Book Review - Alex Epstein - Fossil Future

“Mr.Epstein are you a scientist?” That is how Sen. Babara Boxer tried to discredit Alex Epstein [@AlexEpstein] as expert in a hearing. He is not. He is something more troublesome. He is a philosopher.

That means he is an expert on thinking and flaws in thinking. One of which would be Boxer’s display of “argument from authority”. In “Fossil Future”¹ He takes this skill set to the question of climate change policy, which is a distinct topic from climate science. He is not disputing the findings of climate dynamics, chemistry or paleology. Instead, he delivers a critique of the designated experts, synthesizers like the IPCC, disseminators like WaPo or NYT journalists and interpreters of the scientific findings and their influence on policy design.

Cost-Benefit-Analysis

Epstein approaches the question of fossil fuel usage methodically;

He finds that in the public discussion the benefits of fossil fuels are ignored, and it is generally assumed that alternative sources of energy can easily pick up. But fossil fuels are delivering 80% of the world’s energy. Solar and Wind are at around 4%, large hydro, biomass and nuclear are the rest. Fossil fuels are especially helpful for long-range transport, because they are so energy dense, for industrial heat applications, like smelting iron or making concrete, for materials, like plastic, which we use to prevent the spoilage of food, infections and to make cars lighter, and they are indispensable in fertilizer and pesticides production. Without fossil fuels, large parts of our life cease to work. Banning fossil fuels without an alternative is a catastrophe.

He contrasts these predictable outcomes of “the cure” with the predicted outcomes of the “disease” and finds that the knowledge system tends to emphasize the negative side effects of fossil fuels, for example the consequences of sea-level rise are predicted using the most pessimistic emission scenarios and assuming no adaption of humanity to changing circumstances. This produces hundreds of millions of predicted refugees. Allowing for adaption reduces these numbers to tens of thousands. The benefits of fossil fuels - cost-effectiveness, scalability, reliability and portability - are almost never mentioned. To the contrary, the promises of alternative sources of energies are portrait optimistically, despite the fact that after 50 years of aggressive subsidies they still have a rather small contribution of overall energy consumption, virtually zero in industrial heat or heavy-transport applications.

Contrary to that, Epstein produces the Human Flourishing Hockey Sticks, significant increases in human life expectancy, world population, wealth measured in GDP. These are highly correlated and easily causally explainable by the increased use of fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels enable humanity the use of machine labor, which amplifies and extends our capabilities. This helps humanity to become robust against varying climates and are allows us to live in places as different as Northern Canada and Florida. Abandoning them would make us less safe.

Do we allow a distortion of the cost-benefit analysis of fossil fuels? If so, what allows this distortion? True to a philosopher, Epstein tries to pin the root cause of these phenomena down to bad philosophy. The delicate nurturer assumption, which states that the world is in a fragile balance, that just happens to be right for us, makes it appear as if any impact on nature must necessarily change it to the worse. This spawns what Epstein calls the Anti-Impact Framework, which pegs “no human impact” as the highest moral goal. This explains resistance to low-carbon energy sources (nuclear, fracking, fusion) and the growing opposition to wind and solar projects, even though these would help us to solve the predicted problems attributed to CO2 emissions.

He tries to contrast this with a “Human Flourishing”-framework, where the goal is to increase human flourishing.

The “Delicate Nurturer Assumption”

The delicate nurturer assumption is the assumption that Earth, absent human impact, exists in an optimal, nurturing “delicate balance” that is as stable, sufficient, and safe as we can hope to expect. But for Epstein, nature is dynamic, deficient and dangerous.

The distortion wrecked upon nature is captured by the famous formula “Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology” - oh how often we are the victim of some ridiculous oversimplification!

If we look at this formula, how do we minimize human impact? By reducing our level of technology, our numbers and/or our affluence. Given that billions of people are still using less energy than the average American fridge, that hardly seems like a sustainable or ethical solution. But this formula is kind of instructive to the behavior of a lot of the “designated experts” of the “deep green” way of thinking: we have often heard that there is overpopulation and we need to reduce our numbers; that capitalism produces excess, and we need a system that “rationally distributes” (just?) as much as people need; and we see an aversion against basically any form of technological advancement: gene edited crops, nuclear power, vaccines, industry. Almost anything that could make a large contribution towards intensifying our land usage in order to keep more land “pristine”, is opposed, because it is “unnatural”.

If your goal is to minimize impact, these are just pretty straight forward conclusions. But of course, this formula is a ridiculous simplification: Let’s just take nuclear as an obvious example - it’s a technology that can power entire high-tech civilizations on a minimal footprint, leaving super-small amounts of waste compared to other technologies and virtually zero waste after a thousand years or so, if we assume the development of a breeding economy.

Also observe, what you would desperately want to oppose, if your goal consisted of minimizing impact: you would be mortified by large numbers of people getting their hands on enough technology to make themselves affluent. I cannot read minds and I cannot divine the motivation of people, but a lot of “aid” money seems to be geared towards perpetuating a state of dependence and subsistence level living for people of color, especially in the global South. Keeping a lot of people at - or even preferably below - subsistence level of economic development fits squarely with the goal of minimizing impact by that formula.

I think this opposition can be showcased with the topic of a yet unproven technology, which should, have the smallest footprint of them all: nuclear fusion. Solar, wind, biomass, hydropower - even fossil fuels are ultimately transformed or stored forms of fusion power; every star you see is a mindbogglingly huge fusion generator. Most of the mass in our solar system is in our sun, undergoing fusion eventually. You cannot go much more “natural” than using one of the fundamental forces of the universe.

Yet our “designated experts” are trembling at the very thought of it ever getting developed: “Paul Ehrlich: Developing fusion for human beings would be “like giving a machine gun to an idiot child.” Jeremy Rifkin, another designated environmental expert: “It’s the worst thing that could happen to our planet.” Amory Lovins was already on record as saying, “It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.” (p.87)

The more impact we can make, the worse. That’s why fusion is not the ultimate good, but rather the ultimate evil: “Consider: What do we do with energy? We use it to power machines that then impact nature in one way or another—from plowing fields to building homes to producing cars. The more cost-effective energy is, the more we will impact nature with more development, more resource use, more consumption—all things that are immoral if our goal is to eliminate human impact."(p.87)

Epstein contrasts this “delicate nurturer assumption with the producer-improver premise: Human beings are capable of producing new value and of improving the safety and cleanliness of dynamically and adaptive environment. And they use technology to do so.

The benefits of fossil fuels for human flourishing

Epstein argues that only fossil fuels provide what he calls ultra-cost-effective energy - low cost, on-demand, versatile, on a scale of billions of people in thousands of places and claims that today’s world is unnaturally livable and ultra-low-cost energy is fundamental to that. That’s why the usage of fossil fuels is still growing.

Fossil fuels have remarkable natural attributes and unrivalled amount of innovation and achievement put into them. They are naturally stored, naturally concentrated and abundant. Fossil fuels are benefitting our world in different forms: “fulfilling productive time, fulfilling nourishment and protection, and fulfilling leisure time."(p.155) They are used in fertilizers to feed us, in plastic to cloth us, shelter us, protect us and our food, in medicine to keep us from becoming infected, in pumps to supply us with fresh water, in harvesters, trucks and ships to collect and transport our food, in refrigerators to keep it from spoiling, in cranes to erect the buildings and infrastructure to keep us sheltered etc. There is for example an unbound demand for computation in virtually any endeavor of life: communication, control of processes, telework, telemedicine, cryptography, entertainment, research. AI application will become a new source major source of power consumption. Even “money creation” can be directly tied to energy: bitcoin is in a very literal sense energy money: “miners” are using the most energy-efficient components they can muster to build to calculate numbers in one-way functions (which are really, really inefficient to reverse), to create symbols of value; because it takes non-fakable effort to create these symbols, a lot of people consider them as a great substitute to so-called “fiat money”. This indicates that energy efficiency will not necessarily lead to less energy consumption. This is known as “rebound effect”.

Consequences of dropping the context

Without the proper context, it becomes clear why people of school age, like Thunberg, act the way they do. They don’t understand, why we are “ending the world” with “this totally unnecessary thing” and “all experts agree”. How dare you! But in fact the services derived from cheap energy are not “unnecessary” and not easily replaced. And the consensus of the experts about “ending the world” seems to be a little less uniform, if you ask questions differently. Will the climate change? Yes. Will it wipe out civilization? I think you will be harder pressed to find a consensus of any sort on the question. In fact, the estimates of the economic impact of climate change on the economy, a proxy word for human wellbeing, seems to be on the order of a few percentage points by 2100. But you would probably not get that message from the front pages of the news. Dropping that context has created millions of children with “climate anxiety”.

We would need to build untested energy sources on an unprecedented scale of mining and infrastructure with an anti-development mindset in a crash timeline, if we were to fulfill the “pledges” of “net zero”. It’s unlikely that we can do that. Building is quite hard. Destroying is far easier. ESG is a device to destroy the fossil fuel industry. Climate activists are champions of this device. And it already has shown real world impact: the restriction in production, refinement and transportation of energy have left us unprepared for a market disruption brought about by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It’s a contributing factor to the current energy crisis, probably the largest since the 70s. Epstein believes there are two criteria that must be met before a side effect is considered genuine endangerment that justifies government action. It must be (1) demonstrably and significantly harmful and (2) reasonably preventable. For him, both criteria are flagrantly violated by today’s anti-impact endangerment policies regarding fossil fuels.

A small group of designated sinners (oil & companies, and chemical industry) was created that is supposed to take the blame for providing something a lot of people want. Almost like with prostitution, alcohol and gambling. I don’t want to draw analogies lightly, but I think we have seen what devastating effects a youth, “radicalized” against their elder “villains” that are in the way of “progress” can have: in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Such is the power of dominance-virtue games. And “the green movement” is probably the most powerful of such games being played right now.

Alternative scenarios for future energy use

Epstein presents five scenarios for the future of fossil fuels:

1. Alternatives to fossil fuels, which currently provide 20 percent of the world’s energy, will continue to be modest supplements.

2. Alternatives to fossil fuels will become more significant supplements to meet increasing global energy needs—providing, say, 30 percent of the world’s energy in a world that increasingly uses far more energy. Under this hypothetical scenario, fossil fuel use would still increase, just less slowly than alternatives would.

3. In a radical departure from current reality and trends, alternatives to fossil fuels will become partial replacements for fossil fuels, providing so much cost-effective energy there is actually a decline in fossil fuel use despite growing energy needs.

4. In a radical departure from the way any energy economy has ever worked, alternatives will rapidly become total replacements for fossil fuels, supplying all the energy fossil fuels provide today plus all the additional energy that will be needed by an empowering world.

5. Even more extreme than the previous scenario, the alternatives considered “green”—solar, wind, biomass, and geothermal, but no large-scale hydro and no nuclear—can alone become total replacements for fossil fuels.(p. 203)

Unfortunately, innovation is hard. Epstein cites Elon Musk: “Smart people on Wall Street generally … think that once you have come up with a prototype, that’s the hard part and everything else is trivial copying after that. It’s not. It’s perhaps 1 percent of the problem. Large-scale manufacturing, especially of a new technology, it’s something between 1,000 and 10,000 percent harder than the prototype.” (p.190) Incidentally, Musk’s critique is something I share with respect to the fusion industry and more recently with respect to advanced nuclear power plants. It takes a lot of blood and sweat to get through the learning curve of a technology. Without any substantial technological improvements, the fleet capacity factor of the US nuclear plants rose from something like 70% to something like 93%. There is nothing in energy that rivals the accumulated knowledge and innovation of fossil fuels. Epstein looks at alternatives to fossil fuels:

“Solar and wind, while sometimes good for remote locations that need very little electricity, have been a disaster when applied to the massive and dynamic electricity needs of the empowered world. Adding wasteful, unreliable solar and wind infrastructure to the grid has increased costs and decreased reliability, harming people and industry wherever it has been used to the extent it has been used."(p. 218). They provide little in heating, domestic and industrial, do not help with long-range, heavy-duty transportation and are still no able to provide reliable, dispatchable power economically without subsidies. Even in idealized situations, there are problems. Promises of cheap energy are based on partial cost accounting, without even a trace of system cost accounting. And these become gigantic pretty quickly².

Geothermal provides <1% of global energy production. It is not scalable yet, because the technologies for deep geothermal power, advanced and enhanced geothermal, which might be able to scale it significantly, are still in early development phase. Quaise Energy wants to develop multi-TW levels of power production, and “just” needs to drill “deeper, hotter, and faster than ever before possible”. Maybe in the future, after a lot of innovation and improvement, geothermal will be able to provide large-scale power for some applications.

Nuclear (fission) power is almost regulated out of existence. But it is the most promising form of energy from a physics perspective. Epstein’s thesis is that opposition to nuclear on “safety” grounds is a smoke screen for the real motivation of its anti-impact opponents: their hatred of nuclear is “because it impacts nature in ways they consider morally unacceptable. Even though nuclear is the safest form of energy for human beings, on the anti-impact framework it is morally “dangerous” because it deals in “unnatural” high-energy, radioactive materials and processes."(p. 235). I have argued that even in the most permissive regulatory environment possible, a “WW2 style economy” scaling nuclear to the dominant power source is not an easy task until 2050.

Large scale hydropower is criminalized and opposed. Western countries are denying the investments necessary to develop low-cost, low-carbon hydropower in Africa, because it would impact nature negatively. It might be scalable to 4 times its current level, but will not be able to scale to global energy demands.

Biomass might be interesting, if we found a way grow unprecedented amounts of raw material on really worthless land. We have hardly any idea about how to do that (maybe algae farms on the open ocean?), but the upside is that we would also be able to solve world hunger for good.

Removing CO2 from the atmosphere is really hard. There is no demand for it anywhere near the amounts that would be necessary to get back to pre-industrial level of atmospheric concentration. We will have to either store huge amounts of gaseous CO2 “somewhere” or we will have to convert it into stable solids or liquids; in a sense reversing the combustion process. And unfortunately, this will require at least as much energy as was gained by burning the fossil fuels in the first place. We are talking about rolling back hundreds of years of global energy consumption in addition to powering a world of 8 billion people - hopefully living a life with first world standard. The situation is not made better by the low concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. This does not look like a probable near-term scenario.

“To summarize: The economic innovation and achievement of today’s cost-effective electricity systems—involving large local plants producing baseload, load-following, and peaking electricity, have involved millions of people over generations working with the specific attributes of fossil fuels. The fact that fossil fuels have both remarkable natural attributes that most alternatives lack, and that an unrivaled amount of economic innovation and achievement has gone into harnessing those specific attributes with maximum cost-effectiveness, creates an incredibly high bar for potential alternatives to fossil fuels.” (p.192)

Greenhouse Effect

Without the greenhouse effect, life on earth would look very differently, because earth’s average temperature would not be on the order of -18° C. Greenhouse gases modify how the atmosphere retransmits solar radiation. Normally, there is a logarithmic relationship; the doubling of the concentration of CO2 should lead to the same increase in average temperature. This increase is the unamplified greenhouse effect.

Climate scientists, know that there are certain feedback loops which “amplify” or “enhanced” this greenhouse effect. While the unamplified effect is on the order of 1° C per doubling in atmospheric CO2 concentration, the amplified effect is hotly disputed; estimates of 1.5° C to 5° C are discussed. For Epstein, it doesn’t really matter, because even if those extreme projections came true, they would be masterable. And we could not get the CO2 concentration to even a quarter of what it has been according to the paleological estimate. But his reading of the evidence is that it supports a CO2 sensitivity in the lower part of that range. This “average” heating will be distributed quite inhomogeneously. It will be mostly concentrated in colder regions at colder times. Some effects of this might be positive for some people; longer growing periods, extending growing areas to the North, milder winters in colder regions, etc. Epstein argues that it is not trivial to net all of these effects of CO2 alone; contrary, he argues that the net of the direct effects of fossil fuels plus the negatives of CO2 is easily positive.

Policy Recommendations

Given the discussion of alternatives and the cost-benefit analysis of fossil fuels, Epstein argues that giving people freedom will be most conductive to increasing human flourishing. “Fundamentally, freedom—the freedom to produce energy, properly defined so as to prevent the improper endangerment of others. The reason why freedom is fundamental is that it liberates the deepest root of productive ability, even deeper than cost-effective machine labor: the reasoning human mind."(p. 362-363) This view, probably rooted in his Ayn Rand inspired world view, also leads to a different perspective on development aid: “[T]he key to using significant amounts of energy as a consumer is first using significant amounts of energy as a producer, so that you become productive enough to afford lights, cell phones, and air-conditioning—not dependent on receiving them as a gift from abroad. And using significant amounts of energy as a producer depends on the freedom to trade. Thus, policy priority number one to empower the unempowered world is for the unempowered world to create the institutions necessary to protect the freedom to trade: contracts, property rights, rule of law.” (p. 368) Epstein identifies some additional high-leverage policies to rapidly expand freedom of competition:

1. eliminate all government preferences, above all “green” preferences;

2. where governments have a monopoly, use the pro-human standard of cost-effectiveness. (p. 378)

Epstein believes that global fossil fuel elimination is not going to happen, but that our knowledge system’s overwhelming push for global fossil fuel elimination will almost certainly lead to a disempowered future in three ways:

1. unilateral disempowerment,

2. incentivized unempowerment, and

3. widespread underempowerment.(p. 397)

Unilateral disempowerment is the concept that some places eliminate fossil fuel usage, which leads to skyrocketing prices and the loss of competitive jobs. Economic collapse is a real possibility. He fears that this fate will befall the freest nations, while unfree economies like China or Russia could gain a competitive edge from the continued usage of fossil fuels.

Incentivized unempowerment is the idea that rich nations incentivize unempowred, poor nations to refrain from using fossil, either by carrot (=direct handouts) or stick(=threat of embargos or ceasing of aid payments). “Since many unempowered nations are dictatorships, the dictators involved will be more than willing, in exchange for some sort of payoff, to not increase fossil fuel use—which will inevitably hold back progress (which is what dictatorships do anyway). (p.398)

Widespread underempowerment is the idea that even partial restriction on energy freedom are making energy less reliable, less versatile and more expensive. “Because energy is the industry that powers every other industry, widespread underempowerment will prevent flourishing and progress on a global scale.” (p.398)

The summarized argument

Epstein summarizes his argument as follows:

• The uniquely cost-effective energy we get from fossil fuels makes the world an unnaturally livable place—including unnaturally safe from climate—for billions of people.

• The world is still a barely livable place for billions of people who lack cost-effective energy.

• No combination of alternatives, least of all unreliable solar and wind, can replace fossil fuels’ ability to provide cost-effective energy for the billions who have it and the billions who need it.

• Fossil fuels’ CO2 emissions have contributed to and will continue to contribute to slow, masterable, and often beneficial warming as well as significant global greening—nothing resembling a crisis.

• Before the fossil fuel conversation is properly framed, each of these fundamental truths is some combination of not considered and inconceivable. But when the conversation is properly framed, each of these fundamental truths becomes (1) extremely hard to deny, (2) extremely discrediting of the mainstream approach to fossil fuels, and (3) extremely effective at changing someone’s view of fossil fuels. (p. 415-416)

I believe Epstein is sincere, when he states that “[b]ecause cost-effective energy is so important and so desperately needed, what to do about fossil fuels going forward is one of the most important decisions of our lifetime. Because the mainstream knowledge system is on the anti-impact framework, it is guaranteed to give us terrible, anti-human guidance—and its prescription of rapidly eliminating fossil fuels could well be catastrophically bad.” (p.103-104)

The question of empowering the world, bringing modern comforts like health care for children, reproductive medicine or air-conditioning to the people who desperately need it, is still an urgent matter: “Not only are there the 10 percent of people who still struggle (and die early) on less than $2 a day, but the overwhelming majority of humanity still lives at a level that most readers of this book would consider desperate poverty. For example, five billion people still live on less than $10 a day."(p. 358) This cause needs a champion and Epstein looks like he would not mind being it. I think Epstein was diligently in presenting the case. He has a very structured why of presenting his argument. But this, at least to me, makes it somewhat repetitive. It’s ok, because in a day and age of vastly reduced attention spans for print media, a reader might be reading the book in multiple sessions, which makes the existence of summaries helpful.

Discussion

On Philosophy

Personally, I don’t think that many of the poorly structured arguments from proponents of “green” ideas are rooted in philosophy, instead I believe that they are an effect of a virtue game gone wild. They are, I think, not a question of philosophy or even logic. They are a question of status: an irrational zero-sum game. But maybe that is just because I have been exposed to and thought about this concept so much recently. See for example my podcast episode on the status game. I just see a lot of the calls for reducing the lifestyle and energy consumption as signaling elite status.

It seems to me that Epstein is sometimes using the “argument from ignorance”. He mistakenly uses a lack of imagination about a different hypothesis as conclusive proof that there is none. For me, this lets some passages convey too much certainty about the unknown inner thoughts of other people.

Another area of contention I have with the argument is what I would like to call the “economists’ fallacy”: linearity (Gaussian probability distributions and differentiability) seems to rule supreme in a lot of economists. But: there is no real reason to expect linearity, especially in the reaction of highly complicated and complex coupled system WITH KNOWN non-linearities. In that sense, I think it is not rigorous to assume that there are no threshold effects. Taleb would probably even insist that our ignorance about it SHOULD make us extra cautious, because extinction might be at stake.

Additionally, the proxy measures like average life expectancy, GDP and population are proxies of flourishing, not a direct measure of it. Such proxies have to be used with caution! For example, is a population decline the effect of ideology or of technological decline? Does GDP measure “wealth” accurately? Or is it overemphasizing for example the financial sector, real-estate, the healthcare sector and the military-industrial sector by including their monopoly profits?

I failed to understand Epstein’s case against including the negative externalities of fossil fuels in their price. Of course, there are bad ways to include the price. But I think that carbon dividends and carbon clubs can put a price on the CO2, incentivizing the development of CO2-free alternatives, without reducing average buying power. I am open to the argument that there are practical problems with such schemes, fair enough, but I don’t understand the theoretical case against it. But that might very much be my fault.

Personally, I have my problem with Epstein’s thinly veiled form of utilitarianism, because I am more rooted in the Popperian/Rawlsian conception of neg-utilitarianism. In this conception, the reduction of suffering is the highest goal. Practically, I believe, this would emphasize access to low-cost energy, transport, healthcare, ACs and so on for the world’s poor even more. But the philosophical argument between maximizing the average or maximizing the minimum has gone on for too long to even hope to solve it here. So I will leave it at that.

What has to be said so though, is that taking the worst 5% of a group to represent the whole group is “loserthink”, as per Scott Adams [@ScottAdamsSays].

No question, this is an abominable statement:

“McKibben is a biocentrist, and so am I. We are not interested in the utility of a particular species or free-flowing river, or ecosystem, to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value—to me—than another human body, or a billion of them. Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. … Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” (p.81).

But we have to remind ourselves that this is not representative of the green movement. Most members will not hold as extreme views. And we should be diligent in putting blame, where it belongs.

The future of billions of people is riding on our decisions about energy; we just cannot allow ourselves to reason sloppily. That is why Alex Epstein has done all of us a service by formulating the “pro”-argument for fossil fuels as powerfully and persuasively as I have not seen anywhere else. It’s my sincere hope, that we will come to a so much better synthesis, if the public discourse about energy and climate seriously engages his argument to have the full and proper context.

Update 2022-09-02: Alex Epstein has released a summary of his argument on substack. You might want to check it out.