Alex Epstein’s latest book “Fossil Future” makes the case for continued industrial advancement through by using more and more energy. Epstein argues convincingly that fossil fuels are and will remain the most attractive options to meet our energy needs. He also notes that nuclear power generation is the best way but that’s been closed off by the Greens.
Epstein notes fossil fuels have played a seminal role in human progress, powering the machines that have generated unprecedented improvements in mobility, agricultural productivity, construction quality, and well-being. Why, then, are they so often maligned? The book answers by summarizing two contrasting worldviews. First is the “anti-impact framework,” under which people venerate an allegedly pristine natural world and consider actions that sully it to be immoral. Second is Epstein’s preferred “human flourishing framework,” which takes “human beings’ ability to live long, healthy, fulfilling lives” as the standard of moral evaluation.
As Epstein sees it, our “knowledge system”—the mechanism through which scientific research reaches the general public—has been taken over by the anti-impact framework, distorting the public understanding of fossil fuels, climate change, and the environment more broadly. For Epstein, this corrupted knowledge system obscures the world-historical achievement of industrialization that fossil fuels made possible. It also exaggerates only the negative consequences, or “side effects,” of emissions. Epstein breaks the spell of the anti-impact framework and persuades us that not only that fossil fuels have bolstered human flourishing to date but also that they will continue doing so. Portable, energy-dense, and benefiting from generations of human creativity, oil, coal, and natural gas are cost-effective and, Epstein argues, essential to elevating human flourishing higher still.
Restrictions on fossil fuels intended to arrest climate change set humanity back, Epstein writes. This will actually kill people. The knowledge system tends to portray developing countries as desperate victims of climate change, as the extreme weather and rising sea level hoaxes threaten their habitability. Instead, Epstein argues forcefully that “the unempowered world” has the most to gain from “full-steam-ahead” fossil-fuel industrialization. Indeed, data demonstrate the correlation between energy use and such quality-of-life measurements as life expectancies and average incomes. Fossil Future readers will struggle to deny that promoting global energy abundance is morally necessary.
Epstein begins by praising the prescience of his 2014 book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, in which he “made the highly unusual and controversial prediction that fossil fuel use would grow, not shrink.” In fact, such a prediction was far from unusual. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) and BP, two organizations that Epstein calls “leading synthesizers” in the knowledge system, predicted that fossil-fuel use would grow in their own 2014 reports. According to EIA’s 2014 outlook to 2040, the United States’ total use of fossil fuels would increase from around 80 quadrillion British thermal units in the reference year to more than 85 quadrillion in 2040. Similarly, the 2014 BP outlook to 2035 projected that global oil, coal, and natural-gas consumption would each rise by around 1 percent to 2 percent annually in its two-decade analysis period.
“We need to look at the best versions of the moral case for eliminating fossil fuels—that is, those versions being made by today’s leading experts,” Epstein writes. “One valuable lesson I have learned from philosophy is that when I’m considering an argument, I want to familiarize myself with the best version of that argument.”
Fossil Future celebrates, with justification, the triumphs of industrial and economic progress that coal, oil, and natural gas have enabled. These triumphs have so thoroughly transformed our world that we often take them for granted. Epstein shakes us from our complacency, holds up all that we have gained, and warns us that it is under threat.
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