Is there a moral case for fossil fuels?

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Kurt Wallace:  This is Kurt Wallace and our guest today is Alex Epstein “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels” is his new book.  Alex thanks for being with us today on Rare.

Alex Epstein:  My pleasure.

Kurt Wallace: Now, your book talks about things that a lot of people have shied away from because of national and international pressure to look of alternatives to fossil fuel.  And you;re saying that there’s a moral case for fossil fuel?

Alex Epstein:  Yeah, I think a lot of the pressure is actually moral.  That is people think that it is the wrong thing to do to use coal, oil and natural gas.  And, they think it’s the right thing to use solar and wind.  That’s a lot of the pressure even though when we look in practice solar and wind are really massive failures.

Kurt Wallace:  You talk about in the book that wind energy is very loud and solar energy is marginal because it’s based on whether or not you have access to the sun.  You’re not making a case against alternative energies in this book are you?

Alex Epstein:  No the issue is — is it moral to use fossil fuels.  Now part of the equation though is what is the state of the alternatives?  And, I’ll give you an example from medicine.  Let’s say you have an antibiotic that leads one out of ten people to have a mild headache.

Well, if you could replace that with something that had exactly the same benefit but none of the side effects, then you should do it.  But the issue with fossil fuels is that the energy benefits that we get from them.

The ability to light our homes and work our refrigerators and run our farms and purify our water nothing comes close to being able to do that for 7 billion people.  So, saying we shouldn’t use fossil fuels or saying we should heavily restrict them is to say well most people shouldn’t use antibiotics.

Kurt Wallace:  In the book you talk about the fact that there are 1.3 billion people that don’t have energy.  I didn’t realize that and this being a natural reason why we would want to use this cheap fuel.

Alex Epstein:  Yeah, it’s electricity that’s the 1.3 in particular.  The energy in that for though they don’t have much transportation energy either.  But, really about 3 billion people have next to no energy by our standards.

We went to half the people of the world we would think of them as basically having no access to energy.  And the rest of us, most of us wouldn’t have access to energy were it not for fossil fuels.

It’s the key to 3 billion people getting energy but also to us maintaining our standard of living.  And, it’s just remarkable and in a big problem that is never talked about.  Not only the benefits of using fossil fuel is never talked about only the risk and that points to a biased discussion.

Kurt Wallace:  Okay on the biased part of this, obviously governments are involved in this.  You talk about how President Obama tweeted 97% of scientist agree, climate change is real, manmade and dangerous.  But, is it really extremely harmful to human life?

Alex Epstein:  The 97% thing is a mess of a claim.  And, it points to the fact that people aren’t really thinking carefully about this.  I like the analogy of antibiotics just because everything in life has benefits and has side effects.

And, the question with climate is not do fossil fuels have any climate impact whatsoever?  That’s where the 97% believe they have some climate impact, Okay?  So, do I.  But, that’s different from — do they have a catastrophic impact?  And, is that impact so bad that it outweighs the life and death benefits of using fossil fuels?

And, that’s precisely what 97% of scientist don’t agree on and none of them 0% should agree on because there’s no evidence for the claim that there are these catastrophic harms that outweigh the benefits of fossil fuels.  It’s not an honest thing.  And, it’s disappointing that people would do this kind of manipulation when there are a lot of lives at stake.

Kurt Wallace:  What’s amazing to me is how much we use fossil fuel related energy everyday for everything.  And people that are against it, they don’t see some of the things you point out in the book about eradicating disease.  And, there are a lot of benefits that far outweigh any kind of destruction.  And, I’d like to talk about that part of it and then also the emissions and the issues about pollution.

Alex Epstein:  Yeah sure, the broadest mistake in thinking about this issue is what I like to call the perfect planet premise.  So, the idea that nature independent of us is perfect and all that we need to do is leave it alone.

And, if you take something like having a clean environment,  this is not true.  What are the dirtiest places in the world?  The least developed places in the world.  Because nature doesn’t give us a clean environment.

Nature is full of disease, full of filth, full of waste.  Not full of clean water on demand.  Not even full of clean air.  And we need to be warm and nature’s not warm enough in most places.  We need wood and you’re around a wood burning fire which is usually indoors is much worse than a coal plant that we have.  So, nature doesn’t give us a clean environment we need, nor does it give us a safe climate.

Until a couple hundred years ago really until the last 100 years people were terrified of the natural climate.  That was a fact of life and today we’re just fact terrified of it.  We talk about it on Twitter.  But we’re not actually afraid of it because we know how to alleviate drought which is a permanent condition.

We know how to deal with storms.  And this all points to the fact that nature is not a clean safe place that we mess up primarily.  It’s a dirty and dangerous place that we make a lot better and we can only do that if we have the energy to transform it.  So, fossil fuels and any other form of energy are a transformative agent that turns a worse climate into a better one.

Kurt Wallace:  What are the dangers of us not being on fossil fuel or making these radical changes that governments are talking about doing around the world?

Alex Epstein:  Well, fossil fuels is just a fuel of the machine of all the machines that we use.  We have a machine based lifestyle.  And it’s kind of like asking “what’s the problem is government restricts eating food”  well you run out of food.

What happens if your machines run out of food?  Well they die and then you die.  Because you depend on having a machine that can make your food.  We can’t actually use a hand plow and feed 7 billion people.  So, it’s food and everything else.

Kurt Wallace:  Well, you refer to machine calories, in the book you talk about that.

Alex Epstein:  Yeah, I like that idea.  Just think about this experience we need our 2000 calories a day more or less.  We use about as much energy as a 100 watt light bulb.  Which is a pretty amazing fact.  And, we need our calories and without them we die.

And, the same thing is true with every machine that runs on any sort of energy source.  We take it for granted that everything’s going to work.  But, as soon as the energy disappears everything is useless scrap.

Kurt Wallace:  Well, the alarmists are out there.  They worry about saving the planet and you talk about man’s life is our one and only standard of value when it comes to energy.  What do you say to those that say “look fossil fuels are polluting the earth and they’re causing the oceans to rise and this going to destroy humanity — this is going to destroy human life”?

Alex Epstein:  Well, I would say that you need to investigate the issue.  Which, you know I wrote a book on so I’d recommend that they read the book.  It’s noteworthy that all of those things are just blended together and thrown out as a package and you have to look at the individual elements and see what’s the evidence.

But in terms of this idea of we’re making the earth dirty we’re polluting the earth, this is a view that nature gave us a clean planet that we make dirty that human beings are a blight on the Earth.  But if you’re focus is human well-being you have to say nature doesn’t give us nearly clean enough a planet and we’ve cleaned it up a lot.

Even if you take oil itself.  Oil is a dirty substance that human beings purify.  That’s what an oil refinery does.  So, we’re actually even in using the stuff making it a lot clean.  So, I don’t think if you’re focus is “how do I maximize well-being?”.  Then, the overall verdict about fossil fuels as to be A+.

Now, there are better ways of doing it maybe, better practices to avoid certain things to get A++++.  But these usable fuels are one of the greatest inventions in history.  And to just act like you’re ruining our lives as the people saying this are living lives that kings 200 years ago couldn’t dream of.  And, it’s thanks a lot to the fossil fuel industry.

Kurt Wallace:  Alex Epstein your book, it’s endorsed by Peter Thiel one of my favorite libertarians.  As far as I can tell, this is a very funny, educational and thought-provoking book.  Is there anything that we haven’t discussed today that you would like to tell the audience at Rare?

Alex Epstein:  Well, I thought your questions were really really good and I just want to thank you for that.  Especially, because the Huffington Post just wrote a review and the guy clearly didn’t read past the book jacket.  So, it’s just criticizing things that I had addressed.

I just say that one thing people might enjoy about the book is that it tries to be comprehensive in addressing every concern that we might have.  It’s not at all preaching to the choir.  People can check it out at MoralCaseForFossilFuels.com and people can always contact me at [email protected] if they have questions.

Kurt Wallace:  Alex Epstein “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels” thanks for being with us today on Rare.

Alex Epstein:  Thank you.