by Alex Epstein
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. Since making these predictions, John Holdren has become science adviser to President Obama, Bill McKibben is called “the nation’s leading environmentalist”23 and more than anyone led opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, and Paul Ehrlich is still arguably the most influential ecological thinker in the world. Energy historian Robert Bradley Jr. chronicles his accolades:
Ehrlich held an endowed chair as the Bing Professor of Population Studies in the Biology Department at Stanford and was elected president of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and received many awards and prizes, including the inaugural prize of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for Science in the Service of Humanity, a MacArthur Genius Award, the Volvo Environmental Prize, the World Ecology Medal from the International Center for Tropical Ecology, and the International Ecology Institute Prize.
He also received what is hyped as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in a field where it is not awarded—the Crafoord Prize in Population Biology and the Conservation of Biological Diversity.24
Thus, today’s leading thinkers and leading ideas about fossil fuels have a decades-long track record—and given that they are calling for the abolition of our most popular form of energy, it would be irresponsible not to look at how reality has compared to their predictions.
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 things: 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. Rather, it led to an epic improvement in human life across the board.
MORE FOSSIL FUELS, MORE FLOURISHING
Here is a picture summarizing world energy use since 1980.
Figure 1.1: 80 Percent Increase in Worldwide Fossil Fuel Use 1980–2012
Source: BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2013, Historical data workbook
From the 1970s to the present, fossil fuels have overwhelmingly been the fuel of choice, particularly for developing countries. In the United States between 1980 and 2012, the consumption of oil increased 8.7 percent, the consumption of natural gas increased 28.3 percent, and the consumption of coal increased 12.6 percent.25 During that time period, the world overall increased fossil fuel usage far more than we did. Today the world uses 39 percent more oil, 107 percent more coal, and 131 percent more natural gas than it did in 1980.26
This wasn’t supposed to happen.
The anti–fossil fuel experts had predicted that this would be not only deadly, but unnecessary due to the cutting-edge promise of solar and wind (sound familiar?). Then as now, environmental leaders were arguing that renewable energy combined with conservation—using less energy—was a viable replacement for fossil fuels.
Amory Lovins wrote in 1976: “Recent research suggests that a largely or wholly solar economy can be constructed in the United States with straightforward soft technologies that are now demonstrated and now economic or nearly economic.”27 Lovins was a sensation, and around the globe governments gave solar (and wind and ethanol) companies billions of dollars in the hope that they would be able to generate cheap, plentiful, reliable energy.
But as the last graph illustrates, this did not happen. Solar and wind are a minuscule portion of world energy use. And even that is misleading because fossil fuel energy is reliable whereas solar and wind aren’t. While energy from, say, coal is available on demand so you can keep a refrigerator—or a respirator—on whenever you need it, solar energy is available only when the sun shines and the clouds cooperate, which means it can work only if it’s combined with a reliable source of energy, such as coal, gas, nuclear, or hydro.28
Why did fossil fuel energy outcompete renewable energy—not just for existing energy production but for most new energy production? This trend is too consistent across too many countries to be ignored. The answer is simply that renewable energy couldn’t meet those countries’ energy needs, though fossil fuels could. 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.
So despite the warnings of leading experts, people around the world nearly doubled their use of fossil fuels.
According to the predictions of the most popular experts, who assured us that their conclusions reflected the best science, this should have led to utter catastrophe. But the result was one of the greatest-ever improvements in human life.
This book is about morality, about right and wrong. To me, the question of what to do about fossil fuels and any other moral issue comes down to: What will promote human life? What will promote human flourishing—realizing the full potential of life? Colloquially, how do we maximize the years in our life and the life in our years? When we look at the recent past, the past that was supposed to be so disastrous, we should look at flourishing—and that of course includes the quality (or lack thereof) of our environment.
And 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. Figures 1.2 and 1.3 show recent trends in China and India of fossil fuel use, life expectancy, and income.
There is no perfect measure of flourishing, but one really good measure is life expectancy—the average number of years in the life of a human being. Another good one, for less obvious reasons, is average income. This is valuable because while in a sense “money can’t buy happiness,” it gives us resources and, therefore, time and opportunity to pursue our happiness. It’s hard to be happy when you don’t know where your next meal is coming from. The more opportunity you have to do what you want with your time, the more opportunity you have to be happy.
Consider the fate of two countries that have been responsible for a great deal of the increase in fossil fuel use, 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
Figure 1.2: Fossil Fuel Use and Life Expectancy in China and India
Sources: BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2013, Historical data workbook; World Bank, World Development Indicators (WDI) Online Data, April 2014
Figure 1.3: Fossil Fuel Use and Income in China and India
Sources: BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2013, Historical data workbook; World Bank, World Development Indicators (WDI) Online Data, April 2014
The story is clear—both life expectancy and income increased rapidly, meaning that life got better for billions of people in just a few decades. For example, the infant mortality rate has plummeted in both countries—in China by 70 percent, which translates to 66 more children living per 1000 births.30 India has experienced a similar decrease, of 58 percent.
Not only in China and India, but around the world, hundreds of millions of individuals in industrializing countries have gotten their first lightbulb, their first refrigerator, their first decent-paying job, their first year with clean drinking water or a full stomach. To take one particularly wonderful statistic, global malnutrition and undernourishment have plummeted—by 39 percent and 40 percent, respectively, since 1990.31 That means, in a world with a growing population, billions of people are better fed than they would have been just a few decades ago. While there is plenty to criticize in how certain governments have handled industrialization, the big-picture effect has been amazingly positive so far.
• • •
Where did the thinkers go wrong? One thing I have noticed in reading most predictions of doom is that the “experts” almost always focus on the risks of a technology but never the benefits—and on top of that, those who predict the most risk get the most attention from the media and from politicians who want to “do something.”
But there is little to no focus on the benefits of cheap, reliable energy from fossil fuels.
This is a failure to think big picture, to consider all the benefits and all the risks. And the benefits of cheap, reliable energy to power the machines that civilization runs on are enormous. They are just as fundamental to life as food, clothing, shelter, and medical care—indeed, all of these require cheap, reliable energy. By failing to consider the benefits of fossil fuel energy, the experts didn’t anticipate the spectacular benefits that energy brought about in the last thirty years.
At the same time, we do have to consider the risks—including predictions that using fossil fuel energy will lead to catastrophic resource depletion, catastrophic pollution, and catastrophic climate change.
How did those predictions fare? Even if the overall trends are positive, might the anti–fossil fuel experts have been right about catastrophic depletion, catastrophic pollution, and catastrophic climate change, and might those problems still be leading us to long-term catastrophe?
These are important questions to answer.
But when we look at the data, a fascinating fact emerges: As we have used more fossil fuels, our resource situation, our environment situation, and our climate situation have been improving, too.
MORE FOSSIL FUELS, MORE RESOURCES, BETTER ENVIRONMENT, SAFER CLIMATE?
Let’s start with the popular prediction that we’re running out of resources, especially fossil fuels.
If the predictions were right that we were running out of fossil fuel resources, then nearly doubling fossil fuel use worldwide should have practically depleted us of fossil fuels, even faster than Paul Ehrlich and others predicted. That’s certainly what the experts told us in the 1970s. In a 1977 televised address, Jimmy Carter, conveying conventional wisdom at the time, told the nation, “We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.”32 A popular Saudi expression at the time captured this idea: “My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet airplane. His son will ride a camel.”33
Well, no one in the oil business is riding a camel, because as fossil fuel use has increased, fossil fuel resources have increased. How is that possible?
The 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. While these statistics are subject to some manipulation—sometimes countries and companies can give misleading data—they are the best information we have and we have historically underpredicted availability.
Let’s look at reserves from 1980 to the present for oil and gas, the fossil fuels we are traditionally afraid will run out. Coal is much easier to find and extract and is considered to be the fossil fuel that is least likely to run out. Notice how the more we consume, the more reserves increase.
Figure 1.4: More Oil Consumption, More Oil Reserves
Source: BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2013, Historical data workbook
Figure 1.5: More Natural Gas Consumption, More Natural Gas Reserves
Source: BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2013, Historical data workbook
This is counterintuitive; the more we use, the more we have.
How did this happen? Stay tuned.
Why did so many expect catastrophic depletion? Again, there was a failure to think big picture. Many experts paid attention only to our consumption of oil and gas resources, but not our ability to create new oil and gas resources.
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. It turns out that there are many times more of each in the ground than we have used in the entire history of civilization—it’s just a matter of developing the technology to extract them economically.34 And in general, human beings are amazingly good at using ingenuity to create wealth, which means to create resources. 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 thought leaders did not sufficiently consider these virtues of human beings.
What about the prediction that our environment would degrade as we used more fossil fuels and more everything? Our escalating fossil fuel use was definitely supposed to be punished with a much, much dirtier environment.
What actually happened? We’ll look at all major measures of environmental quality in chapter 8, but for now let’s look at clean air and clean water. Both have increased substantially.
Here are measurements from the EPA of six major air pollutants. As fossil fuel use goes up, they go down.
Figure 1.6: U.S. Air Pollution Goes Down Despite Increasing Fossil Fuel Use
Source: U.S. EPA National Emissions Inventory Air Pollutant Emissions Trends Data
And here are international data for the percentage of people in the world with good water quality, which has gone up dramatically in the last 25 years as countries have used more and more fossil fuels.
Figure 1.7: More Fossil Fuels, More Clean Water
Sources: BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2013, Historical data workbook; World Bank, World Development Indicators (WDI) Online Data, April 2014
Overall, the improvement is incredible. Of course, there are places such as China that have high levels of smog—but the track record of the rest of the world indicates that this can be corrected while using ever increasing amounts of fossil fuels.
Once again, the anti–fossil fuel experts got it completely wrong. Why?
Again by not thinking big picture, by paying attention to only one half of the equation—in the case of fossil fuels, focusing only on the ways in which using them can harm our environment. But 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. Pessimistic predictions often assume that our environment is perfect until humans mess it up; they don’t consider the possibility that we could improve our environment. But the data of the last forty years indicate that we have been doing exactly that—using fossil fuels.
Finally, we have to look at what the trend is in the realm of climate change. Catastrophic climate change is the most dire claim about fossil fuels today, and it is associated with many prominent scientific bodies, journals, and media outlets—although if we go through the writings of the 1970s and 1980s, we see those same bodies declare many things confidently about global cooling only to contradict themselves several years later. In 1975, the American Meteorological Society told Americans that the climate was cooling and that this meant worse weather: “Regardless of long term trends, such as the return of an Ice Age, unsettled weather conditions now appear more likely than those of the abnormally favorable period which ended in 1972.”35 In 1975, Nature said, “A recent flurry of papers has provided further evidence for the belief that the Earth is cooling. There now seems little doubt that changes over the past few years are more than a minor statistical fluctuation.”36
In the late 1970s, the global cooling trend many expected to end in disaster ended with no disaster whatsoever.
Since then, those who believe in catastrophic climate change have overwhelmingly focused on global warming due to CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. It has long
been known that when CO2 is added to the atmosphere, the greenhouse effect leads to a warming impact—but before the 1970s and 1980s, there was not much fear that it was of a significant enough magnitude to do major harm (or good, for that matter). But starting in the 1970s and especially the 1980s, claims of runaway global warming and resulting catastrophic climate change became popular. How did they fare when compared to reality?
Recall that in 1986 James Hansen predicted that “if current trends are unchanged,” temperatures would rise .5 to 1.0 degree Fahrenheit in the 1990s and 2 to 4 degrees in the first decade of the 2000s.37 According to Hansen’s own department at NASA, from the beginning to the end of the 1990s, temperatures were .018 degree Fahrenheit (.01 degree Celsius) higher, and from 2000 to 2010, temperatures were .27 degree Fahrenheit (.15 degree Celsius) higher—meaning he was wrong many times over.38
Recall also that journalist Bill McKibben, summarizing the claims of Hansen and others, confidently predicted that by now we would “burn up, to put it bluntly.”39 Looking at the actual data on a graph, it becomes clear that he was completely wrong.
Here’s a graph of the last hundred-plus years of temperature compared to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. We can see that CO2 emissions rose rapidly, most rapidly in the last fifteen years. But there is not nearly the warming or the pattern of warming that we have been led to expect. We can see a very mild warming trend overall—less than 1 degree Celsius (less than 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) over a century—which in itself is unremarkable, given that there is always a trend one way or the other, depending on the time scale you select. But notice that there are smaller trends of warming and cooling, signifying that CO2 is not a particularly powerful driver, and especially notice that the current trend is flat when it “should be” skyrocketing.
