The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels Read online

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  First published by Portfolio / Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

  Copyright © 2014 by Alexander J. Epstein

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  Image on page 115: Craig D. Idso, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.

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  eBook ISBN 978-0-698-17548-8

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  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1

  The Secret History of Fossil Fuels

  2

  The Energy Challenge: Cheap, Plentiful, Reliable Energy . . . for 7 Billion People

  3

  The Greatest Energy Technology of All Time

  4

  The Greenhouse Effect and the Fertilizer Effect

  5

  The Energy Effect and Climate Mastery

  6

  Improving Our Environment

  7

  Reducing Risks and Side Effects

  8

  Fossil Fuels, Sustainability, and the Future

  9

  Winning the Future

  Acknowledgments

  Select Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  1

  THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS

  “YOU MUST MAKE A LOT OF MONEY”

  “You’re an environmentalist, right?” the girl, college age, asked me. It was 2009, in Irvine, California. I had stopped at a farmers’ market near my office for lunch, and she was manning a Greenpeace booth right next to it.

  “Do you want to help us end our addiction to dirty fossil fuels and use clean, renewable energy instead?”

  “Actually,” I replied, “I study energy for a living—and I think it’s good that we use a lot of fossil fuels. I think the world would be a much better place if people used a lot more.”

  I was curious to see how she would respond—I doubted she had ever met anyone who believed we should use more fossil fuels. I was hoping that she would bring up one of the popular arguments for dramatically reducing fossil fuel use, and I could share with her why I thought the benefits of using fossil fuels far outweighed the risks.

  But fossil fuels cause climate change, she might have said. I agree, I would have replied, but I think the evidence shows that climate change, natural or man-made, is more manageable than ever, because human beings are so good at adapting, using ingenuity and technology.

  But fossil fuels cause pollution, she might have said. I agree, I would have replied, but I think the evidence shows that ingenuity and technology make pollution a smaller problem every year.

  But fossil fuels are nonrenewable, she might have said. I agree, I would have replied, but I think the evidence shows that there are huge amounts of fossil fuels left, and we’ll have plenty of time to use ingenuity and technology to find something cheaper—such as some form of advanced nuclear power.

  But fossil fuels are replaceable by solar and wind, she might have said. I disagree, I would have replied, because the sun and the wind are intermittent, unreliable fuels that always need backup from a reliable source of energy—usually fossil fuels, which is the only source of energy that has been able to provide cheap, plentiful, reliable energy for the billions of people whose lives depend on it.

  But she didn’t say any of those things. Instead, when I said I thought that we should use more fossil fuels, she looked at me with wide-eyed disbelief and said, “Wow, you must make a lot of money.”

  In other words, the only conceivable reason I would say that our use of fossil fuels is a good thing is if I had been paid off by the fossil fuel industry.

  Even though this wasn’t true, I understood why she thought it. It is conventional wisdom that our use of fossil fuels is an “addiction”—a short-range, unsustainable, destructive habit.

  Eighty-seven percent of the energy mankind uses every second, including most of the energy I am using as I write this, comes from burning one of the fossil fuels: coal, oil, or natural gas.1 Every time someone uses a machine—whether the computer I am using right now, the factory it was produced in, the trucks and ships that transported it, the furnace that forged the aluminum, the farm equipment that fed all the workers who made it, or the electricity that keeps their lights on, their phones charged, and their restaurants and hospitals open—they are using energy that they must be able to rely on and afford. And 87 percent of the time, that energy comes from coal, oil, or natural gas.2 Without exception, anyone who lives a modern life is directly or indirectly using large amounts of fossil fuel energy—it is that ubiquitous.

  But, we are told, this cannot continue.

  While it might be convenient to drive gasoline cars and get electricity from coal in the short run, and while we might have needed them in the past, the argument goes, in the long run we are making our climate unlivable, destroying our environment, and depleting our resources. We must and can replace fossil fuels with renewable, green, climate-friendly energy from solar, wind, and biomass (plants).

  This is not a liberal view or a conservative view; it’s a view that almost everyone holds in one form or another. Even fossil fuel companies make statements like the one the former CEO of Shell made in 2013: “We believe climate change is real and time is running out to take real action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”3 President George W. Bush was the person who popularized the expression “addicted to oil.”4 The debate over our addiction to fossil fuels is usually over how dangerous the addiction is and how quickly we can get rid of it—not whether we have one.

  And the most prominent groups say we must get rid of it very quickly.

  For years, the Nobel Prize–winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has demanded that the United States and other industrialized countries cut carbon dioxide emissions to 20 percent of 1990 levels by 2050—and the United States has joined hundreds of other countries in agreeing to this goal.5

  Every day, we hear of new predictions from prestigious experts reinforcing the calls for massive restrictions on fossil fuel use. As I write this, news about melting ice in West Antarctica is leading to dire predictions of sea level rises: “Scientists Warn of Rising Oceans from Polar Melt,” reports the New York Times; “Is It Too Late to Save Our Cities from Sea-Level Rise?” asks Newsweek, citing new research that “Miami and Manhattan will drown sooner than we thought.”6

  The message is clear: Our use of f
ossil fuels is going to destroy us in the long run, and we should focus our efforts on dramatically reducing it as soon as humanly possible.

  So when the girl at the Greenpeace booth implied that I had sold my soul, I didn’t get offended. I simply explained that, no, I wasn’t being paid off; I had just concluded, based on my research, that the short- and long-term benefits of using fossil fuels actually far, far outweigh the risks and was happy to explain why. But she wasn’t interested. Pointing me to the Greenpeace pamphlets giving all the reasons fossil fuels are bad, she said, “So many experts predict that using fossil fuels is going to lead to catastrophe—why should I listen to you?” She made it clear that this wasn’t a real question and that the conversation was over.

  But if she had wanted an answer, I would have told her this: I understand that a lot of smart people are predicting catastrophic consequences from using fossil fuels, I take that very seriously, and I have studied their predictions extensively.

  And what I have found is this: leading experts and the media have been making the exact same predictions for more than thirty years. As far back as the 1970s they predicted that if we did not dramatically reduce fossil fuel use then, and use renewables instead, we would be experiencing catastrophe today—catastrophic resource depletion, catastrophic pollution, and catastrophic climate change. Instead, the exact opposite happened. Instead of using a lot less fossil fuel energy, we used a lot more—but instead of long-term catastrophe, we have experienced dramatic, long-term improvement in every aspect of life, including environmental quality. The risks and side effects of using fossil fuels declined while the benefits—cheap, reliable energy and everything it brings—expanded to billions more people.

  This is the secret history of fossil fuels. It changed the way I think about fossil fuels and it may change the way you think about them, too.

  DÉJÀ VU

  When I was twenty years old, I decided I wanted to write about “practical philosophy” for a living. Philosophy is the study of the basic principles of clear thinking and moral action. While college philosophy classes all too often present philosophy as an impractical subject that involves endlessly debating skeptical questions (“How do you know you exist?” “How do you know you’re not in The Matrix?”), philosophy is in fact an incredibly practical tool. No matter what we’re doing in life, whether we’re coming up with a business plan or raising children or deciding what to do about fossil fuels, it is always valuable to be able to think clearly about what is right and what is wrong and why.

  One valuable lesson philosophy taught me is that with any idea, such as the idea that we need to get off fossil fuels, we should look at the track record of that idea, if it has one.

  Now, you might think: this idea does not have a history because it is a new idea based on the latest science. This is certainly the impression many of our leading intellectuals give. For example, in 2012 I debated Bill McKibben, the world’s leading opponent of fossil fuels, at Duke University, and he presented his view of our addiction to fossil fuels as cutting-edge: “We should be grateful for the role that fossil fuel played in creating our world and equally grateful that scientists now give us ample warning of its new risks, and engineers increasingly provide us with the alternatives that we need.”7 This is the narrative we hear over and over: fossil fuels were once necessary, but the latest science tells us they’re causing an imminent catastrophe unless we stop using them and replace them with cutting-edge renewables.

  What is rarely mentioned is that thirty years ago, leading experts, including many of today’s leading experts, were telling us that fossil fuels were once necessary, but the latest science tells us they’re causing an imminent catastrophe unless we stop using them and replace them with cutting-edge renewables.

  Take the prediction we hear today that we will soon run out of fossil fuels—particularly oil—because they are nonrenewable. This prediction was made over and over by some of the most prestigious thinkers of the 1970s, who assured us that their predictions were backed by the best science.

  In 1972, the international think tank the Club of Rome released a multimillion-copy-selling book, The Limits to Growth, which declared that its state-of-the-art computer models had demonstrated that we would run out of oil by 1992 and natural gas by 1993 (and, for good measure, gold, mercury, silver, tin, zinc, and lead by 1993 at the latest).8 The leading resource theorist of the time was ecologist Paul Ehrlich, who was so popular and prestigious that Johnny Carson invited him onto his show over a dozen times. In 1971 he said, “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people,”9 and in 1974 he wrote, “America’s economic joyride is coming to an end: there will be no more cheap, abundant energy, no more cheap abundant food.”10

  Another catastrophic prediction we hear today is that pollution from fossil fuels will make our environment more and more hazardous to our health—hence we need to stop using “dirty” fossil fuels. This prediction was also made many times in the 1970s—with many assurances that these predictions were backed by the best science.

  Life magazine reported in January 1970 that, because of particles emitted in the air by burning fossil fuels, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support . . . the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution . . . by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half . . .”11 To quote Paul Ehrlich again, as he may have been the most influential public intellectual of the decade (and is still a prestigious professor of ecology at Stanford University): “Air pollution . . . is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone,” he said in 1970.12

  And then there’s the prediction we hear most today: the supposedly scientifically indisputable claim that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels will cause a true climate catastrophe within a couple of decades.13 Reading back in time, I saw that many of the leaders who make that prediction now had, decades ago, predicted that we’d be living in catastrophe today.

  Here’s a 1986 news story about a prediction by James Hansen, the most influential climate scientist in the world over the last thirty years:

  Dr. James E. Hansen of the Goddard Space Flight Center’s Institute for Space Studies said research by his institute showed that because of the “greenhouse effect” that results when gases prevent heat from escaping the earth’s atmosphere, global temperatures would rise early in the next century to “well above any level experienced in the past 100,000 years.”

  Average global temperatures would rise by one-half a degree to one degree Fahrenheit from 1990 to 2000 if current trends are unchanged, according to Dr. Hansen’s findings. Dr. Hansen said the global temperature would rise by another 2 to 4 degrees in the following decade.14

  Bill McKibben, when he told Duke students in 2012 that we were on the verge of drastic warming, neglected to mention the results of his decades-old claims, such as this one in 1989: “The choice of doing nothing—of continuing to burn ever more oil and coal—is not a choice, in other words. It will lead us, if not straight to hell, then straight to a place with a similar temperature”; and “a few more decades of ungoverned fossil-fuel use and we burn up, to put it bluntly.”15

  John Holdren, a protégé of Paul Ehrlich who serves as science adviser to President Barack Obama, had a particularly dire prediction, according to Ehrlich in 1986: “As University of California physicist John Holdren has said, it is possible that carbon-dioxide climate-induced famines could kill as many as a billion people before the year 2020.”16

  Just as the media today tell us these catastrophic predictions are a matter of scientific consensus, so did the media of the 1980s. For example, on the issue of catastrophic climate change: “By early 1989 the popular media were declaring that ‘all scientists’ agreed that warming was real and catastrophic in its potential,�
�� a 1992 study reported.17

  If all the predicted catastrophes—depletion, pollution, climate change—had occurred as thought leaders said they would, the world of today would be much, much worse than the world of the 1970s. In the 1970s, Ehrlich went as far as to say, of the overall devastation ahead, “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”18

  And these were not idle predictions—the coming fossil fuel catastrophe was so bad, these leading experts said, that we needed dramatic restrictions on fossil fuel energy use. Ehrlich wrote: “Except in special circumstances, all construction of power generating facilities should cease immediately, and power companies should be forbidden to encourage people to use more power. Power is much too cheap. It should certainly be made more expensive and perhaps rationed, in order to reduce its frivolous use.”19

  In 1977, Amory Lovins, widely considered the leading energy thinker of the 1970s for his criticisms of fossil fuels and nuclear power and his support of solar power and reduced energy use, explained that we already used too much energy. And in particular, the kind of energy we least needed was . . . electricity, the foundation of the digital/information revolution: “[W]e don’t need any more big electric generating stations. We already have about twice as much electricity as we can use to advantage.”20

  In 1998, Bill McKibben endorsed a scenario of outlawing 60 percent of present fossil fuel use to slow catastrophic climate change, even though that would mean, in his words, that “each human being would get to produce 1.69 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually—which would allow you to drive an average American car nine miles a day. By the time the population increased to 8.5 billion, in about 2025, you’d be down to six miles a day. If you carpooled, you’d have about three pounds of CO2 left in your daily ration—enough to run a highly efficient refrigerator. Forget your computer, your TV, your stereo, your stove, your dishwasher, your water heater, your microwave, your water pump, your clock. Forget your light bulbs, compact fluorescent or not.”21