Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas – Not Less by Alex Epstein
The full title of Fossil Future may seem at odds with the dominant media and government doomsday stories, but Epstein refutes them with fact after thoroughly researched fact, based on the ethical premise that the “good” is what supports human flourishing.
The New York Times best selling author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels draws on the latest data and new insights to challenge everything you thought you knew about the future of energy.
For over a decade, philosopher and energy expert Alex Epstein has predicted that any negative impacts of fossil fuel use on our climate will be outweighed by the unique benefits of fossil fuels to human flourishing–including their unrivaled ability to provide low-cost, reliable energy to billions of people around the world, especially the world’s poorest people.
And contrary to what we hear from media “experts” about today’s “renewable revolution” and “climate emergency,” reality has proven Epstein right:
Some interesting facts about fossil fuels today
Fact 1. Fossil fuels are still the dominant source of energy around the world, providing about 80 percent of the world’s energy, and its use is still growing. Solar and wind are just 3 percent of the world’s energy, and they not only are dependent on mandates, subsidies, and reliable fossil-fueled backup power plants, but are causing skyrocketing electricity prices and increased blackouts.
Fact 2. Fossil-fueled development has brought global poverty to an all-time low.
Fact 3. The world has become a better place to live. With increasing use of fossil fuels and even along with increased CO2, globally, life expectancy at birth has risen from under 30 years to over 70 years and infant mortality has gone down. In the U.S. air pollution has gone down.
Fact 4. While fossil fuels have contributed to a warming global climate system, that warming system amounts to 1ºC over the last 170 years, climate-related disaster deaths continue to fall thanks to fossil-fueled “climate mastery”: from fossil-fueled irrigation to fossil-fueled heating and cooling to fossil-fueled construction of sturdy buildings to fossil-fueled early warning systems. Over the last century the rate of climate-related disaster deaths has fallen by 98 percent! For every million people on earth, annual deaths from climate-related causes (extreme temperature, drought, flood, storms, wildfires …) declined from an average of 247 per year during the 1920s to 2.5 per year during the 2010s.
Fossil Future?
What does the future hold? In Fossil Future, Epstein, applying his distinctive “human flourishing framework” to the latest evidence, concludes that the benefits of fossil fuels will continue to far outweigh their side effects—including climate impacts—for generations to come. The path to global human flourishing, Epstein argues, is a combination of using more fossil fuels, getting better at “climate mastery,” and establishing “energy freedom” policies that allow nuclear and other truly promising alternatives to reach their full long-term potential.
Epstein discusses the premises underlying the calls by the mainstream media, politicians, governments, and many university faculties – our knowledge system – to eliminate fossil fuels. And those premises do not include human flourishing. Rather they include an anti-impact “delicate nurturer” assumption, as if we are living in a Garden of Eden where we shouldn’t try to alter the environment. That assumption is clearly against the nature of human beings and the requirements to “command Nature” in order to survive and flourish.
In other words, we started out in a naturally unlivable world without fossil fuels, and through the use of man’s creative genius, we now live in an unnaturally livable fossil-fueled world.
Today’s pervasive claims of imminent climate catastrophe and imminent renewable energy dominance, Epstein shows, are based on what he calls the “anti-impact framework”—a set of faulty methods, false assumptions, and anti-human values that have caused the media’s designated experts to make wildly wrong predictions about fossil fuels, climate, and renewables for the last fifty years. Deeply researched and wide-ranging, this book will cause you to rethink everything you thought you knew about the future of our energy use, our environment, and our climate.
Excerpts from an Amazon review …
Epstein’s book is a brilliant antidote to the assault on fossil fuels. Its theme is that fossil fuels are one of the greatest benefits to human civilization ever and that there is, for now, no viable substitute. Epstein covers relevant issues from every angle, so this is just a brief summary.
1. The earth, absent the benefits of machines powered by fossil fuels and electrical energy created by fossil fuels is a very dangerous place, characterized by mass poverty, recurring starvation, death from the cold, poor medical care, poor sanitation, exhausting manual labor, bad water, inadequate shelter, devastating natural disasters, and low life expectancy. It is not the Garden of Eden that we must not disturb.
2. The nations that suffer the most today are those that lack such technology. Without fossil fuels, people who lack them will keep suffering because they will stay poor, continuing to burn wood and cow dung for heat.
3. Coal, oil, and gas are responsible for almost all the energy created today– about 80%. Solar and wind provide only about 3%. Fossil fuels have allowed humanity, insofar it has advocated reason, to master nature (following the laws of nature and science) thus enabling the human race to multiply and thrive.
4. Fossils fuels are abundant in nature: plentiful, cheap, and reliable when production and transportation are not opposed by government regulations. They supply on-demand electricity.
5. The championed substitutes for fossil fuels are: wind, solar, and batteries. Epstein notes, as have others, the many problems with these sources. Windmills do not work without wind. Solar panels do not work without sunlight. Batteries are nowhere near cost-effective enough or efficient enough to store and provide sufficient energy when the wind isn’t blowing enough or the sun isn’t shining enough. So, in practice, solar, wind, and batteries are not replacements for fossil-fueled grids. They are inefficient, cost-adding add-ons to fossil-fueled grids.
6. Epstein calls the idea that all power would be created by wind, solar, and batteries to be divorced from reality, just from the aspect of cost alone.
7. What about pollution? Epstein shows that it has been decreasing for decades thanks to technology. Further, he identifies the ways that side effects can be mitigated.
8. Fossil fuel energy’s side-effects are increasingly neutralized by its benefits, as well-documented by Epstein.
9. What other alternatives are there for power? Epstein favors two: waterpower from dams and nuclear. Both are safe, dependable, non-polluting and do not take up much land or harm birds and animals. Unfortunately, both are roundly opposed by environmentalists. He shows that biomass and geothermal are at least decades away from becoming even significant supplements to fossil fuels, let alone replacements.
10. There is a long section on dealing with climate side effects including evidence that fossil fuels lead to fewer storm-related deaths, e.g., floods. Sea level rise today is radically less than in previous history (and can be coped with) and the danger has been greatly exaggerated as with the case of ocean acidification.
11. The book ends with a call for freedom of production and a critique of companies, including oil companies, which have conceded the anti-fossil agenda.
I consider this book to be, by far, the best—most honest, most accurate– statement of the fossil fuel issue written so far. But each reader will have to decide what to believe by using their own rational judgment.