The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels
Page 11
Imagine if we actually had a very serious problem from CO2 emissions. These leaders would be doing everyone a disservice by exaggerating the evidence and leading many disillusioned followers to conclude that there was none.
If there was a true threat, they would win credibility by giving an honest, big-picture explanation to the effect of: We thought we didn’t have to worry about CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, but now we think there’s strong evidence they could lead to something very dramatic and bad. Here’s the evidence, and here are our answers to the counterarguments. We understand that there are other considerations, such as the crucial importance of fossil fuel energy in modern life, and we don’t know enough about the big picture to say what policy should be, but we do think there’s a major risk and we want to have a public discussion about it.
The lack of this kind of honest explanation and the conspicuous lack of concern about proposals to drain our energy suggest that they are not using human life as their standard of value. As does the fact that they do not publicize a significant positive impact of CO2 emissions: global greening.
THE FERTILIZER EFFECT AND GLOBAL GREENING
Climate scientist Craig Idso is an anomaly. The son of climate scientist Sherwood Idso, he followed in his father’s footsteps and did research on the most scientifically established—yet least discussed—aspect of CO2’s climate impact—the fertilizing effect of giving more CO2 to plants.
Here’s the situation from a plant perspective. Fossil fuels are superconcentrated ancient dead plants. When we burn/oxidize them, we increase the amount of CO2, plant food, in the atmosphere. Thus, on top of getting energy, we should get a lot more plant growth—including growth of the most important plants to us, such as food crops.
Idso and others, conducting thousands of experiments in controlled conditions—where everything is held constant except CO2—have convincingly demonstrated that more CO2 means more plant growth.43
Figure 4.6 documents what happens to the four plants, identical and all grown at the same time, except with different levels of CO2.
Again, the results are dramatic. If we are “green” in the sense of liking plant life, rather than in the sense of not affecting anything, shouldn’t we be excited?
Figure 4.6: More CO2, More Plant Growth
Photograph courtesy of Craig Idso, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change
Worldwide increases in plant growth are nontrivial—indeed, Idso and others attribute significant portions of modern agricultural yields to increased atmospheric CO2.44 And there is a lot of evidence for this; observe the increases in crop yield when the following crucial crops were exposed to 300 ppm more CO2 than is in the atmosphere.
Figure 4.7: More CO2, More Crop Growth
Source: Idso, Plant Growth Database (2014)
All of this follows from basic chemistry and biology. Below 120 to 150 ppm CO2, most plants die, which means human beings would die. All things being equal, in terms of plant growth, agriculture, et cetera, more CO2 is better. Today’s climate gives us far less CO2 than we would like from a plant-growth perspective. We would prefer the thousands of ppm CO2 that, say, the Cretaceous period had.45
What’s most important about all this is not that it proves that there will be overwhelmingly positive climatological effects from increasing CO2—though I think that’s a possibility. The climate system is complex, and if no one among the specialists can predict it well, I certainly can’t.
What’s most striking is that these extremely positive plant effects of CO2 are scientifically uncontroversial yet practically never mentioned, even by the climate-science community. This is a dereliction of duty. It is our responsibility to look at the big picture, all positives and negatives, without prejudice. If they think the plant positives are outweighed, they can give their reasons. But to ignore the fertilizer effect and to fail to include it when discussing the impacts of CO2 is dishonest. It is meant to advance an agenda by not muddying it with “inconvenient” facts.
Occasionally the fertilizer effect will be mentioned as a trivial impact, not worthy of discussion, because the greenhouse effect will allegedly outweigh it so much with “too much” heat. This is dubious, given the observable increase in plant growth under conditions of increased CO2 and given that the heat predictions are failures.
What’s also striking is how, even though we all know that plants live on CO2, almost no one in the culture thinks of potential positive impacts when he thinks about his “carbon footprint.” This is prejudice—the belief that man-made impacts on our environment are necessarily bad, that the standard of value is nonimpact, and that there’s no possibility of improving on Mother Nature.
Given that the climate naturally changes and human beings have generally thrived the warmer it has been, it is quite possible that a higher global temperature with higher CO2 levels would be a great boon. It makes no sense to believe that the unchanged climate is the ideal.
My reading of the evidence is that there is a mild greenhouse effect in the direction human beings have always wanted—warmer—and a significant fertilizer effect in the direction human beings have always wanted—more plant life. I believe that the public discussion is prejudiced by an assumption that human impacts are bad, which causes us to fear and disapprove of the idea of affecting climate, even though climate is an inherently changing phenomenon that has no naturally perfect state.
But with both of these, particularly the greenhouse effect, I think it’s important to be open to new evidence and new developments. And the only way to do that properly is for the community discussing this, including the scientific community, to drop its prejudice against man-made impacts, stop thinking about being “effective,” and think only about being honest.
5
THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
FOSSIL FUELS’ MOST IMPORTANT CLIMATE-RELATED EFFECT
So far we have surveyed the evidence about the impact of the greenhouse effect and the fertilizer effect on climate. Now we turn to a different question: How does the energy we get from fossil fuels affect the livability of our climate?
A theme of this book is that energy is ability—because energy can help us do anything better. So if we have more energy, all things being equal, we should be better at dealing with climate—at protecting ourselves from or counteracting storms, heat, cold, floods, and so on.
How much better? And how is that offset by risks? Well, we need a way of measuring climate livability.
One way to approach this is to look at overall life expectancy and income—the leading indicators of human flourishing. If our climate is a significant danger and has been getting more dangerous since catastrophic predictions began over thirty years ago, then its effect might show up; it certainly would if it had reached catastrophe status. But as we saw in chapter 1, the more fossil fuel we use, the more life expectancy and income we have.
But if climate danger was a growing threat that was at the earlier stages of a terrifying ascent, it wouldn’t show up in life-expectancy statistics yet. Where it would surely show up is in statistics that measure climate danger specifically.
The best source I have found for this is called EM-DAT: The OFDA/CRED (U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance and Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters) International Disaster Database, based in Brussels.1 It gathers data about disasters since 1900.
Here again is the graph from chapter 1 that relates CO2 emissions, the alleged climate danger, to the number of climate-related deaths, which reflects the actual climate danger. It’s striking: as CO2 emissions rise, climate-related deaths plunge.
And to make matters better, in reality the trend is even more dramatically downward, because before the 1970s, many disasters went unreported. One big reason for this was lack of satellite data. Now we can see the whole world, so we can track icecaps and disaster areas with relative ease. In 1950,
if there was a disaster in the middle of what is now Bangladesh, would that information have been accurately collected? In general, we can expect that in more recent years, more of the deaths were recorded and that in earlier years, fewer of the deaths were recorded. For some countries, there is simply no good data, because in underdeveloped places like Haiti or Ethiopia, we do not even know exactly how many people lived in a particular place before a disaster struck. Today we have much better information—and because disaster statistics are tied to aid, there is an incentive to overreport.
And the more we dig into the data, the stronger the correlations get.
Figure 5.1: More Fossil Fuels, Fewer Climate-Related Deaths
Sources: Boden, Marland, Andres (2013); Etheridge et al. (1998); Keeling et al. (2001); MacFarling Meure et al. (2006); Merged Ice-Core Record Data, Scripps Institution of Oceanography; EM-DAT International Disaster Database
Here are a couple of striking numbers from the data: In the decade from 2004 to 2013, worldwide climate-related deaths (including droughts, floods, extreme temperatures, wildfires, and storms) plummeted to a level 88.6 percent below that of the peak decade, 1930 to 1939.2 The year 2013, with 29,404 reported deaths, had 99.4 percent fewer climate-related deaths than the historic record year of 1932, which had 5,073,283 reported deaths for the same category.3
That reduction occurred despite more complete reporting, an incentive by poor nations to declare greater damage to gain more aid, and a massively growing population, particularly in vulnerable places like coastal areas, in recent times.
All things being equal, one would expect the total number of deaths from these events to go up in proportion to population—and if catastrophic climate change were true, we should see a massive recent uptick, not 29,404 deaths in 2013.
Just to be sure, let’s look at the trends of individual types of climate danger in the last thirty years—when the predicted disasters were supposed to occur.
We’ll start with droughts. Droughts are historically the most common form of climate-related death; a lack of rainfall can affect the supply of the two most basic essentials of life, food and water.4
Drought is supposed to be one of the most devastating consequences of CO2 emissions, so let’s see how they match up.
Figure 5.2: More Fossil Fuel Use, Fewer Drought-Related Deaths
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Sources: Boden, Marland, Andres (2010); EM-DAT International Disaster Database; World Bank, World Development Indicators (WDI) Online Data, April 2014
Clearly, CO2 emissions have not had a significant negative effect on droughts, but expanded human ability to fight drought, powered by fossil fuels, has: from better agriculture (more crops for more people) to rapid transportation to drought-affected areas to modern irrigation that makes farmers less dependent on rainfall.
Shouldn’t fossil fuel energy get some credit here?
What about dangerous storms?
Figure 5.3: More Fossil Fuel Use, Fewer Storm-Related Deaths
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Sources: Boden, Marland, Andres (2010); EM-DAT International Disaster Database; World Bank, World Development Indicators (WDI) Online Data, April 2014
There are fewer storm-related deaths than ever. CO2 emissions are not having a detectable effect on storm danger, but the fossil fuel energy that helps us build sturdy buildings and move people away from disaster areas, is.
What about floods?
Figure 5.4: More Fossil Fuel Use, Fewer Flood-Related Deaths
Sources: Boden, Marland, Andres (2010); EM-DAT International Disaster Database; World Bank, World Development Indicators (WDI) Online Data, April 2014
Again, the doomsayers are not looking at the big-picture data. If they were, they would appreciate the value of energy in building sturdier coastlines and better levees and seawalls. The more fossil fuel we use, the safer—dramatically, dramatically safer—we become from climate-related dangers.
We can also observe this from the perspective of comparing high-energy developed countries with low-energy underdeveloped countries. Here are the G7 countries compared to the world as a whole in death rates from climate-related causes.
When comparing storm death rates we see that developed nations fare much better than the world average. Note that the United States is making the G7 numbers higher because it is much more vulnerable to storms than the G7 average of countries. Of these countries, the United States is the only country with major tornadoes and has received a significant number of landfalling hurricanes over the decades.5
Figure 5.5: More Development, Less Climate Danger
Sources: EM-DAT International Disaster Database; World Bank, World
Development Indicators (WDI) Online Data, April 2014
If we look at year-to-year data, there is a dramatic difference between the heavy fossil fuel users and the light fossil fuel users in climate-related deaths—you are much, much safer in an industrialized country. This has a fairly obvious application: If you care about safety from climate, shouldn’t you be encouraging rapid industrialization? Which today means encouraging fossil fuel use.
We can see that spikes from events like a major storm in one country increase the short-term volatility in the data. This reflects the nature of weather. The blue G7 nations are nevertheless much safer places, despite including disaster-prone nations with high population numbers, like the United States and Japan.
Shouldn’t fossil fuel energy get some credit here?
To give you one particularly astonishing data point, the database reports that the United States has had zero deaths from drought in the last eight years. This doesn’t mean there are actually zero, as the database only covers incidents involving ten or more deaths, but it means pretty near zero. Historically, drought is the number-one climate-related cause of death. Worldwide it has gone down by 99.98 percent in the last eighty years for many energy-related reasons: oil-powered drought-relief convoys, more food in general because of more prolific, fossil fuel–based agriculture, and irrigation systems.6, 7 And yet we constantly hear reports that fossil fuels are making droughts worse. These reports give credibility to climate-prediction models that can’t predict climate, but no credibility to the plain facts about how important more energy is to countering drought.
There is one more point to be made about the 29,404 deaths in 2013. Climate is no longer a major cause of death, thanks in large part to fossil fuels.8 By contrast, there are 1.3 billion people with no electricity, the vast majority of whom will die early deaths, a problem that can be solved only by using more fossil fuels. Not only are we ignoring the big picture by making the fight against climate danger the fixation of our culture, we are “fighting” climate change by opposing the weapon that has made it dozens of times less dangerous.
The popular climate discussion has the issue backward. It looks at man as a destructive force for climate livability, one who makes the climate dangerous because we use fossil fuels.
In fact, the truth is the exact opposite; we don’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous; we take a dangerous climate and make it safe. High-energy civilization, not climate, is the driver of climate livability. No matter what, climate will always be naturally hazardous—and the key question will always be whether we have the adaptability to handle it or, better yet, master it.
OUR NATURALLY HAZARDOUS CLIMATE
There is a widespread idea among climate commentators, including climate scientists, that the global climate system, absent human CO2 emissions, is safe.
There is an unsophisticated and a sophisticated version of this argument.
Unsophisticated: John Kerry, when speaking to Indonesia, a nation that has dramatically increased its well-being in recent years through the burning of coal, tells them to stop burning coal: “But, ultimately, every nation on Earth has a responsibility to do its part if we have any hope of leaving our future generations t
he safe and healthy planet that they deserve.”9 But that “safe and healthy” planet is incredibly precarious for anyone outside high-energy civilization. Indonesia frequently gets hit by earthquakes and tsunamis killing hundreds or thousands and would be much safer were it more industrialized, with sturdy buildings, modern disaster relief, and the wealth and resources to rebuild quickly.
The sophisticated version of the idea that our climate is naturally safe or ideal says that because man has flourished in the current climatological period, the 10,000-year post–Ice Age stretch known as the Holocene, that is the only global climate we can live in and if there’s a risk that fossil fuels will break the “natural” temperature highs of that last 10,000 years, we need to stop using them. “Just like us,” says Bill McKibben, “our crops are adapted to the Holocene, the 11,000-year period of climatic stability we’re now leaving . . . in the dust.”10
This argument does not reflect reality.
First of all, the Holocene is an abstraction; it is not a “climate” anyone lived in; it is a summary of a climate system that contains an incredible variety of climates that individuals lived in. And in practice, we can live in pretty much any of them if we are industrialized and pretty much none of them if we aren’t. The open secret of our relationship to climate is how good we are at living in different climates thanks to technology.
I live in the United States, in Southern California, which is naturally a near desert where I would have died of drought (or not lived here) in previous generations. But thanks to irrigation, air-conditioning, sturdy homes, and other technological advances (especially high-energy transport, which enables me to trade with people far away for goods I could not create under the local circumstances), this is one of the most wonderful places on Earth to live: I can enjoy warm, temperate, low-humidity weather without the downsides of the desert.