Buchhinweis: Alex Epstein, "Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas - Not Less" (Portfolio, 480 S., geb, ISBN 0593420411). Ist heute erschienen. Der Titel ist bei mir noch nicht eingetroffen, und ich habe es deshalb noch nicht gelesen. Es handelt sich um den Nachfolgetitel zu "The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels" des Autors von 2014.
Aus dem Klappentext:
Zitat
For over a decade, philosopher and energy expert Alex Epstein has predicted that any negative impacts of fossil fuel use on our climate will be outweighed by the unique benefits of fossil fuels to human flourishing--including their unrivaled ability to provide low-cost, reliable energy to billions of people around the world, especially the world’s poorest people.
And contrary to what we hear from media “experts” about today’s “renewable revolution” and “climate emergency,” reality has proven Epstein right:
• Fact: Fossil fuels are still the dominant source of energy around the world, and growing fast—while much-hyped renewables are causing skyrocketing electricity prices and increased blackouts. • Fact: Fossil-fueled development has brought global poverty to an all-time low. • Fact: While fossil fuels have contributed to the 1 degree of warming in the last 170 years, climate-related deaths are at all-time lows thanks to fossil-fueled development.
What does the future hold? In Fossil Future, Epstein, applying his distinctive “human flourishing framework” to the latest evidence, comes to the shocking conclusion that the benefits of fossil fuels will continue to far outweigh their side effects—including climate impacts—for generations to come. The path to global human flourishing, Epstein argues, is a combination of using more fossil fuels, getting better at “climate mastery,” and establishing “energy freedom” policies that allow nuclear and other truly promising alternatives to reach their full long-term potential.
Today’s pervasive claims of imminent climate catastrophe and imminent renewable energy dominance, Epstein shows, are based on what he calls the “anti-impact framework”—a set of faulty methods, false assumptions, and anti-human values that have caused the media’s designated experts to make wildly wrong predictions about fossil fuels, climate, and renewables for the last fifty years. Deeply researched and wide-ranging, this book will cause you to rethink everything you thought you knew about the future of our energy use, our environment, and our climate.
Ich gebe mal die Zusammenfassung der Kernthesen, die er auf seiner Webseite präsentiert.
Zitat 33 controversial conclusions about energy, environmental, and climate issues
In Fossil Future, I look at the *full context* of facts about energy, environment, and climate from a *human flourishing perspective*. This leads to some very controversial conclusions.
A frequent question I get is: “Why do you think you’re right, given that so many experts disagree with you?”
I have two answers to this: 1. What most expert researchers think about energy and climate is very different from what we are told they think. (This is the issue, discussed extensively in Fossil Future, of how our “knowledge system” fails to do its job of synthesizing and disseminating expert research.) 2. Because, as a humanist philosopher, I consider the full context of facts about fossil fuels from a human flourishing perspective. And most thinkers on energy and climate do not do this. Not even close.
Here are 33 controversial conclusions I have come to, explained thoroughly in Fossil Future, based on full context, pro-human thinking.
Energy 1. The cost of energy is far more significant to the livability of the planet for human beings than the level of CO₂ in the atmosphere. Except if the level of CO₂ is too low, in which case we all die. (Chapter 4, pages 110-113) 2. Revolutions in digital technology, including machine learning and cryptocurrency, will continue to drive increasing energy demand even as energy efficiency increases — and that’s a good thing. (Pages 176-178)
Fossil fuels 3. Fossil fuels haven’t made Earth unnaturally unlivable, they’ve made Earth unnaturally livable. (Chapter 4, Pages 114-125) 4. Fossil fuels deserve but do not get credit for rapid progress, because they have made and continue to make possible most advancements in science, technology, medicine, and sanitation. (Pages 129-135) 5. Fossil fuels haven’t taken a naturally safe planet and made it unnaturally dangerous, they have taken a naturally dangerous planet and made it unnaturally safe. (Chapter 4, Pages 109-113, 153) 6. Fossil fuels haven’t taken a naturally resource rich planet and made it resource poor, they have taken a resource-poor planet and made it unnaturally resource rich. (Pages 53-56) 7. Fossil fuel use is not “unsustainable” or “sustainable,” but “progressive”—part of an evolutionary process of always using the best form of energy. (Page 377)
Alternatives to fossil fuels 8. All claims that solar and wind are cost-competitive replacements for fossil fuels are based on “partial cost accounting”: not looking at the cost of the full process necessary to produce energy. (Pages 218-220) 9. If solar and wind ever become practical on a large scale, their biggest opponents would not be the fossil fuel industry but the “green” movement. (Pages 223-226) 10. Claims that the world can be powered by solar and wind are based not on evidence but on baseless fantasies such as low-cost multiday electricity storage. (Pages 221-223)
The environmental and climate effects of fossil fuels 11. The “negative externalities” of fossil fuels are far exceeded by their “positive externalities.” (Page 170-173) 12. Warming will occur mostly in colder places, during colder seasons, and at colder times of day. (Pages 265, 324) 13. No climate scientist or climate economist has established that the negatives of rising CO₂ levels outweigh the positives of rising CO₂ levels, let alone outweigh the unique, fundamental, and desperately-needed benefits of fossil fuels. (Pages 339, 351-352) 14. Fossil fuels have made our water far cleaner. (Pages 49, 58, 93, 110, 359) 15. If human beings practice “wildfire mastery,” no conceivable change in climate could cause significant wildfire problems. (Pages 271-275) 16. Not only is fossil fuel use not causing mass extinction, continuing fossil fuel use will help foster the preservation and expansion of important species. (Page 339) 17. Human beings are not only not ruining the oceans, we are beginning to make oceans better via fossil-fueled ocean mastery—like the “mariculture” project that led to an explosion of salmon in Canada. (Pages 348-350) 18. Rising CO₂ levels can’t make the Earth unlivable—at most, they can make Earth more tropical at a rate that is disrupting (not catastrophic). (Page 321-325) 19. Fossil fuels, by powering modern irrigation and drought relief systems, have transformed drought from the deadliest form of climate danger into something that kills 99% fewer people than it used to. (Page 266-269) 20. “Climate mastery,” the use of human intelligence—above all, high-energy machines—to neutralize climate danger and enhance climate benefits, is the most important, and most ignored, variable in determining the livability of the global climate system. (Chapter 7, Pages 250-251)
The anti-fossil fuel movement 21. Most media-designated “experts” are very poor thinkers about energy, focusing on negative side-effects and ignoring benefits. (Pages 6-7) 22. What we are told by leading institutions that “the experts” think about fossil fuels is very different from what most expert energy and climate researchers actually think. (Pages 11-19, 39) 23. Most climate scientists are essentially ignorant about climate adaptation and climate mastery. (Page 38) 24. 90% of disagreement about energy issues is not based on differences over facts but differences over philosophy. (Chapter 3, Pages 74-78) 25. 90% of designated experts on fossil fuels largely or totally ignore the unique, massive, and desperately-needed benefits of fossil fuels and almost exclusively focus on negative side-effects. (Pages 29-34) 26.The biggest critics of fossil fuels—academics and Hollywood celebrities—are the biggest beneficiaries of fossil fuels, since most of their jobs would not exist without the time and resources fossil fuels free up for academics and entertainment. (Pages 127, 159) 27. “97 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change is real” falsely equates belief that humans have some climate impact (true) with the belief that humans have catastrophic climate impact (false). (Pages 305-307) 28. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is primarily a religious and political organization, not a scientific organization. (Pages 12-13, 288, 308) 29. “Protect the environment” and “save the planet” are invalid expressions that mislead us into thinking that anti-human actions are good for us. (Pages 81-82, 300, 404) 30. All restrictions on CO₂ emissions should be eliminated. The only CO₂ reductions efforts that should be undertaken are liberating cost-effective sources of low-carbon or lower-carbon energy like nuclear, deep geothermal, and natural gas. (Pages 357-392)
Persuasion 31. It’s possible to change people’s minds on fossil fuels and climate change by “reframing the conversation” and “arguing to 100.” (Pages 401-421) 32. The fossil fuel industry and other fossil fuel advocates have unintentionally reinforced the case for eliminating fossil fuels. (Pages 405-409) 33. One of the best things you can do for the world is to advocate for increasing fossil fuel use. (Pages 415-421)
Jede einzelne dieser Thesen dürfte geeignet sein, beim grünen Mainstream Apoplexie & Schlagfluß hervorzurufen. als geballte Ladung kann dafür garantiert werden.
Hier faßt er es noch etwas anders gewichtet zusammen:
"17 surprising facts from Fossil Future"
Zitat Energy Fossil fuels are uniquely cost-effective: the only form of energy that can provide every type of energy need (electricity, mobility, industrial heat, residential heat) at low cost, on-demand, for billions of people. (Page 20) After 100 years of vigorous competition from alternatives, fossil fuels provide 80% of the world’s energy, including over 90% of the world’s transportation energy—and are growing. (Page 196) Only 1/5th of the world uses what Americans would consider a modest amount of energy. 3 billion people use less electricity than a typical American refrigerator. (Page 26)
Alternatives to fossil fuels Nuclear energy is the safest form of energy ever created. (Page 60) Nuclear energy is the cleanest form of energy ever created. (Page 60) Nuclear energy has become many times more expensive even though the raw material prices haven’t increased and the knowledge of how to produce nuclear energy efficiently has improved. (Page 62) There is no low-cost, scalable way of capturing CO₂ in existence or on the horizon. (Page 237)
The anti-fossil fuel movement The anti-fossil fuel “green” movement claims to want to lower CO₂ emissions at all costs, yet opposes the two most proven, cost-effective ways of lowering CO₂ emissions: nuclear energy and hydroelectric energy. (Page 86) Contrary to the idea that today’s designated climate experts have been “too conservative” in their predictions about climate change, they have actually been far too catastrophic—predicting a dramatic increase in climate-related death, when in reality climate-related deaths ended up plummeting. (Page 42) Climate-related disaster deaths have decreased 98% over the last century. (Page 42) Many leading “studies” claiming to prove climate catastrophe totally ignore human beings’ incredible ability to adapt to and master negative climate changes. (Pages 84, 101-102, 247)
The environmental and climate impacts of fossil fuels Despite claims that the world is “too hot,” cold-related deaths far exceed heat-related deaths. (Page 262) The “greenhouse effect” is a diminishing effect: new CO2 emissions have less of a warming impact than earlier CO₂ emissions. (Page 325) The global climate system is near historic lows in CO₂ and temperature. (Pages 334-335) We have no near-term mechanism of reaching even one fourth the historical high of CO₂. (Page 321) Life on Earth thrived at far higher CO₂ levels and temperatures in the past. (Page 322) Planetary warming is concentrated in colder parts of the Earth—it is not truly global. (Page 324)
Zitat Douglas Murray @DouglasKMurray Replying to @AlexEpstein and @ChrisWillx Congratulations Alex! I’m reading it at the moment. Important and very timely…. 5:03 PM · May 24, 2022·Twitter for iPhone
Zitat Alex Epstein @AlexEpstein · 1h My new book Fossil Future comes out today, and not a moment too soon. Anti-fossil fuel policies have caused a global energy crisis--which is now causing a global food crisis. Fossil Future proves definitively that the world needs *more* fossil fuels.
Zitat Vivek Ramaswamy @VivekGRamaswamy Every American should read this book.
I had the opportunity to read a preprint of this book: it was eye-opening and challenged a lot of my assumptions, in a good way. 4:51 PM · May 24, 2022·Twitter for iPhone
Und diese Meldung von heute paßt zum Thema wie die 🤜 aufs 👁.
Zitat Top-Banker kritisiert Umgang mit Klimawandel – und verliert seinen Job
Der britische HSBC-Banker Stuart Kirk soll wegen Klimawandel-Verharmlosung entlassen worden sein. Der Fall ist brisant: Experten geben seinen Aussagen durchaus recht. Einer dankt ihm gar „für den Mut, das zu sagen, was 98 Prozent der Leute im Finanzwesen denken“. ... Anlass für die harsche Distanzierung ist die Rede eines führenden Investmentmanagers seiner Bank, Stuart Kirk, auf einer Konferenz am vergangenen Donnerstag. „Es gibt immer irgendeinen Verrückten, der mir vom Ende der Welt erzählt“, hatte Kirk seine Rede eröffnet und im Folgenden erläutert, warum sich Investoren wegen des Klimawandels keine Sorgen zu machen bräuchten: Er sei vernachlässigbar bei der Einschätzung der ökonomischen Entwicklung. Nachdem der Vortrag öffentlich bekannt geworden war, protestierten Tausende in den sozialen Medien, manche forderten die Entlassung. „Feuert Kirk“, twitterte die frühere Chefin der UN-Klimakonvention, Christiana Figueres. So geschah es, die HSBC habe Kirk mittlerweile entlassen, berichtet die „Financial Times“. Dabei, so berichtet es die Zeitung, wäre Kirks Vortrag zuvor intern abgesegnet worden.
Ja. Das findet sich auch immer wieder bei Bjorn Lomborg. Die Zahl der registrierten Todesfälle weltweit infolge von Naturgewalten: Stürme, Überschwemmungen, Wald- und Steppenbrände und infolge von Kälte- oder Hitzewellen.
Indur Goklany, "Wealth and Safety: The Amazing Decline in Deaths from Extreme Weather in an Era of Global Warming, 1900–2010":
Zitat Aggregate mortality attributed to all extreme weather events globally has declined by more than 90% since the 1920s, in spite of a four-fold rise in population and much more complete reporting of such events. The aggregate mortality rate declined by 98%, largely due to decreased mortality in three main areas:
Deaths and death rates from droughts, which were responsible for approximately 60% of cumulative deaths due to extreme weather events from 1900–2010, are more than 99.9% lower than in the 1920s. Deaths and death rates for floods, responsible for over 30% of cumulative extreme weather deaths, have declined by over 98% since the 1930s. Deaths and death rates for storms (i.e. hurricanes, cyclones, tornados, typhoons), responsible for around 7% of extreme weather deaths from 1900–2008, declined by more than 55% since the 1970s
To put the public health impact of extreme weather events into context, cumulatively they now contribute only 0.07% to global mortality. Mortality from extreme weather events has declined even as all-cause mortality has increased, indicating that humanity is coping better with extreme weather events than it is with far more important health and safety problems. The decreases in the numbers of deaths and death rates reflect a remarkable improvement in society’s adaptive capacity, likely due to greater wealth and better technology, enabled in part by use of hydrocarbon fuels. Imposing additional restrictions on the use of hydrocarbon fuels may slow the rate of improvement of this adaptive capacity and thereby worsen any negative impact of climate change. At the very least, the potential for such an adverse outcome should be weighed against any putative benefit arising from such restrictions.
Das hier hören die grünen Zeitgeisttänzer gar nicht gern.
Zitat A fully-realized green transition would amount to the largest mass murder event “since the killings of one hundred million people by communist regimes” in the 1900s, according to energy policy expert Alex Epstein.
Relying too heavily on intermittent, unreliable green energy sources like solar and wind power would starve millions of people around the world of much-needed electricity, Epstein argues in his book, “Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas — Not Less”, which was shared with The Daily Caller News Foundation in advance of its release Tuesday. He adds that the impact of such a transition “would likely be far greater” than that of the brutal regimes of the 20th century.
“When I say it’ll be the greatest act of mass murder, what I’m saying is losing these benefits that everyone is ignoring or denying will be catastrophic,” Epstein, the president and founder of the Center for Industrial Progress, told TheDCNF in an interview. “You just have to look at a few facts.”
Low cost and reliable energy is fundamental to human flourishing since it breeds greater productivity and, therefore, prosperity, Epstein said. In addition, fossil fuels are “uniquely good” at producing such low cost, reliable energy at a global scale unlike green alternatives.
“It’s just a fact that if you eliminate a unique source of vital value — low cost, reliable energy — in a world that needs far more of it, you’re shortening billions of lives, guaranteed,” he told TheDCNF.
Fossil fuels, namely oil, natural gas and coal, currently fulfill about 80% of the world’s energy demand, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Despite this high reliance, Western governments and global institutions like the United Nations (UN) have urged a rapid green transition to stave off climate change and “secure a liveable future.”
Epstein argues that solar and wind, largely propped up by favorable government programs, are examples of unreliable energy since their output diminishes when it is cloudy or not windy. In addition, he says such green energy projects often require backup fossil fuel generation and only produce electricity, which accounts for 20% of the world’s total energy needs. ... “I consider the reports to be terrible syntheses, which doesn’t mean all the research is bad, but as a synthesis, they are totally rigged to lead to hostility toward fossil fuels,” he told TheDCNF, noting that the UN reports notably leave out the number of annual climate-related deaths, a figure he said is declining.
“All of those things combined made me very motivated to do an entirely new book on fossil fuels that really took advantage of the potential to reframe the issue and to explain it comprehensively to a world that really needs it,” Epstein said.
Zitat von Ulrich Elkmann im Beitrag #1Es handelt sich um den Nachfolgetitel zu "The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels" des Autors von 2014.
Zitat Alex Epstein @AlexEpstein
Fossil Future is a completely self-contained book that *totally replaces* The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. You definitely don't need to read MCFF to understand it. And I no longer recommend MCFF except to people who want to see how my thinking has evolved.
Zitat von Ulrich Elkmann im Beitrag #4Top-Banker kritisiert Umgang mit Klimawandel – und verliert seinen Job
Tja, das zeigt dann exemplarisch auf, warum deutsche CEOs so begeistert von Energiesteuern und Migration sind: "Dagegen sein" kostet sofort Geld, "dafür sein" interessiert niemanden mehr wenn man sich zur Ruhe gesetzt hat und dann die Sintflut kommt. Von den Aktionären hat man i.d.R. auch nicht viel zu befürchten, weil die Institutionellen alle selbst auf dem Grünen Trip sind. Wenn dann irgendwann die Rechnung kommt wird es viel Geschrei geben, aber wer sich aktuell gegen die Staatsreligion auflehnt, dem geht's nicht anders als vor 1.000 Jahren, abgesehen davon, dass er es überleben dürfte...
Zitat von F.Alfonzo im Beitrag #9aber wer sich aktuell gegen die Staatsreligion auflehnt, dem geht's nicht anders als vor 1.000 Jahren, abgesehen davon, dass er es überleben dürfte...
OT, aber der politische Konflikt "vor 1.000 Jahren", der sich durch das ganze Mittelalter hindurchzog, war ja immer der zwischen König/Kaiser und dem Adel. Und ich habe seit geraumer Zeit den Eindruck, daß sich bei uns, bis rauf zur EU als Artushof, ein Gefüge herausbildet, das der alten Konstruktion nicht unähnlich ist. Wobei Brüssel als Hebel für die Lobbys von unten und die Seilschaften der Peer Groups genutzt wird, um per EU-Entscheid und Vorgabe die Vasallenherscher und derne Hofstaat in den jeweiligen Landesparlamenten zu dirigieren.
"Les hommes seront toujours fous; et ceux qui croient les guérir sont les plus fous de la bande." - Voltaire
Der Mann gefällt mir immer besser. "Pro-Human Future: An Interview With Alex Epstein"
Zitat I have a big issue with the fact that people care a lot more about distant polar bears than they do about millions of people who are poor and lack energy. Nevertheless, the polar bear is my favorite animal. Aesthetically, I think it's amazing in terms of how beautiful it is. I like to watch it. But I like to watch it under very circumscribed conditions, namely, where it does not have direct access to me. So that's again, it's not anti-polar-bear, I’m pro-polar-bear, but in a certain controlled context. But then, say a malarial mosquito, I just want to get rid of that.
You have to recognize that when you're looking at the world, and when you're deciding on actions, you have to decide which organism you are prioritizing. You can't be neutral, because organisms sometimes have harmonious interests, but they often have conflicting interests. And so, to say you're for human flourishing just means that when you're making these decisions, you're prioritizing the well-being of humans. And guess what, that leads to really enjoying nature as a beautiful place because that benefits us. I think what leads to people having an aversion to pursuing human flourishing is that it's portrayed as humans somehow bad being for everything about our environment, or about nature, that we like. And it's the exact opposite.
If you don't have a human flourishing standard, then you don't get to enjoy nature at all. Because you don't have any impact. You're very poor. You can't travel anywhere, you don't have time. And then you're like a primitive person who's living in the same place their whole lives and is just spending inordinate amounts of effort just getting enough food to eat to make it to the next day, and is meagerly protecting themselves against all sorts of natural dangers and being at the mercy of inanimate forces or even other animals ravaging them.
So I think it's about really clarifying the positive, and then contrasting it and showing that the opposite is really just a hatred of humans, because to say your goal is eliminating human impact, you're singling out the human race because you don't like its impact. People get really mad at me for the term I'm about to use. But I think they get mad because it hits home. What I say is like, the premise is, if your goal is eliminating human impact, the premise is that everything the human race does is bad. Everything we impact is bad. Bear impact is great, beaver impact is great, bird impact, all those things are great, but human impact is bad. So it’s a bias against the human race. And so I sometimes call this “human racism,” and people get so mad at that. But it is true. And it is bad. For a very similar reason that specific racism is bad. In a sense, it's worse because it’s against every member of our species. When you say, “Why is racism bad?” it’s because it dehumanizes people based on an arbitrary variable like skin color, and it's telling some people, “You don't get to be human.”
But “human racism” tells every human: “You are bad, and you're inferior to the rest of nature.”
One of the things that helped me a lot is, when I was 18, I really learned the philosophy of this. And I really realized that the modern environmental movement’s goal is eliminating human impact. And humans survive by impacting nature intelligently. I didn't know anything about fossil fuels, and I was still scared of global warming and that kind of thing. But I had a view that this was an anti-human movement, and that I wanted nothing to do with it. And that helped me then be more suspicious of some of the claims before I looked into them than other people might be.
Zitat I won't out anyone, but I was talking to a really famous scientist. And we've talked about these issues, and I was waiting, I thought: “It's gonna be a long discussion. It's gonna take me forever to explain this stuff.” But he just thought my position was the most obvious thing in the world. Like, “Yeah, of course, with climate, we're probably impacting it. But we can do all sorts of things to deal with any impacts. We're really sophisticated beavers.” He he had no concern about it. Because he understands that nature is wild potential. Human beings are good at mastering it, and we should master it. He didn’t impute some perfect significance to the Earth before humans, like he didn’t assume any of that environmental Original Sin, which is, you know, describing it religiously, which I think is a good way to describe it. But it's so rare not to have any anti-human ideas.
Zitat Green energy products are a subset of morally-promoted inferior products. Who benefits from a morally promoted inferior product? I would say if something is promoted in an artificial way, then the people who make it can make money, even if they're not creating value.
For example, we have way too many solar panels in California in terms of we produce way too much electricity during part of the day, and not even reliably because of clouds, and then, during other parts of the day, including night, they're not working. Solar panel owners get paid a premium through what's called net metering. They get paid twice as much as they should or more, and they're producing unreliable electricity. That's a case in which the people with the inferior product are just getting paid because of government manipulation.
Who else can benefit? Well, the politicians giving the favors, they can benefit. Then the other thing I think is very important is whenever you have one of these moral movements, people glom on to it for status. So often people just think of motivation by money. I think motivation by money is often very healthy. If you want to create value and benefit from it that's a deeply healthy motivation. But there are unhealthy motivations to get money. The one I fear the most is among people who already have money. They're seeking to do things that are totally unprofitable—for status.
"Les hommes seront toujours fous; et ceux qui croient les guérir sont les plus fous de la bande." - Voltaire
Zitat von Ulrich Elkmann im Beitrag #6Ja. Das findet sich auch immer wieder bei Bjorn Lomborg.
Weil's mir gerade unterkommt.
Zitat von Bjorn Lomborg, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 3, 2021As the world has gotten richer and its population has grown, the number and quality of structures in the path of floods, fires, and hurricanes have risen. If you remove this variable by looking at damage as a percent of gross domestic product, it actually paints an optimistic picture. The trend of weather-related damages from 1990 to 2020 declined from 0.26% of global GDP to 0.18%. A landmark study shows this has been the trend for poor and rich countries alike, regardless of the types of disaster. Economic growth and innovation have insulated all sorts of people from floods, droughts, wind, heat and cold. ... Still it’s easy to misuse the data to make things seem worse than they actually are. The International Disaster Database—the biggest disaster data depository in the world—attempts to register every catastrophe around the globe using reports from sources ranging from the press to insurance companies to United Nations agencies. But because the internet and proliferation of media has made it so much easier to access information today, the database records small natural disasters from 1980 onward that in prior decades wouldn’t have been recorded.
This skews the database by making it appear there are more total disasters today than the past. (Several U.N. agencies have twisted this data to say just that.) For instance, the database recorded four times as many earthquakes each year on average after 1980 as it did before. As the U.S. Geological Survey points out, when databases show more earthquakes, it isn’t because there are actually more earthquakes, but because they have been recorded better over time. Indeed, almost all of the earthquake increase in the disaster database is composed of small earthquakes that likely just didn’t make the news earlier in the 20th century. You see the same slant with hurricanes: The disaster database recorded far more U.S. hurricanes after 1980 than before—six times as many a year on average. But the historical record from dozens of peer-reviewed studies shows the number of landfalling U.S. hurricanes has actually declined slightly since 1900.
Death totals, on the other hand, are much less pliable. While reports on climate catastrophes multiplied over the last century, large-scale deaths have been consistently recorded. In fact, the disaster database’s death toll is very close to official estimates. And that data tells an incredible and heartening story. A century ago, almost half a million people died on average each year from storms, floods, droughts, wildfires and extreme temperatures. Over the next 10 decades, global annual deaths from these causes declined 96%, to 18,000. In 2020, they dropped to 14,000. Unsurprisingly, the media this year has been filled to the brim with coverage of natural disasters, from the Northwestern Heat Dome to floods in Germany and China. Yet it has conveniently left out the total death toll. So far 5,500 people have died from climate-related disasters in 2021. Using previous years’ data to extrapolate, climate-related deaths will probably total about 6,600 by the end of the year. That’s almost 99% less than the death toll a century ago. The global population has quadrupled since then, so this is an even bigger drop than it looks.
Zitat von Keith Lockitch May 27, 2022 33 min readFossil Future: A Powerful, Must-Read Defense of Fossil Fuels
Among a set of recent books challenging the alarmist view of climate change, Fossil Future by Alex Epstein is uniquely original, forceful and persuasive.
The fear and anxiety people feel about this issue has reached such a fever pitch that it was viewed as unremarkable in 2019 when figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Greta Thunberg said with a straight face that the world will end by 2030 if we don’t stop using fossil fuels.
Four recent books challenging this apocalyptic narrative, therefore, are a welcome addition to the debate over climate and energy. Each in its own way urges us to think about these issues in a more sober, objective way — and to discuss them rationally, without judgments clouded by panic and hysteria.
Three of these books were published within the last two years: False Alarm by Bjorn Lomborg, Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger, and Unsettled by Steven Koonin. A fourth book, Fossil Future by Alex Epstein, just recently came out on May 24, 2022. ... With Epstein’s framework, we can view all four books, in essence, as detailed explorations of all the various ways our “knowledge system” goes wrong on the issues of climate and energy.
But why does that happen? Why is it that the complex network of people and institutions that study and disseminate information about these subjects produces such drastically false and dishonest conclusions?
This is another question to which the answer offered by Epstein’s Fossil Future stands out above the other books in its depth and insightfulness. ... The whole structure of Epstein’s argument is radically different from the other three books. They each begin by focusing their efforts on refuting the alarmist perspective on climate change. The alternative perspective they each have to offer comes later and, in some respects, almost seems like an afterthought.
Epstein, by contrast, argues right out of the gate for a positive ideal: a future of unlimited human flourishing made possible, in part, by expanding our use of fossil fuels. ... The books by Lomborg, Koonin, and Shellenberger can all help with this. I don’t endorse every last one of their various claims and arguments, but I highly recommend all of them as worth reading. They each bring a unique approach to the subject and have their own valuable insights to offer.
But Alex Epstein’s Fossil Future is in a category of its own.
It argues, carefully and painstakingly but with luminous clarity, for a fundamental rethinking of everything we think we know about fossil fuels and climate change.
Anyone who thinks they’ve heard all the arguments on these issues must think again. As someone who has been writing and thinking about energy, climate, and environmentalism for almost two decades, I was inspired by the originality, the clarity, and the persuasive forcefulness of Epstein’s argument.
If Fossil Future gets a fair hearing, it has the potential to be a true game-changer — to fundamentally shift the debate on climate and energy away from the suicidal, anti-human, climate-alarmist path the world is currently on, and towards a rational, pro-human perspective.
Anyone who cares about humanity’s future owes it to himself to read this profoundly important book, to engage deeply with its reasoning, and to recommend it to everyone they know.
Zitat Megyn Kelly: Now you make sure to point out you're not a climate change denier. You're somebody who acknowledges the planet is warming - but not necessarily at the catastrophic levels that are being predicted and I don't know: Would you say it's not something we need to worry about? Or would you say it's just not something we need to catastrophize the way some on the left do?
Alex Epstein: I think you need to just recognize what it is. So yes: when you do anything in life, there are benefits and side effects. And some of those side effects are negative, so when you burn fossil fuels, it's a warming gas and a fertilizing gas (by the way, that part is positive). The warming has positives and negatives. Warming occurs mostly in colder parts of the world where people want it to be warmer. But it can also lead to some increase in heat waves in warmer parts of the world. But the thing that comes along with that are just these enormous benefits - the ability to have modern agriculture, which depends on modern diesel machines and fertilizer; the ability to have modern medical care; the ability to have all of this time to fight, you know, a new virus like Covid-19. So my basic argument is: we need to think about fossil fuels in the way we think of prescription drugs. You look at the benefits and the side effects - except the one thing about fossil fuels is that they can actually cure their own side effects. So they can make drought worse, hypothetically - but then they can have irrigation and drought relief convoys that make it far better - which is why drought-related deaths are down 99 percent over the last 100 years. So I'm OK - and I'm totally OK and on board with people looking for superior low-carbon alternatives, and I'm probably the world's biggest advocate of nuclear. But we should not be sacrificing energy, because energy is far more important than climate change.
MK: And I know you make the point in the book that what we don't realize is that there are three billion people out there who are not really using electricity and energy in the way that we do here in the western world - and that we they are using is actually quite terrible for them and for the environment. And so expanding the use of fossil fuels to these people would actually help the world, not hurt it.
AE: I mean that one statistic that I find really powerful, which I got from the energy expert Robert Bryce, just looking at the data - is that there are three billion people who are using less electricity individually than one of our refrigerators. So you just think about you have to divide all your electricity into one refrigerator. And as you indicated with environmental quality: One third of the world is burning wood and animal dung for their heating and cooking. So think about what that means for their environment. So imagine them using natural gas, even modern clean coal: it's a total transformation in their environmental quality. Also gives them clean water. And then it just allows them to become productive and prosperous. Without energy powering machines you cannot be productive and prosperous, and therefore the world is not a good place to live.
MK: Let's talk about that - because we kind of take these machines for granted, don't we? You know, it's like, I don't know, I'm building a studio right now, and you look out, you see the excavator, and you see the dump trucks, and you see all these big machines that do what would take men or women probably years to actually do, and they do it in a wek. That's related to your argument: How do we power those vehicles? How does the way in which we use fossil fuels go way beyond what we put in our gas tank?
ME: Definitely. I think it's such a crucial point, and before I started in energy I just didn't think of it. I just thought of "Oh, I fill up my gas tank, and maybe I pay a gas bill, and maybe I pay a power bill..." You know, what most think about that. But the way to think of it is: today's world is just completely, unnaturally abundant, and everything you see around you, it can exist in this abundance (including the food, by the way) because of machine, because we can use machines to dramatically amplify our abilities and exand. So by amplifying - and an example of that is a modern combine harvester that can reap and thresh one thousand times more wheat than the best manual labor. So it turns us into supermen, superwomen. But what it also does: it allows us to do things that no number of human beings can do. For example: we can't get a thousand of us together and fly. We can't move cargo via flight. We need machines to do that. A lot of what computers do we can't do at all. What an incubator does, that's a really life-and death thing, I point out in "Fossil Future." Human beings can't provide that. And so our whole way of life, the whole world we live in as we experience it, depends on these amazing machines, and they are these unsung heroes - as are the people who are producing the fossils fuels that we're choosing to use, because they are the lowest cost, most reliable way of powering our machines, most of the time.
MK: You point out in the book that according to the WHO, two billion peple lack basic sanitation in this world: toilets and so on, that an estimated 10% of the world's population consumes food irrigated by waste water. That diarrhea kills roughly 432,000 people annually. I mean, those are just stunning numbers. But if you live in a fossil-fueled world, you have a very different experience - incredibly clean, incredibly sanitary - yet another thing we take for granted.
ME: Yeah, and I think we should really lay a lot of blame on what I call "our designated experts": they're the people that are basically telling us: "hey, here's what to do" - so the people are telling us "hey, we need to rapidly eliminate fossil fuels." And what I point out, starting in Chapter One of the book, which is called "Ignoring Benefits" is: these people are ignoring the huge benefits of fossil fuels now and in the future. And this is really deadly. So an example I've been thinking of lately because we're hearing talk of starvation, is the fact that we haven't been taught about the benefits of fossil fuels for agriculture - both fertilizer coming from natural gas, and all the amazing machines being being powered primarily by oil-based fuels. And an example I give is one of our leading experts, a climate scientist named Michael Mann, has a whole book about "Fossil Fuels and Climate," and he talks a lot about agriculture - but he only talks about negative side effects, about how warming might harm agriculture in some areas - but he doesn't talk about the fact that 8 billion people depend on fossil fuels for their food. And so it's no wonder we have restricted fossils fuels: prices are skyrocketing, and people are threatened with starvation. And I put that on Michael Mann and our other designated experts for deliberately making us ignorant about the unbelievable benefits of fossil fuels.
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