Review of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels

2014 book by Alex Epstein

Review by Denis G. Rancourt

Alex Epstein's The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels is an engaging and thought provoking read, no matter which side of the issue you prefer. There have already been many thorough and positive reviews in the major mainstream media. Alex asked me to write a review, knowing my penchant for independent critical thought. It's just like Alex to do that. After reading the book, I decided to do it because the book offers a lot and therefore provides an platform for my additions.

Alex has a great ability to understand and interpret the science, technology, economics, and statistics that he describes, and an equally great ability to explain it all in plain yet intellectually compelling prose. He has gathered excellent factual material to support his arguments. Merely sifting through the many clear graphs and figures is already an education.

The only physics error I found was Alex's insistence that "a resource is just matter and energy transformed via human ingenuity to meet human needs ... with unlimited potential to be rendered valuable by the human mind." Actually, a resource is not just matter and energy. A resource also has entropy and every reaction in the universe increases entropy, or disorder. The entropy principle only locally appears to be violated thanks to the constant energy from the sun, thus allowing life itself for a certain limited time. The chemical energy released on burning fossil fuel cannot be recovered without recapturing it from the sun, until the sun itself burns out. Within the limit of present biology and technology, the said recapture would take a very long time compared to the time needed to burn all the planet's fossil fuels. The same is true of nuclear, where radioactive nuclides take even longer to make, on the life-times of stars and galaxies. For fusion, cold-fusion mythology aside, the expenditure needed to locally recreate conditions analogous to those inside the sun is prohibitive. And so on. For all practical purposes, this is a one-time burn. The crux of Alex's corrected point, therefore, is that humans have the possibility to live well as long as the sun is around. I would agree with that but I would say that good life is more dependent on political structure (and the dysfunctional excesses of politics) than on the human mind's ability to invent technology. I don't agree with the sentiment that there is even a scintilla of danger that the Green mythology of untouched nature could drive humanity into a cave-age era if entrepreneurs don't have the freedom to frack or extract coal (more below).

Alex's documented and blistering criticisms of environmental thought leaders are well deserved and would be embarrassing for those thought leaders if they prized reason instead of smugness. After reading Alex's book, I'm starting to think of the expression "environmental thought leaders" as an oxymoron, up there with "the department of justice". Alex also provides a psychological basis for our cultural susceptibility to the Green paradigm that is anti-development. He makes a good attempt at explaining why we allow ourselves to be swayed by manipulative slogans promising attainable global bliss via harmony with nature.

The book does a great job of explaining that alternative energy (wind and solar) is a fantasy at best and will not replace fossil fuel any time soon. Alex spells out the requirements for a global energy resource and the reasons that alternatives cannot meet these criteria. Alex's explanations helped me to formulate my own version, expressed as a general rule: Since some 87% or so of energy used, which powers all of machine activity, is fossil fuel (not to mention hydro and nuclear), therefore the true (no public subsidy) cost of any "alternative" is a fair proportional measure of the fossil-fuel expenditure needed to create and maintain the said "alternative". This means that "alternatives" burn more fossil fuel than the fossil fuel technologies themselves, per quantum of energy produced. "Alternatives" burn more fossil fuel than conventional energy. This will be true until the high costs in energy for total-cycle manufacturing and maintaining of alternatives is paid for using energy produced by alternatives.

While the book is an excellent contribution to the public debate, Alex does not tell a sufficiently realistic story about the sociopolitical forces in play; and his evidence-based foundational premise for concluding that "using fossil fuels is a moral imperative" is incorrect.

Let me start with the said premise. Alex correctly points out that there is a historical correlation between increased fossil fuel use and many global average welfare indicators, such as life expectancy and reduced liabilities from disease and natural disasters. Of course it's true that humans are able to safely inhabit more of the planet and in greater numbers because of technology that uses fossil fuel energy as the dominant energy source. That proposition cannot reasonably be disputed. Alex rigorously drives this point home (no pun intended).

But Alex takes it one step too far by concluding that, since a lot of accessible and concentrated energy makes our present world and its 7-billion-person occupancy possible, then more energy use can only improve our lives, including the lives of those most in need; such that the most energy we can use is what we should do, and we should thank the entrepreneurs that make more possible.

Alex pushes it to the limit and argues that more energy must imply better human lives, that the world can only be better off if more of the most accessible energy is used. Alex sees inevitable positive spinoffs from increased use of the most economically advantageous energy resources. The narrative is convincing and optimistic but incorrect.

For example, a world with more war will intensely use more of the most readily available energy but it will not be a safer and more habitable world. The US is amply demonstrating this point in our era, with its destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria... and the continuous waves of nightmares it produces in Latin America.

Cuba's recent "greener revolution" that occurred when it was cut off from the USSR oil supply and food imports (following the collapse of the USSR) is another example. The country had to become more self-reliant, without fossil fuel and its many benefits. It developed distributed farming, and public health increased from the additional mobility and neighbourly cooperation [1]. All this under the US blockade. Even today, despite economic differences, energy consumption disparity (one-eighth of US per-capita energy consumption), tropical disease, the continued US blockade... the US and Cuba have virtually the same life expectancy at birth, 79.3 and 79.1, respectively (2016). Using another measure, Cuba has an infant mortality rate of 4.6 per 1000 live births per year, whereas the US rate is 5.9 (2015).

But there is way more to a healthy and meaningful life than life expectancy at birth and national energy consumption. I don't agree with Alex that happiness is measured by one's amount of leisure time and the ability to use energy (travel to exotic places) in one's leisure. I don't even agree that the goal in life is to be "happy". I think a satisfying and meaningful life comes from self-knowledge, community and culture, and that Western "high energy" lifestyles tend to isolate and fragment. Meaning is tied to depth of connection, to oneself and to the community. The variables locally controlling depth of connection (and its dynamics from liberation struggle) are too numerous and disparate for an energy-use trend to be found or to have any value in social policy discussions.

In other words, Alex did not convince me that on an anthropocentric standard we benefit from more accessible energy. If the goal is to help those most in need, then Western countries can dramatically achieve that at very little expense, without needing to increase global energy production [2]. In any case, I would argue that those "most in need" are peoples whose nations have been disrupted by interventions from colonizers who had mastered accessible energy. That is certainly the case with Canada's aboriginal peoples [3].

But  this makes little difference to me because, likewise, the environmentalists have not convinced me that energy use in itself is negative or that more use will be harmful [4].

I find both arguments (Alex vs CO2 alarmists) to be simplistic and beside the point. Whether nations will destroy all natural habitats or only most natural habitats or put aside areas for nature reclamation is a question of real (and unjust) politics, which has nothing to do with CO2. Likewise, whether a global carbon economy is imposed, and the degrees to which it is imposed, will depend on power struggles that have nothing to do with saving the planet. Domestic carbon taxes also have nothing to do with saving the planet. And the US domestic freedom of domestic companies to extract shale oil and gas will depend on domestic power struggles that are overlaid with the global agendas.

The present war in Syria and its many regional and global repercussions will determine shale freedom in the US more than any marketing campaign or thought leader could ever achieve.

I don't like imperialism. I don't like war. And I don't like the infantile blabbering of "climate-conscious scientists". The real world is where nation states put most of their resources: War, intelligence, and geopolitical maneuvering. Everything else is a derivative, including our entire public discourse, including the entire fabrication about CO2-driven climate catastrophe [4].

Alex is not saying it this way, but I agree with him that more freedom is better. More players, less monopolies, more opportunity, less top-layer constraints, more democracy.

As it stands, a strong US domestic energy sector would mess up US strategic energy machinations that have been the foreign policy for many decades, not to mention the privileged status of the energy mega-corporations. The US world-dominance model is centrally based on controlling foreign access to finite energy reserves, and ensuring that oil is purchased in US dollars. Meanwhile domestic US entrepreneurs go and develop fracking, thereby multiplying and distributing world energy reserves and creating domestic interference in global price fixing. Additionally, where new independent entrepreneurs emerge and are successful, new political influence emerges, which is not always welcome. But fracking freedom is on the verge of happening. The world is changing. Eurasia is forming. A multipolar world is emerging. Saudi Arabia will crack from its need for cash; and cut production for a higher oil price. US nationalism is a natural response to the shifting world. I would predict that the US domestic economy will be "made great again", in order to compete more fairly. And, hopefully, this needed renewal will produce electable US national leaders worthy of trust.

Having said that, if I had to pick a strategy to liberate fracking, I would sell freedom, not human value based on material resources. And I would take on the true enemies of freedom, which both nurture and feed on the climate religion. A free-market is anti-war. I would fight for rules that protect a free market, which is also free of collusion and coercion.


Endnotes

[1] See: The Power of Community - How Cuba Survived Peak Oil (film), Faith Morgan (Director), The Community Solution (USA), 2006.

[2] See: David Lester, The Gruesome Acts of Capitalism, Arbiter Ring Publishing, Winnipeg, 2005. ISBN 1-894037-20-0.

[3] See: Lawyer Bruce Clark - Canada's Genocide (video), Peter Biesterfeld (Director), Ontario Civil Liberties Association, 2016.

[4] Denis G. Rancourt, The Climate Religion, Dissident Voice, September 15, 2016; and links HERE.

Dr. Jean-Louis Pinault explains his idea about global climate forcing and his experience with climate politics

Dr. Jean-Louis Pinault

Comment and review by Denis G. Rancourt, PhD

Dr. Jean-Louis Pinault is a proven expert environmental physicist and statistical analyst of global spatio-temporal data. His publication record leaves no doubt in this regard: Pinault-Google-scholar-profile. A specific example of his work in climate science is HERE.

Dr. Pinault has developed a model, which he supports with extensive statistical analyses of global spatio-temporal data, whereby relatively small solar variations (relative to the large variations occurring on the lifetime of the Sun) acquire leverage on global climate via an oceanic resonance tuning that operates on the global ocean oscillations on Earth.

Dr. Pinault was met with sufficiently significant resistance from the dominant scientific cabal, know as "peer review", to decide to concentrate on writing a book, rather than fighting reviewers and spineless and lazy editors (my words). In his book he both explains his science ideas and exposes the scientific censorship which has frustrated him. His book is "From the melody of the oceans to climate change: a fight against ostracism", and was just released on May 10, 2014.

Dr. Pinault's ideas are important for two reasons: (1) they suggest a new and plausible mechanism whereby small solar constant variations have an amplified effect on Earth, which may dominate climate change within the current multimillion-year period, with the present ocean masses, and (2) they illustrate how difficult it is for a recognized scientist to propose a model that is not sufficiently aligned with dominant scientific dogma.

Dr. Pinault's model is consistent with my own calculations that show that average climate sensitivity, without ocean resonances, is greater for solar constant changes and for planetary surface modifications than for changes in CO2 concentration: HERE, and HERE.

In a recent email exchange, Dr. Pinault explained his new book to me in this way:

The theory of anthropogenic climate warming, i.e. resulting from the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide in particular, has produced the economic and political media frenzy we know, unprecedented in the history of science. On the other hand, there are those who oppose who are skeptical about this hypothesis. Arguing natural climate variability observed in the past, including the recent past regarding the Little Ice Age, they refute alarmist predictions that are becoming harder to sustain as the temperature of the planet has no longer increased over the last fifteen years, while the concentration of carbon dioxide is soaring.

This confrontation between the proponents of global warming due to human activity, supported by the IPCC, and skeptics reflects a misunderstanding of the mechanisms involved in climate variability. Computers of the former allow a "bad model to be accurately wrong", I quote William Gray, whereas the latter challenge the working methods and the scientific integrity of the IPCC members who cling tenaciously to the theory of greenhouse gases liable for global warming, which is the raison d'être of the IPCC.

But this very uneven debate, skeptics cannot enforce their arguments in scientific journals that are subject to censorship since the Copenhagen Climate Conference, should now be enriched with a phenomenon totally unknown to climatologists and oceanographers, which is the planetary wave resonance in the oceans. This discovery, which I did by chance at a time when I knew almost nothing about the oceans and climate, not only allows explaining and reproducing the warming of our planet, more precisely the middle and long-term climate variability, but also the El Niño phenomenon, the succession of wet or dry years observed in Western Europe since the 70°S, the surface currents in oceans...

Highlighting the resonantly forced ocean long-waves allows lifting the veil on many previously unexplained phenomena of both oceanic and climatic origin. Is that the tropical belt of the oceans produces long-waves, whose wavelength is several thousand kilometers. Trapped by the equator they are deflected at the approach of the continents to form off-equatorial waves that act as tuning slides, like a trombonist who uses his slide for resonating the air column in the pipe with the vibration of his lips to produce a note. This musical analogy explains the title of this book, my instrumental practice helped me a lot in understanding the oceanic and atmospheric phenomena, at least as much as my training as a physicist mathematician that provided me with a beautiful diploma from the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, a long time ago.

These long tropical waves resonate with the main source of forcing that are the trade winds, whose period is annual, to produce sub-harmonic whose period is multi-annual. These long baroclinic waves result of the oscillation of the thermocline.

The tropical oceanic resonance is one of the drivers of ocean surface circulation and contributes to the formation of strong western boundary currents. Around latitude 40°N or S, those western boundary currents leave the boundary of the continents to join each of the five oceanic subtropical gyres. These resonantly forced baroclinic waves then become gyral, turning clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere. Having the same periods as the baroclinic waves of the tropical oceans, they form where the western boundary currents leave the coast: again, like the trombone, the wavelength of these gyral waves tunes with the period  frequency of forcing.

For periods between half a year and eight years, the forcing of these gyral waves is induced from the sequence of warm and cold waters conveyed by western boundary currents, and now cause the oscillation of the thermocline of the gyre. But these gigantic gyral waves also have the ability to tune with the long-period solar cycles of one to up to several centuries, as well as Milankovitch cycles that affect the occurrence of glacial and interglacial periods, which reflect the changes in terrestrial astronomical parameters throughout tens of thousands of years, while filtering out the effects of the better known, the 11-year solar cycle.

These resonant baroclinic waves have the ability to 'hide' the thermal energy that drives them by lowering the thermocline; those warm deepwater little participate in evaporation so that the resonant gyral ocean waves act as heat sink by absorbing more thermal energy than they re-emit. On the contrary, during the uprising of the thermocline, thermal surface anomalies induce atmospheric instabilities say again baroclinic, depressions or cyclones, which, carried by the jet-streams at high altitude, travel throughout the continents. Changes in surface temperature of continents tend to balance with the thermal anomalies of subtropical gyres. Positive or negative, these thermal anomalies of sea surface tend to produce the same anomalies at the surface of continents due to the large heat capacity of seawater on the one hand, and the cyclonic or anticyclonic activity stimulated at mid-latitudes secondly.

This thermal balancing internal to our planet, which occurs over the years, smooth the climate variations we observe daily at mid-latitudes. This simple model, if not simplistic, is based on the imbalance between the energy received and re-emitted by the earth. This imbalance mainly depends on the depth of the thermocline of resonantly forced gyral waves, firstly allowing to account for long-term climate variability, and secondly to reproduce with high accuracy global warming observed during the second half of the 20th century, then the stagnation of the average temperature of the planet, precursor of the beginning of a slow cooling that will continue for several centuries. This warming effect results in the accumulation of warm seawaters by coupling with solar activity which showed a burst in the 20th century, what climatologists call the modern maximum which indicates the end of the Little ice age that occurred between the 16th and 18th centuries and also that of the Ice Age that happened more than 10,000 years ago.

This discovery gives reason to the skeptics when they observe a correlation between long-term variations in solar activity and climate. Up to now these arguments were refuted by the official theory since climate models were not able to interpret how a variation in solar activity well below the percent can impact the climate without involving the phenomenon of oceanic resonance. Then the influence of greenhouse gas emissions played the role of troubleshooter to remedy model failures.

Clearly the controversy over global warming emphasized our ignorance concerning fundamental oceanic and climatic phenomena. Gyral wave resonance should reconcile the community of oceanographers and climatologists, skeptical or not. But subjected to the ubiquitous ostracism in 'official' scientific circles, I resigned myself to suspend submitting my work in peer-reviewed scientific journals, giving priority to dissemination of results.

Dr. Pinault's book should be of interest to climate scientists worthy of the title, and to historians of science.

His model will be tested in the coming decades, since it predicts: "...firstly allowing to account for long-term climate variability, and secondly to reproduce with high accuracy global warming observed during the second half of the 20th century, then the stagnation of the average temperature of the planet, precursor of the beginning of a slow cooling that will continue for several centuries."

If he is correct, then it will be even more reason to conclude that modern CO2 increases don't matter and never mattered, regarding modern climate change. For the climate activists, read THIS. For historians of science and true scientists who are not solely careerists, read this:

Dr. Tim Ball's new book "The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science"

Dr. Tim Ball's new book "The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science" has just been released.

300 or so pages of analysis of the historical development of climate science itself, and some of its main players. Fascinating.

(Available from the publisher, and from amazon.com.)

Relevant radio interview featuring Dr. Tim Ball is here: LINK.

Relevant lawsuit: Dr. Ball is being sued in a defamation lawsuit pursued by Dr. Michael Mann: LINK.

Dr. Bob Carter's new book "Taxing Air"

Dr. Bob Carter's new book "Taxing Air: Facts and fallacies about climate change" will be released July 1st:

www.taxingair.com

Related: 2012 radio interview with Bob Carter: LINK.