The moral case for fossil fuels?

From our Philosophical Easter Egg series

There is actually a book on Amazon called The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. The carnival barker style Amazon blurb starts like this:  

Could everything we know about fossil fuels be wrong?

For decades, environmentalists have told us that using fossil fuels is a self-destructive addiction that will destroy our planet. Yet at the same time, by every measure of human well-being, from life expectancy to clean water to climate safety, life has been getting better and better.

Let's point you to two reviews on the web, one strongly supportive of the book, the other heavily critical.

The blogster tends to have a problem with a question that starts with "could everything we know about..." because of the all encompassing nature of the word everything. But we decided to chalk it up to the cacophony of modern business.

The most intriguing statement regarding the book is not in the list of the "myths" (dirty, unsustainable, hurts the developing world) but the postulate that not only are fossil fuels good, we should use more of them.

For one, there obvious arguments in support of the author's reasoning that leave out huge chunks of reality. It is all well and absolutely correct when he points to incorrect predictions about resources in the report of the Club of Rome (The Limits of Growth) as well as the Global 2000 Report. Maybe it is an oversight that voices critical of the predictions at the time are ignored in his book.

Yes, most of the resource depletion scenarios were wrong. But not all, look at fishing, for example, or population increase, or the undisputed record loss of species.

Yes, you can argue fossil fuels take a naturally dirty environment and make it clean, if you ignore the primary reason for the dirty environment.

Yes, you can show a graphic that puts life expectancy in China next to the rise in use of fossil fuels in the country, but what does it mean? You can do the same for the use of solar energy in China and get the same visuals. And why then has life expectancy in Western countries not gone through the roof? Comparing per capita use of fossil fuel in China and the West, Westerners should have a life expectancy of 150 years minimum by now, shouldn't they?

These arguments and a whole host of others are not the crucial tenets of the book, and that is what makes it very readable and sad at the same time.

The writer of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels really excels in repeatedly reminding readers of the trinity of cheap, plentiful, scalable.

Given current science, there can be no doubt about plentiful.  If oil, coal, and natural gas run out, hey, there is almost limitless methane in the depths of the oceans or in the permafrost soils of the North.

They are pretty cheap, too, in simple economic terms and compared to other sources of energy. Cheap is the perfect adjective for getting around "true costs" or externals, such as the pesky question how many people died because we used leaded gasoline although the technology for unleaded gas existed. Cheap allows you to ignore wars over oil, too. But why are fossil fuel outfits fighting the installation of cheap home solar?

Then there is scalable and the mantra of the intermittent availability of solar and wind with the claim that you need 100% backup for these types of energy. They are great arguments with regards to industry and transportation, though not necessarily universally true without the understanding that you measure them against the current demands and status of a Western urban area. A picture taken at a time some 40 or so years after the start of the oil age would arguably not look that much different from a picture taken at the same instance after the introduction of solar energy, or would it?

Human development has not taken place on a straight line from primitive, poor, and precarious to progressive and prosperous.

Science has established some interesting aspects in the past decades: in some groups of humans, you had better healthcare 40 000 plus years ago than in some parts of the world today.

And the great leap forward of civilization to life as farmers was not all that it was cracked up to be: science tells us that life expectancy dropped when humans took to full time farming.

If you feel there is a moral case for fossil fuels, wouldn't there be a moral case for he colonization of, say, the Americas? Millions died from disease and war, but we received potatoes and tomatoes, corn, and chocolate.

In the words of Winston Churchill: I do not admit... that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia... by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race... has come in and taken its place.
Churchill to Palestine Royal Commission, 1937

[Update 4/4] Added "Comparing per capita use..."