the radioactive waste produced from mining metals for windmills.
Solar and wind: diluteness and intermittency.
The process for solar and wind to create reliable energy requires so many resources that it cannot be cheap or plentiful. The main problem is the diluteness and intermittency problems associated with these energy sources.
The diluteness problem is that sun and wind do not deliver concentrated energy, which means that a lot of materials are required per unit of energy produced. Then we have the fact that the sun and wind are intermittent. They cannot be relied upon to be there when you need them. Due to this intermittency a reliable energy source such as fossil fuels is required to do the heavy lifting for the power grid. Not only this, the use of coal becomes more inefficient as it has to move up and down quickly to adjust to the roller coaster of energy produced by solar and wind. Too much electricity pumped into the grid when the sun comes out from behind the clouds will cause rolling blackouts. You are effectively starting and stopping coal power plants to deal with intermittent nature of solar and wind.
Solar and wind always require a backup, a host, making them a parasite on the energy grid. To state it plainly - windmills cannot power the factories that are required to make windmills.
There is no evidence that solar or wind can come close to supplementing fossil fuels, let alone replacing and scaling to provide for the energy growth that is required for 7 billion people. It may work on a remote property with low energy needs, but it cannot scale. And it is dishonest and dangerous to suggest otherwise.
Energy that is cheap, plentiful and reliable.
The term renewable is not a useful criterion for a good energy source and it says nothing about the cost of production.
Instead of trying to extract energy from dilute and intermittent sources, the most effective way to access cheap, plentiful and reliable energy is by working with a source that nature has already concentrated for us. The best concentrated energy sources we have at the moment are water in the form of hydropower, forces holding atoms together (nuclear power) and chemical bonds in dead plant matter (fossil fuels). Let’s look at these in a bit more detail.
Hydropower is a cheap and reliable medium-scale energy source. Water flows through a turbine, creating cheap and reliable energy through the movement of the turbine’s blades. The two main limitations to this energy source are natural and political. The natural limitation is that there are only so many natural flowing river sources that can be taken advantage of. There is still a number around the world that haven’t been dammed and developed to produce energy and this is due to political opposition. Hydropower is a cheap reliable non-CO2 emitting source of energy. If the standard is human life, and if we need to reduce CO2 as much as possible then hydropower is an incredibly clean, cheap and reliable energy source.
Nuclear power is derived from the concentration of energy in uranium and other radioactive metals, and the amount of energy available is simply phenomenal. It is more than a million times greater than oil and 2 million times greater than coal. There is a perceived difficulty in producing nuclear power cheaply and safely. It is more complex to transform into usable energy. If exposed to high levels of radiation this can lead to radiation sickness and cancer in the long-term. At the same time below certain thresholds it is perfectly safe. We emit radioactivity, the sun is radioactive, you’re exposed to more radiation on a plane than if you lived next to a nuclear power plant. And this may surprise you but in the free world there have been no deaths from nuclear power. These irrational fears have led to the industry largely being run by the government, which has impacted price and innovation. Nuclear as a power source is definitely scalable and has a chance in the coming decades to become a leading source of global energy.
Now let’s turn to the greatest energy technology of our time - fossil fuels.
The Greatest Energy Technology of All Time
Fossil fuel power: cheap, plentiful, reliable, scalable.
As I’ve stated already and what is becoming clear from looking at other sources of energy is there is a challenge. The challenge is finding a source of energy that is cheap, reliable, plentiful and scalable. And I hate to break it to you but solar and wind aren’t it and it’s not even close.
Fossil fuels are essentially dead plants that are millions of years in the making. They come in three forms - coal is solid, oil is liquid and natural gas is, well, a gas. They are naturally concentrated and stored by the earth’s processes over long periods of time. And they exist in huge quantities trapped underground. The technical term for fossil fuels is hydrocarbons because they are made up of hydrogen and carbon.
Let’s learn about the three forms of fossil fuels now.
Coal.
Coal is the leading fuel for electricity. It is plentiful, widespread and relatively easy to extract. It is also easy to transport and process. Sometimes the hydrocarbons of coal have been bonded with sulfur and nitrogen. When burned these can become harmful and require filtration and dilution. Coal also releases the most carbon dioxide. Coal has the capacity to provide billions of people all the electricity they need for decades to come.
Natural gas.
Natural gas is primarily used for peak load electricity. The grid uses different amounts of electricity at different times. The minimum that it always requires is the base load power. Coal, nuclear and hydropower are typically used for the base load power. For electricity peaks, such as a hot day when everyone uses their air-conditioner at the same time, natural gas enters the equation. It is great for scaling up or down quickly and it burns clean so it is great for heating the home.
The disadvantage with natural gas is that it is a gas, so therefore it is harder to transport in large quantities. Gas usually ends up being a local market. There is new technology that is starting to overcome this disadvantage, such as hydraulic fracking and advances in compressing and liquefying for transport.
Oil.
Oil is the most coveted fuel in the world due in large part to its portability. It is a super concentrated source of energy that can be refined into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. It is used for nearly all transportation. Oil is the fuel of freedom. It allows travel and specialisation. It is the greatest portable energy source the world has ever known.
In the twentieth century human ingenuity made oil not only the most important fuel, but also the most important raw material for modern civilisation. Humans figured out how to breakdown the molecules in oil into a huge variety of polymers.
Oil is a resource that was useless prior to humans figuring out how to transform and harness its potential. It was a black nuisance often found by farmers when digging on their land. Now it can be used for energy, manufacture of electronic devices, asphalt and plastics, to name a few.
We’ve barely scratched the Earth’s surface in terms of the vast amount of resources available. We already know we have enough fossil fuels and nuclear energy to last thousands of years.
The market uses the price mechanism to show us which energy source is most efficient and the market points to the fact that fossil fuels win hands down. Fossil fuels are many times cheaper to use than solar and wind and the only practical option for lifting people out of energy poverty.
We should not be concerned about running out of energy resources. We should be concerned about losing the freedom to create energy resources.
Every calorie matters.
It’s important to understand how truly transformative fossil fuels have been for the human race. Life expectancy and productivity all shot through the roof with the Industrial Revolution, due to the unlocking of the energy in fossil fuels, through coal-powered steam engine technology. This energy allowed everything to be more productive. People at the time understood the value of this incredible technological development. Here is a letter from the time that captures the sentiment.
Coal is everything to us. Without coal, our factories will become idle, our foundries and workshops be still as the grave; the locomotive will rust in the shed, and the rail be buried in the weeds. Our streets will be dark, our houses uninhabitable. Our rivers will forget the paddlewheel, and we shall again be separated by days from France, by months from the United States. The post will lengthen its periods and protract its dates. A thousand special arts and manufacturers, one by one, then in a crowd, will fly the empty soil, as boon companions are said to disappear when the cask is dry.
This was at a time when coal pollution was at its dirtiest due to the early stage of the technology, and this is not even mentioned in letters at the time. Every machine calorie counts towards human flourishing. And this is most evident in agriculture and the production of food.
More fossil fuels means more food.
There was a general belief in the 1960s that the battle to feed everyone had been lost. The fact is however that we now have twice as many people and the average person is better fed than in the 1960s. Mechanisation and fossil fuels allowed for a dramatic expansion of farming and food production. 90% of the population were involved in farming without fossil fuels. Fossil fuels allowed for tractors and the transportation of food from farms to the marketplace. When there was insufficient manure for fertiliser, synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, derived from natural gas, could be deployed. Irrigation could be used to get water to crops yielding up to three times the production of rain-fed areas. This freed people up to conduct research to improve farming methods to produce even more food. Fossil fuel energy is the food of food. It has to be admitted that the oil industry has made a huge contribution to the betterment of humanity, so this should be considering when discussing any potential issues with this industry.
More fossil fuels means more ability.
It must also be acknowledged that without the energy industry no other industry is possible. It is the master industry that powers everything else. More energy means more ability to enjoy our lives, to explore and evolve. Every facet of our modern lives depends on this ability.
Fossil fuel energy and the myth of a safe, natural environment.
The natural environment is not naturally safe and healthy for humans. It is only thanks to cheap, plentiful and reliable energy that we have water to drink, food to eat, and the technology to cope with the hostile climate. When we consider the potential damage from consuming fossil fuels, we have to look at the positives, and ultimately what aids human flourishing. More energy gives us more ability to do everything.
Unlike renewables, fossil fuel technology can take a fuel source that is cheap, and convert it into usable energy cheaply, on a scale that powers billions of people. For the foreseeable future, fossil fuel energy is absolutely critical to mankind.
So let’s summarise what we’ve learned so far about fossil fuels:
87% of the energy we currently use comes from fossil fuels.
Dire predictions about the environment burning up have been made for 50 years with none of the models proving accurate in the real world.
As we’ve used more fossil fuels humans have improved their lives and the quality of the environment.
Without reliable energy, premature babies are left to die.
Two facts of the energy debate that are often ignored are that we need much more and it is very difficult to produce it cheaply and reliably.
Solar and wind energy suffer from the problems of diluteness and intermittency, always requiring a reliable power source like fossil fuels to provide base load power. Solar and wind end up acting like parasites on the grid.
Hydropower and nuclear power are great energy sources but are usually opposed on political grounds.
Once we unlocked the energy from fossil fuels we were able to make more food. Fossil fuels and the energy they provide became the master industry that powers everything.
If our standard of value is human flourishing, then fossil fuels are the clear moral choice.
Cheap, plentiful, reliable energy supplied by fossil fuels, combined with human ingenuity have allowed us to transform the world into a far richer and safer place.
You should now start to understand how invaluable fossil fuels are and how they are uniquely positioned to continue to provide cheap, plentiful and reliable energy for 7 billion people. But what about the impacts on the environment? Well the next post will lay out the impact of additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, how we’ve improved our environment, risks and side effects, and how our actions now will impact future generations.
If you’ve enjoyed this so far go get the book here, read it and share it with your friends. Remember this is just a sketch, a collection of notes I use to refresh the key points from a book. The real head-banging argument for fossil fuels is in the details of the book. Use these posts as a way to learn new chunks of knowledge quickly and send nuggets of wisdom to your friends who cannot commit to reading a whole book. If you’ve got any questions on this book or suggestions for any books you’d like to see notes on hit me up on twitter @thedavidhart.