The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels

by Alex Epstein

  And that’s great, so long as I don’t forget what got me there: complex machines.

  Just as we are taught to think of nature as safe and clean, so we are taught to think of it as scenic. But it becomes scenic to us only if we have access to a variety of beautiful scenes.

  There are more such scenes, but for most of history, no one got to enjoy many of them because they lacked the ultimate tool for enjoying nature—mobility. They also lacked the other crucial tool: adaptability, including medicine. Now we think of camping as a fun adventure. In the past, it was a deadly adventure.

  If we view nature as another resource for us to enjoy and something to preserve when it is particularly beautiful or significant to us, then we will embrace fossil fuels. Fossil fuel energy gives us the mobility to get to it, the adaptability to be safe in it, and the time to enjoy it.

  When we talk about resources, we have to remember that the only resource that can’t be re-created, the real resource to guard jealously, is time—it is irreplaceable and unrepeatable. We can make more plastic, but we can’t get back our time. And time is what enables us to enjoy nature. The more productive we are, the more time we have for leisure pursuits. (Whether people choose to take advantage of that is another issue.)

  Furthermore, because fossil fuel energy is so dense and requires very little land and no live plants, it gives us both the wealth and the physical ability to preserve pretty much any piece of nature we want. And even in cases where one person’s irreplaceable beauty is another person’s needed energy source, we are talking about an installation that, if need be, has a finite lifetime and then can be transformed into a lush forest. Which is not to say that oil rigs are ugly—I think we should consider industrial civilization beautiful, too.

  Look at the parts of the world where the “rain forest” (jungle) gets mowed down in seemingly shortsighted ways. Are they rich places? No, they are poor places with primitive agriculture and industry.

  The now-developed world was once like that in preindustrial times. While we are taught to think that the country was once lush landscape, in fact, before coal, oil, and natural energy, our country and others survived by developing the landscape. As geographer Pierre Desrochers writes:

  Carbon fuels made this expansion of the forest cover possible in various ways. With the development of more sophisticated combustion technologies, coal, heavy oil and natural gas proved vastly superior alternatives to firewood and charcoal. Through their role as long-distance land and maritime transportation fuels, coal and later petroleum-based fuels (diesel and marine bunker fuel) encouraged agricultural specialization in the most productive zones of the planet, in the process making much marginal agricultural land superfluous.24

  If you love enjoying nature, you should love fossil fuels.

  The same basic logic applies to more abstract concerns about “biodiversity” and species extinction. There are huge debates in the ecology literature about what is happening or not happening to what species, and I have not studied them enough to take sides, but I can say that from an energy perspective, to the extent it makes sense to preserve a given species or biological arrangement—and such decisions should be made according to a human standard of value, not a nonhuman one—cheap, plentiful, reliable energy gives us the means to do so just as we can preserve a desirable forest or park. It is only when we are truly living off the rest of nature that we must gobble up whatever we can.

  Whether to actively preserve a species or not should be made with reference to a human standard of value. Much of the ecology field holds to the nonimpact standard, which treats another species’ extinction as intrinsically wrong. But human beings are right to favor some species over others. For example, pigs, cattle, and chickens are in no danger of extinction because their human-centered benefits are immediately visible, so we make them some of the most abundant life-forms on Earth. On the other hand, wolves and bears and disease-carrying insects have been threats that we destroyed in many regions. There is no inherent reason to think that the extinction of any given plant or animal is bad for humans. We should focus on maximizing our benefits. That can be the removal of a direct threat, such as making bears nonexistent where our kids go to school, or the preservation of species that we want to survive, such as the panda, even if we do not strictly need it for our own survival.

  THE BIG PICTURE

  So far we have seen that the overall impact of fossil fuels on our environment is tremendously positive. But let’s step back and ask this: Why are we concerned about our environment? Why are we concerned, say, about pollution? Of course, most fundamentally we desire human flourishing but in particular we desire human health. Therefore, in looking at fossil fuels and environmental quality, it’s important to look at not just how they help us transform our environment for the better, but also how they help us transform ourselves for the better through health technology.

  Let’s look at the trends: infant mortality, mortality under five, malnutrition, and life expectancy.

  Figure 7.2: Health Trends Improving Across the Board and Around the World

  Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (WDI) Online Data, April 2014

  Every one of these graphs represents a collection of real people, many of whom have been recently empowered by energy and many of whom who are suffering every day for lack of it.

  World life expectancy at birth has gone up from sixty-three in 1980 to seventy in 2012. The child mortality rate on the planet went down from 115 to 47 per 1,000 live births. Infant mortality declined from 80 to 35 per 1,000 live births in the same time period.25 The incidence of tuberculosis, an infectious disease that particularly threatens poor people with little access to modern medicine, has declined from 147 per 100,000 population in 1990, when the World Bank’s record begins, to 122 in 2012.26 Malnutrition, defined by the percentage of children under five with significantly below average weight or height for their age, has been constantly decreasing at a significant rate since 1990.27 Access to electricity and improved water sources, which are basic indicators for human well-being, hygiene, and health in general, went up as well.28

  Developing countries in the sub-Saharan and East Asian region have been particularly impressive; East Asian developing countries now have an average life expectancy at birth of seventy-three years.There is much credit to be given to industrial-scale energy, primarily, as we have seen in previous chapters, from fossil fuels. Without a large amount of affordable energy, the vast majority of the people whose lives were drastically improved in recent decades would still sit in the dark mourning their dead children and friends, if they were ever born in the first place.

  Many energy-intensive technologies influence our overall health in a positive way. Food production, modern medicine, and sanitation require cheap, plentiful, reliable energy to make them available and affordable to as many people as possible.

  All of this is part of the big picture of fossil fuels’ impact on our lives, health, and environment.

  To summarize, fossil fuels improve our environment by, among other things, empowering us to fight the otherwise overwhelming health hazards of nature. Like all forms of energy, they have risks and by-products, but they also give us the energy and resources to minimize, neutralize, or even reverse those harms. More broadly, if health is our concern, fossil fuels underlie the food and medical care systems that have created the longest life expectancy in history.

  Once again, we see that an alleged negative of fossil fuels, its impact on environmental quality, is in fact a tremendous positive.

  We have a choice to make. Will we use fossil fuels to maximize human well-being in all areas of life, including our environment? Or will we continue to see fossil fuels only through negative glasses, blind to the tremendous benefits that have come so far, and the tremendous ones that can come in the future?

  8

  FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE

  I
S OUR WAY OF LIFE SUSTAINABLE?

  Exploring the evidence about mankind’s use of fossil fuels so far, we have seen that the fossil fuel industry is far and away the world leader at producing cheap, plentiful, reliable energy and that that energy has radically increased our ability to create a flourishing society, a more livable climate, and greater environmental quality. On these fronts, so long as we are able to use fossil fuels, the evidence is overwhelming that life can get better and better across the board, as we use fossil fuel technology and other technologies to solve more problems—including those that fossil fuel technology and other technologies create.

  One big question remains: What are the long-term prospects for this way of life? While today we are rich in fossil fuel resources and the wealth they help us create, what is in store for the future?

  With so much consuming, can this way of life really last? Is it sustainable?

  The answer is better than yes. Not only can our way of life last; it can keep getting better and better, as long as we don’t adopt “sustainability” policies.

  In chapter 3, we saw that the amount of unused fossil fuel raw material currently in the Earth exceeds by far the amount we’ve used in the entire history of civilization by many multiples and that the key issue is whether we have the technological ability and economic reason to turn that raw material into a resource.

  For years, actually centuries, opponents of fossil fuels—and some supporters of fossil fuels—have said that using fossil fuels is unsustainable because we’ll run out of them.

  Instead, we keep running into them. The more we use, the more we create. Fossil fuel energy resources, we discussed, are created—by turning a nonresource raw material into a resource using human ingenuity. And there is plenty of raw material left.

  In the last few years, the shale energy revolution has unlocked vast new oil and gas resources, making the “running out of fossil fuels” claim seem implausible for the foreseeable future. Many environmental leaders have therefore shifted from saying that we’re running out of fossil fuels to saying that our abundance of fossil fuels is causing us to run out of other resources—arable land and water, most alarmingly, but also a whole host of other materials that are crucial for civilizations.

  “Consuming three planets’ worth of resources when in fact we have one is the environmental equivalent of childhood obesity—eating until you make yourself sick,” says David Miliband, secretary of state for the environment, food, and rural affairs in the United Kingdom.1 In response to criticisms of renewable energy plans as utopian and far-fetched, Bill McKibben says, “Perhaps it’s the current scheme, with its requirement of endless growth in a finite world, that seems utopian and far-fetched.”2

  The theory behind these predictions is that Earth has a finite “carrying capacity,” an idea that was spread far and wide in the 1970s. Two of the leading exponents of this view were Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren. In their landmark book, Global Ecology, they wrote:

  When a population of organisms grows in a finite environment, sooner or later it will encounter a resource limit. This phenomenon, described by ecologists as reaching the “carrying capacity” of the environment, applies to bacteria on a culture dish, to fruit flies in a jar of agar, and to buffalo on a prairie. It must also apply to man on this finite planet.3

  These theories were not idle banter—they were used by many to call for drastic restrictions on fossil fuel use, much as we have today.

  Ehrlich and Holdren announced, “A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States.”4 This meant an attempt to reverse industrial development—by law: “This effort must be largely political.”5

  These ideas were viewed highly enough that Holdren’s body of work, which stresses these themes over and over, gave him the prestige to become science adviser to President Barack Obama.

  As we’ve discussed earlier, these predictions were wrong, but why, exactly, were they wrong? The most direct reason is that there are far more fossil fuel raw materials and far more human ingenuity to get them than Ehrlich and Holdren expected. But there is a deeper error here, an error at the root of the whole concept of sustainability. The error is a backward understanding of resources.

  THE UNLIMITED POTENTIAL FOR RESOURCE CREATION AND HUMAN PROGRESS

  The believers in a finite carrying capacity think of the Earth as something that “carries” us by dispensing a certain amount of resources. But if this was true, then why did the caveman have so few resources?

  Those who believe in the ideal of human nonimpact tend to endow nature with godlike status, as an entity that nurtures us if only we will live in harmony with the other species and not demand so much for ourselves.

  But nature gives us very few directly usable machine energy resources. Resources are not taken from nature, but created from nature. What applies to the raw materials of coal, oil, and gas also applies to every raw material in nature—they are all potential resources, with unlimited potential to be rendered valuable by the human mind.

  Ultimately, a resource is just matter and energy transformed via human ingenuity to meet human needs. Well, the planet we live on is 100 percent matter and energy, 100 percent potential resource for energy and anything else we would want. To say we’ve only scratched the surface is to significantly understate how little of this planet’s potential we’ve unlocked. We already know that we have enough of a combination of fossil fuels and nuclear power to last thousands and thousands of years, and by then, hopefully, we’ll have fusion (a potential, far superior form of nuclear power) or even some hyperefficient form of solar power.

  The amount of raw matter and energy on this planet is so incomprehensibly vast that it is nonsensical to speculate about running out of it. Telling us that there is only so much matter and energy to create resources from is like telling us that there is only so much galaxy to visit for the first time. True, but irrelevant.

  Sustainability is not a clearly defined term. According to the United Nations, it has over a thousand interpretations, but the basic idea is “indefinitely repeatable.”6 For example, the idea of renewability, which is usually synonymous with sustainability in the realm of energy, is that the fuel source keeps replenishing itself over and over without the need to do anything different.

  But why is this an ideal? In most realms, we accept and desire constant change. For example, you want the best phone with the best materials, regardless of whether those materials will be there in two hundred years and regardless of whether it would be more “renewable” to use two cups and a string.

  Why should we want to use solar panels or windmills over and over (leaving aside the fact that they quickly deteriorate and thus require a continuous series of mass-mining projects) if they keep giving us expensive, unreliable energy? Why not use the best, the most progressive form of energy at any given time, recognizing that this will change as we advance and the best becomes better?

  At the beginning of this book, we observed that human beings survive by using ingenuity to transform nature to meet their needs—i.e., to produce and consume resources. And we observed that the motive power of transformation, the amplifier of human ability, the resource behind every other resource, is energy—which, for the foreseeable future, means largely fossil fuel energy. There is no inherent limit to energy resources—we just need human ingenuity to be free to discover ways to turn unusable energy into usable energy. This opens up a thrilling possibility: the endless potential for improving life through ever growing energy resources helping create ever growing resources of every kind. This is the principle that explains the strong correlation between fossil fuel use and life expectancy, fossil fuel use and income, fossil fuel use and pretty much anything good: human ingenuity transforming potential resources into actual resources—including the most fundamental resource, energy.

  Growth is not unsustainable. With fr
eedom, including the freedom to produce energy, it is practically inevitable. We are not eating the last slice of pizza in the box or scraping the bottom of the barrel; we are standing on the tip of an endless iceberg.

  This is a thrilling prospect for everyone in the world—and certainly for those who live in resource poverty. And if we keep creating resources, I think my future grandchildren will think of my generation of Americans in 2014 as having lived in resource poverty.

  HOW USING FOSSIL FUELS ADVANCES FUTURE GENERATIONS

  Let’s apply the idea of resource creation to the concerns that today’s activities are harming future generations, whom the opponents of fossil fuels often focus on.

  I do not have children myself, so I know I cannot relate to the perspective on the future that parenthood gives you, but I think it’s important for me to try to. So when I think about these issues, I try to think about children I know, children of my close friends or family members, and ask myself how what I’m doing will affect them.

  The other day, I was visiting two of my best friends, who have a two-year-old named Seth. I’ve been fortunate enough to see him about once a week from the time he was born—and it’s rare that seeing him is not a highlight of my week. If only we adults could pack as much learning and joy into our lives as a happy two-year-old. Lately, when I visit, I’ve been teaching him some rudimentary Brazilian jujitsu, because I love it and think it’s a great thing for a kid to learn, and I hope that he’ll pursue it later in life.

  To anyone who has ever connected with even one child, the thought of knowingly taking actions to hurt his future is horrifying. We naturally want our children’s lives to be as good as, or better than, ours.