Book: The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels - Alex Epstein (Part 2/2)
Do fossil fuels have a positive impact on the environment?
We are continuing on with the book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, by Alex Epstein. Today we’ll get into the Greenhouse and Fertiliser Effect, how energy impacts our ability to master climate, how fossil fuels help us improve our environment and how we can work to balance the risks and side effects with the tremendous benefits provided by fossil fuels.
The Greenhouse Effect and The Fertiliser Effect
Climate confusion.
Looking at it from a human standard of value, the question to ask is: How does fossil fuel affect climate livability? What are the actual risks and benefits? What is the actual impact of additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? The assumption is usually that if humans have any impact on the climate, that impact is large and catastrophic and the benefits to our ability to adapt, survive and thrive are discarded from the equation. We need to understand what an increased amount of carbon dioxide actually means for the climate and how it affects us.
Let’s get into some definitions so that we are clear. The atmosphere consists of gases around the earth, and is made up of oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen to name a few. Weather is near-term atmospheric conditions, temperature and precipitation. At any given time across the earth there is a huge range of weather, with different benefits and risks for human life. The climate is the weather trend for a given region and is measured in longer term 30 year increments. The climate itself is not uniform. Climate change is a change in the local climate. The global climate consists of the entire globe and all its sub-climates.
The climate has and always will be naturally volatile and dangerous to humans. Extreme weather and volatility is an inherent feature and not something we will eliminate by lowering carbon dioxide. So the question to ask is are we making the climate overall safer or more dangerous?
The Greenhouse Effect.
Here is the belief structure put forward on the greenhouse gas effect:
Man-made greenhouse gases emitted by fossil fuel combustion will cause significant warming in the global climate system.
This warming will cause harmful change to the global climate system.
Those changes will make the planet less livable.
If any of these three beliefs turns out to be false then CO2 emissions are not the catastrophe that we are told to believe.
So what is the Greenhouse Effect?
Similar to glass in a greenhouse making it warmer for plants inside the greenhouse, certain molecules, including water and carbon dioxide, act to absorb some of the infrared radiation from the sun. This radiation reflects back off the earth into the atmosphere and rather than heading back into space, gets absorbed by these molecules causing heat.
Without the greenhouse effect the planet would be 33 degrees Celsius colder - an ultra-Ice Age. When fossil fuels are burned it breaks the hydrocarbons apart, with hydrogen becoming water (H2O) and carbon becomes carbon dioxide (CO2).
So how much carbon dioxide is there in the atmosphere? Well CO2 existed in the atmosphere at 0.027% before the industrial revolution. It is now at 0.0396%.
At what rate and magnitude does additional carbon dioxide heat the system? Not many people know this but it turns out that adding carbon dioxide to the system has an extreme diminishing effect. As additional CO2 is added its impact on temperature logarithmically decreases, meaning past a certain point huge amounts of CO2 added to the system will result in negligible temperature changes, all other things being held equal.
All predictions for how carbon dioxide will impact the global climate are based on models, which are simplistic representations of what is actually going on in the real world. All have been shown to be unable to make accurate predictions about anything. For a model to be valid it must be able to make accurate predictions that are then proven to be true.
Below shows a snapshot of 102 models and the real world results:
What has actually happened, since the Industrial Revolution is that we’ve increased carbon dioxide from 0.03% to 0.04% and temperatures have gone up less than a degree Celsius, a rate of increase that has occurred many times throughout the Earth’s history. Since the 1990s there has been little to no warming as we’ve radically increased the amount of fossil fuels used.
It should go without saying but if a climate prediction model cannot predict climate then it is not a valid model.
Climate dishonesty.
As predictions of extreme global warming have failed to materialise there has been more of an emphasis on extreme weather as a reason to oppose fossil fuels. This is misleading as the claim is that the warming will drive extreme weather, and we’ve seen there has been no warming since the 1990s. The whole enterprise that threatens our energy supply is based on equating a demonstrated scientific truth, the greenhouse effect, with extremely speculative projections made by invalidated models.
The 97% fabrication.
The claim that 97% of climate scientists agree there is global warming and that human beings are the main cause is often rolled out as an appeal to authority, to try and crush any dissenting opinions. It is a deliberately manipulative statement that when trotted out by climate alarmists alleges man-made warming will be extremely harmful to human life. There is nothing in the original paper indicating that if we are responsible for the mild warming that the outcome will be disastrous. The number of 97% is a manipulated figure also, with many of the authors of the papers cited indicating that the conclusions drawn were not accurate and represented a straw-man argument.
Questionable climate ethics.
In 1996 Stephen Schneider, a Stanford climate scientist, wrote an influential paper on the ethics of exaggerating the evidence for catastrophic climate change.
On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but—which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.
This statement highlights the issue of scientists behaving in what they believe to be an ethical manner. It is unethical to be a specialist in a field and willfully misrepresent the risks to mislead the public, which will ultimately lead to uninformed, inappropriate and damaging decision making. Reacting to the extreme and alarmist statements now coming from scientists mouths would mean dismantling our use of fossil fuels, driving millions, or even billions to starvation. The lack of an honest explanation from leading scientists in the field is also backed up by the fact that they do not talk about the significant positive impacts of carbon dioxide emissions: global greening.
The Fertiliser Effect
Carbon dioxide is plant food. And it has been consistently demonstrated that when all other factors are held constant, increasing the amount of CO2 in an atmosphere results in more plant growth. The fact that this is never mentioned points to the advancement of an agenda rather than a full analysis of the impacts of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere.
So what can be determined from the collected evidence? There is a mild greenhouse effect in the direction that humans have always wanted, making the climate warmer, and a significant fertiliser effect in the direction that humans have always wanted, making plants grow more. The public discussion is prejudiced by the assumption that any human impact is bad, even though the climate is a complex system that has been in many significantly different states over the history of the earth and has no naturally perfect state.
Now what about the positive impact of fossil fuels?
The Energy Effect and Climate Mastery
The real fossil fuel climate-related effect.
So how does the energy we get from fossil fuels impact the livability of our climate? What the data show is that that the more fossil fuels we use, the greater life expectancy and income are. Admittedly though if we are in the emergent stage of a climate threat it wouldn’t show up in the life expectancy statistics yet. It would show up in the climate danger statistics.
Looking at data from 1900 there has been a consistent decrease in climate-related deaths, despite more complete reporting and a massive increase in the population size. These events should have increased in proportion to the population increase. But we haven’t seen that. There are now fewer drought, storm and flood-related deaths. The more development there is in an area, the less climate danger there is. The climate discussion has the issue backwards. Man does not destroy a safe climate. Using fossil fuels man makes a dangerous climate safe. A high-energy civilisation is the driver of climate livability.
Nature is always trying to kill you.
There is no climate that man is ideally suited to, in a sense that will guarantee him a decent quality of life. Nature does not care about your personal story, or how long you’d like to live for. Death at 30 is now considered a tragedy but it used to be the norm before we unlocked the energy from fossil fuels. Although we hear news stories about climate related disasters every day the reality is humans generally do not face an existential threat from the climate on a daily basis.
Climate livability is not just a matter of the global climate system, but also the state of the technology used to control the local climate for the individual and the technology is useless without a reliable power source like fossil fuels. We cannot survive and thrive without the power of technology. Through technology we achieve climate mastery. Whether it be through the complex network of flood control technology in the Netherlands, or the fact that we can travel into dangerous blizzard-prone areas to snowboard for the day, it is truly amazing the possibilities fossil fuels have unlocked for us. Fossil fuels give us the climate freedom to move if we want or to stay and survive and thrive.
The climate focus needs to switch. We need to focus on dealing with climate danger by applying high energy technology as required, and ensure that when that high energy technology is deployed, human life is the standard of value.
But what about the underdeveloped world?
People like to state that the burning of fossil fuels in the developed world is ruining the underdeveloped world. If the underdeveloped world is struggling to deal with the climate it is not due to our 0.01% change in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide. It is directly due to not deploying the cheap energy fossil fuels provide to technologically master the climate.
It is like we are moralising to them about the dangers of using fossil fuel, pulling up the ladder behind us after we’ve used this incredible technology to level up our own societies. Every country has a moral imperative to use as much fossil fuels as required to control the climate and improve human life. To oppose fossil fuels is to oppose the developing world and ensure the early deaths of millions now, and maybe billions of people in the future.
The big picture.
The energy from fossil fuels has given us mastery over climate and record climate livability. Carbon dioxide has fertilised the atmosphere and made it slightly warmer, with additional greening effects for plants.
Improving Our Environment
As outlined in the previous section every area of the world is exposed to some combination of climate dangers - extreme temperatures, droughts or floods. But every region of the world is also full of other environmental dangers to our health. Think disease-carrying insects and animals, lack of waste-disposal technology, disease-carrying crops, bacteria-filled water, earthquakes and tsunamis.
It used to be if we wanted fire for warmth and to cook our food we had to breathe in smoke, leading to terrible health outcomes. Now all we need to do is turn a knob and the temperature adjusts. We have clean air, safe drinking water and very little disease based on historical standards. These environmental controls have all been unlocked through fossil fuels powering high energy machines. We are talking about water-purification systems, irrigation and synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. We have fossil fuels to thank for genetically improved crops, dams, seawalls, heating and air-conditioning.
Here is how fossil fuels improve our environment in four key areas - water, disease, waste and air quality.
Water: Nature does not deliberately produce drinking water that won’t make us sick. We must transform the unusable water found in nature into something usable - whether it be through moving usable water, purifying unusable water or desalinating seawater. And to do this in an affordable way requires cheap and abundant energy.
Disease: With fossil fuels allowing for the liberation of most of humanity from the fields, this enabled specialisation and more time for scientific inquiry to investigate the causes of diseases and develop technology to eradicate them.
Waste: One of the largest threats to our health in previous centuries was due to our inability to safely deal with our own body waste. Cholera is a bacterial disease transmitted when eating food or water contaminated with human fecal matter. It inhibits the body’s ability to absorb food or water which can quickly lead to death through dehydration. This has been completely eradicated in the industrialised world. Thanks to fossil fuels supplying cheap and abundant energy, we’ve been able to develop sewerage systems that are separate from our drinking water, and even treat the sewerage so that it can be turned into fertiliser or even used as drinking water.
Air: Indoor pollution produced by burning wood for heat and cooking is still a massive problem in the developing world. Heating is usually done in the industrialised world through clean-burning natural gas, or electricity coming from smokestacks far away. Consider the air cleaning benefits of fossil fuels when we look at the risks next.
Reducing Risks and Side Effects
Pollution.
So let’s summarise where we are at now. We use cheap, plentiful and reliable energy from fossil fuels to transform the environment to meet our needs. It gives us a longer and much better life with far greater safety from the climate. We take a dangerous environment and make it safer.
Now, there are risks and side effects that can be deadly and these need to be managed to maximise benefits and minimise harm. There are all sorts of potential dangers from the process of extracting and refining fossil fuels. There are by-products that are hazardous to our health but this can be minimised through the use of antipollution technology. This can be seen in places like the US where there has been a decline in air pollution despite using more and more fossil fuels.
By-products and risks - a challenge for any energy source.
Every form of energy has risks and side effects that need to be managed. This is not unique to fossil fuels. Consider the following story about the hazards of producing wind power. Wind power tends to be assumed to be clean energy but consideration needs to be given to what is required at every step of the chain to get to the point where we have a wind turbine standing in a field. Wind turbines require far more toxic materials than fossil fuels do. They use rare-earth metals that exist in extremely low concentration in the Earth and therefore require a lot of mining, using hazardous substances like hydrofluoric acid to separate them out from the soil. This is from a major facility in China:
On the outskirts of one of China’s most polluted cities, an old farmer stares despairingly out across an immense lake of bubbling toxic waste covered in black dust. He remembers it as fields of wheat and corn.
Hidden out of sight behind smoke-shrouded factory complexes in the city of Baotou, and patrolled by platoons of security guards, lies a five-mile-wide “tailing” lake. It has killed farmland for miles around, made thousands of people ill and put one of China’s key waterways in jeopardy.
This vast, hissing cauldron of chemicals is the dumping ground for seven million tons a year of mined rare earth after it has been doused in acid and chemicals and processed through red-hot furnaces to extract its components.
. . . When we finally break through the cordon and climb sand dunes to reach its brim, an apocalyptic sight greets us: a giant, secret toxic dump . . .
The lake instantly assaults your senses. Stand on the black crust for just seconds and your eyes water and a powerful, acrid stench fills your lungs.
For hours after our visit, my stomach lurched and my head throbbed. We were there for only one hour, but those who live in Mr. Yan’s village of Dalahai, and other villages around, breathe in the same poison every day.
People too began to suffer. Dalahai villagers say their teeth began to fall out, their hair turned white at unusually young ages, and they suffered from severe skin and respiratory diseases. Children were born with soft bones and cancer rates rocketed.
Does this mean we shouldn’t use wind power? Not necessarily. It is a universal challenge to try and minimise the hazards and side effects associated with the production and use of an energy source. So what can we do to minimise the downside?
Using technology to reduce pollution.
A disadvantage with coal is that when burnt it can release sulfur, nitrogen and heavy metals - all of which can be harmful to human health. In the 1800s coal was a major supplier of energy for Western countries, being used for heating and cooking in all houses. There was constant coal smoke indoors and out, blackening peoples homes and lungs. It would darken cities and reduce visibility to metres. Despite this the energy that coal provided was so valuable that these side effects were tolerated. If there were no coal it meant there was no manufacturing, which meant poverty and starvation. Dirty air was perceived to be the far better alternative. With the centralisation of power plants, we were able to get the coal out of the houses and moved away from the cities. As technology has developed we’ve been able to reduce pollutants produced from burning coal and significantly improve the quality of air near power plants.
In summary, we have the technology to increase our use of fossil fuels and decrease the amount of pollution. Now let’s look at a few of the fallacies that commonly get attributed to fossil fuels.
False attribution fallacy.
Often fossil fuels get blamed for an event despite there being no proof. This is known as the false attribution fallacy - claiming one event caused another despite having no proof. An example of this is the association of being able to light water on fire with the activity of fracking. Being able to light water on fire is a phenomenon that is a frequent occurrence almost always stemming from the natural presence of methane in the water. But it gets falsely attributed to fracking despite the fact that many standard water wells are naturally contaminated. Any drilling underground can compromise groundwater but fracking is one of the least likely as it occurs thousands of feet away from where the groundwater is located.
A more sophisticated version of this fallacy uses scientific studies based on speculative models. Usually the conclusions drawn from these models are oversimplifications at best, completely wrong at worst, with no provable relationship discovered.
There are negative cause-and-effect relationships between humans and fossil fuels but what must be understood is that it depends on the concentration levels and contexts of the interaction.
No-threshold fallacy.
All things are poison and nothing [is] without poison; only the dosage determines that something is not a poison.
—Paracelsus, sixteenth century
A poison or pollutant is always dependent on the substance and dose. Our bodies are made of chemicals and too much of anything, even water, can have dire health outcomes. Mentioning a substance to scare people is completely misleading if not given the context and the dose. The expectation is that if some dosage is dangerous then all doses are dangerous. The threshold of danger needs to be considered, along with the benefits to human life.
The human-centred view of the environment is that using fossil fuels to develop the environment, we improve the environment for humans, and while there will be some net minus effects from a nonhuman perspective, we can use technology powered by fossil fuels to further develop and clean up the environment, as can be seen in developed countries with continually improving air quality and land management practices. Fossil fuels enable us to preserve the nature that we want to enjoy and minimise the negative impacts. It allows us to perceive nature as clean and pristine and to enjoy it for activities like camping, which would have previously been a deadly adventure. Fossil fuels give us the mobility to get to and from nature, the adaptability to be safe in nature and the free time to enjoy it.
We have to remember the only resource we can’t replace, or make more of is time.
Fossils fuels are so dense that we need to consume very little land or plants, so we can preserve any part of nature we want. They give us the ability to choose how we want to manifest and experience nature.
Additionally, when considering potential harm to the environment it is worth remembering that humans are part of that environment, and with the increased use of fossil fuels we’ve seen infant mortality and malnutrition rates plummet while life expectancy shoots skyward.
Fossil fuels allow us to improve our environment by giving us the energy we need to control the negative aspects of nature. They power the food and medical systems to extend human life. There are risks and by-products but these can and have been managed through technology and continual improvement.
Fossil fuels have by far and away a net positive benefit on the environment.
So is this sustainable?
We’ve seen how there is no current practical replacement for fossil fuels and we’ve seen the tremendous benefit that they bring to our life, but is this sustainable across the long-term?
The short answer is yes. The more we use, the more we run into, and we are currently aware of vast deposits that exceed the amount we have used in the entire history of humanity many times over. We have more than enough fossil fuels and nuclear energy available to last thousands and thousands of years.
We thrive by transforming our environment. We maximise resources while minimising risks. Energy use is the ultimate form of transformation. For future generations to thrive, for our children to live their best lives, we want them to have more energy to use, so they can go on to create new resources and further extend our ability to transform and thrive. We don’t want their lives cut short, in darkness with no food or emergency services.
Production of energy increases production of knowledge. Building on resources transformed makes future generations richer. They inherit this advantage. And the most valuable resource is time. Using fossil fuels buys us more time. We get more life and opportunity. Fossil fuels are tools that unlock this supreme resource, allowing us to use our minds and bodies to not only enjoy our lives, but to push the human species further.
Using fossil fuels is moral, but our society is confused and acts like it isn’t. Restrictions on fossil fuel use will mean you work harder in the dark and then die earlier. For no good reason.
The attack on our fossil fuels and our future.
All around the world there are opportunities to produce fossil fuels, and almost without exception the green movement is trying to stop these from being developed. Fossil fuel companies have to fight daily for permission to empower people with the energy they need to extend and enjoy their lives.
So why do we believe the wrong things about fossil fuels? Part of it is a lack of education. We haven’t been shown both sides of the argument. We haven’t been taught how energy use makes the climate safer, how it makes the environment better, how the fossil fuel industry actually creates resources rather than depleting them.
There is a also a clear prejudice in our culture to view fossil fuels as negative and immoral. Until we can correct this whatever facts are presented will be ignored. The prejudice is non-impact on nature as the standard of value.
The thought leaders of the environmental movements opposed to fossil fuels come to certain deadly conclusions and policies, exaggerating the negatives and ignoring the positives. They don’t value the cheap, plentiful and reliable energy or the unique ability of the fossil fuel industry to provide it. Instead they claim without evidence that expensive, unreliable energy that does not scale will somehow become cheap, plentiful and reliable without a damn given to what happens if they are wrong.
They don’t see the positives of hydro or nuclear. We have mastered local climate to make us the safest humans in history. We have the cleanest and healthiest environments. Fossil fuels have unlocked an abundance of resources and helped us identify new resources for further expansion of humanity’s capabilities.
They deny the benefits because of their standard of value. To have a value of non-impact is to be anti-human. Prince Philip, former head of the World Wildlife Fund, has said, “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.”
This is a consistent message of the environmentalists. The logical conclusion of holding human non-impact as your standard of value. Mass suffering and death for all humans so that a romantic notion of the environment, one that exists only in the mind of humans, can be attained.
Instead of recognising that transforming the environment serves the betterment of humanity and can have environmentally undesirable risks and side effects, the Green movement wants you to see all human impact as bad for the environment. We need to recognise the anti-human prejudice for what it is and identify a pro-human environmental philosophy.
A new ideal: industrial progress.
The moral ideal we need to adhere to is Industrial Progress - the progressive improvement of our environment using human industry (energy and technology) in the service of human life.
The goal is not to save the planet from humans, but to improve the planet for human beings. If we deny this we will harm real people, damaging and shortening their lives. We are still arguably at the beginning of the fossil fuel age. Technology will keep improving to make accessing and using fossil fuels more convenient with less side-effects. As carbon dioxide increases from 0.04% to 0.05% we will benefit from more plant growth. And if new climate dynamics are discovered we will adapt through the application of technology powered by fossil fuels.
We are not taught about the deadly risks of NOT using fossil fuels. We must hold human life as the standard of value because using fossil fuels to transform our environment saves human life and extends it, giving us the power to enact change to improve our lives now, and the lives of our children and future generations.
So when you see the Government funneling billions into another wind farm, or your co-workers are swooning at how close battery technology is to finally allowing us to dispense with evil fossil fuels, or you are being told that you must be the devil himself for thinking of bringing a child into this burning cesspool of a society, you can calmly council them with the following:
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.
The climate has and always will be naturally volatile and dangerous to humans.
We have increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 0.027% to 0.0396%, which has resulted in less than a 1 degree Celsius rise in average temperature, an average temperature change that has happened many times in Earth’s history.
Adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will NOT result in a commensurate temperature increase. It is a decelerating logarithmic pattern.
All predictions are based on simplistic models of the real world and have been proven unable to predict with any accuracy temperature changes in the past 50 years.
The fertiliser effect means that as carbon dioxide is increased in the atmosphere the planet gets greener.
Climate-related deaths are at an all-time low.
Fossil fuels give us the power to control our local climate and make us safe.
Fossil fuels have been used to improve our environment - giving us clean drinking water, eliminating disease, managing our waste and improving the quality of our air.
There are risks and side-effects but these can be managed through technology, and need to be assessed alongside the tremendous benefits provided by fossil fuels.
Morally, we must hold human life as the standard of value. If we do, the moral choice for the betterment of humanity for the foreseeable future is fossil fuels.
Action.
If you’ve enjoyed this go get the book here, read it and share it with your friends and tormentors. It is extremely important that we understand how important fossil fuels are to our continued way of life. Please, think deeply on this my friends.
If you’ve got any questions on this book or suggestions for any books you’d like to see summarised here hit me up on twitter @thedavidhart.
Next up in the Self As Lab series is “Never Split The Difference”, by Chris Voss - a book that will teach you the all-important skill of negotiation. This is a powerful book that I’ve used to negotiate pay rises, get better deals on cars and have more success with customers. You don’t want to miss this.
Thanks for reading.