by Alex Epstein
In a sense, yes—but that raises a deeper question: Why are we as a culture so oblivious to the facts? In particular, why are we so oblivious to positive facts about fossil fuels and so susceptible to negative fabrications about fossil fuels? We are surrounded by a better and safer world that runs on fossil fuel energy. Why can’t we see it?
Here’s my answer: 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.
Anytime someone is oblivious to the positive and inclined toward the negative, he has a prejudice. Consider racial prejudice. Someone with, say, a racial prejudice against blacks will tend to ignore the virtues of a black individual he meets and exaggerate (or manufacture) vices.
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.
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.
UNDERSTANDING THE ANTI–FOSSIL FUEL MOVEMENT
In this book, I have quoted extensively from certain environmental thought leaders—Paul Ehrlich, Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Amory Lovins, John Holdren—precisely because they are thought leaders: They have had tremendous influence throughout the culture.
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.
Notice that they, and practically all other environmental or Green leaders, express little enthusiasm for the value of cheap, plentiful, reliable energy or the unique ability of the fossil fuel industry to provide it; instead, they keep claiming, without evidence, that expensive, unreliable, unscalable energy will somehow become cheap, reliable, and scalable—unconcerned by what will happen if and when they are wrong and nothing can make up for the energy they’ve taken away from us. They also cannot see much positive in nuclear or hydro. They claim to care about climate but are indifferent to the climate mastery fossil fuels give us and the opportunity to give that mastery to billions more, but they will use every fallacy in the book to make us terrified of fossil fuel–related climate change. They claim to care about a clean environment but have nothing but scorn for the industry that gave us the ability to create the cleanest, healthiest environment in history. They claim to care about abundant resources, but are indifferent to the fact that the fossil fuel industry is itself producing new resources and helping every other industry produce new resources—and that restricting fossil fuel use would bring us that much closer to the resource poverty that has been mankind’s condition for all but a recent sliver of history.
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.
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. Energy is our most powerful means of transforming our environment to meet our needs. If an unaltered, untransformed environment is our standard of value, then nothing could be worse than cheap, plentiful, reliable energy.
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.
This is hard to believe. Which is why you need to know the following story.
For many decades, the ultimate energy fantasy has been what’s called nuclear fusion. Conventional nuclear power is called nuclear fission, which unleashes power through the decay of heavy atoms such as uranium. Nuclear fusion unleashes far more power through fusion of two light atoms, of hydrogen, for example. 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.
In the late 1980s, some reports that fusion was close to commercial reality got quite a bit of press. Reporters interviewed some of the world’s environmental thought leaders to ask them what they thought of fusion—testing how they felt, not about energy’s human-harming risks and wastes but its pure transformative power. What did they say?
There are some quotes from a story in the Los Angeles Times called “Fear of Fusion: What if It Works?”
Leading environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin: “It’s the worst thing that could happen to our planet.”13
Paul Ehrlich: Developing fusion for human beings would be “like giving a machine gun to an idiot child.”14
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
He is talking here about something that, if it had worked, would have been able to empower every single individual on the globe and that undoubtedly would have given him a longer life through the increased scientific and technological progress a fusion-powered society would make. He’s talking about something that could take someone who had never had access to a lightbulb for more than an hour, and give him all the light he needed for the rest of his life. He’s talking about something that would have given that hospital in The Gambia the power that it needed to save the two dead babies in the story, who could have been thriving eight-year-olds as I write this, instead of painful memories for would-be parents.
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. We go from physically helpless to physical supermen. We build skyscrapers and hospitals. We take vacations and go on honeymoons. We visit our families and tour the world. We relieve drought and vanquish disease. We transform the planet for the better.
Better—by a human standard of value.
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.
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 Remember that in chapter 1, David M. Graber, in praising the theme of Bill McKibben’s book, said, “Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”18
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. Of course, few hold that standard of value consistently, and even these men do not depopulate the world of themselves. But to the extent that we hold human nonimpact
as our standard of value, we are going against what our survival requires.
And our culture has accepted this toxic standard in large doses under the friendly label “Green.”
OUR PREJUDICED CULTURE
In the last section, about the thought leaders, I observed that on every single issue pertaining to fossil fuels they would greatly exaggerate the negatives of fossil fuels and ignore or greatly understate the positives.
But let’s focus now on our culture. How different are we from the thought leaders who influence our culture? I think our motives are much better, but we have adopted many of their same bad thinking methods, and we partially share their nonimpact standard of value.
Notice that, with each issue surrounding fossil fuels, we all too easily believe the negatives and are blinded to the positives. How many of us have ever thought to appreciate the man-made miracle that is cheap, plentiful, reliable energy?
How many of us appreciate the people who actually produce it, rather than demonize them and laud their imaginary replacements in the solar and wind industries?
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?
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.
As a culture, we are consistently inclined to view the fossil fuel industry as negative, and in particular, environmentally negative.
Why? Because we haven’t been taught the facts? That doesn’t explain it—why don’t we look for positive environmental facts about the fossil fuel industry, instead of assuming that they don’t exist? Because we believe that to be environmentally good, to follow an environmentally good standard of value, is to be “green,” to not have an impact on things.
Green is often associated with a lack of pollution and other environmental health hazards, but this is both far too narrow and highly misleading. Consider the range of actions that fall under the banner of Green. 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.
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 (there is now an attack on iPhones for being insufficiently Green, given the various materials that must be mined to make them).
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.
The difference between our culture and the Green movement is that our culture believes that you can’t always be environmentally good; our culture regards Green as one of many competing ideals that we must balance. 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.
Why do we accept the Green ideal, the ideal that causes us to hate our greatest energy technology and the people who produce it? 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. But if you’re antipollution, Greenness or nonimpact is a confusing and dangerous way of thinking about the issue, for by associating impact with something negative, you’re conceding that all human impact is somehow bad for the environment.
And that’s what the Green movement wants you to believe.
Instead of recognizing that transforming our environment is a life-serving virtue that can have environmentally undesirable risks and side effects, the Green movement wants you to look at all transformation of our environment as environmentally bad.
In fact, the worst thing we can do environmentally is not transform our environment, because then we would live with the threat-laden and resource-poor environment of undeveloped nature.
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.
Accepting nonimpact as our environmental ideal primes us to swallow any argument that an industry’s environmental impact is too high and to assume that the consequences of any environmental impact must be bad—even while we wake up every day in the greatest environment in history.
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.
Now that we know its meaning, we can look for—and embrace—a new, prohuman environmental philosophy.
A NEW IDEAL: INDUSTRIAL PROGRESS
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.
But transformation is a moral ideal. I call that ideal industrial progress—the progressive improvement of our environment using human industry, including energy and technology, in service of human life. It’s why I named my think tank the Center for Industrial Progress. I wanted to start a positive alternative to the mainstream Green environmentalist movement, to replace the deadly ideal of nonimpact with the true ideal of industrial progress. We don’t want to “save the planet” from human beings; we want to improve the planet for human beings.
We need to say this loudly and proudly. 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.
Making a moral case always means naming your standard—for us, human life. It means tying everything, including every positive and negative of fossil fuel use, to human life. If you do that in your thinking, I believe you will come to conclusions similar to mine. If you do that in communicating with others, you will be amazingly effective, because you will be clear and sincere.
If we can do this, we can create the dream—an energy revolution that spawns revolutions in every other field. And we can perform a great act of justice for the millions of men and women in the fossil fuel industry who have been working every day to keep our machines alive, who have been given little appreciation by our culture but much condemnation, and who in my experience do not themselves understand the full importance of their work. I hope this book helps them see it.
The fossil fuel industry is a moral industry at its core. Members do immoral things, to be sure, but transforming ancient dead plants into the energy of life in a way that maximizes benefits and minimizes risks is an activity that the industry should be proud of, and we should be proud to use its product.
Unfortunately, the fossil fuel industry has, in recent decades, not believed that or at least has refused to say it. It has conceded to its environmentalist opponents that fossil fuels are an “addiction,” just a temporarily necessary one.
Last year, I wrote an open letter to executives in the fossil fuel industry criticizing them for this conduct and asking them to join me in making a moral case for their industry. I want to include a shortened version of it in this book, because what they say about their industry doesn’t affect just them; it affects all of us.
WHAT THE FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY MUST DO
To leaders of the fossil fuel industry:
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Here’s a typical communications plan of yours to win over the public.
“We will explain to the public that we contribute to economic growth.”
“We will explain to the public that we create a lot of jobs.”
“We will link our industry to our national identity.”
“We will stress to the public that we are addressing our attackers’ concerns—by lowering the emissions of our product.”
“We will spend millions on a state-of-the-art media campaign.”
Why doesn’t it work? Well, imagine if you saw the same plan from a tobacco company. It would tie increased tobacco sales to economic growth, to job creation, to national identity, to reducing tar. Would you be convinced that it would be a good thing if Americans bought way more tobacco?
I doubt it, because none of these strategies does anything to address the industry’s fundamental problem, the fact that use of the industry’s core product, tobacco, is viewed as a self-destructive addiction. So long as that is true, the industry will be viewed as an inherently immoral industry. And so long as that is true, no matter what the industry does, its critics will always have the moral high ground.
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.
Your attackers have successfully portrayed your core product, fossil fuel energy, as a self-destructive addiction that is destroying our planet, and characterized your industry as fundamentally immoral. In a better world, the kind of world we should aspire to, they argue, the fossil fuel industry would not exist.
There is only one way to defeat the environmentalists’ moral case against fossil fuels—refute its false central idea that fossil fuels destroy the planet. If we don’t refute that idea, we accept it, and if we accept that fossil fuels are destroying the planet, the only logical conclusion is to cease new development and slow down existing development as much as possible.
