by Alex Epstein
THE BIG PICTURE
There is an incredibly positive story everyone should be told.
The climate future appears to be extremely bright. Fossil fuels’ product, energy, has given us an unthinkable mastery over climate and thus record climate livability. And its major climate-affecting by-product, CO2, has fertilized the atmosphere and likely brought some mild and beneficial warming along with it. But we can’t know how good the warming is because, whether it is net negative or positive, it’s completely drowned out by the net positive of the energy effect.
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.
The proper attitude toward human activity and climate is expressed in the 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Consider the following passage, where industrialist-philosopher Francisco d’Anconia remarks to steel magnate Hank Rearden how dangerous the climate is, absent massive industrial development. The conversation takes place indoors at an elegant party during a severe storm (in the era before all severe storms were blamed on fossil fuels).
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 be left helpless at the mercy of that wind in the middle of some such plain.”24
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.
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. 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.
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, 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.”
I wrote earlier that we owe the fossil fuel industry an apology for the way we’ve treated it on climate and that we owe them a long-overdue thank you. I meant it.
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IMPROVING OUR ENVIRONMENT
ENVIRONMENTAL IMPROVEMENT
Try this thought experiment: Imagine that we transported someone from three hundred years ago, from essentially a fossil fuel–free environment, to today’s world, which has fundamentally been shaped by coal, oil, and natural gas, and then took him on a tour of the modern world, good and bad, clean and dirty. What would he think about our environment overall?
I’ll call our visitor Thomas, in honor of Thomas Newcomen, one of the pioneers of the steam engine, which was invented in 1712, almost exactly three hundred years ago.
Thomas’s reaction would be disbelief that such a clean, healthy environment was possible.
“How is this possible?” he would ask. “The air is so clean. Where I come from, we’re breathing in smoke all day from the fire we need to burn in our furnace.”
“And the water. Everywhere I go, there’s this water that tastes so good, and it’s all safe to drink. On my farm, we get our water from a brook we share with animals, and my kids are always getting sick.”
“And then the weather. I mean, the weather isn’t that much different, but you’re so much safer in it; you can move a knob and make it cool when it’s hot and warm when it’s cold.”
“And you have to tell me, what happened to all the disease? Where I’m from, we have insects all over the place giving us disease—my neighbor’s son died of malaria—and you don’t seem to have any of that here. What’s your secret?”
I’d tell him that the secret was his invention: a method of transforming a concentrated, stored, plentiful energy source into cheap, plentiful, reliable energy so we could use machines to transform our hazardous natural environment into a far healthier human environment.
Just as every region of the world, in its undeveloped state, is full of climate dangers (excessive cold, excessive heat, lack of rainfall, too much rainfall), so every region of the world is full of other environmental dangers to our health, such as disease-carrying insects, lack of waste-disposal technology, disease-carrying animals, disease-carrying crops, bacteria-filled water, earthquakes, and tsunamis. Nature doesn’t even really give us clean air—because to live we have always needed some sort of fire, and for most of history, we had to breathe in smoke from outdoor fires or, once we got the benefit of true shelter, indoor fires, where the smoke was even worse, but the warmth was worth it.
To conquer these environmental hazards we need to develop a far more sanitary and durable environment. Development is the transformation of a nonhuman environment into a human-friendly environment using high-energy machines. Development means water-purification systems, irrigation, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, genetically improved crops, dams, seawalls, heating, air-conditioning, sturdy homes, drained swamps, central power stations, vaccination, pharmaceuticals, and so on.
Of course, as I address in the next chapter, development and the fossil fuel energy that powers it carries risks and creates by-products, such as coal smog, that we need to understand and minimize, but these need to be viewed in the context of fossil fuels’ overall benefits, including their environmental benefits. And it turns out that those benefits far, far outweigh the negatives—and technology is getting ever better at minimizing and neutralizing those risks.
How much of a positive difference does fossil fuel energy make to environmental quality? Let’s look at modern trends in four key areas of environmental quality: water, disease, sanitation, and air.
Here’s water quality—measured by the percentage of world population with “access to improved water sources.”
Figure 6.1: 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 2
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Fossil fuel energy was essential to this improvement. It enabled us to transform once unusable water into usable water.
Most of Earth’s surface is covered with water. The problem is that most of it is naturally in a chemical state unusable for our high standards and purposes. Most of the water is saltwater in the oceans. Most of the fresh water is trapped in massive ice sheets in places like Antarctica or Greenland. Some is part of a large water cycle of clouds and precipitation. Some portion is naturally “poisoned” brackish water of low quality in soil layers deep below the surface, containing too much salt and too many metals and other chemicals to be of any use without energy-intensive treatment. Nature does not deliberately or consistently produce “drinking water” able to meet a rigorous set of human health specifications.1
We need to transform naturally dangerous or unusable water into usable water—by moving usable water, purifying unusable water, or desalinating seawater. And that takes affordable energy.
If you were to turn on your faucet right now, in all likelihood you could fill a glass with water that you would have no fear of drinking. Consider how that water got to you: It traveled to your home through a complex network of plastic (oil) or copper pipes originating from a massive storage tank made of metal and plastic. Before it ever even got to the distribution tank, your water went through a massive, high-energy treatment plant where it was treated with complex synthetic chemicals to remove toxic substances like arsenic or lead or mercury. Before that, the water would have been disinfected using chlorine, ozone, or ultraviolet light to kill off any potentially harmful biological organisms. And to make all these steps work efficiently, the pH level of the water has to be adjusted, using chemicals like lime or sodium hydroxide.2
Natural water is rarely so usable. Most of the undeveloped world has to make do with natural water, and the results are horrifying. Billions of people have to get by using water that might contain high concentrations of heavy metals, dissolved hydrogen sulfide gas (which produces a rotten-egg smell), and countless numbers of waterborne pathogens that still claim millions of lives each year.3 It’s a major victory for any person who gains access to the kind of water we take for granted every day—a victory that fossil fuels deserve a major part of the credit for.
ERADICATING DISEASE
Potentially the worst, deadliest force in an environment is disease—the greatest predator of man. Some estimates have put the total number of human deaths caused by the bubonic plague, smallpox, and malaria alone at around one billion people.4 While in the modern world we are taught to focus on any little particle emitted into the air by a power plant, we are not taught to appreciate the incomparably worse diseases those power plants have helped us get out of our air or made us safe from through mass production of pharmaceuticals and vaccinations.
Disease is on the decline—in large part because of the increased wealth that exists in the world and the increased time for scientific research—both products of cheap, plentiful, reliable energy. For example, Figure 6.2 illustrates the worldwide trend for tuberculosis, a major killer and one of the few diseases that is reported with any kind of consistency.
The tuberculosis trend just begins to indicate what is possible. Developed countries can use energy and technology to transform their environment to be totally rid of diseases that ravage underdeveloped countries today and that once ravaged all countries when they were underdeveloped.
While all infectious diseases can be traced back to some sort of pathogenic living organism, or germ, many of them require another animal to be transmitted: bugs. Mosquitoes transmit malaria and yellow fever, fleas transmit the bubonic plague, and lice transmit typhus. Once we understood this and had powerful machines to amplify our physical abilities and our time to engage in scientific inquiry, we declared war on the bugs that spread disease. We drained the wetlands where the bugs can lay their eggs, we introduced natural predators for the larval and adult forms of the bugs, we developed different chemicals that could kill the eggs, larvae, or adults, and we made it impossible for the bugs to encounter humans without encountering pesticide.
Figure 6.2: More Fossil Fuel Use, Less Tuberculosis
Sources: BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2013, Historical data workbook; World Bank, World Development Indicators (WDI) Online Data, April 2014
Notice how we discuss diseases like malaria as if they just happen to be in underdeveloped countries? Malaria existed in developed countries—they just developed their way out of it. 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:
I wonder how many of your Lordships are aware of the historical significance of the Palace of Westminster? I refer to the history of malaria, not the evolution of government. Are you aware that the entire area now occupied by the Houses of Parliament was once a notoriously malarious swamp? And that until the beginning of the 20th century, “ague” (the original English word for malaria) was a cause of high morbidity and mortality in parts of the British Isles, particularly in tidal marshes such as those at Westminster? And that George Washington followed British Parliamentary precedent by also siting his government buildings in a malarious swamp! I mention this to dispel any misconception you may have that malaria is a “tropical” disease.5
Want an increasingly disease-free population around the globe? We need more cheap, reliable energy from fossil fuels.
SANITIZING OUR ENVIRONMENT
Historically, the inability to effectively deal with our own bodily waste has been one of the largest threats to human health. To this day it takes an enormous toll on human life throughout the world. For example, cholera is a bacterial disease that is transmitted through the ingestion of food or water contaminated by human fecal matter. The toxin that these bacteria produce inhibits the body’s ability to absorb food and water, which can very quickly cause death through dehydration. Worldwide, over a hundred thousand people get sick from cholera annually. (Think about that when you hear environmentalists talk about “harmony with nature”—i.e., harmony with all our predators, their waste, and our waste.) But cholera has been all but eradicated in the industrialized world.6
Here’s the big picture of sanitation—the percent of our world population with access to improved sanitation facilities, according to the World Bank.
Figure 6.3: More Fossil Fuel Use, More Access to Sanitation
Sources: BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2013, Historical data workbook; World Bank, World Development Indicators (WDI) Online Data, April 2014
Note that as recently as 1990, under half the world had “improved sanitation facilities.” The increase to two thirds in only a few decades is a wonderful accomplishment, but a lot more development is necessary to make sure everyone has a decent, sanitary environment.
Part of the way we have solved sanitation problems is through the industrialized world’s ability to thoroughly sanitize any water human beings might consume using high-energy machines. Just as important, we have created entirely separate water systems to deal with sewage. Historically, a person’s sewer tended to be connected, at least in part, to his drinking water. This was rarely intentional, and early civilizations did construct sewer systems to isolate human waste, but natural, unrestricted water flows usually lead to a certain amount of mixing between the human waste and the nearest freshwater source—particularly as more and more people group together.
Today, sewage is not only kept separate from clean water sources, but it is also extensively treated to render its most dangerous elements harmless so that it can be disposed of safely, in some cases used as a fertilizer or even, thanks to the latest technology, turned into drinking water.7 The technology of sewage treatment is another advance made possible by industrialization, and it is yet another energy-intensive process for transforming our environment
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Want a more sanitary environment for people around the globe? We need more cheap, reliable energy from fossil fuels.
CLEANING THE AIR
Most of us have had the experience of sitting around a campfire when the wind changes direction and blows the smoke into our faces right as we take a breath. The resulting experience is unpleasant: a few sharp coughs, along with some stinging of the eyes and throat. For us, it’s a temporary annoyance. For billions of people around the world, it is an everyday experience.
Imagine if the only way you could avoid the danger of cold—historically, cold is a far bigger killer than warmth—was to light a fire in your house every day of the year. You could do things to reduce the amount of smoke you breathed in by using a chimney and opening windows (though at the expense of letting cold in), but the fact remains that you would be breathing in an enormous amount of smoke every day. For many people today, that’s the choice: breathing in smoky air or cold.
Today the idea of using a fire to routinely heat our dwellings is foreign to most of us. Modern homes are heated with advanced furnaces that heat air within a machine and then send the warm air to various locations in the house. The heating is usually done either via clean-burning natural gas, in which case the furnace has an exhaust system to remove any waste from the combustion, or with electrical heating elements powered by mostly faraway smokestacks (which themselves minimize air pollution by diluting and dispersing particulates higher in the air).
The combination of sophisticated machines and cheap, reliable energy has made the heating of homes such a trivial issue that most of us have never considered its connection to cleaning up the air we breathe every day. And yet natural-gas furnaces enable us to enjoy all the benefits of having a warm place to live with none of the downsides of smoky, toxic air that our ancestors would have endured for the same privilege.
