by Alex Epstein
When I see Seth, I sometimes ask myself, What will he be like in the future?
Part of the answer to that question is wonderfully unknowable. What choices will he make? I don’t know, but I am excited to see.
Part of the answer to that question is within his parents’ control: How will his parents influence and educate him, for good or bad? There, I am happy to know that he is in good hands.
But part of the answer to that question is in the control of the rest of us. What choices will we make that define the world that he lives in? 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?
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.
The basic principle espoused in this book is that we survive by transforming our environment to meet our needs. We maximize resources and we minimize risks. Energy use is the ultimate form of transformation—because it increases our ability to transform our environment to meet every other need, to maximize every resource and minimize every threat.
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). 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.
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. I am confident he will get this world, because that’s exactly what my generation needed—and got.
Think about your generation. From the perspective of previous generations, you are a future generation. To the extent our grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents thought about what kind of world they would leave, they were thinking about us.
What actions of theirs—and generations before them—benefited us most?
One type of 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.
If 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. We should be grateful to past generations for producing and consuming fossil fuels, rather than restricting them and trying to subsist on something inferior.
If we slow down our progress, including the generation of new ideas, by using inferior energy, we deserve nothing but contempt from future generations—for example, from those who die prematurely because a medical cure comes twenty years later than it needed to.
The production of energy increases the production of knowledge, and it is knowledge that enables one generation to begin where the last left off.
Besides our ideas and knowledge, another form of past action that benefits us is past wealth creation.
Imagine that we had all the knowledge we do today but we were placed in a precivilization environment. By popular accounts, this is a state “rich in natural resources.” Would we want to be there? Of course not, because those “resources” would not be genuine resources; they would be only potential resources, raw materials, and it would take a tremendous amount of time and effort to even start using them to create wealth.
The more resources that have been created in the past, the more prosperous societies have been, the more resources they leave behind for us to start with. 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.
That process of resource creation provides the material for the next stage of resource creation. 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.
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.
The final point to make about consumption and efficiency and waste is that the most valuable thing we have is our time. If we want to talk about a resource, if human life is our standard, then the most important resource we should be focused on is our time. Using fossil fuels buys us time. It buys us more life. It buys us more opportunities. It buys us more resources. Fossil fuels are an amazing tool with which to create this ultimate form of wealth, this supreme resource: time to use our minds and our bodies to enjoy our lives as much as possible.
Time, and the quality of the life we can enjoy in that time, is already less than it should be, and is threatened to become far, far less than it should be, because even though using fossil fuels is moral, our society does not know it. The voices guiding our society have convinced many of us that the energy of life is immoral and are calling for restrictions that, from all the evidence we have, would be a nightmare.
9
WINNING THE FUTURE
“WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?”
November 5, 2012
I am standing at the front of a lecture hall packed with three hundred students at the Levine Science Research Center at Duke University. Twelve years ago, I was sitting in one of those seats. Now I’m standing in front, across from Bill McKibben, who has been called the nation’s leading environmentalist and is arguably the world’s leading opponent of fossil fuels.1
Tonight he and I will be debating “the ethics of fossil fuel use.” I am nervous. Every debate where there’s a camera is immortalized, and no matter how experienced you are, something can always go wrong. Your opponent can make an unexpected point or simply be a bully, and one second of losing your cool can negate an hour and a half of calmness.
McKibben is much more experienced in debates than I am. I’ve seen him debate before, and he’s very skilled—he’s calm, thinks well on his feet, and can, on demand, cite any one of hundreds of prestigious studies and authors to make his points.
And he’s going to be arguing a much more popular position than I am—that our use of fossil fuels is immoral, an unsustainable “addiction” that causes catastrophic climate change, pollution, and resource depletion. I’m guessing the students are steeped in these ideas; I certainly was when I went to Duke.
I’m going to be arguing that our use of fossil fuels is moral and should be continued and even expanded. I’m going to be arguing that fossil fuels actually improve our environment, which is a counterin
tuitive idea that most people have never heard, one that even I didn’t hold a decade earlier.
Preparing for this debate has been rough. Although I am told I am a good debater and many fans of my work have been “talking trash” on my behalf, I have known since day one that I would be in for a war. In the previous two months, I have spent over half my time preparing for this one night.
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.
What about the deep pockets of my friends in the fossil fuel industry? It is 2012, and I have no such friends. I know barely anyone in the industry, and after months of putting out feelers for some kind of involvement, I managed to get one organization to give me use of their video production crew to film the event. 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—and by our host, the Program for Values and Ethics in the Marketplace at Duke University, run by my former professor Gary Hull.
As I stood onstage, feeling a combination of adrenaline, nerves, and fatigue, I asked myself the question that many of the audience members must have been asking inside their heads: Why are you doing this?
It had all started in Rolling Stone.
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.” He argued that it had long since been scientifically proven that we needed to restrict the vast majority of our fossil fuel use—at various times, he has called for outlawing between 80 percent and 95 percent over the next several decades. The only thing stopping us, he said, is the political manipulations of the fossil fuel industry, which has fought for its profits at the expense of our future and has thus become “Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization.”2 He called for a mass-movement to demonize the fossil fuel industry and deprive it of political standing, much as South Africa’s apartheid regime had been demonized and dismantled due to the moral outrage of private citizens around the world. And just as one powerful mechanism for bringing down that regime had been divesting—withdrawing investments from—South African businesses, McKibben called for Americans to divest from the fossil fuel industry as a form of public ostracism.
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 And it was celebrated by citizens and intellectual elites alike.
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 is a master political activist, widely credited with the more than five-year delay of the Keystone XL pipeline, the most prominent fossil fuel project of the last ten years.4
The 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.
Someone had to do something, and I had control of exactly one person. I felt that my best shot at making a difference, even though it was scary and risky, was getting the top anti–fossil fuel advocate on video being challenged on moral grounds. At least then people could see that there was an alternative.
That’s why I was there. That’s why the stress and the time and the money were worth it. I won’t say who I thought won; you can decide for yourself at www.moralcaseforfossilfuels.com. 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.
If, at the beginning of this book, it seemed crazy for a human being to invest his life championing fossil fuels and the fossil fuel industry, I hope I have convinced you why this is a more than worthy cause, a cause I hope you’ll want to join as part of the broader cause of human flourishing and human progress. Because I am going to ask you, too, to take action, and it won’t always be easy and comfortable, but it will be the right thing to do for the present and especially for our 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. And 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.
THE ATTACK ON OUR FOSSIL FUTURE
Around the world, in whatever country you live in and maybe the state or city you live in, there are opportunities to produce fossil fuel energy—and almost without exception there are forces conspiring to stop it or that have already stopped it.
In California, where I live, we have perhaps the greatest oil opportunity in the United States, called the Monterey Shale. The companies who want to produce oil there say it has the potential to produce billions of barrels of oil—that’s hundreds of billions of gallons of the most coveted energy source on Earth, in a state with arguably the biggest economic problems in the United States.5 Others, including our Energy Information Administration, claim that the deposit has much less potential, but then, many great oil formations, from Saudi Arabia to North Dakota, were once believed to have no potential. I say, let companies find out. There is no movement in support of the Monterey Shale—but there is a massive movement against it.
This is the story throughout the United States, where shale energy technology, in my view the most exciting technology of our generation, has already been the biggest boon to our economy in the last ten years, and it’s just getting started. Or maybe it’s just getting stopped. In New York, it’s stopped by a moratorium.6 As I write this, the citizens of Colorado are seriously considering banning it throughout the state.7 In California, I’ll fight for it, but it may well get stopped here.8
Or take the coal industry. The United States has been called the Saudi Arabia of coal. Coal is the one source of energy we can be certain can provide energy for as many people as necessary—there are over three thousand years of recoverable reserves at current usage rates.9 With the right economics and technology, it can be converted into oil fuels, gas fuels, plastics, et cetera. Just consider that. With the right infrastructure, this is a source of energy that we know could take billions of people from not being able to power a fan to cool them down or a radiator to keep them warm all the way to central air-conditioning and heating. Not that it would be easy—energy is just one part of development, which requires rule of law and economic freedom, among other things—but we can count on the coal industry to produce all the energy that is needed.
Shouldn’t that inspire support?
Culturally, it never seems to. Coal is “dirty,” as if it’s the only energy source that has risks and side effects, and as if it doesn’t have the benefit of being the hope for billions of people to have a better, healthier life.
In the United States, we have a place in Wyoming called the Powder River Basin, one of the greatest coal deposits of all time, mined with state-of-the-art mining technology that can extract
more coal from a mine than ever before.10 But the participants in the project, such as Peabody Energy, have had to fight daily for permission to empower billions of people. And in particular, they have to fight for permission to export that coal in the Pacific Northwest.11 At the start of 2013, there were six export project proposals in the Pacific Northwest. By the end of the year, three of the six had been dropped due to fierce opposition from environmentalist organizations.
The message of those organizations is summed up by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: “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.
In place after place, the energy of life is portrayed as deadly, its producers immoral. Why?
If you agree with me that using fossil fuels is a moral imperative, that more energy is more ability and the only way 7 billion people are going to get it anytime soon is with more fossil fuels, then I hope you want to fight for fossil fuel freedom around the world. But to do that, we need to understand why that cause is losing, why our culture as a whole believes, despite the evidence, that fossil fuels are not a healthy, moral choice but a dangerous, immoral addiction.
In one sense, the answer to “Why do we believe the wrong thing about fossil fuels?” is simple. Lack of education. We haven’t been taught all the right facts. We aren’t taught in school how energy makes our climate safer, only how CO2 emissions supposedly make it more dangerous. We aren’t taught in school how energy makes our environment better, only ways (usually exaggerated) in which fossil fuels make it dirtier. We aren’t taught in school how the fossil fuel industry is a resource-creating industry; we are taught that it is shamelessly exploiting dwindling natural resources. If only the truth were taught, the world would be a different place, right?
