The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels

by Alex Epstein

  The reason is that the cheap, plentiful, reliable energy we get from fossil fuels and other forms of cheap, plentiful, reliable energy, combined with human ingenuity, gives us the ability to transform the world around us into a place that is far safer from any health hazards (man-made or natural), far safer from any climate change (man-made or natural), and far richer in resources now and in the future.

  Fossil fuel technology transforms nature to improve human life on an epic scale. It is the only energy technology that can currently meet the energy needs of all 7+ billion people on this planet. While there are some truly exciting supplemental technologies that may rise to dominance in some distant decade, that does not diminish the greatness or immense value of fossil fuel technology.

  • • •

  Ultimately, the moral case for fossil fuels is not about fossil fuels; it’s the moral case for using cheap, plentiful, reliable energy to amplify our abilities to make the world a better place—a better place for human beings.

  That’s where we will start. In chapters 2 and 3, I will make the case that no other energy technology besides fossil fuels can even come close to producing that energy for the foreseeable future (although several can be valuable supplements).

  In chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7, I will make the case that just as energy dramatically improves our ability to deal with any aspect of life by using machines—increasing our mental capacities with computers, our medical capabilities with MRI machines, and our agricultural capabilities with high-powered farming equipment—so it dramatically improves our ability to make our environment healthier and safer from natural and man-made threats. The data clearly show that we have never had higher environmental quality and we have never been safer from climate, despite—no, because of—record fossil fuel use.

  In chapter 8, I will make the case that fossil fuel use is not “unsustainable” but progressive—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.

  Finally, in chapter 9, I will make the case that we are at one of those points in history where we are at a fork between a dream and a nightmare and that the nightmare side is winning, thanks to decades of underappreciation of fossil fuels’ benefits and massive misrepresentations of fossil fuels’ risks. But the dream is absolutely possible. It just requires that we truly, to our core, understand the value of energy to human life.

  2

  THE ENERGY CHALLENGE: CHEAP, PLENTIFUL, RELIABLE ENERGY . . . FOR 7 BILLION PEOPLE

  ENERGY AND LIFE

  Tell me if this is motivating: This year humanity will use some 560 quadrillion BTU of energy, which averages out to around 215,000 BTU per person per day—and some people have access to less than 25,000 BTU per day.1

  No?

  Unfortunately, discussions of energy are often extremely abstract and technical, causing us not to think about energy in a very personal, meaningful way. Before I studied energy professionally, I thought of it mostly when I filled up my car, when I paid my power bill, and when I followed controversies about allegedly bad things the energy industry (usually the fossil fuel industry) was doing.

  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. To give you a sense of what I mean, here’s a story from The Gambia about what electricity means to a woman having a child.

  THE GAMBIA

  June 2006

  At 4 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon, I was startled when the lights came on; the lights never came on after 2 p.m. on the weekends. The adrenaline really kicked in when I was invited to observe an emergency cesarean section—a first for me. When the infant emerged I felt my heart racing from excitement and awe!

  But no matter how many times the technician suctioned out the nose and mouth, the infant did not utter a sound. After twenty five minutes the technician and nurse both gave up. The surgeon later explained that the baby had suffocated in utero. If only they had had enough power to use the ultrasound machine for each pregnancy, he would have detected the problem earlier and been able to plan the C-section. Without early detection, the C-section became an emergency, moreover, the surgery had to wait for the generator to be powered on. The loss of precious minutes meant the loss of a precious life. At that time, in that place, all I could do was cry.

  And later, when the maternity ward was too hushed, I cried again. A full-term infant was born weighing only 3.5 pounds. In the U.S., the solution would have been obvious and effective: incubation. But without reliable electricity, the hospital did not even contemplate owning an incubator. This seemingly simple solution was not available to this newborn girl, and she perished needlessly.

  Reliable electricity is at the forefront of every staff members’ thoughts. With it, they can conduct tests with electrically powered medical equipment, use vaccines and antibiotics requiring refrigeration, and plan surgeries to meet patients’ needs. Without it, they will continue to give their patients the best care available, but in a country with an average life expectancy of only 54 years of age, it’s a hard fight to win.2

  This story should remind us of how “unnatural” our lives are—and why that’s a good thing. It’s easy to take for granted that we have the ability to detect early problems with babies—not thinking that absent the machine that can detect them and the energy to power that machine, human beings past and present have lost untold millions of babies. It’s easy to take for granted that we have the ability to keep a three-and-a-half-pound baby alive—not thinking that absent the machine that can incubate it and the energy to power that machine, most of people’s beloved children who were underweight babies would have died.

  This is a microcosm of the central idea of this book—that more energy means more ability to improve our lives; less energy means less ability—more helplessness, more suffering, and more death. Of course, this book is focused on fossil fuel energy—but only, as you’ll see, because I believe that it is the most essential technology for producing energy for 7 billion people to improve their lives, at least over the next several decades. If there was a better form of energy and it was under attack in a way that wildly exaggerated its negatives and undervalued its positives, I’d be writing the moral case for that form of energy.

  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 CALORIES

  Humanity needs as much energy as it can get.

  First: What exactly is energy? The technical definition is “the capacity to do work” but my favorite way to sum it up is with two words: “machine calories.”

  Every human being runs off the calories he or she consumes; those calories are our energy, our ability to act. If we run out of calories, we can’t act—we die.

  The same is true of the machines we use to improve our lives. Whether we’re talking about the ultrasound and incubation machines that enable us to save babies, the computers that enable us to gain or discover knowledge, the planes that enable us to visit family members across the globe, or the factories that make it possible for all of those things to be affordable, every aspect of our lives is improved dramatically by machines. Those machines live on energy—their ability to act—and without energy, they are the same as the energy-starved machines that can’t save the Gambian babies: useless.

  And 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 flo
urish.

  The average human being needs about 2,000 calories a day to give him enough energy to do everything he needs to do—from going to the office to taking a walk to manual labor to sleeping. That’s equal to 2,326 watt-hours, which is the amount of energy it takes to power a 100-watt lightbulb for 23.26 hours. Essentially, your body uses the same amount of energy as a 100-watt lightbulb. Pretty interesting, right?

  The more physical work you need to do, the more calories you use. A farmer doing vigorous physical work for a day might exert 4,000 calories.3 An Olympic athlete like Michael Phelps might use 8,000 calories of energy a day.4

  The more energy you are using at any time, the more power you are exerting. Power is defined as the rate of energy use. Power is energy in action; the gasoline is the energy, the engine turns it into power.

  And here’s where the problem of human weakness comes in. We are not very powerful—about one tenth as powerful as a horse that’s one two-hundredth the power of the average car—and thus we can use only so much energy and do only so much work, not nearly enough for a good standard of living.

  The story of energy for over 99 percent of history is that human beings couldn’t get enough of it to live, and if they could, they could make very limited use of it, because they lacked power. Thus they spent their lives engaging in grueling physical labor just to keep their bodies going long enough to engage in the next day of grueling physical labor.

  Now if we were all like Superman, it would be a different story. Imagine if Superman, instead of devoting himself to saving Lois Lane and others, decided to help poor countries industrialize. He would be amazing! Superman’s superpower, after all, is power. He is a high-powered machine that stores a lot of energy in his body. He can melt iron, forge steel, plow fields, build buildings, even run an electrical system by turning some sort of especially large crank. He could transform any place for the better.

  And so can we, with enough energy and high-powered machines. Using human ingenuity, we have made ourselves into supermen.

  Consider the amount of energy at the average American’s disposal. The average American’s total machine energy use is 186,000 calories a day—ninety-three humans (or twenty-three Michael Phelpses)!5 This is one of the greatest achievements in human history. 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—which meant that only some could prosper, and at the great expense of others. But with machine energy and machine servants, no one has to suffer; in fact, the more people, the merrier.

  The most memorable summary I’ve read about this amazing development is by economist Milton Friedman:

  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

  “Running servants replaced running water”—I’ll never forget that.

  THE ENERGY CHALLENGE: CHEAP, PLENTIFUL, RELIABLE, SCALABLE

  If our ability to act to improve our lives depends on energy, we have an epic challenge.

  There are 7 billion people in the world, but 1.3 billion have no electricity.7 Over 3 billion are classified as not having “adequate electricity”—a threshold that is far less than we enjoy and take for granted.8 For everyone to have as much access to energy as the average American, the world’s energy production would have to quadruple.9 And we Americans would benefit greatly from even more cheap, plentiful, reliable energy.

  So where are we going to get it from?

  In this chapter and the next, we’re going to examine every major energy technology, including all the non–fossil fuel sources of energy, to get an idea of how much they can contribute to energy production going forward. This is important because, assuming you can do it safely, the more energy production, the better and also because there are concerns about the future supply of fossil fuels and the present and future risks of fossil fuels. We’ll cover future supply in the next chapter and in chapter 8, and the risks in chapters 4–6, but as a matter of principle, 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.

  Nineteenth-century coal technology is justifiably illegal today. The hazardous smoke that would be generated is now preventable by far more advanced, cleaner coal-burning technologies. 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.

  By the same token, the degree of risk we would theoretically be willing to accept from fossil fuels will depend in large part on what the alternatives are. Let’s say—and I am completely making this up—we could prove that burning fossil fuels will cause ten times more hurricanes for the next fifty years. Should the government take action? Well, if there is a technology that is more affordable and can scale to produce cheaper, more plentiful, reliable energy for 7 billion people, then quite possibly. 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.

  To get a sense of where things stand today and where they stood in the past, when “renewables” were predicted to be the future, let’s look at how much energy use comes from what sources.

  Figure 2.1: The Truth About Global Energy Use

  Source: BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2013, Historical data workbook

  Note the difference. Solar and wind produce a combined 1 percent of the energy we use, whereas fossil fuel energy—coal, oil, and natural gas—produces 86 percent, more than five times all other sources combined. That 86 percent is only 7 percent less than 1980’s 93 percent. But the total is what matters most—note that our total fossil fuel use is now far, far greater. Other sources of energy, particularly nuclear and hydro, have been supplements, not replacements for fossil fuels.

  And note that in many ways people have been discouraged from using fossil fuels. 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. Nevertheless, fossil fuels have remained the energy source of choice.

  Why? Or to put it in reverse, why is so much energy not made from alternatives?

  THE HAZELNUT ENERGY PROBLEM

  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. (Although there’s one source of energy that may well outcompete fossil fuels in three to five decades—stay tuned.)

  A brilliant illustration of this appeared on, of all places, Saturday Night Live a few years ago. The host of the “Weekend Update” segment at the time, Jimmy Fallon, commented on a plan to use oil derived from hazelnuts to power a car. I have no doubt that this could work technically—vegetable oil and petroleum oil are extremely similar chemically. But I wasn’t excited, and neither
was Fallon:

  New Scientist magazine reported that in the future, cars could be powered by hazelnuts. That’s encouraging, considering an eight-ounce jar of hazelnuts costs about nine dollars. Yeah, I’ve got an idea for a car that runs on bald eagle heads and Fabergé eggs.10

  I thought that was brilliant. But here’s the question I wished Fallon, a member of Artists Against Fracking and thus a public opponent of fossil fuels, had asked: Why are “renewable” hazelnuts so expensive? After all, their energy comes from the sun, which is free, right?

  He probably would have responded that while the sun is free, there were other factors in the process of producing hazelnuts that make them expensive.

  And there are.

  Here’s a key principle for understanding what makes energy, or anything else, cheap and plentiful. 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. With hazelnuts, not only do you have, as in any process, materials, machines, and manpower, you have a huge limiting factor in that the land needed is far from plentiful. Hazelnuts require land with a unique combination of rainfall or irrigation, mild summer climate and cold winter climate, and fertile soil. This happens overwhelmingly in one place, Turkey, which dominates the market, and this ideal hazelnut habitat generates only one crop a year.11

  What we can call the hazelnut problem comes up over and over again with most of the alternatives to fossil fuels. 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.

  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 that’s true or not depends on all the materials, manpower, and machines involved in the entire process of harnessing the sun’s power.