How can a practical case also be a moral case? Simple: if one’s standard of value is human life, as Epstein says his is, then whatever enhances human life is moral. There are some problems around the edges of his argument, but in a big-picture sense it holds up.
The best way to see this is to consider a true story he retells about Gambia, a tiny country in West Africa. In 2006, Kathryn Hall, founder of the energy charity Power Up Gambia, observed an emergency cesarean section in that country. The baby died only minutes after birth. The doctor explained that if he had had enough electric power, he would have been able to use an ultrasound machine and plan the C‑section rather than do it as an emergency surgery. Hall also observed the birth of a full-term baby weighing only 3.5 pounds. In the United States, the infant would have been put in an incubator. But the hospital managers, knowing they did not have a reliable energy supply, did not bother wasting money on an incubator. The baby died.
This story drives home the importance of a stable energy supply. Our lives literally depend on it.
Of course, we could still live our lives with much less energy. It’s just that our lives would be less full, we would be able to do fewer things, and we would be less wealthy. So it’s not just our lives that are Epstein’s standard, but a certain kind of life. Unfortunately he never makes that point explicit.
Fortunately, that shortcoming does not badly damage his argument. The vast majority of us want to have more wealth, more things, more leisure, more of the “good life.” Epstein does a tremendous job of showing how getting more of those things will require copious amounts of energy. For example, he quotes a passage from Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose in which they write, “The rich in ancient Greece would have benefited hardly at all from modern plumbing—running servants replaced running water.” The vast majority of us benefit greatly because we don’t have servants. And running water, of course, requires pumps, which require energy.
Cost / Epstein argues that fossil fuels are “cheap, plentiful, reliable, and scalable,” and he justifies each of those claims. He does so by relating facts about the fuels and by contrasting them with solar energy and wind power. Neither solar nor wind, he notes, is cheap and both are unreliable. Consider solar. The top five countries ranked by solar energy consumption, he writes, “are Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, and China.” But the percentage of those countries’ electricity from solar energy is tiny: “0.5 percent, 6.3 percent, 4.0 percent, 0.09 percent, and 0.6 percent.”
Why so low? Epstein argues that it is because solar is so expensive. He reminds us that we need to judge various energy sources by the cost of all the resources used to produce energy. Sure, rays from the sun are free, but the various materials used to convert those rays into a usable energy form are very expensive, requiring many other materials per unit of energy produced. Referencing a U.S. Department of Energy report, he notes that such materials “can include highly purified silicon, phosphorus, boron, and compounds like titanium dioxide, cadmium telluride, and copper indium gallium selenide.” The story for wind power is similar. He points out that generating one megawatt of electricity with wind power requires 542.3 tons of iron and steel, compared to only 5.2 tons to get the same amount of electricity using coal.
Moreover, both wind and solar energy are unreliable, for what should be obvious reasons: try getting solar energy at 8 p.m. in the winter or wind energy on a windless day. Epstein’s critique is more devastating than this, but at least you get the flavor.
Fossil fuels, by contrast, are much cheaper and much more reliable. Coal, which, Epstein points out, produced 41 percent of the world’s electricity in 2011, “is plentiful, widely distributed, and relatively easy to extract.” Unlike most mine products, he notes, “coal requires relatively little processing.” The big virtue of natural gas, besides the fact that it pollutes relatively little, is that it is very useful for producing peak power—that is, power during times of heavy usage.
In one section, Epstein absolutely devastates the idea of biofuels, pointing out how absurd it is to use large amounts of energy to produce biofuels, and then convert those biofuels back into energy. He writes, “If we could eat oil or electricity, we would, because it’s much cheaper [than food] per unit of energy. Why should we feed human food to machines with hundreds of times our appetites?”
Climate change / What about one potential downside to using more fossil fuels, all of which are carbon-based: namely, climate change? Epstein discusses this extensively. He points out that increased carbon dioxide affects climate in at least two ways: “as a greenhouse gas with a warming impact” and “as plant food with a fertilizing impact.”
On the “fertilizer effect,” Epstein references research by climate scientist Craig Idso showing that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere results in greater plant growth. Epstein cautions that this one effect does not prove “that there will be overwhelmingly positive climatological effects from” increasing carbon dioxide. That’s not his point. Rather, he points out that these positive effects on plants are “scientifically uncontroversial yet practically never mentioned” (italics his). This, he charges, is “a dereliction of duty” by commentators. He writes, “It is our responsibility to look at the big picture, all positives and negatives, without prejudice.” That is really the theme of the book.
But isn’t the “warming effect” of increased carbon dioxide a problem? It would be, he argues, only if it is catastrophic. Epstein gives evidence that the effect of increased carbon dioxide is logarithmic. In other words, if carbon dioxide increased by, say, 10 percent, the temperature would increase by much less than 10 percent.
Epstein produces a figure that purports to show this, but instead of giving the temperature increase as a result of more carbon dioxide, his figure gives something called “net downward forcing.” Presumably, there’s a relationship between this variable and temperature, but that relationship—while it might be obvious to climate scientists—is not obvious to this lay reader. Fortunately, his other graphs are more informative. One important graph, in particular, shows predictions for increases in the earth’s temperature made in 1988 by James Hansen, whom some people consider the world’s leading climate scientist. In the same graph, Epstein shows that the actual increases in the earth’s temperature as of 2013 were well below the numbers that Hansen predicted. Score one for Epstein’s logarithmic point.
Here’s how Epstein summarizes the record: “Since the industrial revolution, we’ve increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 0.03 percent to 0.04 percent, and temperatures have gone up less than a degree Celsius, a rate of increase that has occurred at many points in history.” That appears to be accurate.
In considering the effect of changes in climate, Epstein brings to bear his moral standard: its effect on human life. He shows that even as fuel usage and carbon dioxide concentrations have increased, climate-related deaths have plunged. Is there a connection? He makes a strong case that there is. Consider deaths from drought, which, he writes, are “the most common form of climate-related death.” The number of drought-related deaths has fallen. He points out that more use of fossil fuels has improved both agriculture and transportation to drought-affected areas and has facilitated modern irrigation.
Other pollution / What about other forms of pollution from fossil fuels? Epstein admits that this could be a problem, and his solution is unclear. He starts out with a property rights approach to controlling pollution and criticizes a “common good” approach. Yet, as my Econlog co-blogger Bryan Caplan has pointed out, Epstein slips the common good approach in through the back door. He shows no awareness of the usual way economists address this issue if they believe in a role for government (which most do): tax pollution or have tradable pollution permits.
Consider Epstein’s claim that we need more energy, a claim that he appears to regard as obvious. What he actually has shown is that energy, in total, is wonderful. That refutes the more extreme environmentalists who would dramatically curtail fossil fuel use. But economists, who are used to thinking on the margin, would point out that some of that energy might cause pollution that harms people. So the marginal uses of energy might be inefficient. It’s possible, therefore, that we should use slightly less energy.
I’ll close on a positive note. Epstein’s last chapter is his best and should have been his first chapter. In it, he tells how he paid famous environmentalist Bill McKibben $10,000 to debate him. That alone impressed me. Epstein tells the story in such a dramatic way that it almost gave me chills. I recommend reading it first; you will likely then be motivated to read the rest of the book.
