Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less by Alex Epstein

Author:Alex Epstein [Epstein, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780593420416
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2022-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

PART 3

Climate Side-Effects

7

The Enormous Power of Fossil-Fueled Climate Mastery

How to Evaluate Rising CO2 Levels

Here’s where we are.

The purpose of the book is to give you what our anti-human-impact, anti-energy knowledge system won’t: a full-context evaluation of continuing fossil fuel use, including both its full benefits and its full negative side-effects from a human flourishing perspective.

In part 2, we found that, contrary to our knowledge system’s portrayal of the benefits of continuing fossil fuel use as trivial and easily replaceable, the ultra-cost-effective energy we get from fossil fuels is fundamental to the unnatural, amazing livability of our world, and not only irreplaceable in the coming decades by alternatives, but actually needed in growing quantities to make the world more livable for more people.

We found that the benefits of ultra-cost-effective fossil fuel energy not only overwhelm its side-effects, but they also reduce its negative side-effects and/or neutralize their negativity over time—meaning that we can expect fossil fuels’ side-effects to get better over time, not worse.

The one possible exception to this expectation is any negative climate impacts of fossil fuels’ CO2 emissions, because these emissions (1) aggregate over time (in contrast to others that quickly disappear) and (2) cannot be reduced at low cost using any current or expected methods.

Thus, it is crucial to evaluate fossil fuels’ CO2 side-effects going forward—which is the purpose of this part of the book—but to do so on the human flourishing framework, not the anti-impact framework that we have seen over and over drive our knowledge system to ignore the benefits of fossil fuels and catastrophize their side-effects, in both cases wildly distorting reality and the state of science to do so.

Our knowledge system tells us that rising CO2 levels will absolutely destroy the livability of our world. It tells us this so often and so vehemently that four in ten Americans think there is more than a 50 percent chance that global warming will lead to the extinction of the human race.[1]

But we know that the same knowledge system telling us that rising CO2 levels will destroy the livability of our world denies the fact that the unprecedented livability of our world as we know it depends on the fossil fuels our knowledge system is trying to eliminate. And we know that the same knowledge system telling us that rising CO2 levels will destroy the livability of our world has been claiming for fifty years that some side-effect or another of fossil fuels—resource depletion, pollution, cooling, now warming—will destroy the livability of our world.

We know that the root of these distortions by our knowledge system is the anti-impact framework.

Our knowledge system denies the fossil-fueled increase in the livability of our world by the standard of human flourishing because our knowledge system is not applying the standard of human flourishing. It is applying the standard of eliminating human impact, which causes it to view the amazing world fossil fuels have created as immoral because it involves so much impact on nature.

And our knowledge system keeps falsely predicting

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