Oct
18
The Blessing of Fossil Fuels
We have all heard the claims and warnings — some quite hysterical — that our use of fossil fuels is recklessly irresponsible and immoral. If we don’t make dramatic changes ASAP, the end of civilization will be upon us in mere decades, if not just a few years. But, this is nothing new.
Since at least the 1970s, experts have been telling us that if we didn’t drastically reduce fossil fuel use then, and replace it with renewable energy sources, the catastrophic results would be very real today. Resource depletion, pollution, climate change, etc. (Note: I find it ironic that they warn about “catastrophic resource depletion”, while also proclaiming the evils and predicted disasters of using such resources. To be consistent, they should be happy if/when we run out of the stuff.)
For example,…
1970: Life magazine reported that, due to particles emitted into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support… the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution [and] by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
1971: Paul Ehrlich, ecologist and ‘leading resource theorist’ who railed about overpopulation, said, “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.”
1972: International think-tank the Club of Rome predicted (based on its state-of-the-art computer models) that we would run out of oil by 1992 and natural gas (along with gold, silver, mercury, tin, zinc, and lead) by 1993.
1986: Ehrlich announced the following about one of his proteges (who later served as science advisor to President Obama): “As University of California physicist John Holdren has said, it is possible that carbon-dioxide climate-induced famines could kill as many as a billion people before the year 2020.” Talk about fear-mongering!
1989: Bill McKibben, world’s leading anti-fossil fuel activist, claimed, “The choice of doing nothing — of continuing to burn ever more oil and coal — is not a choice, in other words. It will lead us, if not straight to hell, then straight to a place with a similar temperature”; and “a few more decades of ungoverned fossil-fuel use and we burn up, to put it bluntly.”
However, the exact opposite to their predictions happened — we use a lot more fossil fuels. Between 1980 and 2012, U.S. oil consumption increased 8.7%, natural gas use increased 28.3%, and coal use increased 12.6%. During the same period, global consumption increased 39% for oil, 131% for natural gas, and 107% for coal. Meanwhile, technological advances have allowed us to detect and tap huge new fossil fuel reserves, and amazing improvements have been made in terms of environmental quality and quality-of-life (not to mention life expectancy) for humans.
Alex Epstein of the Center for Industrial Progress makes the following observation:
“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 [forty-plus] 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 climate situation have been improving, too….
[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.”
All of this reminds me of how incredibly God has orchestrated things — e.g., oxygenation events and the building up of biodeposits — throughout history, always at the just-right times and in the just-right places, “for the necessary chemical transformations of Earth’s surface environment to occur in order to support global human civilization.” (H/T Hugh Ross)
