The seventeenth-century philosopher Sir Francis Bacon argued that the
human mind had been squandered on superstition: metaphysical
speculation, theological disputation, and violent political delusions.
Bacon’s greatest American disciple, Benjamin Franklin, agreed. It would
be better, both believed, to focus on the conquest of man’s common
enemy: nature. Bacon and Franklin were right, but they misjudged
superstition’s staying power. Fast-forward to a conversation I had with
the late Arne Naess, the Norwegian father of “deep ecology” and guru of
the European Green movement. With a straight face, Naess told me that
the eradication of smallpox was a technological crime against nature.
For Naess’s deep ecology, the smallpox virus “deserved” and needed our
protection, despite having maimed, tortured, and killed millions of
people.
In his sprightly recent book,
The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,
Alex Epstein takes on Naess’s American progeny—people such as Bill
McKibben and David M. Graber—who have become influential opinion-makers
on the environment, fossil fuels, and technology. Epstein asks us to
imagine someone transported to the present from a virtually fossil
fuels-free England in 1712, when the
Newcomen steam engine was invented. What would that person think of our world, where 87 percent
of
all energy is produced from fossil fuels? In short, he’d be amazed to
find clean drinking water, sanitation, enviable and improving air
quality, long life, freedom from much disease, material prosperity,
mobility, and leisure.
Epstein makes a compelling “big picture” case that the interaction of
technology and fossil fuels provides everything we take for granted
today. He also reminds us of earlier hysterical predictions of doom
concerning fossil-fuel use. In the late 1960s and early 1970s,
environmentalists such as Paul Ehrlich predicted mass starvation by the
year 2000 because “world food production could not keep up with the
galloping growth of population.” Flat wrong: the world’s population
doubled, and the average person today is far
better fed than when
the starvation apocalypse was announced. That’s because the other
apocalypse proclaimed back then—the depletion of oil and natural gas by
1992 and 1993, respectively—also proved wrong. Since 1980, worldwide
usage of fossil fuels increased massively, yet both oil and natural gas
supplies have more than doubled, and we have enough coal to last 3,000
years.
Epstein explains what the environmental doomsayers could not or would
not see: first, that “fossil fuel energy is the fuel of food”; and
second, that the human mind is as powerful as Franklin and Bacon said it
was. Humans discovered more fossil fuels, and technology used those
fuels to industrialize food production. Moreover, fossil fuels enabled
Norman Borlaug’s
Green Revolution
in food science, which, unlike the political movement of that name,
actually did something to improve world nutrition and relieve the
suffering of millions. Ehrlich was also wrong about fossil-fuel
pollution in the developed world. In the U.S., though the use of fossil
fuels climbed steadily since 1970, emissions of pollutants decreased
dramatically—thanks to technology.
Predictions of starvation, depletion, and pollution didn’t pan out.
What about global warming? Epstein’s warming discussion should be
required reading. He acknowledges the greenhouse effect of carbon
dioxide, which can be demonstrated in a laboratory. But the effect is
not linear; if it was, every new molecule of carbon dioxide added to the
atmosphere would add a unit of heat equivalent to the one preceding it.
Rather, the greenhouse effect is decelerating and logarithmic, which
means that every additional molecule of carbon dioxide is
less potent
than the preceding one. Many theories of rapid global warming are based
on speculative models of carbon dioxide interacting in positive
feedback loops with increases in atmospheric water vapor. Most climate
models are based on so-called “hindcasting,” coming up with explanatory
schemes that predict what has happened in the past. There’s nothing
inherently wrong with this, since the only alternative would be
clairvoyance—but predicting the past with a computer model is not the
same as accurately predicting the future.
Most climate models, says Epstein, have consistently and dramatically
over-predicted
mid-tropospheric global warming. We haven’t “burned up,” as McKibben
predicted we would in 1989. Some suggest that the warming is occurring
in the oceans; but mean sea levels around the world have been stable or
declining for the last 100-plus years. Since the beginning of the
industrial revolution, atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels
have increased
by .03 percent to .04 percent and since 1850, temperatures have risen
less than one degree Celsius (an increase that has happened in many
earlier time periods). And for the past 15 years—a period of record emissions—there
has been little to no warming.
The warming models may prove correct in the long term, of course, so
Epstein asks a reasonable question: What if it becomes clear that, in
the next 100 years, the seas will rise by two feet and the globe will
warm by 2 degrees Celsius, as predicted by many climate scientists? The
answer is simple, though often ignored by climate alarmists: we’ll
adapt. Since the Industrial Revolution, and especially in the last 30
years, the human race has become progressively better at remediating the
harmful effects of storms, heat, cold, floods, and so on. It’s
irresponsible, says Epstein, to trivialize the power of technology to
solve the problems generated by fossil fuels. Much of that technology
could consist of fossil-powered techniques to capture and recycle or
sequester carbon dioxide.
Epstein exposes the profound misanthropy motivating much contemporary
environmentalism. He quotes Graber: “Human happiness, and certainly
human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet . . .
human beings have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth . .
. and until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature,
some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” Alexis de
Tocqueville noted that democratic peoples have a tendency toward
pantheism in religion: given their passion for equality, they come to
think that
everything is God. To radical Greens like Naess,
Graber, and McKibben, everything is God, with one exception: the human
being, whose “impact” spoils the “independent and mysterious” divine.
Why do hysterical warnings about sustainability and depletion persist
despite the failure of the crackpot 1960s and 1970s predictions?
Because the non-impact standard—conceiving of the environment as a
loving but finite God—sees the environment as having a limited “carrying
capacity” of gifts, such as arable land, water, and crucial minerals,
in addition to fossil fuels. The more people on the planet, the closer
we are to maxing out that carrying capacity, the thinking goes. Thus the
urgent call,
made in 2010
by White House Office of Science and Technology director John P.
Holdren, to “de-develop the United States.” This notion of a finite
carrying capacity discounts the powerful role of human ingenuity in
finding natural resources. But the deeper problem is rooted in the divinization of the planet as something that simply is what it is.
Epstein argues brilliantly that the carrying-capacity superstition
amounts to a “backward understanding of resources.” The fact is that
nature by itself gives us very few directly supplied energy resources:
most resources “are not
taken from nature, but
created
from nature,” he maintains. Every raw material in nature is but a
“potential resource, with unlimited potential to be to be rendered
valuable by the human mind.” Right now we have enough fossil fuels and
nuclear power to last us thousands of years. “The amount of raw matter
and energy on this planet,” Epstein writes, “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.”
Bill McKibben says that the post-Ice Age Holocene period is the
only
climate that humans can live in. Epstein responds that the Holocene is
an abstraction that summarizes “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.” Until the Industrial Revolution, the climate was dangerous for
all human beings. Since then, we have marched steadily toward “climate
mastery.” Fewer people die today from the weather than at any time in
history. “We don’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous,” according
to Epstein. “We take a dangerous climate and make it safe.”
The non-impact standard is a pervasive but irrational
prejudice—irrational because it’s a neo-pagan faith that the earth is in
effect an uncreated God, and a prejudice because it’s asserted
dogmatically by those who profess it and taken for granted by a public
unaware of being in its grip. The default position on environmental
matters is “respect” for the planet. It tilts opinion to focus only on
the harms of fossil fuels and technology, not their benefits. The bottom
line is always the same: humans should minimize their impact on nature.
Alex Epstein’s book is a breath of fresh air in this polluted opinion climate.
The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels
shows why fossil fuels are good for human flourishing in general and
good for the world’s poor in particular. Epstein is a true friend of the
earth—an earth inhabited and made better by human beings.
Jerry Weinberger is University Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University.
