Measurement and Climate Change – Part 5

Alex Epstein’s case for a Fossil Future, continued.

As has been explored in previous essays in this series, most people are aware of the costs of using fossil fuels.  Many fewer are aware of the vast benefits to humanity of fossil fuels.  And fewer still are aware of how fossil fuels themselves allow humanity to mitigate and control the negative effects of climate change.  In his book Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas – Not Less, Alex Epstein explores that last point in some detail.  As Epstein writes:

If our knowledge system is ignoring the benefits of fossil fuels in general, that may well mean it is ignoring the significant benefits of fossil fuels in protecting ourselves from climate danger, whether natural or man-made, which could lead it to dramatically overestimate the negative consequences of fossil fuels’ climate impacts … [T]he energy we get from fossil fuels also has significant climate mastery benefits, such as powering irrigation systems and drought relief convoys, that have reduced climate-related disaster deaths to all-time lows … The easier an environment makes it for the average human being to flourish, the more livable it is. I divide the livability of our world or any of its sub- environments into three basic aspects: How nourishing it is— meaning, what quantity and quality of food and water can a typical individual acquire with a given amount of time and effort? … How safe it is—how low a threat of death and damage from one’s environment a typical individual can achieve with a given amount of time and effort … How opportunity-filled it is—how much opportunity for fulfillment the typical individual has. Opportunity for fulfillment comes down to three issues: how much time individuals have on Earth, how much control individuals have over that time, and how fulfilling individuals’ options are for how to spend that time … If today’s narrative about fossil fuels destroying our delicate, nurturing planet were true, then a chart of fossil fuel use, life expectancy, income, and population would be a sad story. As fossil fuel use went up, life expectancy would go down as fossil fuels depleted the Earth of nourishment and created myriad new dangers. Income would also go down as resources became scarce—and the scarcity would become worse and worse if population went up. But when we look at an actual chart of these metrics of a livable world, we see that these metrics are going up in an unbelievable “hockey stick” that exactly correlates with fossil fuel use, including the CO2 emissions that are supposedly destroying our world … One of the key phenomena this chart shows is that each of the metrics of livability—life expectancy, income, population—stagnated at a very low level for thousands of years, meaning Earth was a barely livable place from a human flourishing perspective. While these charts go back only two thousand years, we know from historical records that they were preceded by tens of thousands of years of even less flourishing and progress. Then, some two hundred years ago, everything started improving dramatically. Earth went from what we would consider an unlivable place for the average human being to an increasingly livable place, continuing through to today—with the world being what our ancestors would consider to be an unimaginably livable place.

FIGURE 4.1 The Hydrocarbons and Human Flourishing Hockey Sticks Sources: Gilfillan, Marland, Boden, Andres (2020); World Bank Data; Maddison Project Database.

Epstein continues:

[E]ven though Earth is more livable than ever, it’s widely evaluated as “destroyed” because we’ve impacted it so much—even though that impact has brought billions of people out of poverty and made them far safer from climate danger … [T]he hydrocarbons and human flourishing hockey sticks illustrate that the incredible increase in the world’s livability correlates directly with a rapid increase in human CO2 emissions.

As Vaclav Smil writes in his book in his book How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going:

To get an even clearer picture of the magnitude of these changes, we should express these rates in per capita terms. The global population rose from 1 billion in 1800 to 1.6 billion in 1900 and 6.1 billion in the year 2000, and hence the supply of useful energy rose (all values in gigajoules per capita) from 0.05 in 1800 to 2.7 in 1900 and to about 28 in the year 2000. China’s post-2000 rise on the world stage was the main reason for a further increase in the global rate to about 34 GJ/capita by 2020. An average inhabitant of the Earth nowadays has at their disposal nearly 700 times more useful energy than their ancestors had at the beginning of the 19th century. The consequences of this in terms of human exertion, hours of physical labor, time for leisure, and the overall standard of living are obvious. An abundance of useful energy underlies and explains all the gains—from better eating to mass-scale travel; from mechanization of production and transport to instant personal electronic communication—that have become norms rather than exceptions in all affluent countries.

Epstein again:

The hydrocarbons and human flourishing hockey sticks, at minimum, demonstrate that whatever negative impacts rising CO2 may have on the livability of our world via additional climate danger, those negatives have been completely overwhelmed by other factors—factors that, for example, have saved and extended billions of lives that would have, in the past, been lost to starvation, poverty, and disease … When the improvement of our world is, all too rarely and incompletely, acknowledged, it is invariably ascribed to crucial factors that are treated as unrelated or barely-related to fossil fuel use, such as scientific discoveries, technological innovation, improved medical care, and improved sanitation. While scientific discoveries, technological innovations, improved medical care, and improved sanitation are indeed crucial contributors to the world’s livability, they are not unrelated or barely-related to fossil fuel use. In fact they have overwhelmingly depended on and will continue to depend on ultra-cost-effective energy production from fossil fuels or their equal … [A] timeless but little-recognized truth is that the livability of our naturally deficient and dangerous world is overwhelmingly determined by humanity’s productive ability. Our productive ability is the amount of life-enhancing value we can produce in a given amount of time. I emphasize “in a given amount of time” because producing value takes time, and human time continuously consumes value—including food, water, and fuel for warmth. The less value we can produce in a given amount of time, the lower our ability to flourish or even to survive. For example, throughout history when subsistence farmers have consumed food or firewood faster than they could produce them, they ran out of resources and died.

Epstein points out that our planet, without the energy we use, would be quite a dangerous place to live:

Our productive ability—the amount of life-enhancing value we can produce in a given amount of time—is directly linked to the amount of energy we can deploy in a given amount of time. The reason is that all production involves transforming nature, and transforming nature takes energy. When we are producing any material value, from a crop of corn to a water treatment plant to a hospital, we are using energy to transform the elements of nature into a more valuable form. Energy in the broadest sense is a measure of physical work, which in physics is defined as the product of force and distance—how much physical force is used over what distance to transform the elements of nature from one form into another form … Building a modern home takes a lot more energy than building a tepee, which takes a lot more energy than just moving oneself into a cave … Manual tools are amazing. But our ability to use manual tools is limited by the amount of energy we have to produce them and to power them. As much as manual tools help human beings, when human beings can only make and use tools with their own physical power, they can’t produce all that many tools and they can’t do all that much with those tools … [M]anual-labor, low-productivity life, which is in desperate need of productive innovation, also lacks the time necessary for such innovation. This explains much of the flatness of the human flourishing hockey sticks. When productivity and therefore income are low, life expectancy is low and time for innovation is limited. Which keeps productivity low, which keeps time for innovation low, and so on … Fossil fuels have increasingly solved the problem of human weakness on this naturally deficient and dangerous planet by producing energy cost-effectively enough that human beings can use machines to produce the values that we need to survive and flourish.

The use of fossil fuels makes us more physically safer in many ways.  As Epstein writes:

How safe is today’s world and what is fossil fuels’ positive role? While we are taught by our knowledge system, on the delicate nurturer assumption, to think of safety as something our planet naturally provided until destroyed by fossil fuels, the reality is that in its natural, unimpacted state, the planet perpetually poses many dangers to human life—and fossil fuels have made it unnaturally safe … Today, empowered by fossil fuels, we keep ourselves unnaturally safe by producing unprecedented amounts of protection from natural dangers, including (1) unprecedented shelter, (2) unprecedented sanitation, and (3) unprecedented medical care … When human beings are unempowered, they spend enormous amounts of time producing shelter and yet still only manage to produce shelters that are vulnerable, fragile, dirty, and uncomfortable … To take a modern-day example, consider the situation of Florence, a resident of Zambia, as told by energy and environmental expert Bjorn Lomborg: “As a widow, Florence is the sole income provider for five children and a grandchild … She scrapes together just [$38] each month by selling ground nuts and vegetables at a desk outside her house, and renting out one of its two rooms … Her family of seven crams into [one] room. There is no running water and no toilet.” That one room is ten feet by ten feet—one hundred square feet. For seven people. And she can barely afford it. Contrast Florence’s situation with that of the typical person in the empowered world, who can readily afford shelters that are unnaturally and amazingly protective, resilient, clean, and comfortable. The unprecedented state of shelter today depends on numerous fossil-fueled, shelter-related industries, including (1) shelter building, (2) temperature control, (3) fence building, and (4) clothing. Today’s unprecedented shelters are possible only because today’s shelter-building industry, like the food industry, employs a massive staff of fossil-fueled machine laborers that cost-effectively do incredible amounts of work for us. These machine laborers include: excavation machines that enable one human to dig up and move massive amounts of earth to make room for the foundations of sturdy buildings; grading machines that enable one human being to easily flatten uneven, bumpy patches of land to make them suitable for large, level structures; lifting machines, such as cranes, that can lift enormous amounts of weight that, if they could ever be lifted before, took years of slave labor; the machines we call power tools, which enable human beings to combine their dexterity with large amounts of power for precision tasks such as hammering, fastening, and sawing; compacting machines that make the ground under buildings solid; cutting machines that clear trees to make way for human habitation; paving machines that build the amazing roads that interconnect our shelters; mining machines that extract all the raw materials involved in our amazing buildings, from iron and coal for steel, to aluminum, to copper, to sand; and high-heat machines used to transform mined materials into vital usable materials such as cement, steel, and plastics.

Fossil fuels are used to protect people from extreme temperatures:

Fossil-fueled machine labor is also fundamental to our unprecedented protection from dangerous temperatures—above all the perennial death threat of cold—via temperature control. One of the most overwhelming shelter challenges in an unempowered environment is the timeless need to produce warmth when it’s cold. While today’s temperature focus in public discussions is on the phenomenon of being too hot, historically and to this day the far greater direct danger for human beings is being too cold … Even at moderate northern latitudes, cold requires an amount of heat production that can be overwhelming. For example, on the American frontier a typical household would consume four thousand cubic feet of wood per year, which weighed 80,000 to 160,000 pounds! That means on the average day a household would need 350 pounds of wood, chopped into pieces small enough to fit in a fireplace. In unempowered times and places that chopping must be done with manual labor, as must the felling of trees, as must much of the transportation of felled trees, such as on-loading and off-loading. Thus, keeping warm in unempowered places consumes a large portion of life. But it gets worse. The result of all this time spent on acquiring heat in unempowered places is not the level of comfort that we in the empowered world enjoy when we think of heat, which is a consistent, controllable level of heat distributed throughout our shelters, with little or no fumes. In unempowered places, wood—or, in the poorest places, animal dung—instead provides only concentrated heat around a multipurpose open fire, often used not only for warmth but also for cooking and heating water. This more “natural” way of heating shelters requires that individuals indoors breathe in amounts of smoke and fumes that are far greater than today’s world’s worst outdoor air pollution. “Having an open fire in your kitchen is like burning 400 cigarettes an hour,” says one leading researcher. And “household air pollution is still the largest single health risk factor for Indian women and girls.” Breathing fumes from an open fire is rampant in the unempowered world today, and literally billions of people live this way … In the empowered world, our heroic fossil-fueled machine laborers enable the average person to affordably and cleanly heat their shelter on-demand. For example, heating machines—the most cost-effective being natural gas furnaces—can enable a person making $25 an hour in a cold part of the U.S. to effectively and cleanly heat their family’s home for less than $2 a day—just five minutes of their time … Miraculous, cost-effective air-conditioning (cooling) machines make it possible, even in a hot summer in Phoenix, Arizona, for a $25-per-hour worker to cool their family’s home for just over three minutes of work a day—usually work done in an air-conditioned building! What a wonderful thing our fossil-fueled machine-labor world is—and what a dangerous travesty that we’re not taught to appreciate it and to fear its loss … Absent cost-effective machine labor, clothing is painstaking to produce, leading to a lot of time devoted to acquiring clothing with little to show for it. Before widespread empowerment, most people had only several items of clothing for their entire lifetimes. The difficulty of acquiring clothing was so bad that it was common practice in Europe to try to steal clothes off the dead, a practice that rapidly spread the disease that had killed the deceased in the first place … We use machines to grow the raw materials for clothing (or, in the case of synthetic clothing, to drill for them), to produce fabrics, to sew fabrics into clothing, to transport clothing. All of this makes clothing production so cost-effective that a poor person can buy a very warm winter jacket at Walmart for $50. Even at just $12.50 an hour, that’s four hours of work to be warm throughout an entire winter.

Before industrial advances made possible by fossil fuels, heat waves were particularly deadly:

For example, 1911, a year when CO2 levels were at the allegedly safe level of 298 parts per million, was a particularly tragic year of heat waves—because air-conditioning did not yet exist. The tragedy is captured well by a New England Historical Society story titled “The 1911 Heat Wave Was So Deadly It Drove People Insane.” A July 1911 heat wave killed thousands of New Englanders and sent many over the brink of madness … During 11 hellish days, horses dropped in the street and babies didn’t wake up from their naps. Boats in Providence Harbor oozed pitch and began to take on water. Tar in the streets bubbled like hot syrup. Trees shed their leaves, grass turned to dust and cows’ milk started to dry up. In every major northeastern city, the sweltering heat drove people to suicide. On July 4, temperatures hit 103 in Portland, 104 in Boston (a record that still stands), 105 in Vernon, Vt., and 106 in Nashua, N.H., and Bangor, Maine. At least 200 died from drowning, trying to cool off in rivers, lakes, ponds and the ocean—anything wet. Still more died from heat stroke. The 1911 heat wave was possibly the worst weather disaster in New England’s history, with estimates of the death toll as high as 2,000. Things were even worse in Europe. In France, over 40,000 people died in a heatwave—including thousands of babies. This kind of death from heat is unimaginable in the (supposedly too-hot) empowered world today, thanks to the use of fossil-fueled machines to produce insulated structures and the use of modern fossil-fueled air-conditioning systems—as well as the whole fossil-fueled modern medical care system, which can alleviate and cure heat-related conditions … Worldwide, including the empowered and unempowered world, drought-related deaths, once the leading form of climate-disaster death, have gone down by an incredible 99 percent in the last century—and reporting gaps in the data indicate that this might still be an underestimate … The number one way in which we use fossil-fueled machine labor to master drought is through irrigation … Irrigated lands average more than three times the crop yields of rain-fed areas. Sometimes irrigation can rely on gravity to move water, but when it can’t, irrigation takes a lot of energy—usually fossil fuel energy—to move the water. Irrigation systems utilize electricity-based (usually fossil fuel-dominated) or diesel-based machines to increase the amount and reliability of water going to crops.

Regarding storms:

Those in the empowered world today are safer from storms than anyone has ever been—with the unempowered world also experiencing an unusually high degree of safety from storms. Overall deaths from storms have declined 55.8 percent after peaking in the 1970s—when a massive storm in the unempowered world (specifically, in what is now Bangladesh) killed 200,000. Today’s low level of storm death is lowest in the empowered world, as illustrated by the chart of death rates from storms in G7 countries compared with the world as a whole … For every million people on earth, annual deaths from climate-related causes (extreme temperature, drought, flood, storms, wildfires … ) declined 98 percent—from an average of 247 per year during the 1920s to 2.5 per year during the 2010s.

Fossil fuels are also used to make things clean:

One of our knowledge system’s perpetual attacks on fossil fuels is that they make our environment unnaturally dirty. These attacks make any proposal to eliminate fossil fuel use seem like a boon for a clean environment. But nothing could be further from the truth: today’s fossil-fueled world is unnaturally clean and in particular sanitary. Contrary to the idea that a “natural” life is clean, all life involves waste. It involves waste from the animals we eat or use for labor, from the plants we use and eat, and from our own bodies. Thus, producing sanitation is always a crucial human task … Today in the unempowered world many die from diseases that emerge from poor sanitary conditions. According to the World Health Organization, 2 billion people lack basic sanitation, such as toilets, and an estimated 10 percent of the world’s population consumes food irrigated by wastewater. Diarrhea alone kills roughly 432,000 people annually.[24] One major reason why unempowered places have such bad sanitation is that because they must spend so much time producing food and shelter, they have limited time and other resources to devote to sanitation … We can dispose of all our waste almost effortlessly, achieving levels of hygiene that were once unimaginable. And this might cost us $100 a month for our combined water, sewer, and garbage bills. That’s just over $3 a day for amazing sanitation. At $25 per hour, that’s eight minutes a day to be cleaner than a king ever was. We call fossil fuels “dirty,” but it’s the world’s massive use of fossil fuels that produces this state of cleanliness … And today’s sanitation industry runs on fossil-fueled machines. Consider just a handful of the machines involved in modern sanitation: excavating machines that dig the sewers that separate drinking water from waste water; water-treatment machines that take water from a lake or a reservoir and make it safe for human use and consumption; garbage trucks that remove waste from where we live and work; garbage-processing machines, like waste separators, rotating trommels, and compactors that sort and handle the different types of garbage—from hazardous materials to recyclables; and garbage-burning machines that transform certain kinds of garbage into usable energy while dramatically shrinking the amount of space the garbage occupies. Modern sanitation also uses many materials that come from fossil fuels, including: plastic garbage and recycling bins that are lightweight, durable, and easy to clean; PVC plastic, the material of choice for household sanitary sewer pipes thanks to their low weight and long life span; and petroleum-based tarps for landfills that reduce odors, reduce fire hazards, and reduce risks from disease-spreading animals and insects … In the empowered world we use fossil-fueled machine labor to destroy the environments of dangerous populations of bugs. For example, in the case of malaria we drained the wetlands where the bugs laid their eggs. This involved diesel-powered excavators to dig drainage canals, and other fossil-fueled construction equipment to build levees and reservoirs. We also use fossil fuels as the material basis of pesticides—and spray them using fossil-fueled planes. While pesticides are demonized, they have saved hundreds of millions of lives, at least. For example, the National Academy of Sciences credited the fossil fuel–based pesticide DDT with saving 500 million lives … If billions of others are to live in as clean an environment as the empowered world does, it will require more of the value that fossil fuels provide. And without fossil fuels or their equivalent, the now-empowered world would regress toward its “naturally” dirty and unsanitary state.

Fossil fuels are also “fundamental to modern medical care.”  As Epstein writes:

We cannot think responsibly about our health if we do not recognize that modern medical care, like every other productive area of life, depends on fossil-fueled machine labor, fossil-fuel-freed-up mental labor, and fossil fuel materials. Let’s start with mental labor. Today’s massive medical care industry, with millions of people in the U.S. alone focusing on medical care full time, is possible only because fossil-fueled machine labor is so cost-effective at producing everything else we need. If it were not for all the time that fossil fuels free up, there would be no medical care industry as we know it. And the medical care industry as we know it, widely acknowledged as lengthening and improving lives, is powered by fossil fuels. Consider just some of the fossil-fueled machines that amplify and expand the abilities of medical practitioners: magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines that give doctors a 3D image of what’s going inside our bodies so they can diagnose previously undiagnosable ailments; fetal monitors that enable doctors to monitor the health of babies before they are born; refrigeration machines that keep temperature-sensitive medicines like vaccines at the right temperatures; heating and cooling machines that keep hospitals at the right temperature; anesthesia machines that give doctors the power to safely sedate us; infant incubators that save the lives of premature babies by giving them a safe environment as they develop; and computing machines that access and keep track of massive amounts of medical information … Machines are so prevalent in medicine that hospitals often spend almost 50 percent of their budgets on energy costs. And yet we’re not taught to think about fossil fuels when we think of medical care or medical care when we think of fossil fuels—we’re only taught to think of ways that fossil fuels’ side-effects can harm us. Fossil fuel materials are also indispensable to modern medicine, with medications, syringes, medical equipment, gloves, and masks all made of oil and/or natural gas. It’s hard to find something in a hospital that isn’t substantially made of oil and/or gas.

As Epstein summarizes:

Thanks to humanity’s fossil-fueled production of shelter, sanitation, and medical care, fossil fuels haven’t taken a naturally safe planet and made it unnaturally dangerous; they’ve taken an unnaturally dangerous planet and made it unnaturally safe. And for our world to become unnaturally safe for billions more people, we’re going to need far more of the ultra-cost-effective energy and materials we currently get from fossil fuels … [F]rom a human flourishing perspective, opportunity for fulfillment comes down to three issues: how much time we have on Earth, how much control we have over that time, and how fulfilling our options are for how to spend that time … As we’ve seen, an environment without massive amounts of time-freeing machine labor is an environment where most of one’s time is spent acquiring the most basic necessities in their crudest form. Such an environment, for the average individual, means a life of frequent tragedy, with infants dying, children dying, teenagers dying, adults dying in their thirties and forties, as the normal way of life. It means being in mostly the same place, unable to see most of the wonders of the world … [T]hanks to fossil-fueled machine labor, freed-up time, and materials, nourishment and protection have gone from insecure, time-consuming, and often painful necessities to sources of comfort, pleasure, and meaning … Our anti-energy knowledge system presents the current benefits of fossil fuel use as trivial compared with its increasingly overwhelming side-effects—which, we are told, will get increasingly worse over time, especially in the realm of climate. In reality, fossil fuels’ side-effects are overwhelmed by fossil fuel energy’s benefits, they are largely reduced by fossil fuel energy’s benefits, and they are increasingly neutralized by fossil fuel energy’s benefits.

This concludes this series of essays on measurement and climate change.