The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels

Alex Epstein, an energy philosopher and founder of the Center for Industrial Progress, a think tank focused on energy issues, presents an argument that fossil fuel use is not merely practical but morally good, measured by a standard of human well-being. Published in 2014, the book combines data analysis, philosophical reasoning, and critiques of the environmental movement to argue that coal, oil, and natural gas have been, and remain, indispensable to human flourishing.

Epstein opens with a 2009 encounter at a farmers' market in Irvine, California, where a Greenpeace volunteer asked him to help end humanity's "addiction" to fossil fuels. When Epstein replied that the world would be better with more fossil fuel use, the volunteer assumed he must be paid by the fossil fuel industry. This anecdote frames Epstein's central observation: The conventional wisdom treats fossil fuel use as a destructive habit, yet 87 percent of the world's energy comes from coal, oil, and natural gas. Epstein contends that leading experts predicted catastrophe from fossil fuel use for over 30 years, but the opposite occurred. The world nearly doubled its fossil fuel consumption while experiencing dramatic improvement in nearly every measure of human life.

To support this claim, Epstein surveys decades of failed predictions. He cites the Club of Rome's 1972 book The Limits to Growth, which forecast that oil would run out by 1992; ecologist Paul Ehrlich's predictions of mass famine; and Life magazine's 1970 forecast that urban dwellers would need gas masks within a decade. He notes that climate scientist James Hansen predicted in 1986 temperature rises of "2 to 4 degrees in the following decade" (7), far exceeding what actually occurred. Environmentalist Bill McKibben predicted in 1989 that "a few more decades of ungoverned fossil-fuel use and we burn up, to put it bluntly" (8). John Holdren, who later became science adviser to President Obama, warned of CO₂-induced famines killing up to a billion people before 2020. Epstein stresses that these thinkers remain highly influential, yet their track records are rarely examined.

Against these predictions, Epstein presents data showing strong correlations between rising fossil fuel use and improvements in human welfare. Between 1980 and 2012, global oil consumption rose 39 percent, coal 107 percent, and natural gas 131 percent. In China and India, where fossil fuel use increased by at least a factor of five, life expectancy climbed sharply and infant mortality fell by 70 percent and 58 percent respectively. Globally, malnutrition declined 39 percent since 1990. Proven reserves of oil and natural gas grew even as consumption rose, because human ingenuity continually developed new extraction technologies. Most striking, Epstein argues, climate-related deaths worldwide fell by 98 percent over 80 years of escalating CO₂ emissions.

Epstein then establishes his methodological framework. He argues that experts should function as advisers rather than authorities, explaining their reasoning and acknowledging uncertainty. He insists on evaluating both benefits and risks, and he identifies a key philosophical divide: those who hold human life as their standard of value versus those who hold unaltered nature as the standard. He quotes National Park Service biologist David M. Graber, who wrote that human happiness is "not as important as a wild and healthy planet" (30-31), arguing that this nonhuman standard of value drives the anti-fossil fuel movement.

The book examines the global energy challenge. Epstein recounts a story from The Gambia in which two newborns died because a hospital lacked reliable electricity for an ultrasound machine and an incubator. He defines energy as "machine calories," the fuel that powers the machines enabling modern life, and notes that the average American uses approximately 186,000 calories of machine energy per day. With 1.3 billion people lacking electricity and over 3 billion lacking adequate electricity, Epstein argues the world needs far more energy, not less.

Epstein evaluates each major alternative and finds it insufficient. Solar and wind suffer from the diluteness problem, requiring enormous material inputs per unit of energy, and the intermittency problem, since sunlight and wind are unpredictable and unavailable on demand. He notes that Germany's massive renewable subsidies yielded only a small, unreliable fraction of the country's electricity, while coal capacity actually increased as backup. Biomass energy competes with cropland and drives up food prices. Hydroelectric power is cheap and reliable but geographically limited. Nuclear power is the most concentrated energy source, but its progress has been held back by exaggerated safety fears and government overregulation. Epstein concludes that no alternative can currently replace fossil fuels at scale.

He makes his positive case by explaining that fossil fuels are naturally concentrated, stored forms of ancient plant energy. Coal produced 41 percent of the world's electricity in 2011. Oil is the leading transportation fuel, with a gallon of gasoline containing 31,000 calories. Natural gas is ideal for peak-load electricity and home heating, and the shale energy revolution has expanded supply. Epstein argues that energy resources are created by human ingenuity, not passively consumed from a fixed stock. He traces oil's transformation from a nuisance substance in the 1850s to the world's most coveted fuel and contends that the Earth is "100 percent matter and energy, 100 percent potential resource" (75), limited only by human freedom and ingenuity.

A major section details how fossil fuels revolutionized agriculture through oil-powered mechanization, oil-based transportation, coal- or diesel-powered irrigation, and the Haber-Bosch process, which uses natural gas to produce synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. Epstein calls fossil fuel energy "the food of food" (83) and argues the energy industry is "the master industry" (84) that powers every other sector.

On climate science, Epstein distinguishes between the proven greenhouse effect, a laboratory-demonstrable warming impact of CO₂ that follows a diminishing logarithmic function, and speculative theories that positive feedback loops from water vapor will amplify warming to catastrophic levels. He shows that 102 modern climate models all significantly overpredicted warming. He deconstructs the "97 percent of scientists agree" claim, tracing it to a study by researcher John Cook that classified papers endorsing any amount of human contribution to warming as agreement that humans are the "main cause" (110), when only 1.6 percent of surveyed papers explicitly stated that human-caused greenhouse gases accounted for at least 50 percent of warming. Epstein also presents the fertilizer effect: thousands of controlled experiments by climate scientist Craig Idso showed that higher CO₂ concentrations produce significantly more plant growth, a benefit Epstein calls "scientifically uncontroversial yet practically never mentioned" (116).

Epstein introduces the "energy effect," arguing that fossil fuel energy's greatest climate benefit is amplifying humanity's ability to manage climate dangers. Data from the EM-DAT International Disaster Database, a Brussels-based repository of global disaster data, show that climate-related deaths plummeted even as CO₂ emissions rose. Industrialized G7 nations, the group of seven major advanced economies, experience dramatically lower climate-related death rates than less developed nations. Using the Netherlands, where 50 percent of the land lies less than three feet above sea level, as an example, Epstein argues that fossil fuel-powered engineering overcame severe geographic vulnerability through dikes, dams, and storm walls. The popular narrative, he contends, is backward: Humans do not take a safe climate and make it dangerous but take a naturally dangerous climate and make it safe.

The book closes with Epstein's account of his 2012 debate with McKibben at Duke University. He argues the environmental movement's true standard of value is minimizing human impact on nature, not protecting human welfare. As evidence, he cites environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin, who called the prospect of nuclear fusion "the worst thing that could happen to our planet" (196), and energy analyst Amory Lovins, who said a source of "clean, cheap, abundant energy" would be "little short of disastrous . . . because of what we might do with it" (196). Epstein proposes replacing the Green ideal of nonimpact with what he calls "industrial progress," the continuous improvement of the human environment through energy and technology. He closes with a single-sentence thesis: "Mankind's use of fossil fuels is supremely virtuous, because human life is the standard of value, and because using fossil fuels transforms our environment to make it wonderful for human life" (209).