The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels

by Alex Epstein

  In 1968, the world’s population was 3.6 billion people.24 Since then, it has doubled, yet the average person is better fed than he was in 1968.25 This seeming miracle was due to a combination of the fossil fuel industry and genetic science—such as the achievements of the great Norman Borlaug, who bred new revolutionary wheat varieties and introduced new farming techniques to Mexico, India, Pakistan, China, and parts of South America.

  Modern agriculture, like every modern industry, runs on machines, and fossil fuel energy is our leading source of machine food. Therefore, fossil fuel energy is the food of food.

  For example, oil-powered mechanization causes a dramatic increase in the amount of farmland that can be cultivated per worker.

  For most of human history, agricultural work was done by the muscle power of humans or draft animals, placing a low ceiling on the amount of farmland that could be harvested—and requiring often 90 percent of populations to be devoted to farm labor. The oil industry changed that by making available cheap, concentrated energy that could power tractors, combines, and other forms of high-powered farm equipment. Matt Ridley, author of the valuable survey of human progress, The Rational Optimist, describes the value of mechanization on his own farm: “A modern combine harvester, driven by a single man, can reap enough wheat in a single day to make half a million loaves.”26 A single man, made into an agricultural Superman by the power of oil.

  Another example: Oil-based transportation causes a dramatic increase in the amount of farm products that can be brought to market.

  For the vast majority of human history, the world was full of patches of useless potential farmland—useless because the land was too far to ship from. When men and goods travel by horse or mule, let alone on foot, the shipping costs quickly exceed the value of the cargo. But the twentieth century’s gradual increase in oil-powered transportation—railroads (modern railroads are powered by diesel engines), freighters, and trucks, especially—brought an enormous amount of remote farmland, once too expensive to ship from, within the reach of anyone in the city, state, country, and eventually the world. The cheaper transportation became, the more farmland came into the global agricultural economy, and the more plentiful and affordable food became.

  By the same token, the cheaper transportation became, the more new seeds and other supplies could be brought to new locations to make previously low-performing land yield a giant amount of crops. Much of the green revolution led by Norman Borlaug involved bringing in new, more resilient forms of wheat and rice to places like India; this was expedited and amplified by cheap, global, oil-powered transportation.

  Another example: Gas-based fertilization increases the amount of crops that can be grown per unit of farmland.

  The amount of crops we can grow today is an utterly “unnatural” phenomenon—that is, it is way beyond the natural capacity of the nutrients in land to nourish crops in one season, let alone season after season. One solution to the problem of fertilizing was manure or some other organic fertilizer, which increased the amount of nitrogen plants could absorb and thus the amount of them that could grow. The use of such fertilizer allowed population growth and living standards to rise throughout the nineteenth century. But there was a problem; as population grew, it was harder to find enough manure to collect. The supplies of guano off the coasts of South America and South Africa were being exhausted, which caused eminent chemist William Crookes to declare in 1898 that “all civilisations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat.”27

  The solution was Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch’s process of making large quantities of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer using enormous amounts of methane—the predominant component of natural gas.28

  Another example: Electricity-based (usually coal-based) or diesel-based irrigation increases the amount and reliability of water going to crops. Irrigated lands average more than three times the crop yields of rain-fed areas. Sometimes irrigation occurs via gravity, but when it doesn’t, it takes a lot of energy—usually fossil fuel energy—to move the water.29

  Finally, the achievements of Norman Borlaug and other great food scientists, often called the green revolution (not related to the modern Green movement), were possible only because of the time created by fossil-fueled civilization to engage in intensive research, because high-powered machines have made it unnecessary for all of us to do physical labor.

  Fossil fuel energy is the food of food.

  It is an undeniable truth that, in providing the fuel that makes modern, industrialized, globalized, fertilized agriculture possible, the oil industry has sustained and improved billions and billions of lives. If we rate achievements by their contribution to human well-being, surely this must rank as one of the great achievements of our time, and when we consider the problems with that industry, shouldn’t we take into account that it fed and feeds the world? And yet have you ever—and I mean ever—heard any major public or private figure give the oil industry credit for it? I see Bono and other celebrity activists get credit for caring but not the oil and energy industries for doing.

  MORE FOSSIL FUELS, MORE ABILITY

  Without the energy industry, the agricultural industry would not exist; the world could not support a population of 7 billion or 3.6 billion and perhaps not even 1 billion. To starve our machines of energy would be to starve ourselves.

  What is true of agriculture is true of every industry. The energy industry has a special place in human productivity, prosperity, and progress. As the industry that powers every other industry, it can be considered the master industry. Whether we are talking about the computer industry, the electronics industry, the health-care industry, or the pharmaceutical industry, every industry uses machines, uses resources that are manufactured using energy, and uses time that is available because of our high-energy society’s productivity. The less energy we have, the fewer machines an industry can use, the fewer resources an industry has, and the less time it has. And what happens to industry happens to the rest of life. The less productive industry is, the less time, resources, and machinery we have to enjoy our lives.

  And I want to stress enjoy our lives, because this is not something we typically think about when we think of energy—but we should, because more energy means more ability to enjoy our lives.

  If our standard of value is human life, the ultimate benefit that a commodity like fossil fuel energy can deliver is to contribute to the pursuit of happiness. If we can only survive in a way that is miserable, why survive? Happiness is the reward of life. And energy is a great enabler of happiness—including forms of happiness that we are taught to associate with people who decry large amounts of energy use.

  Take traveling to places that excite us. In my life, I have been fortunate enough to travel to many such places. I’ve spent fifteen days river-rafting in the Grand Canyon, several hundred days snowboarding or skiing on faraway mountains, and gone to Italy, France, Israel, Turkey, and other faraway lands. I’m not setting any travel records here, but no doubt I’ve used a lot of cheap energy to enjoy what the world has to offer. On a more local level, I love living in Southern California and being able to get to a lot of places easily by car (assuming I time the traffic properly). I enjoy martial arts, specifically Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, as a hobby, and for years I would happily drive an hour after work almost every day to get to my favorite Jiu-Jitsu school. I was using a lot of cheap energy, and if it hadn’t been cheap, I wouldn’t have been able to afford it.

  More fossil fuel energy, more ability to pursue happiness.

  I keep stressing that more energy means more ability to take the actions necessary to flourish, because I want it to be in our minds at all times that when we talk about more or less energy, we are talking about more or less ability, and everything we want in life depends on ability. Thus in every realm that affects our lives, we should expect to discover that more energy can play an amazingly positive role.

  That includes our en
vironment, including our climate.

  FOSSIL FUEL ENERGY AND OUR ENVIRONMENT

  The relationship between energy and environment is usually considered in a negative way; how can we use the energy that will least “impact the environment”? But we have to be careful; if we’re on a human standard of value, we need to have an impact on our environment. Transforming our environment is how we survive. Every animal survives in a way that affects its environment; we just do it on a greater scale with far greater ability. We have to be clear: Is human life our standard of value or is “lack of impact” our standard of value?

  If we’re on a human standard, we should be concerned in a negative way only about impacts of energy use that harm our environment from a human perspective—such as dumping toxic waste in a nearby river or filling a city with smog.

  But we should also assume that energy gives us more ability to improve our environment, to make it healthier and safer for human beings. I’ll explore this in detail in chapters 4–7, but for now I’ll just observe that the natural environment is not naturally a healthy, safe place; that’s why human beings historically had a life expectancy of thirty. Absent human action, our natural environment threatens us with organisms eager to kill us and natural forces, including natural climate dangers, that can easily overwhelm us.

  It is only thanks to cheap, plentiful, reliable energy that we live in an environment where the water we drink and the food we eat will not make us sick and where we can cope with the often hostile climate of Mother Nature. Energy is what we need to build sturdy homes, to purify water, to produce huge amounts of fresh food, to generate heat and air-conditioning, to irrigate deserts, to dry malaria-infested swamps, to build hospitals, and to manufacture pharmaceuticals, among many other things. And those of us who enjoy exploring the rest of nature should never forget that energy is what enables us to explore to our heart’s content, which preindustrial people didn’t have the time, wealth, energy, or technology to do.

  We’ll revisit this topic later; for now, I just want to stress that whenever we have more energy, we have more ability everywhere—including the places we can do damage. So when we look at the damage or the risks of damage, we have to take into account the positive as well. Once again, we’re always looking for the big picture about what benefits human life.

  THE BIG PICTURE

  We have seen that the non–fossil fuel attempts at cheap, plentiful, reliable energy for billions of people fall short—because none of them involve a process wherein every element can be scaled cheaply and reliably.

  But fossil fuel technology puts everything together: It can get a plentiful fuel source cheaply and convert it to energy cheaply—on a scale that can power life for billions of people. This is why when people choose to use energy to improve their lives, 87 percent of the time they choose fossil fuel energy.30 The technology is that far ahead of the competition. If we want cheap, plentiful, reliable energy around the globe, we absolutely need to use fossil fuel technology. If we want to flourish, we need fossil fuel technology.

  And yet opponents of fossil fuel energy claim there are catastrophic consequences to using fossil fuels that will prevent us from flourishing. That will be our subject for the next several chapters.

  But before we get there, let’s be clear: If fossil fuels have catastrophic consequences and it makes sense to use a lot less of them, that would be an epic tragedy, given the state of the alternatives right now. Being forced to rely on solar, wind, and biofuels would be a horror beyond anything we can imagine, as a civilization that runs on cheap, plentiful, reliable energy would see its machines dead, its productivity destroyed, its resources disappearing.

  Thus it is disturbing to hear politicians talk about restricting fossil fuels as an “exciting opportunity.” John Kerry, our secretary of state, whose job is to represent the mainstream views of America to the rest of the world, described the prospect of outlawing the vast majority of fossil fuels, even if there were no catastrophic climate change, this way:

  If the worst-case scenario about climate change, all the worst predictions, if they never materialize, what will be the harm that is done from having made the decision to respond to it? We would actually leave our air cleaner. We would leave our water cleaner. We would actually make our food supply more secure. Our populations would be healthier because of fewer particulates of pollution in the air—less cost to health care. Those are the things that would happen if we happen to be wrong and we responded.31

  Actually, the type of “response” governments around the world have embraced—an 80 percent reduction in CO2 emissions over several decades—would, by all the evidence we have, lead to billions of premature deaths.

  Fossil fuel energy is, for the foreseeable future, necessary to life. The more of it we produce, the more people will have the ability to improve their lives. The less of it we produce, the more preventable suffering and death will exist. To not use fossil fuels, therefore, is beyond a risk—it is certain mortal peril for mankind.

  That brings us to the issue of the major risks cited with fossil-fuel use: climate change and environmental degradation. As we begin to think about risks, we need to keep this in mind: The reason we care about risk is because it is a danger to human life. Thus if something is essential to human life, like fossil fuels, we need to assess all risks in that context.

  We need a rigorous, big-picture examination of fossil fuels’ impact on climate and other environmental issues. We must clearly hold human life as our standard of value, or if we don’t, we must make clear that we are willing to sacrifice human life for something we think is more important. With that standard, we must look at the big picture, the full context. And we must use experts as advisers, not authorities, getting precise explanations from them about what is known and what is not known, so that we as individuals can make the most informed decision.

  4

  THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT

  CLIMATE CONFUSION

  Growing up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a suburb inside the Beltway of the D.C. metro area, I learned only one thing about fossil fuels in school for the first eighteen years of my life: They were bad because they were causing global warming. It wasn’t very clear in my mind what warming was or how it worked, but the gist was this: The CO2 my parents’ SUV was spewing in the air was making the Earth a lot hotter, and that would make a lot of things worse. Oh, and there was one more thing I learned: that everyone who knew the relevant science agreed with this.

  Perhaps this would make a better story if I told you that I promptly joined Greenpeace and fought fossil fuels until discovering a massive hoax that I will reveal later in this chapter.

  But that’s not quite how it went. As a young free-marketer, my sixteen-year-old self did not like all the talk of political restrictions that went along with global warming. So I wasn’t going anywhere near Greenpeace. But at the same time, the idea that this was a matter of established science was extremely significant to me. I come from a family of scientists (two of my grandparents were physicists, two were chemists) and I was being told about global warming not by scientifically illiterate teachers who repeated what they read in the paper (well, not only by those), but by my math and science teachers at the internationally renowned Math, Science, and Computer Science Magnet Program at Montgomery Blair High School.

  My strongest memory from my senior year statistics class is of the time when my teacher, a very bright woman, stopped talking about statistics one day and started talking about the perils of global warming. That she brought it up in statistics class and that she was so adamant about it gave all of us the impression that this was an issue the scientifically minded should get involved with.

  It was the same story at Duke. In freshman chemistry, local legend teacher James Bonk explained that the greenhouse effect was simple physics and chemistry and denounced the Republicans who denied it.

  At that time, as I w
ent searching for alternative views, I became familiar with the existence of professionals in climate science, such as Richard Lindzen of MIT and Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia, who argued that global warming wasn’t the big deal it was made out to be.1

  What was I supposed to make of all this? Should I go by the more popular position? My science teachers had taught me that this, historically, was a recipe for failure, and that we should believe things only if someone can give compelling evidence for them.

  But there was so much going on in discussions of global warming, I didn’t know how to decide where the evidence lay. I would hear different sides say different things about sea levels, polar bears, wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, temperature increases, what was and wasn’t caused by global warming, and on and on.

  With such a mess to work with, I—like most, I think—tended to side with the scientists or commentators whose conclusions were more congenial to me. I will admit to reiterating the arguments of skeptics of catastrophic global warming with the lack of rigor I think is extremely common among believers. But I didn’t do this for long. I acknowledged that I didn’t really know what to think, and the idea that we might be making the Earth fundamentally uninhabitable scared me.

  CLIMATE CLARITY

  My greatest moments of clarity came whenever I discovered an author or speaker who, instead of giving his particular answer to the question of global warming, would try to clarify the questions. For example: “What exactly does it mean to believe in ‘global warming’?” Some warming or a lot? Little deal or big deal? A little man-made or a lot man-made? Accelerating or decelerating?

  Having a background in philosophy, I recognized that most discussion of global warming would not stand up to fifteen seconds of scrutiny by Socrates, who alienated fellow Athenians by asking them to define what they meant when they used terms vaguely. I think Socrates would have been all over anyone who spoke vaguely of global warming or climate change without making clear which version of that theory they meant: mild warming or catastrophic warming.