Fossil Future Quotes

“Net-zero policy, if actually implemented, would certainly be the most significant act of mass murder since the killings of one hundred million people by communist regimes in the twentieth century—and it would likely be far greater.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“Have you ever, in any mainstream discussion of “climate change,” seen any concern expressed about whether restricting fossil fuel use might increase climate danger by decreasing fossil-fueled climate mastery”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“The Earth is not a naturally nurturing “delicate balance” but rather a naturally (1) dynamic, (2) deficient, and (3) dangerous place that we must massively impact if we are to survive and flourish.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“We are told that rising CO2 levels will cause a “sixth mass extinction”—a species extinction so devastating that we literally won’t be able to live. Given that previous mass extinctions involved phenomena that blocked out massive amounts of light and warmth, like the giant asteroid that left a ninety-three-mile wide, twelve-mile-deep crater 66 million years ago in what is now Mexico, there is an incredibly high bar to claim that an increase in a warming and fertilizing gas will cause mass extinction.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“three crucial, undeniable facts about the benefits of fossil fuels that hold true to this day—and yet are ignored by our knowledge system when it advocates for the rapid elimination of fossil fuels. These facts are: Fossil fuels are a uniquely cost-effective source of energy. Cost-effective energy is essential to human flourishing. Billions of people are suffering and dying for lack of cost-effective energy.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“if you go through the multi-thousand-page IPCC synthesis reports, you will not find any quantification of climate-related disaster deaths. And if you review the world’s leading source of climate disaster data, you will find that it totally contradicts the moral case for eliminating fossil fuels. Climate-related disaster deaths have plummeted by 98 percent over the last century, as CO2 levels have risen from 280 ppm (parts per million) to 420 ppm (parts per million) and temperatures have risen by 1°C.[6]”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“Given the term “ocean acidification,” you’d expect current pH levels to be well under 7. But in fact, mainstream estimates of the average pH of our current oceans are about 8.1—estimated to have declined from 8.2 in preindustrial times—very much in the alkaline range. Thus we are witnessing very slow ocean “neutralization,” not “acidification”—acidification is a completely unscientific term used to scare us.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“new catastrophe claims will involve the same distortions as the catastrophe claims I’ve debunked so far. They will (1) ignore the fundamental benefits of fossil fuels, (2) especially ignore the environmental mastery benefits of fossil fuels, and (3) wildly overstate the negative side-effects of fossil fuels. Thus, when confronting the latest catastrophe claims, we want to be on the lookout for these distortions.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“A climate knowledge system that denies the possibility of the massive plant-growth and warming benefits of CO2 is a system that cannot be trusted.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“But as reasonable as it is to expect our climate knowledge system to be good overall and accurate on questions of science, this is demonstrably not the case.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“the mainstream knowledge system, especially its disseminators and evaluators, is fundamentally distorted by the anti-impact framework, which causes it to consistently ignore fossil fuels’ fundamental benefits to human flourishing and to catastrophize fossil fuels’ thus far masterable side-effects. Its catastrophizing includes, as we saw in chapter 2 and chapter 4, wildly and negatively distorting the various environmental side-effects of fossil fuels—including by elevating the minority of specialists with the most extreme negative views to the status of designated experts. And in the previous chapter we saw pervasive climate mastery denial that makes all catastrophe predictions we hear from our knowledge system suspect.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“A prime example of such infrastructure is the Netherlands, which protects its people from floods despite being near or below sea level. Fifty percent of the Netherlands lies less than three feet above sea level, and roughly one eighth of the country is at an elevation below sea level—in some cases as much as twenty-two feet below sea level.[37] Today the Netherlands has flood-protection infrastructure consisting of thousands of miles of dikes, dams, and electronically operated storm walls and gates. Much of the system has been designed to withstand floods that have a probability of occurring once in ten thousand years.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“Knowing that our knowledge system consistently denies temperature mastery is crucial context to keep in mind whenever we hear claims about “catastrophic” temperature changes in the future; there is a very good chance those claims are based on climate mastery denial, and that without such denial catastrophe would be implausible.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“because of the effects of large dams on wildlife and watersheds, the Club does not support large-scale hydropower.”[40] Once again, we see that the “green energy” movement is not about energy—even cost-effective, non-CO2-emitting energy—it is about sacrificing energy and other human values to the idol of unimpacted nature.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“How, then, can Apple claim to be 100 percent renewable? It purchases a fraudulent “100 percent renewable” status from electricity producers. The basic way this works is that Apple pays utilities to give it credit for the solar and wind that others use—and to give others the blame for the coal, gas, and nuclear that Apple uses. It’s as if Apple CEO Tim Cook were traveling with nine other people on a yacht powered 90 percent by diesel and 10 percent by a sail—and Cook claimed that he traveled just using the sail, while the others traveled using the diesel. This energy accounting fraud is shameful and destructive, because it leads us to think that we can have innovators like Apple without the uniquely cost-effective energy we get from fossil fuels. Even worse, leading company after leading company, including Facebook, Google, Bank of America, and Anheuser-Busch, is claiming to be 100 percent renewable.[18]”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“The reality of solar and wind around the world is that they are not outcompeting fossil fuels in the realm of electricity; they are making electricity generated by fossil fuels and other controllable sources of electricity (nuclear and hydro) more expensive. This reality leads to a frequent, additional negative consequence: declining reliability.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“To the extent a grid is committed to using solar and wind, whenever sunlight or wind increases, the grid has to cycle down controllable power plants, and whenever sunlight or wind decreases or disappears, it has to cycle up controllable power plants. Rapidly cycling power plants up and down is an efficiency killer, just as stop-and-go-traffic kills your car’s fuel efficiency.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“The examples of machine learning and Bitcoin are particularly clear refutations of a widespread (and disastrous) fallacy: that progress in energy efficiency will lead to the need for far less energy in the future.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“If we are to make even remotely rational decisions about energy going forward, the reality of today’s unnatural level of nourishment and its dependence on fossil fuels need to be widely understood.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“The main obstacle to using machine labor is lack of cost-effectiveness: machine labor consuming more value than it produces. I call this the “private jet problem.” Travel by private jet is an amazing thing. If you have a private jet, you can save a lot of time in your traveling, and you can travel to all kinds of great places at the drop of a hat. So why don’t the vast majority of us travel by private jet? Because despite the value of the time private-jet labor produces, the enormous amount of resources consumed via private-jet labor makes it cost-prohibitive for the vast majority of us.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“Note that most people don’t even think of the state of poverty when they think of the “livability of the planet.” That’s how anti-human a perspective the anti-impact framework and its vague environmental terminology give us.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“The fact that, during the most miraculous decline of extreme poverty in human history, contributed to by ultra-cost-effective energy from fossil fuels, college-educated adults can think the rate of extreme poverty is getting worse due to fossil fuels shows just how completely our knowledge system trivializes the benefits of fossil fuels and of cost-effective energy as such.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“As bad as the denial of fossil fuels’ unique cost-effectiveness is, an even worse failure of our knowledge system is its utter trivialization of the benefits of cost-effective energy as such and of ultra-cost-effective fossil fuel energy in particular.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“when seeking out expert knowledge, reject experts and sources operating on the anti-impact framework and find those who are operating on a better, pro-human framework.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“If we pursue the environmental goal not of “protecting the environment” or “saving the planet” from human beings but of “improving our environment” or “improving our world” for human beings, we can have it all—the best of what exists naturally and the best of what we can create—including the time and ability to enjoy what exists naturally.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“when we are thinking about our environment and our world, the main term we use is not “saving” or “protecting,” since we recognize that these things are naturally deficient and dangerous, but rather “improving”—which requires massive, intelligent, productive impact.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“our designated experts cling to the delicate nurturer assumption to disguise their anti-human goal to themselves. Very few human beings can admit to themselves that they are fundamentally anti-human—even if their whole lives are devoted to stopping the high-impact productive activities that make human flourishing possible. The more one clings to the belief that Earth is “delicate,” and that we’re always one impact away from collapse, the more one can convince oneself: I don’t hate and want to destroy humans, I just want to save human beings from themselves.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“That’s the anti-humanism of seeking to eliminate human impact. When designated experts talk about present and future catastrophe, they are often evaluating increases in human flourishing as morally catastrophic.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“Thus, while in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s the disastrous anti-fossil fuel proposals of benefit-ignoring, side-effect catastrophizing designated environmental experts—proposals that would have prematurely ended billions of lives—were mostly mitigated by the knowledge system’s valuing of energy, that protection is now missing in the mainstream knowledge system. We can see this today in the fact that our designated environmental experts are the number one shapers of energy policy. For example, the fossil fuel elimination policies of going “net zero,” “fossil free,” and “100 percent renewable” were just a decade ago considered idealistic if not crackpot policies most prominently advocated by designated expert Bill McKibben and his organization, 350.org. Today they are the dominant policy idea in the world.”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less

“I stress again, as I did with climate, that the designated experts were catastrophizers, not that all researchers were. There were other experts in resources, such as MIT’s M. A. Adelman and University of Maryland’s Julian Simon, who predicted correctly that fossil fuel resources and other resources would expand. But just as with climate, the mainstream knowledge system chose to designate the catastrophizers as experts. (This was not due to their superior qualifications—while Adelman and Simon were resource economists, Paul Ehrlich’s primary background was in the study of butterflies. I will explain what it is due to in chapter 3.)”
― Alex Epstein, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less