This book was a very important read for me. It was a view I was not exposed to. I liked his use of always coming back to the standard of value he held and arguing from there.
Green Movement’s Standard of Value = Non-Impact of Nature
Standard of Value of the Book = Flourishing of Human Life
There were several assumptions I held that the book directly challenged. I haven’t yet double checked the sources given in the book – I suspect it will be a messy journey, but they do seem to hold true so far. Some examples that stood out for me:
- If we just stopped using fossil fuels today, billions of us will die.
- Renewable energy like solar and wind have not solved the problem of reliable energy.
- 97% of scientists do not agree that climate change will lead to catastrophic results. This number seems to have been skewed.
- If catastrophic climate change is coming, we would want to increase our fossil fuel use, not decrease it, as a way to protect ourselves.
- Besides nuclear and hydroelectric, there are no viable alternatives to fossil fuels.
- Fossil fuels are not running out any time soon, Three thousand years of coal reserves left, and coal can be transformed into oil or natural gas if needed.
- Nuclear power is also abundant, there is A LOT of uranium and current technologies can only extract a small percent of the raw fission power
- Earth does not have finite resources because resources do not come from the Earth – they come from the human ingenuity. Epstein gives the example of oil being a waste product, dumped into lakes until Rockfellar came in and found a way to use it.
- If humanity can create conditions more of us to continue thinking and innovating, there is no fixed upper limit to the resources available (i.e. imagine we figure out free energy). These conditions need time and wealth.
Anyway, below are my highlights. I highly highly recommend the book. Climate change is not a simple problem. It is extremely complex. I fear a greater danger than climate change itself are the people pushing for radical policies that lead to unintended consequences.
The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
prediction by James Hansen, the most influential climate scientist in the world over the last thirty years: Dr. James E. Hansen of the Goddard Space Flight Center’s Institute for Space Studies said research by his institute showed that because of the “greenhouse effect” that results when gases prevent heat from escaping the earth’s atmosphere, global temperatures would rise early in the next century to “well above any level experienced in the past 100,000 years.”
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
Of course, predictions on a societal or global level can never be exact, but they need to be somewhere near the truth. So what happened? Two
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
think it’s good that we use a lot of fossil fuels. I think the world would be a much better place if people used a lot more
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
But fossil fuels cause climate change, she might have said. I agree, I would have replied, but I think the evidence shows that climate change, natural or man-made, is more manageable than ever
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
think the evidence shows that there are huge amounts of fossil fuels left, and we’ll have plenty of time to use ingenuity and technology to find something cheaper—such as some form of advanced nuclear power
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
It is conventional wisdom that our use of fossil fuels is an “addiction”—a short-range, unsustainable, destructive habit
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
Eighty-seven percent of the energy mankind uses every second, including most of the energy I am using as I write this, comes from burning one of the fossil fuels: coal, oil, or natural gas
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
But, we are told, this cannot continue
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
the argument goes, in the long run we are making our climate unlivable, destroying our environment, and depleting our resources. We must and can replace fossil fuels with renewable, green, climate-friendly energy from solar, wind, and biomass (plants).
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
CEO of Shell made in 2013: “We believe climate change is real and time is running out to take real action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”3
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
This is not a liberal view or a conservative view; it’s a view that almost everyone holds in one form or another
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
For years, the Nobel Prize–winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has demanded that the United States and other industrialized countries cut carbon dioxide emissions to 20 percent of 1990 levels by 2050—and the United States has joined hundreds of other countries in agreeing to this goal.5
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
So when the girl at the Greenpeace booth implied that I had sold my soul, I didn’t get offended. I simply explained that, no, I wasn’t being paid off; I had just concluded, based on my research, that the short- and long-term benefits of using fossil fuels actually far, far outweigh the risks and was happy to explain why. But she wasn’t interested. Pointing
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
I understand that a lot of smart people are predicting catastrophic consequences from using fossil fuels, I take that very seriously, and I have studied their predictions extensively.
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
leading experts and the media have been making the exact same predictions for more than thirty years. As far back as the 1970s they predicted that if we did not dramatically reduce fossil fuel use then, and use renewables instead, we would be experiencing catastrophe today—catastrophic resource depletion, catastrophic pollution, and catastrophic climate change
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
Instead, the exact opposite happened. Instead of using a lot less fossil fuel energy, we used a lot more—but instead of long-term catastrophe, we have experienced dramatic, long-term improvement in every aspect of life, including environmental quality
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
we should look at the track record of that idea, if it has one.
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
Take the prediction we hear today that we will soon run out of fossil fuels—particularly oil—because they are nonrenewable. This prediction was made over and over by some of the most prestigious thinkers of the 1970s
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
The Limits to Growth, which declared that its state-of-the-art computer models had demonstrated that we would run out of oil by 1992 and natural gas by 1993 (and, for good measure, gold, mercury, silver, tin, zinc, and lead by 1993 at the latest
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
In 1971 he said, “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people,”9 and in 1974 he wrote, “America’s economic joyride is coming to an end: there will be no more cheap, abundant energy, no more cheap abundant food.”10
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution . . . by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half . . .”11
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
Air pollution . . . is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone,” he said in 1970.12
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
Reading back in time, I saw that many of the leaders who make that prediction now had, decades ago, predicted that we’d be living in catastrophe today.
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
it is possible that carbon-dioxide climate-induced famines could kill as many as a billion people before the year 2020.”16
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
all scientists’ agreed that warming was real and catastrophic in its potential,” a 1992 study reported.17
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
Just as the media today tell us these catastrophic predictions are a matter of scientific consensus, so did the media of the 1980s.
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”18
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
All of these thinkers still advocate similar policies today—in fact, today Bill McKibben endorses a 95 percent ban on fossil fuel use, eight times as severe as the scenario described above!22 And all of them are extremely prestigious
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
Instead of following the leading advice and restricting the use of fossil fuels, people around the world nearly doubled their use of fossil fuels—which allegedly should have led to an epic disaster
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
Solar and wind are a minuscule portion of world energy use
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
While many countries wanted solar and wind, and in fact used a lot of their citizens’ money to prop up solar and wind companies, no one could figure out a cost-effective, scalable process to take sunlight and wind, which are dilute and intermittent forms of energy, and turn them into cheap, plentiful, reliable energy
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
renewable energy couldn’t meet those countries’ energy needs, though fossil fuels could
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
What will promote human life? What will promote human flourishing—realizing the full potential of life
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
there is an incredibly strong correlation between fossil fuel use and life expectancy and between fossil fuel use and income, particularly in the rapidly developing parts of the world
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
China and India. In each country, both coal and oil use increased by at least a factor of 5, producing nearly all their energy.29
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
global malnutrition and undernourishment have plummeted—by 39 percent and 40 percent, respectively, since 1990
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
those who predict the most risk get the most attention from the media and from politicians who want to “do something
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
As we have used more fossil fuels, our resource situation, our environment situation, and our climate situation have been improving, too.
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
as fossil fuel use has increased, fossil fuel resources have increased. How is that possible?
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
measure for fossil fuel resources is “proven reserves,” which is the amount of coal, oil, or gas that is available to us affordably, given today’s technology
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
Many experts paid attention only to our consumption of oil and gas resources, but not our ability to create new oil and gas resources
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
It’s true that once we burn a barrel of oil, it’s gone. But it’s also true that human ingenuity can dramatically increase the amount of coal, oil, or gas that is available
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
in general, human beings are amazingly good at using ingenuity to create wealth, which means to create resources
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
We take the materials around us and make them more valuable; that’s how we went from starving in a cave to producing a cornucopia of food that we can enjoy in comfortable homes. The
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
We’ll look at all major measures of environmental quality in chapter 8,
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
fossil fuels, as we’ll discuss in chapter 6, can also improve our environment by powering machines that clean up nature’s health hazards, such as water purification plants that protect us from naturally contaminated water and sanitation systems that protect us from natural disease and animal waste
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
climate-related deaths
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
In the last eighty years, as CO2 emissions have most rapidly escalated, the annual rate of climate-related deaths worldwide fell by an incredible rate of 98 percent.41
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
We would have caused billions of premature deaths—deaths that were prevented by our increasing use of fossil fuels
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
tendency to ignore benefits and exaggerate risks
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
Whether our escalating use of fossil fuels is good or bad for us is a complex interdisciplinary question, and everyone is a nonexpert in many relevant issues
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
Ultimately, what we’re after in examining the benefits and risks of fossil fuels is to know big picture how they affect human life and what to do going forward
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
risks of burning coal compare to the benefits of burning coal
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
our fossil fuel use so far has been a moral choice because it has enabled billions of people to live longer and more fulfilling lives
Such a tricky issue! When I hear people lament about the death of animal habitat and wild life – they are in a way implying that it would have been better to let billions of humans die instead – or to implement some form of massive contraception pill law. Idk! It’s tricky.
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
I hold human life as the standard of value
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
Many leading environmental thinkers, including those who predict fossil fuel catastrophe, hold as their standard of value what they call “pristine” nature or wilderness—nature unaltered by man
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line—at about a billion [sic] years ago, maybe half that—we quit the contract and became a cancer
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.45
God. It’s so dangerous. These people are *literally* advocating genocide! The mantra goes: “we are doing this for Mother Earth!” And then proceed to use that as a justification for murdering billions of people because the planet is overpopulated.. it’s incredibly scary view.
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
McKibben is a biocentrist, and so am I. We are not interested in the utility of a particular species or free-flowing river, or ecosystem, to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value—to me—than another human body, or a billion of them. Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
Though not in our time, and not in the time of our children, or their children, if we now, today, limited our numbers and our desires and our ambitions, perhaps nature could someday resume its independent working.”47
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
It is holding human nonimpact as one’s standard of value, without regard for human life and happiness
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with transforming our environment—to the contrary, that’s our means of survival
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
But we do want to avoid transforming our environment in a way that harms us now or in the long term
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
You might wonder how holding human life as your standard of value applies to preserving nature. It applies simply: preserve nature when doing so will benefit human life
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
By contrast, if nonimpact, not human life, is the standard, the moral thing to do is always leave nature alone
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
For example, in the 1980s, India had an environmentalist movement, called the Chipko movement, that made it nearly impossible for Indians to cut down forests to engage in industrial development. It was so bad that a movement literally called Log the Forest emerged to counter it
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
the humanist, which is the term I will use to describe someone on a human standard of value, treats the rest of nature as something to use for his benefit; the nonhumanist treats the rest of nature as something that must be served.
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
the vast majority of discussions on the issue are not clear about the standard of value being used, we need to always ask, when we hear any evaluation: “By what standard of value?
22 February 2019
1. THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS
by using the best energy technology today and in the coming decades, we pave the way for fossil fuel technologies not only to harness the copious amounts of fossil fuels remaining in the ground, of which we have just scratched the surface, but also to create the resources and time necessary to develop the next great energy technology.
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
There are two facts about energy that are missing from our discussion: one, people around the world need much, much more energy, and two, it’s extremely difficult to produce that energy cheaply and reliably. MACHINE
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
Industrial progress, mechanical improvement, all of the great wonders of the modern era have meant little to the wealthy. The rich in ancient Greece would have benefited hardly at all from modern plumbing—running servants replaced running water. Television and radio—the patricians of Rome could enjoy the leading musicians and actors in their home, could have the leading artists as domestic retainers. Ready-to-wear clothing, supermarkets—all these and many other modern developments would have added little to their life. They would have welcomed the improvements in transportation and in medicine, but for the rest, the great achievements of western capitalism have redounded primarily to the benefit of the ordinary person. These achievements have made available to the masses conveniences and amenities that were previously the exclusive prerogative of the rich and powerful.6
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
Workable is a challenge. Cheap and plentiful are an incredible challenge. Hazelnut energy is workable; it just isn’t likely going to be cheap and plentiful.
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
James Shikwati of the Inter Region Economic Network, explains why he resents programs to encourage underdeveloped countries to use solar or wind. The rich countries can afford to engage in some luxurious experimentation with other forms of energy, but for us we are still at the stage of survival. I don’t see how a solar panel is going to power a steel industry, how a solar panel is going to power a railway network, it might work, maybe, to power a small transistor radio.23
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
But the reality is that energy affects nearly every aspect of life. Almost nothing matters more to our lives, the lives of those you care about, and the lives of billions of others around the world than the existence of cheap, plentiful, reliable energy
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
This story should remind us of how “unnatural” our lives are—and why that’s a good thing
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
that more energy means more ability to improve our lives; less energy means less ability—more helplessness, more suffering, and more death
You know I can see this exactly in living here at Villasur. That I am so utterly helpless – without a car, without well stocked supermarkets nearby, without an internet connection. My quality of life has dropped by moving to the rural village. Dropped quite dramatically. Where in London something like gingivitis would arise I would’ve been able to do very good research over a weekend, map out a plan of action and buy exactly the foods I needed from local shops or delivered very quickly that same week. I have been able to do somewhat the same here, but it’s been much much slower. Mainly because I don’t have easy access to internet.
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
we desperately need machines to do work for us because we are naturally very weak. Without machines to help us, we don’t have anywhere near all the energy that we need to survive and flourish
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
your body uses the same amount of energy as a 100-watt lightbulb
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
labor
Hmm isn’t this true only in the agricultural age? Not so for hunter gatherers.
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
The average American’s total machine energy use is 186,000 calories a day—ninety-three humans
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
In the past, before modern energy technology, the main way to overcome the problem of human weakness was putting others into a state of servitude or slavery
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
But with machine energy and machine servants, no one has to suffer; in fact, the more people, the merrier
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
assuming you can do it safely, the more energy production, the better
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
anytime we are worried about the risks of one way of doing things (here, using fossil fuel energy) we need to know the benefits and risks of the alternatives
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
Nineteenth-century coal technology is justifiably illegal today
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
But in the 1800s, it was and should have been perfectly legal to burn coal this way—because the alternative was death by cold or starvation or wretched poverty.
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
But if there is no equal or superior alternative, then any government action against fossil fuels, let alone the 50–95 percent bans over the next several decades that have been proposed, is a guaranteed early death sentence for billions—we would be willing to accept ten times more hurricanes if we had to. Energy is that important
Yes. This is why when Joserra says let’s do direct action about climate change.. I am not bought in. You protest against using fossil fuels, but what is your new solution? If we just stop using fossil fuels, *people die*. Babies die. Elderly freeze. Food doesn’t arrive in supermarkets.
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
Other sources of energy, particularly nuclear and hydro, have been supplements, not replacements for fossil fuels
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
For the last thirty years, governments around the world—particularly European governments like Germany, Spain, and Denmark—have gone out of their way to promote non-fossil forms of energy, such as solar, wind, and biofuels
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
why is so much energy not made from alternatives?
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
The simple answer is: because it’s a really, really, really hard challenge to produce cheap, plentiful, reliable energy for billions of people—and the fossil fuel industry is the only one, by a mile, that’s figured out a solution
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
For something to be cheap and plentiful, every part of the process to produce it, including every input that goes into it, must be cheap and plentiful
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
In some cases, they may be cheap and reliable in small quantities—some people use French fry oil to power their cars—but making them cheap and reliable in large quantities, quantities sufficient to power the lives of billions of people, is a major feat.
It’s all about scale scale scale.
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
Just as it’s a mistake to assume that because the sun is free, solar-powered hazelnuts will be cheap, so it is a mistake to assume that solar-powered energy can or will be cheap. Whether
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
radioactive waste generated when mining the metals that go into windmills
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
Solar and wind energy both work with energy flowing directly from the sun; solar through sunlight and wind through the sun’s heating of different parts of the atmosphere, which is the main cause of wind.
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
The top five countries ranked by solar energy consumption are Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, and China. The percentage of each country’s electricity that comes from solar energy is, respectively: 4.5 percent, 6.3 percent, 4.0 percent, .09 percent, and .6 percent.12
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
certain fundamental problems with solar and wind mean that the more energy they attempt to produce, the more of a problem they create.
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
the diluteness problem and the intermittency problem
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
As we saw in the Gambian hospital, it is of life and death importance that energy be reliable
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
But taking a look at Germany’s official energy statistics tells a very different story
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
What they are referring to is the fact that because solar and wind are so variable, at any given moment solar can generate 50 percent of the electricity being used. It can also generate 0 percent of the electricity generated at any given moment
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
may generate less than 5 percent of needed electricity.21 What happens then? Reliable sources of energy, in Germany’s case coal, have to produce more electricity. For various technical reasons, this is even more inefficient than it sounds
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
In practice they often have so much excess that they have to pay other countries to take their electricity—which requires the other countries to inefficiently decelerate their reliable power plants to accommodate the influx
HAHAHAHA wtf!!! This is the DUMBEST thing ever! Germany have literally invested into a shit show.
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
the reliable sources have to move up and down quickly to adjust to the whims of the sunlight and wind, they become inefficient—just like your car in stop-and-go-traffic—which means more energy use and incidentally more emissions
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
And what about when there’s a particularly large amount of sunlight or wind? For an electric grid, too much electricity will cause a blackout just as too little will—so then Germany has to shut down its coal plants and be ready to start them up again
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
This is obviously not scalable; if everyone’s electrical generation was as unreliable as Germany’s, there would be no one to absorb their peaks
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
The only way for solar and wind to be truly useful, reliable sources of energy would be to combine them with some form of extremely inexpensive mass-storage system. No such mass-storage system exists, because storing energy in a compact space itself takes a lot of resources
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
It’s more accurate to say that solar and wind are parasites that require a host.
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
Imagine you have a company of highly productive, efficient, reliable workers. Then there is an initiative to bring in “renewable” workers, who will supposedly live forever, but they are expensive and you don’t know when they’ll show up. A document produced by them is not as valuable as a document produced by someone else—because you don’t know when theirs will arrive
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
Energy is a life and death issue—it is not one where we can afford to be sloppy in our thinking and seize upon statistics that seem to confirm our worldview.
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
It is deeply irresponsible and disturbing that environmental leaders are telling us to deprive ourselves of fossil fuels on the promise of what can charitably be described as a highly speculative experiment, and can less charitably be described as an ill-conceived, resource-wasting, perennial failure
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
biomass has, like solar and wind, produced a small amount of energy worldwide—although considerably more than solar and wind
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
Scalability has been the problem for every biofuel that works
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
The State of Food Insecurity in the World,
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
Biomass energy is not providing scalable energy, but it is making it difficult for farmers to provide scalable food
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
There is zero evidence that solar, wind, and biomass energy can meaningfully supplement fossil fuel energy, let alone replace it, let alone provide the energy growth that is desperately needed
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
To be sure, solar, wind, and biomass may have their utility for niche uses of energy. If you’re living off the grid and can afford it, an installation with a battery that can power a few appliances might be better than the alternative (no energy, or frequently returning to civilization for diesel fuel)
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
And yet our leaders propose massive bans on fossil fuels with the promise that these radically inferior technologies will be replacements. That reflects an ignorance of, or indifference to, the need for efficient energy
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
One lesson of the failure of renewables is that renewable is not a useful criterion for a good energy source. It says only that one of the inputs is derived from the sun; it says nothing about how long the other inputs will last, and, most important, it says nothing about whether the technology can generate energy that is cheap, plentiful, and reliable
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
If you’ve ever been in a rapidly flowing river, you can feel the energy stored in the moving water. Hydroelectric energy technology transforms some of the power of that flowing water into usable, cheap, reliable electricity
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
6 percent of the world’s power
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
The United States has maintained a fairly constant hydropower consumption because we’ve run out of rivers to dam (which is unfortunate, because hydropower lasts for decades; the Hoover Dam was built in the 1930s).
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
Environmental activists have spent decades shutting down as many hydroelectric dams as possible, particularly large hydroelectric dams, despite hydro’s proven track record as a cheap, reliable source of CO2-free power, in the name of protecting species of fish, free-flowing rivers, and other justifications that focus on nonhuman nature.30
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
If the standard is improving human life, those who believe that catastrophic climate change is coming unless we reduce CO2 emissions should favor damming every possible river to generate reliable CO2-free power.
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
the concentration of energy in uranium is more than a million times that of oil and 2 million times that of coal—although given current technology, in practice it “only” delivers thousands of times more energy per unit of input.32
Woah. Holy guck. That means that with possible innovations in the future there is still vast vast vast quantities of nuclear power left untapped.
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
If natural concentration is a benefit, there is no more naturally concentrated energy source than the uranium or other radioactive metals used to generate nuclear power
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
Unfortunately, radioactivity is commonly viewed as deadly as such,
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
Nuclear power uses uranium, which exists in enormous quantities around the world, and can also use thorium, an even more abundant material
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
Even using current technology, we are talking about time horizons upwards of thousands of years
Wow
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
below a certain threshold, radioactivity is not harmful; we ourselves are radioactive and emit radioactivity
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
critics of nuclear power can cite amounts of radiation coming from, for example, the Fukushima accident, and it sounds scary—even though the amount is not enough for anyone to die now (of radiation poisoning) or in the future (from cancer).
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
In the free world, nuclear power in its entire commercial history has not led to a single death—including from much-publicized failures at Three Mile Island and Fukushima.33
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
The issue of nuclear safety is full of so much rhetoric and emotion that it can be hard to sort through
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
How do we know how safe it is
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
Nuclear power is radioactive, they say—not mentioning that so is the sun and that taking a walk, let alone an airplane ride, exposes you to far more radioactivity than does living next to a nuclear power plant.34
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
the type of uranium used in a nuclear plant literally can’t explode.
Haha what
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
What we do know is that, besides fossil fuel energy, it is by far the most scalable form of energy in the world
22 February 2019
2. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE:
it means that the nuclear industry has become an essentially government-controlled industry—which, like many a government-controlled industry, has higher prices than others
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
Fossil fuels are so called because they are (in most theories) high-energy concentrations of ancient dead plants
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
When you burn gasoline in your car or coal in a power plant or gas to heat your home, those bonds break apart, releasing enormous amounts of energy
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
If you’ve ever used charcoal instead of wood to grill food, you grasp the basic advantage of using ancient dead plant fuel. The charcoal can generate more heat in less space because it has been “cooked”—primarily, the water has been taken out of it, producing a higher concentration of energy (“burning” water doesn’t release much energy).1
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
The other advantage they have is that they exist in astonishingly, astonishingly large quantities. For example, the world has an estimated 3,050 years (at current usage rates) of “total remaining recoverable reserves” of coal.2
3050 years??????? What!! Nobody f’ing told me that!!
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
Coal is the world’s leading fuel for electricity—producing 41 percent of the world’s electricity in 2011—and is expected to become the leading source of energy overall.3
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
as electricity consumption increases, infant mortality rate decreases rapidly and access to improved drinking water sources increases.5
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
But in the future, it might be worth it—which means that claims that we’ll “run out of oil” are misguided, as coal and gas can effectively produce oil if needed
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
For example, coal can be transformed into liquid fuel; the South African energy company SASOL says it can be done for less than eighty dollars per barrel.7 Coal can also be transformed into methanol—methyl alcohol, an alcohol that like ethanol can come from plants but can also come from coal and gas
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
The bottom line: If people are free to use it and the industry is free to produce it, coal energy will provide billions with cheap, plentiful, reliable energy for decades to come
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
There is a minimum amount of electricity use that will almost always be needed, called base-load power. Above that, we need a technology that can quickly adjust to changes in electricity needs—such as powering a lot of air conditioners on a hot summer day so that we can be comfortable and avoid heatstroke. This is called peak load electricity, and it is natural gas’s specialty. (Coal, nuclear, and hydro specialize in base-load power.
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
while oil and coal can be moved relatively easily around the world, gas has long been a local market. This causes supply security issues in which one country is dependent on an unreliable country for gas supplies—the case with many European countries that depend on gas from Russia.
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
The shale energy revolution has led to a rapid increase in natural gas and oil production in the last decade and has the potential to do much more.8
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
Thus the potential supply of natural gas could extend many centuries, at least.
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
A gallon of gasoline has 31,000 calories—the amount of energy you use in fifteen days.
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
Oil can be refined into stable, potent liquid fuels—gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel.
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
Oil is used for the vast, vast majority of transportation—93 percent in the United States.11 Other technologies struggle to mimic it
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
modern imaging, called 3D seismic imaging, can get us a far clearer idea of what’s going on below the surface and how it changes over time
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
We can get oil out of hard rock (shale oil). In oil sands
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
Our entire standard of living depends on specialization—on people doing what they do best, wherever they are, and then being able to cheaply move their products to those
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
Personally, oil is the fuel of freedom
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
Economically, oil is the fuel of trade
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
The higher the price of portable power, the slower the world economy moves
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
per unit of energy, we sometimes pay five times as much for oil as for natural gas
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
Oil is also coveted as the world’s most versatile raw material for making synthetic materials
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
Like coal and gas, there is enormous future potential for oil production—if the industry can keep developing better technologies
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
Earth still contains many times more oil than we have used in the entire history of civilization.
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
My answer is no. Because oil—or coal, or natural gas, or uranium, or aluminum for that matter—is not naturally a resource
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
If we understand this, we understand why we can be incredibly optimistic about the future potential of fossil fuels and future sources of energy.
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
Before the 1850s, oil was not a resource—it was naturally useless. It was a distinct raw material, to be sure, with the potential to become valuable, just as sand has the potential to become a microchip
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
But oil had very little use; in fact, in many cases, it was a nuisance. Drillers seeking underground saltwater deposits to distill into salt were annoyed by the presence of this “rock oil.”14
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
What turned oil from a potential resource to an actual resource was human ingenuity—the ingenuity of the chemist Benjamin Silliman Jr., who refined petroleum into kerosene
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
It was only thanks to their ingenuity that useless goo became a resource
This book feels inspiring. Life affirming. Human affirming. Ingenuity affirming.
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
The history of oil is a history of resource creation
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
Chemists can “crack”—break down—the molecules in a barrel of oil into small parts, and then reassemble them into an unbelievable variety of polymers, including modern plastics
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
there is more oil in the materials in the car than in the gas tank. The rubber tires are made of oil, the paint and waterproofing are made of oil, the plastic, dent-resistant bumper is made of oil, the stuffing inside the seats is made of oil, and in most cars, the entire interior is one form of oil fabric
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
What is true of oil is true of essentially every other resource: They need to be created by transforming potential into actual
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
Ultimately, an “energy resource” is just matter and energy transformed to meet human needs. Well, the planet we live on is 100 percent matter and energy—100 percent potential resource
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
To say we’ve only scratched the surface is to significantly understate how little of this planet’s potential we’ve unlocked
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
We already know that we have enough of a combination of fossil fuels and nuclear power to last thousands and thousands of years
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
What energy resources should we use now and in the future? We have a brilliant system for deciding this: the price system of supply and demand
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
For the last several hundred years, the answer to “What do we replace yesterday’s fossil fuels with?” has been “New fossil fuels.” As soon as that doesn’t make sense (typically, when it becomes prohibitively expensive or when a better alternative is available), it won’t happen
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
I like to call the most competitive ones progressive energy, because they are part of a process of continual improvement, of finding the best way to get energy from the Earth’s effectively unlimited stockpile of potential energy resources.
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
Our concern for the future should not be running out of energy resources; it should be running out of the freedom to create energy resources
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
Because we have never lived without fossil fuel energy, it’s hard to imagine life without its benefits
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
We shall miss our grand dependence, as a man misses his companion, his fortune, or a limb, every hour and at every turn reminded of the irreparable loss
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
When someone says, “Let’s use solar,” he is, usually unwittingly, saying, “Let’s have less energy with which to improve our lives
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
One realm in which energy is particularly life or death is in agriculture. The fossil fuel industry has revolutionized acriculture to the benefit of billions—and gotten no credit
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
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
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
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.
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
Matt Ridley, author of the valuable survey of human progress, The Rational Optimist
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
A modern combine harvester, driven by a single man, can reap enough wheat in a single day to make half a million loaves.”26
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
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
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
The use of such fertilizer allowed population growth and living standards to rise throughout the nineteenth century
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
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
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
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
Yes see I understand this very much I feel. When I engage in things like small acts of kindness, or local community, that at times feels like a gargantuan waste of time because that free time could be spent researching, which could lead to technological breakthroughs a million fold more useful to humanity than a small act of kindness. Or if not technological breakthroughs then financial rewards multiple fold.
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
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.
Man that is a good point.
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
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
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
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?
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
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
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
To starve our machines of energy would be to starve ourselves
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
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
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
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
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
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
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
Every animal survives in a way that affects its environment; we just do it on a greater scale with far greater ability
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
Is human life our standard of value or is “lack of impact” our standard of value?
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
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
Hmm. Lierre Keith talks about the myth of progress. It *is* true however that human life expectancy was 30. This didn’t mean people didn’t grow to 60,70 etc. It was 30 because of the extraordinarily high infant mortality rate. Most newborns did not survive. And with regards to free time.. it’s not just about time to do things. Today we have the possibility of designing a lifestyle and business that gives us 100% free time *and* we have machine calories with 90+ people behind us. It’s an incredible progress. At least if happiness = external is our metric.
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
whenever we have more energy, we have more ability everywhere—including the places we can do damage
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
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
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
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
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
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
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
To not use fossil fuels, therefore, is beyond a risk—it is certain mortal peril for mankind
22 February 2019
3. THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
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
This is the most important statement in this book. This is clearly the underlying tone of every environmentalist I have ever heard or read of. Including Lama Alan..
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
Cook survey included 10 of my 122 eligible papers. 5/10 were rated incorrectly. 4/5 were rated as endorse rather than neutral.” —Dr. Richard Tol37
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
That is not an accurate representation of my paper . . .”
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
Dr. Craig Idso38 “Nope . . . it is not an accurate representation.” —Dr. Nir Shaviv39 “Cook et al. (2013) is based on a strawman argument . . .” —Dr. Nicola Scafetta40
22 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
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
22 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
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
22 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
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
22 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
What they deny is that there is evidence of a catastrophic impact from CO2’s warming effect. That is, they
22 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
Once I was clear on how unclear the questions we were asking were, I could ask better questions and get better answers
22 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
How does fossil fuel use affect climate livability? When we burn fossil fuels, what are all the climate-related risks and all the benefits that result
22 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
CO2 affects climate in at least two ways: as a greenhouse gas with a warming impact, but also as plant food with a fertilizing impact (plants are a major part of the climate system as well as a benefit of a livable climate)
22 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
The second impact of CO2, which is rarely mentioned, is the tendency of cheap, plentiful, reliable energy from fossil fuels to amplify our ability to adapt to climate—to maximize the benefits we get from good weather and ample rainfall and minimize the risks from heat waves, cold snaps, and droughts
22 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
Granted, acquiring evidence is often hard because of so many conflicting reports, which is why it’s so important to get experts to explain what they know and what they don’t know clearly and precisely.
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
Primitive peoples prayed so fervently to climate gods because they were almost totally at the mercy of the naturally volatile, dangerous climate system
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
In any era, it’s easy to think that volatile, dangerous weather is unique to our era and must prove some dramatic climate change
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
Thus, when we think about how fossil fuel use impacts climate livability, we are not asking: Are we taking a stable, safe climate and making it dangerous? But: Are we making our volatile, dangerous climate safer or more dangerous?
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
If any element of the greenhouse fear turns out to be false—if CO2 emissions don’t cause dramatic warming, if dramatic warming doesn’t cause harmful climate change, or if human beings can adapt well, then CO2 emissions are not catastrophic.
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
Myhre et al. (1998)
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
the proven greenhouse effect is falsely equated with the related but speculative theory that the greenhouse effect of CO2 is dramatically amplified by other effects in the atmosphere, leading to rapid warming instead of the otherwise expected decelerating warming
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
if you press any climate scientist for an explanation, he will explain (or admit) to you that there is nothing resembling absolute certainty about these large positive feedback loops and the predictions associated with them
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
Just about every prediction or prescription you hear about the issue of climate change is based on models
This is what CSW says is the hallmark of crap science. Applied science. Applied business. Not computer models.
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
politician talks about “the social cost of carbon,” that’s based on model predictions
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
If we hear dire forecasts of drought going forward, that’s based on model predictions. Which means if the models fall, they are invalid
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
How good are the models at predicting warming or the changes in climate that are supposed to follow from warming?
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
field of math that if you are allowed enough complexity, you can engage in “curve fitting” for any pattern of data with an elaborate equation or program that will “postdict” exactly what happened in the past—but in no way does that mean it will predict the future. (Many investors lose money doing this sort of thing.)
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
Many experts in modeling and in statistics thought this was an extremely dubious enterprise, given how complex the climate is—at least as complex as the economic system, where failed computer models helped promote policies that led to our recent Great Recession
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
The NASA/Hansen Climate Model Predictions vs. Reality
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
But as the official government data show, these CO2 increases have not driven major temperature increases; as CO2 has increased dramatically, there have been relatively mild periods of warming, cooling, and now flattening
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
every climate model based on CO2 as a major climate driver has been a failure.
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
Figure 4.3: Climate Prediction Models That Can’t Predict Climate
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
Source: Christy, Climate Model Output from KNMI, Climate Explorer (2014)
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
every prediction of drastic future consequences is based on speculative models that have failed to predict the climate trend so far and that speculate a radically different trend than what has actually happened in the last thirty to eighty years of emitting substantial amounts of CO2
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
If a climate prediction model can’t predict climate, it is not a valid model—and predictions made on the basis of such a model are not scientific. Those
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
Unfortunately, many of the scientists, scientific bodies, and especially public intellectuals and media members have not been honest with the public about the failure of their predictions
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
Unfortunately, because people have been led to believe that CO2 somehow causes climate change in addition to, not as a consequence of, global warming, it seems plausible to blame individual hurricanes on CO2, even though the temperatures haven’t increased
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
disingenuous for climate activists to blame every storm on climate change when there has been so little warming so far and when storm trends are so unremarkable
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
Given the temperature trends, however, we wouldn’t expect warming to have a dramatic effect on sea levels. And, in fact, it hasn’t.
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
what about all those extreme scenarios of future sea level rise? They are not based on real trends or proven science; they are based on climate-prediction models
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
anyone who tries to equate science and speculation is being unethical
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
Source: Tide Gauge Data, Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (2014)
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth, ages when the earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than at present, for the benefit of rapidly propagating mankind.”28
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
Here’s what we know. There is a greenhouse effect. It’s logarithmic. The temperature has increased very mildly and leveled off completely in recent years
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
But many professional organizations, scientists, and journalists have deliberately tried to manipulate us into equating the greenhouse effect with the predictions of invalid computer models based on their demonstrably faulty understanding of how CO2 actually affects climate.
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
THE 97 PERCENT FABRICATION
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
It’s the allegation that man-made warming will be extremely harmful to human life. The 97 percent claim says nothing whatsoever about magnitude or catastrophe
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
First of all, this statement itself, even if it were true, is deliberately manipulative. The
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
Unfortunately, this is very common. On his Twitter account, President Obama tweeted. “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.”32 There was no “dangerous” in the alleged agreement
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
and it wasn’t “scientists,” it was “climate scientists.”
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
Cook et al. (2013) found that over 97 percent [of papers he surveyed] endorsed the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause.”33
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
Cook does not say what percentage, but when the study was publicly challenged by economist David Friedman, one observer calculated that only 1.6 percent explicitly stated that man-made greenhouse gases caused at least 50 percent of global warming.34
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
Cook had created a category called “explicit endorsement without quantification”—that is, papers in which the author, by Cook’s admission, did not say whether 1 percent or 50 percent or 100 percent of the warming was caused by man.35 He had also created a category called “implicit endorsement,” for papers that imply (but don’t say) that there is some man-made global warming and don’t quantify it.36 In other words, he created two categories that he labeled as endorsing a view that they most certainly didn’t.
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
97 percent claim is a deliberate misrepresentation designed to intimidate the public—and numerous scientists whose papers were classified by Cook protested:
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
percent
What the fuck. I’ve been bamboozled AGAIN!!! Fuck sake. I keep getting bamboozled. What is this bloody chiefness???!?!!
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
In 1996, Stanford climate scientist Stephen Schneider wrote an influential paper about the ethics of exaggerating the evidence for catastrophic climate change.
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
We live in a society that has risen via the division of labor, by each of us specializing in, even mastering, some relatively small sliver of the ingredients of human survival and flourishing, so that in the aggregate we might create a world with an amazing sum of knowledge, technological achievement, and progress.
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
Specialization implies a sacred obligation. The specialist must never misrepresent what he knows and doesn’t know, what he can do or can’t do. The incompetent mechanic who claims that he can fix your complex engine problem, capitalizing on the fact that you know even less about engines than he does, is immoral
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
specialists within the field have an obligation to explain precisely what they know and don’t know—and also to welcome critical questioning and debate.
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
Take the realm of nutrition. For years, the government spread the gospel, treated as nutritionally proved, that a low-fat diet was healthy—a campaign that coincided with record obesity
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
As does the fact that they do not publicize a significant positive impact of CO2 emissions: global greening
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
CO2’s climate impact—the fertilizing effect of giving more CO2 to plants
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
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
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
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.
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
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
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
Below 120 to 150 ppm CO2, most plants die
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
All things being equal, in terms of plant growth, agriculture, et cetera, more CO2 is better
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
We would prefer the thousands of ppm CO2 that, say, the Cretaceous period had.45
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
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
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
What’s most striking is that these extremely positive plant effects of CO2 are scientifically uncontroversial yet practically never mentioned,
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
It is our responsibility to look at the big picture, all positives and negatives, without prejudice
23 February 2019
4. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
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
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
There is a widespread idea among climate commentators, including climate scientists, that the global climate system, absent human CO2 emissions, is safe. There
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
BUT WHAT IF . . . ? That said, I want to consider a hypothetical scenario in which CO2 emissions do cause a significant climate danger around the world
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
There was only a faint tinge of red left on the edge of the earth, just enough to outline the scraps of clouds ripped by the tortured battle of the storm in the sky. Dim shapes kept sweeping through space and vanishing, shapes which were branches, but looked as if they were the fury of the wind made visible. “It’s a terrible night for any animal caught unprotected on that plain,” said Francisco d’Anconia. “This is when one should appreciate the meaning of being a man.” Rearden did not answer for a moment; then he said, as if in answer to himself, a tone of wonder in his voice, “Funny . . .” “What?” “You told me what I was thinking just a while ago . . .” “You were?” “. . . only I didn’t have the words for it.” “Shall I tell you the rest of the words?” “Go ahead.” “You stood here and watched the storm with the greatest pride one can ever feel—because you are able to have summer flowers and half-naked women in your house on a night like this, in demonstration of your victory over that storm. And if it weren’t for you, most of those who are here would[…]
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
How does the energy we get from fossil fuels affect the livability of our climate?
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
energy is ability—because energy can help us do anything better.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
overall life expectancy and income—the leading indicators of human flourishing.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
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.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
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.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
as CO2 emissions rise, climate-related deaths plunge
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
Figure 5.1: More Fossil Fuels, Fewer Climate-Related Deaths
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
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
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
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
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
All things being equal, one would expect the total number of deaths from these events to go up in proportion to population
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
Figure 5.2: More Fossil Fuel Use, Fewer Drought-Related Deaths
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
Clearly, CO2 emissions have not had a significant negative effect on droughts, but expanded human ability to fight drought, powered by fossil fuels, has
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
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.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
The more fossil fuel we use, the safer—dramatically, dramatically safer—we become from climate-related dangers.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
If you care about safety from climate, shouldn’t you be encouraging rapid industrialization
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
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.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
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
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
And yet we constantly hear reports that fossil fuels are making droughts worse
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
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.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
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
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
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.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
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.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
Southern California is considered a desirable climate to live in only because technology maximizes its benefits and minimizes its drawbacks. Technology enables us to live in practically any climate
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
There is no climate that man is ideally adapted to, in the sense that it will guarantee him a decent quality of life
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
We are naturally dependent on climate, and naturally endangered by climate
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
While today it does not make sense to obsess about climate changes, at one point in history it did—because such changes controlled our lives more than we could control them.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
To put it bluntly, in our “natural climate,” absent technology, human beings are as sick as dogs and drop like flies. Notice
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
weather, climate, and climate change matter—but not nearly as much as they used to, thanks to technology
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
having that technology is useless unless we have the energy to run it.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
We often talk about Mother Nature as if it is really our mother—a being that deliberately nurtures us and has our best interests at heart. But it isn’t, and doesn’t. Nature, including the climate, is a wondrous background that gives us the potential for an amazing life—if we transform it.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
However, a rise of around two feet over a century, which the IPCC projects13 (likely overprojects, given the models it relies on) is a much different proposition. People, even entire cities’ worth, have time to find a solution
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
More accurately, the Netherlands experienced a sinking of the land, rather than a rise of sea level, but the effect was essentially the same—50 percent of the Netherlands lies less than three feet above sea level, and roughly 20 percent of its people actually live at an elevation below sea level.14
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
At a certain point, it became obvious that floods were becoming a large problem because the water in these lowlands had nowhere to drain. Strangely (or perhaps not), this situation did not turn the residents of the Netherlands into helpless refugees but spurred them to find solutions.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
Much of the system has been designed to withstand floods that have a probability of occurring once in ten thousand years.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
There are two components to mastering climate. One is control over the climate you’re in. Two is the ability to make the most of the climate you’re in.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
But even once human beings came on the scene, with their fantastic brains, they couldn’t choose their climate very easily because of lack of mobility. Thanks to the internal combustion engine, which in 1992 Al Gore said should be outlawed in twenty-five years (i.e., 2017), we can go anywhere, anytime.18
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
If you think of climate in a real way, not as some vague, mystical, “global climate” but as the climate around you, you are a master of climate just by virtue of the fact that you can change climates.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
but climate changes, even in the worst scenarios proposed by the most alarmist of the failed models, occur over periods of fifty to a hundred years. As with everything else in life, if we need to enhance our ability to do something—such as move—we need to be doubling down on energy production, not restricting it.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
Again, mass movement with regard to climate changes seems very unlikely, but it’s still worth mentioning because mobility is desirable, period, for the sake of the pursuit of happiness and because someday, some future generation is going to be faced with a dramatic climate change, and they’ll need the energy and mobility to cope with it.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
even if that were true, the current conduct and policies of environmental leaders would be inappropriate
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
Given what we know about the value of energy and of fossil fuels’ superiority in most contexts, how should an honestly concerned person respond if there is a big problem?
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
say there’s a rapid rise in sea levels, enough to be truly concerned. What reaction would we want from our thought leaders?
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
One would be an embrace of technological solutions,
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
Another would be investing a huge amount of energy and technology looking for still better solutions.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
Economically, we would want a commitment to liberate any and every technology that could help, from seawall technology to dike technology to durable building technology to CO2-free energy technology. We would not oppose the only globally scalable form of CO2-free energy ever invented: nuclear power
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
the evidence is clear that nuclear is the safest energy technology (safer than fossil fuels, hydro, wind, solar).19
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
The one thing a human-focused response to a major climate danger would not do is try to save ourselves by pursuing solar, wind, and biofuels. These are the worst-performing sources of energy we have, and if we were truly in desperate straits, we would go with something that works; we wouldn’t force everyone to use the worst and hope for the best.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
I think that a proper reaction to a major danger from fossil fuels would be sorrow. Think about it: If the energy that runs our civilization has a tragic flaw, that is a terribly sad thing. It would be even worse, say, than if wireless technology caused brain cancer. The appropriate attitude would be gratitude toward the fossil fuel companies for what they had done for us, combined with recognition that we would have to suffer a lot in the years ahead, combined with the commitment to the best technologies that I mentioned earlier.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
I believe that we owe the fossil fuel industry an apology. While the industry has been producing the energy to make our climate more livable, we have treated it as a villain. We owe it the kind of gratitude that we owe anyone who makes our lives much, much better.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
We know that the way to make climate livable is not to try to refrain from affecting it but to use cheap energy to technologically master it. Thus, if the undeveloped world is having trouble dealing with climate, it’s not because of our .01 percent change in the atmosphere; it’s because they haven’t followed the examples of China, India, and others who have increased fossil fuels use by hundreds of percent.22
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
You can’t be a humanitarian and condemn the energy humanity needs.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
To oppose fossil fuels is ultimately to oppose the underdeveloped world
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
we
What if climate change is a global war game narrative to try and keep Asia (China mainly) weak? By encouraging them to NOT invest in industrialisation, these countries would not grow anywhere near as quickly as the so called developed world. In order for the US to remain the world super power it wants to keep the likes of China away.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
This will be challenged every day in the papers, by blaming storms on your tailpipe, by citing “studies” based on climate-prediction models that can’t predict climate, but the truth is in the long-term trends and the powerful principles behind them.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
Think about the climate you live in. Think about how much the temperature changes every day and how uncomfortable or endangered you would be without climate control. Think of what even a garden-variety thunderstorm could have done to a farm or a home two hundred years ago—and then remind yourself that 1.3 billion people have no electricity today.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
There is a group of people who are working every day to make sure that the machines that can make us safe from our naturally dangerous climate and enable us to thrive in it have all the energy they need. These people work in coal mines, on oil rigs, in laboratories, in boardrooms, all devoted to figuring out how to produce plentiful, reliable energy at prices you can afford—because that is what their well-being depends on and, in my experience, because they believe that it is the right thing to do.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
Those are the people in the fossil fuel industry, who are dehumanized in the media on a daily basis, who are tarred as Big Oil or, in the case of workers, such as coal miners, are portrayed as dupes who don’t know what they’re doing, who aren’t wise enough to know they’re making our climate unlivable through the work that supports themselves and their families.
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
Actually it is the top environmentalist intellectuals who lack climate wisdom. Because they are unwilling to think in an unbiased way about the benefits and risks of fossil fuels according to a human standard of value,
24 February 2019
5. THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY
they are blinded to the fact that the fossil fuel industry is the reason they’re alive and not “helpless at the mercy of that wind in the middle of some such plain.”
24 February 2019
6. IMPROVING OUR ENVIRONMENT
Thomas’s reaction would be disbelief that such a clean, healthy environment was possible
24 February 2019
6. IMPROVING OUR ENVIRONMENT
Development is the transformation of a nonhuman environment into a human-friendly environment using high-energy machines
24 February 2019
6. IMPROVING OUR ENVIRONMENT
Some estimates have put the total number of human deaths caused by the bubonic plague, smallpox, and malaria alone at around one billion people
24 February 2019
6. IMPROVING OUR ENVIRONMENT
Professor Paul Reiter, a malaria expert who has publicly criticized the IPCC for blaming malaria on global warming, gave a memorable explanation of the history of malaria in front of the House of Lords:
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
On the outskirts of one of China’s most polluted cities, an old farmer stares despairingly out across an immense lake of bubbling toxic waste covered in black dust. He remembers it as fields of wheat and corn. Hidden out of sight behind smoke-shrouded factory complexes in the city of Baotou, and patrolled by platoons of security guards, lies a five-mile-wide “tailing” lake. It has killed farmland for miles around, made thousands of people ill and put one of China’s key waterways in jeopardy. This vast, hissing cauldron of chemicals is
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
the dumping ground for seven million tons a year of mined rare earth after it has been doused in acid and chemicals and processed through red-hot furnaces to extract its components. . . . When we finally break through the cordon and climb sand dunes to reach its brim, an apocalyptic sight greets us: a giant, secret toxic dump . . . The lake instantly assaults your senses. Stand on the black crust for just seconds and your eyes water and a powerful, acrid stench fills your lungs. For hours after our visit, my stomach lurched and my head throbbed. We were there for only one hour, but those who live in Mr. Yan’s village of Dalahai, and other villages around, breathe in
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
All things are poison and nothing [is] without poison; only the dosage determines that something is not a poison. —Paracelsus, sixteenth century19
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
When one treats something as poisonous regardless of dosage, he is denying the existence of a threshold at which a substance goes from being benign to harmful. If you deny a threshold, you can make a case for banning anything. The
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
machines. And that’s great, so long as I don’t forget what got me there: complex machines
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
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
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
environmental quality in general. We don’t take a safe environment and make it dangerous; we take a dangerous environment and make it far safer
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
When we are using a technology, we are transforming our environment to meet our needs, to achieve a positive effect. But that transformation can accidentally or inevitably lead to an undesired effect
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
there is no limit to how much cleaner and safer fossil fuel use can be. For example, someday it might be possible to completely purify coal so that it generates no air pollutants and the materials that would have become air pollutants—nitrogen, sulfur, heavy metals—become valuable commodities
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
a great extent, this is what we do with oil. What was once oil pollution dumped into a lake is now the basis for the plastic keyboard I am typing on.
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
wind turbines require far more toxic materials than fossil fuels do—materials called rare-earth elements. These elements are “rare,” not in the sense that there are few of them, but in the sense that they exist in low concentrations in the Earth
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
the same poison every day.
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
Does this mean the energy source this process makes possible is dirty and immoral? When I speak at colleges and students tell me that fossil fuels are “dirty,” I sometimes ask them that question without first telling them what kind of energy the story is talking about. Inevitably they say it should be banned. When I reveal it’s wind power, they protest, “No, just because something has problems doesn’t mean we ban it. Otherwise we would ban everything. We should look at the big picture and try to solve the problem
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
today places that are home to coal plants, such as North Dakota, also have some of the world’s cleanest air.
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
late as 1952, London experienced a massive air-pollution problem from a temperature inversion—a phenomenon that prevents particles from dissipating throughout the atmosphere and keeps them in dangerous, concentrated form. The
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
For comparison, in the 1870s, according to Daniel Yergin’s The Prize, some five thousand people died annually in kerosene explosions from the lamps in their homes
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
the most dangerous part of a trip to a coal mine is the drive there.” Statistically, that’s absolutely right.
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
Energy is so valuable that throughout history people have been willing to tolerate what we would consider intolerable pollution because the energy impact was so positive
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
If the government does its job, it achieves two great results: the liberation and growth of energy production and the progressive reduction of pollution and danger
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
abuse-use fallacy, the false-attribution fallacy, the no-threshold fallacy, and the “artificial” fallacy.
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
The abuse-use fallacy is deadly because it can be used to attack anything a group opposes
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
False attribution is claiming that one event causes another, devoid of proof
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
In other words, more than one in five wells are naturally contaminated according to our government’s standards. Yet we are taught to treat “natural” water as clean and blame all dirty water on industry, especially the fossil fuel industry
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
As President Obama’s former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson acknowledged, there is no “proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water. . . .”13
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
So why single out fracking? Because attacks on fossil fuels thrive on technophobia—the fear of new technology—which is exploited by using unfamiliar, unknown terms like fracking
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
It’s hard to prove cause and effect. Here’s a good question to ask when you encounter these kinds of claims: “Could you explain how you prove that—how you know that coal in particular caused asthma instead of everything else that might have caused it?”
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
The main thing to watch out for here is a statement like “X causes Y”—e.g., “coal causes asthma.” That’s usually an oversimplification at best; often it’s completely bogus
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
Discussions of “mercury poisoning” are misleading, because mercury becomes methylmercury only under certain conditions, and methylmercury can be absorbed by human beings in relevant quantities only under certain conditions (for example, the element selenium seems to prevent the absorption of methylmercury).18
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
Mercury, like any substance, is toxic in certain forms and doses and harmless in others
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
The world around us and our own bodies consist of chemicals. All of them, without a single exception, can be poisonous to us if we are exposed to them in a certain concentration
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
A poison or pollutant is always a combination of substance and dose. If someone mentions just a substance to scare you, independent of the context or the dose, he has given you meaningless, misleading information
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
assuming or expecting you to assume that if a substance is dangerous in some dosage, it is dangerous in all dosages.
I wonder if this is the fallacy used to attack vaccinations. And perhaps mercury fillings also? Hmm
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
People said we should have zero tolerance for radiation—not knowing, apparently, that the potassium in their bone tissue emits radiation, enough so that sleeping with a spouse gives you almost as much radiation as standing right outside a nuclear power plant
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
No-threshold” plus “false-attribution” is a dangerous combination in the hands of activists and regulators
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
They can keep claiming that nothing is clean enough and keep passing laws that regulate vital technologies, such as coal, out of existence
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
But it is simply untrue that “natural” is safe and man-made is unsafe
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
While man-made things can be bad, it is perverse to single out the man-made as bad per se. To be against the man-made as such is to have a bias against the mind-made, which is to be against the human mind, whose very purpose is to figure out how to transform our environment to meet our needs
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
The only way fossil fuels are a net minus for “the environment” is if by “the environment” you mean our surroundings not from our perspective, but from a nonhuman perspective. From the perspective of organisms we need to kill or use to survive, such as the parasite, the malarial mosquito, the dangerous animal, or the trees we clear to build a road, we are a negative for the environment.
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
environmental improvement through development.
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
Here’s the truth: The more development that happens, especially in underdeveloped countries, using fossil fuels, the more we can expect a skyrocketing of environmental quality around the world
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
And being prodevelopment, pro–fossil fuels, is completely consistent with another value that has been appropriated by the opponents of fossil fuels: appreciating nature
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
PRESERVING NATURE TO BENEFIT HUMAN LIFE
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
It’s valuable to think of the ability to enjoy nature as a resource, something that we potentially have but don’t automatically have. If we think that way, we see that like any resource, it is expanded by energy
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
Like most people, sometimes I want to get away from everything, including
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
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
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
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
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
Fossil fuel energy gives us the mobility to get to it, the adaptability to be safe in it, and the time to enjoy it
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
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
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
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
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
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
Hmmm
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
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.
If we are not anthropocentric, then what are we using as our centre, our view? This seems like a hugely anthropocentric view, but what would be a different view? And what would the consequences be of that view? We don’t kill the bears because we are bear-centric, so then those bears end up killing our children.. then what?
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
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
24 February 2019
7. REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
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
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND 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
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
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
Yes this is a key point. The statement “Earth has finite resources” is false precisely because the resources we use do not come from Earth. Rather they come from the human mind.
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
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?
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
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
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
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
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
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
I believe the difference here is that flies bacteria or buffalo do not have the brain power to transform their environment and thus create resources.
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
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 is the same as Miki’s ‘degrowth’ movement.
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
The error is a backward understanding of resources
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
THE UNLIMITED POTENTIAL FOR RESOURCE CREATION AND HUMAN PROGRESS
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
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
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
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.
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
Resources are not taken from nature, but created from nature
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
they are all potential resources, with unlimited potential to be rendered valuable by the human mind.
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
Ultimately, a resource is just matter and energy transformed via human ingenuity to meet human needs
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
the planet we live on is 100 percent matter and energy, 100 percent potential resource for energy and anything else we would want
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
we’ve only scratched the surface is to significantly understate how little of this planet’s potential we’ve unlocked
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
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
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
amount of raw matter and energy on this planet is so incomprehensibly vast that it is nonsensical to speculate about running out of
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
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
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
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
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
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 I believe is why communism and socialism never works. Because the incentives become so skewed that they actually decentivise human ingenuity and thus destroy wealth on an epic scale.
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
resources
We are called a cancer species sometimes. I wonder if that is a by-product of ‘original sin’.
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
Growth is not unsustainable. With freedom, including the freedom to produce energy, it is practically inevitable
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
scraping
Wealth creation is not a zero sum game. It is creation.
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
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.
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
Will it be a world with more opportunities and fewer hardships or more hardships and fewer opportunities? Will it be a world of progress—a world where he has more exciting career options, less chance of getting sick, more financial security, less chance of going to war, more opportunities to see the world, less suffering, and a cleaner, safer environment? Or will it be a world gone backward, where some or all of these factors get worse
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
Everything I’ve learned about energy has led me to the conclusion that it will be a world of progress if we eagerly pursue more energy, especially fossil fuels, but it will be a world gone backward if we pursue less, out of fear of the environment and climate, which fossil fuels actually make better, not worse
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
The basic principle espoused in this book is that we survive by transforming our environment to meet our needs
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
The only other “limit” of sorts is our starting point—that is, what existing resources we have to work with and, even more important, what knowledge we have about resource creation.
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
There is no limit to the amount of resources we can create or the number of problems we can solve—except for the amount of time we have, time being our most valuable resource (though it, too, can be expanded
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
What Seth needs is a world where people have created a lot of resources, which will make it easier for him and the others of his generation to create new ones, and a lot of knowledge of how to create resources
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
What actions of theirs—and generations before them—benefited us most?
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
action that benefits everyone going forward is the formation of an important new idea—whether a scientific discovery, such as Newton’s three laws of motion, or a technological achievement, such as Watt’s efficient steam engine
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
we look at history, an incredibly disproportionate percentage of valuable ideas have come in the last several centuries, coinciding with fossil-fueled civilization. Why? Because such a productive civilization buys us time to think and discover, and then use that knowledge to become more productive, and buy more time to think and discover
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
The production of energy increases the production of knowledge, and it is knowledge that enables one generation to begin where the last left off.
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
Besides our ideas and knowledge, another form of past action that benefits us is past wealth creation
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
How grateful am I to the man who first took a streak of rust from a rock and turned it into iron ore, instead of letting it sit there for me and my generation
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
It means taking iron ore and turning it into something more valuable, steel, then taking that steel and turning it into something more valuable, a bunch of girders, then turning those into something much more valuable, a skyscraper, which becomes even more valuable as the workplace for thousands and thousands of productive people, who increase the value of each of those workplaces by starting any number of productive enterprises, which ultimately go back to taking raw materials and making them more valuable through an ingenious combination of machine power, manpower, and superior methods
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
Life can be great, indefinitely. Each of us must try to make the best of his life, by creating as much as he wants to benefit his life, and to take joy in the fact that his interests are harmonized with those of his fellow men and his children and his children’s children, knowing that the greatest gift he can give to both himself and to the future is to be a creative human being who enjoys his life
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
Using fossil fuels buys us time. It buys us more life. It buys us more opportunities. It buys us more resources
24 February 2019
8. FOSSIL FUELS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND THE FUTURE
even though using fossil fuels is moral, our society does not know it. The
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
Thought leaders are usually extremely bright men and women, and all of these thought leaders are bright. At the same time, all of them have been confronted, in one way or another, with the data I have presented in this book. Yet they still say fossil fuels are catastrophic and seem to have absolutely zero fear of the nearly infinite risk of not using fossil fuels at this stage of history. Why? It goes back to the issue of standard of value
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
We transform the planet for the better. Better—by a human standard of value
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
one second of losing your cool can negate an hour and a half of calmness.
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
Usually when I spend the better part of two months on a project, there is at least solace that I am getting paid. Not here. In fact, I am paying to do this debate. I have agreed to pay McKibben ten thousand dollars of my own money—which is a lot of money for me, perhaps a reckless amount of money, given that I run a small business, four of five of which fail in their first five years.
Hahaha what
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
All the promotion and logistics were funded by me, with twenty-five thousand dollars I raised in crowd-funding to promote the debate—overwhelmingly donated by people like me who are outside the fossil fuel industry but value our fossil-fueled civilization
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
In July 2012, Rolling Stone published a fantastically popular piece by Bill McKibben about the evils of fossil fuels entitled “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
McKibben called for Americans to divest from the fossil fuel industry as a form of public ostracism.
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
McKibben’s article was a sensation. It received 120,000 “Likes” on Facebook—which an exultant Center for American Progress blogger described as “monster social media numbers of the kind usually reserved for pieces on HuffPost about Kim Kardashian in a bikini.”3
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
What did not happen was opposition—least of all by the supposedly big and powerful fossil fuel industry. Was this because they do not fear McKibben? Hardly. McKibben
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
lack of response was, I believed, because McKibben was making a moral argument—that it was time to do the right thing about fossil fuels for our future, even if it was difficult. And very few people knew that there was a moral argument for fossil fuels, an argument that using them is best for human life across the board, economy and environment, present and future.
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
Someone had to do something, and I had control of exactly one person
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
But I was gratified that many people who had never heard the moral case told me they thought it was interesting and important—including a book agent, Wes Neff, who watched it and told me I needed to write the book you’re reading right now.
Wow. What a story
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
As you read this, there are millions of people in the fossil fuel industry working to produce more energy to give us more ability to flourish, but their freedom to produce energy and our freedom to use it are in jeopardy
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
as you read this, there is a real, live, committed movement against fossil fuels that truly wants to deprive us of the energy of life. That movement is named the Green movement. To understand how to defend fossil fuels, we must understand the attack, who is attacking, why, and how
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
There is no movement in support of the Monterey Shale—but there is a massive movement against it.
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
They’re coming to ship their poison so they can poison the people in China. And that poison’s going to come back here and poison your salmon and your children, so don’t let it happen.”12 This “poison” is the basis of life-giving energy technology that has given Chinese people years more of health
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
In one sense, the answer to “Why do we believe the wrong thing about fossil fuels?” is simple. Lack of education
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
The reason we have come to oppose fossil fuels and not see their virtues is not primarily because of a lack of factual knowledge, but because of the presence of irrational moral prejudice in our leaders and, to a degree, in our entire culture
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
Anytime someone is oblivious to the positive and inclined toward the negative, he has a prejudice. Consider
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
There is clearly a prejudice in how our culture processes information about fossil fuels. Unless we understand and correct the source of that prejudice, factual education will be an uphill battle.
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
The prejudice, which is held consistently by our environmental thought leaders and inconsistently by the culture at large is the idea that nonimpact on nature is the standard of value. It is better known by a single color: Green.
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
We’ve seen that these thought leaders not only come to certain deadly conclusions and policies, but also keep using the same faulty method of thinking: they exaggerate the negatives of fossil fuels and ignore or greatly understate the positives
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
The environmental thought leaders’ opposition to fossil fuels is not a mistaken attempt at pursuing human life as their standard of value. They are too smart and knowledgeable to make such a mistake. Their opposition is a consistent attempt at pursuing their actual standard of value: a pristine environment, unaltered nature.
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
If an unaltered, untransformed environment is our standard of value, then nothing could be worse than cheap, plentiful, reliable energy.
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
I’m saying that if fossil fuels created no waste, including no CO2, if they were even cheaper, if they would last practically forever, if there were no resource-depletion concerns, the Green movement would still oppose them
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
Fusion is what the sun uses for energy. But all human attempts at fusion so far have been inefficient—they take in more energy than they produce. But if it could be made to work, it would be the cheapest, cleanest, most plentiful energy source ever created. It would be like the problem-free fossil fuels I said the Green leaders would oppose
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
Fear of Fusion: What if It Works?”
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
Amory Lovins was already on record as saying, “Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.”15
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
That is what Amory Lovins regards as disastrous “because of what we might do with it.”16 Well, we’ve seen what we do with energy—we make our lives amazing
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
But if your standard of value is unaltered nature, then Lovins is right to worry. With more energy, we have the ability to alter nature more, and we will do so—because transforming our environment, transforming nature, is our means of survival and flourishing
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
To the antihumanist, that’s precisely the problem. Have you ever heard mankind described as a cancer on the planet? Prince Philip, former head of the World Wildlife Fund, has said, “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.”17
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
to the extent that we hold human nonimpact as our standard of value, we are going against what our survival requires
Yes.. I remember having an uncomfortable feeling about this overpopulation thing.. it just didn’t seem it would end well.
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
This is the logical end of holding human nonimpact as your standard of value; the best way to achieve it is to do nothing at all, to not exist
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
our culture has accepted this toxic standard in large doses under the friendly label “Green.
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
How many of us consider the possibility that human beings could be a positive force climatewise, whether by fertilizing the atmosphere or by creating an environment that maximizes climate benefits and minimizes climate risks?
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
How many of us consider the possibility that we are improving our environment by using fossil fuels? In my experience, not even the fossil fuel industry considers that possibility.
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
It is considered Green to object to crucial industrial projects, from power plants to dams to apartment complexes, on the grounds that some plant or animal will be affected, plants and animals that take precedence over the human animals who need or want the projects
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
It is considered Green to do less of anything industrial, from driving to flying to using a washing machine to using disposable diapers to consuming pretty much any modern product
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
The essence of “going Green,” the common denominator in all its various iterations, is the belief that humans should minimize their impact on nonhuman nature
In a way the life I am leading and have led is all green. It’s all about non-impact. Hence Do Nothing meditations hahaha.
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
But this attempt to balance being on a human standard of value sometimes and a nonhuman standard at other times is like trying to create a balanced diet that includes food and poison.
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
In large part, we do so because environmental leaders have made us associate the antihuman ideal of nonimpact with something very good: minimizing pollution, that is, minimizing negative environmental impacts
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
Another reason we buy into Green is because we as a culture have never been fully comfortable with human industry. We’re taught that the pursuit of profit is wrong, that capitalism is wrong, and that we should feel guilty for our wealth and way of life
It’s that whole original sin thing again no? We don’t deserve this!
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
That’s the power of prejudice—prejudice that comes from holding a false philosophy we don’t know we accept and that most of us would fully reject if we saw its real meaning
This epitomises me and my view. I am very glad to have found and read this book. This is incredibly important work.
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
So long as we accept nonimpact as an environmental ideal, we will not fight passionately against those who oppose the energy of life, because we won’t consider its essence—the transformation of nature in service of human life—as a moral ideal
I wonder if there is a middle way.. the transformation or non-transformation of nature in service to *all* life, and not just humans, but also not just animals/wildlife?
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
We don’t want to “save the planet” from human beings; we want to improve the planet for human beings.
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
We need to say that human life is our one and only standard of value. And we need to say that the transformation of our environment, the essence of our survival, is a supreme virtue. We need to recognize that to the extent we deny either, we are willing to harm real, flesh-and-blood human beings for some antihuman dogma
This latter part is the core of it. But surely there is a middle way? For example roads with underground passages so wildlife can cross safely. Or efforts to relocate animals that will be displaced by development of dams etc, much like we would relocate villages or towns if they would be flooded by a new dam.
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
Making a moral case always means naming your standard—for us, human life
There is 100% a middle way. My moral standard: all life. But by choosing that – does that open me up to wanting to kill human beings? I don’t think so – human beings are part of all life. So development can and should be done for the benefit of human beings, but it must also bring awareness to the other species with which we share this world. There 100% are ways we can continue developing while being mindful of wildlife and nature.
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
The fossil fuel industry is a moral industry at its core.
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
You might say that it’s offensive to compare the fossil fuel industry to the tobacco industry—and you’d be right. But in the battle for hearts and minds, you are widely viewed as worse than the tobacco industry.
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
Historically, it has been a major bankroller of Green organizations. For example, between 2007 and 2010, the natural gas industry gave $25 million to the Sierra Club.19
Hahahhaha wtf??
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
Because I am a capitalist and charge for my services, maybe I will get attacked now for being paid by the fossil fuel industry. But there’s the prejudice again. Why would someone assume that someone who works with fossil fuel companies is corrupt, while those who, say, accept government grants aren’t
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
I don’t say this industry is good because I work with it; I work with this industry because I think it’s good.
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
I wrote this book for anyone who wants to make the world a better place—for human beings—including many, many people who would start this book opposed to or at least suspicious of fossil fuels
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
The idea of ruining the world for the less fortunate and, even worse, for our children or grandchildren is horrifying to us. Thus, when someone tells us of a major risk that our behavior is causing, we want to do something about it
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
What we are not taught is that the biggest risk is not using fossil fuels, and that using them is incredibly virtuous.
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
We’re not taught that some people truly believe that human life doesn’t matter, and that their goal is not to help us triumph over nature’s obstacles but to remove us as an obstacle to the rest of nature
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
they prioritize nature over you
24 February 2019
9. WINNING THE FUTURE
Mankind’s use of fossil fuels is supremely virtuous—because human life is the standard of value, and because using fossil fuels transforms our environment to make it wonderful for human life.
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