In his wonderful book American Happiness and Its Discontents, George Will wrote that Founding Father John Adams began each day with a tankard of beer. The anecdote read as incongruous. How could Adams have been so productive in light of how his days commenced? In a subsequent conversation with the author, he underscored that the U.S. was formerly a “drinking nation,” which we both marveled at for it not mirroring the present.
This came to mind while reading Alex Epstein’s essential and excellent new book, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas – Not Less. Epstein seemed to unearth the why behind Adams’s prodigious early morning drinking: unhealthy water. As Epstein writes about a third of the way through what will now be referred to as Fossil, “Drinking water for most people at most times, has been naturally dirty and or distant.” While the idealistic among us would have us believe that the earth in its natural state produces potable water in abundance, Epstein reminds readers that “Clean drinking water, like virtually every other value, must be produced.” Adams drank produced beer out of necessity it seems. The water of the 18th century arguably would have killed him well before he reached the 19th. One guesses that if he were alive today, Adams’s days would begin without beer.
Indeed, nowadays water is not only clean, ubiquitous (see the stacks of bottled water at grocery stores), but it’s also cheap. Epstein calculates the cost somewhere in the range of ½ a cent per gallon. It’s a beautiful truth, and it’s one born of the genius of fossil fuels. Some will view the previous sentence as a non sequitur, but it’s actually very germane to the endless plenty that those of us lucky enough to be alive in the present enjoy.
As Epstein puts it, “the more power we have at our disposal, the more food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education, and anything else we can produce with our limited time.” Amen. Oil and its byproducts have very thankfully mechanized so much of what used to be human effort. This automation didn’t put us in breadlines as the highly limited in thought would imagine. In reality, what saves us from work frees us to pursue new wants and needs in what Epstein refers to as “limited time.” This truth cannot be stressed or repeated enough.
While serious people with serious academic credentials like Stanford’s Erik Brynjolfsson strangely fear the day that “machines finally master traits that have kept human workers irreplaceable,” the reality is that automation is unrelentingly good, and lifts us to ever better states of being. Whatever saves us time frees our precious minds and hands to fix problems, and this includes the machinery that has rendered drinking water abundant and easy to access.
Applied to fossil fuels like oil, Epstein is happily tireless in alerting readers to the blunt truth that oil is not only of the earth, but that “the world around us is made of oil.” Most of us perhaps think of gasoline when we think of oil, only for Epstein to correct our thinking: “the rubber tires” on automobiles “are made of oil,” and so much else.
To all that’s been written so far, some readers are doubtless wondering who Epstein is, and what his background is such that he feels so confident to so forcefully opine about oil and other “fossil fuels.” It seems former Senator Barbara Boxer wondered much the same, only for her to haughtily ask Epstein “are you a scientist?” Epstein’s response while testifying was refreshing. Rather than squirm, he confidently replied “No, philosopher,” only for Boxer to find it “interesting” that “we have a philosopher here talking about an issue…” Epstein didn’t find it “interesting” at all. He found it logical that he was testifying before Boxer et al. He was there to “teach you how to think more clearly.” Absolutely!
Epstein didn’t print Boxer’s reply, which is likely a signal that at least publicly the Senator wasn’t swayed. And while she wasn’t, readers will be swayed. So much of attaining knowledge is about learning how to think. Readers of Epstein’s book will surely learn how to think about fossil fuel consumption in ways they haven’t in the past.
Is the thinking all positive? Certainly not. Right or wrong (this will be speculated on toward review’s end), Epstein is clear that “we absolutely need to study and consider the negative side-effects attributed to fossil fuels, such as increased heat waves, droughts, wildfires, etc.” At the same time, he wants readers to consider the positives that come with fossil fuel consumption. The latter indicts an expert class that is seemingly unwilling to acknowledge the good, or in Epstein’s words “expert” failure is rooted in “opposing something on the basis of its side-effects without considering its massive benefits.” Precisely.
It’s not enough to just project the negatives. Oil and its byproducts are yet again liquid robots that have powered staggering amounts of progress. This truth on its own is essential when it’s remembered that throughout much of human existence, “unempowered human beings simply could not produce enough protection to overcome nature’s dangers.” What is undeniably true about history is similarly true today: where humans have access to power born of fossil fuels, living standards are exponentially better and life much healthier and longer.
Consider Beirut right now. Thanks to government error (a redundancy if there ever was one), the people are suffering routine and lengthy electricity blackouts. As a recent New York Times article indicated, citizens of the former “Paris of the Middle East” are most active in the middle of the night simply because it’s in the middle of the night that they have the greatest odds of the electricity coming on. What powers us makes us more productive, which should be a statement of the obvious. Of course, there’s much more to it.
The aforementioned Times report is from September of 2022, and September is a time of unbearable heat and humidity in Beirut. Translated for those who need it, those unlucky enough to live without electricity wake up to soaked sheets, assuming they fall asleep at all. What’s true for the citizens of Beirut isn’t true for Americans. Or, it’s not as true. Epstein notes that it costs “just over three minutes of work” for a $25/hour worker in Phoenix, AZ to cool the family home on a daily basis. Please keep this in mind with health top of mind. Have you the reader ever endured endless summer nights without air conditioning? If the answer is yes, you know how little sleep associates with sweaty discomfort, not to mention the health implications born of endless heat and humidity.
Think about it more broadly, as Epstein does. Life expectancy used to be so low. Well, of course. Unsteady shelter exposed us to the elements, including to many more mosquitoes that are said to have killed more humans than any other fly, or for that matter, any specie. It’s useful to remind readers that Epstein’s proper goal is to teach you how to think, and to think more expansively on the matter of fossil fuels. What powers us frees the handy among us to erect shelter that protects us, while those of us with a scientific bent have more time to pursue vaccines and other medical advances that will render what kills us rather “historical” in nature.
From there, let’s think about food. Epstein notes that in the 19th century European people were routinely dying of starvation, after which it was not unusual for humans to be found in the countryside “with their mouths full of grass and their teeth sunk in the earth.” About the horrors of life in the not-too-distant past, Epstein writes acidly of “Trying to fend off starvation by eating grass – that’s a ‘natural’ life.” For the more fortunate citizens of England, the world’s richest country in the 19th century, Epstein reports that “up to 80 percent of the average family’s income – which means 80 percent of their productive time – went to food, mostly low-quality bread.”
Fast forward to the present, and advances like fertilizer (made plentiful by natural gas) have rendered food a certainty. Goodness, one of the concerns modern thinkers have is that America’s poor are broadly overweight. It speaks to yet another tradeoff not discussed enough by those intent on shrinking fossil fuel consumption. The seen is an allegedly “cleaner” environment, but the unseen is what we lacked in natural surroundings from the past when fossil fuels weren’t as evident in daily life: think abundant water and food, vaccines, shelter, etc.
As for the notion of “dirty” fossil fuels versus “clean” energy that at least as of now is but a small fraction of total energy usage, Epstein corrects the hype by reminding readers that “it’s the world’s massive use of fossil fuels that produces this state of cleanliness.” In other words, if we ignore that there would be little “clean energy” without fossil fuels, we can’t ignore how dirty the world’s streets were before fossil fuels began powering our lives. If you’re still scratching your head, the clearing of horse excrement used to be a job.
Taking this further, our ability to love the earth in its natural state is a rather obvious consequence yet again of the massive progress born of automation that would be impossible without oil. Without this automation, life would be brutally short for those lucky enough to live. As for skiing, surfing, mountain biking, sun-bathing, nature walks and other pastimes frequently engaged in by fossil-fuel critics, let’s be serious. The activities mentioned are surplus. No doubt they’re wonderful surplus, but we’re able to enjoy them thanks to free time and immense wealth born of the earth’s ultimate “alternative fuel.”
Furthermore, the world is much safer thanks to oil, coal, natural gas, and other resources extracted from the earth. Exponentially so. All one need do is read about what’s been happening in Pakistan, the Philippines, and other countries largely bereft of the fruits of capitalism. When bad weather strikes less advanced countries, houses flood and frequently disappear. Death is much more likely. Contrast this with the broad experience in what Epstein refers to as the “empowered” world. While no one would say everyone in the developed world emerges safely from hurricanes, monsoons, heat waves, and other vagaries of weather, Epstein reports that “climate-related disaster deaths have plummeted by 98 percent over the last century.”
Even better, when’s the last time you the reader feared excess cold or heat? No doubt both have brought discomfort, but in the empowered world none of us reasonably fear death from temperature extremes. What’s important is that it wasn’t always this way, particularly when a lack of fossil-driven power had the world in a more “natural” state. Life was far deadlier when power was scarce. Getting into specifics, Epstein writes that measured relative to today, 1.77 million per year in the 1920s were “dying from climate-related causes versus 18,000 per year today.” No one should be surprised by this. It’s so very basic. Power, fuel or whatever you want to call it is the equivalent of millions, and realistically billions of “hands” joining the workforce through automation of so much formally done by people. The latter multiplies production, including the production of houses, buildings, air conditioning and other marvels of divided labor that shield us from the earth’s worst weather. This “climate mastery” whereby we innovate around the realities of weather speaks loudly to the unspoken, abundantly positive tradeoffs born of fossil power.
About the previous paragraph, let’s please not insult reason by pretending all these weather extremes are modern hazards born of carbon usage. Attempts to cool our surroundings are as old as man is. And while Epstein is definitive that cold weather absent climate mastery is much more lethal than warm, he writes of heat waves from before the age of common car ownership that were not just deadly, but also literally drove people insane.
There are so many important lines in this excellent book, but the most crucial to your reviewer was on p. 115. On it, Epstein writes that “A non-nourishing environment is one in which one toils for hours and hours a day to acquire barely enough food and water to make it to the next day.” So much meaning in so few words. Oil quite literally shrinks the world. Not only does it power us, not only does it makes it possible for us to divide labor with an ever growing number of humans and machines on the way to ever-soaring productivity, it also makes it possible for brilliant human beings to meet the needs of people around the world. Put another way, there are no fossil-fuel hating billionaires like Yvon Chouinard without oil. Actually, there aren’t any billionaires. Whether he intended to or not, Epstein channeled Adam Smith with this wonderful line.
Indeed, as Epstein properly writes, “the more specialized production is, the more productive everyone is over overall.” Oil makes it abundantly possible to work together, and in working together we produce staggering abundance. This truth underscores Epstein’s assertion that “fossil fuel energy is not incidental or even just important – it is fundamental.” Absolutely. Repeat it over and over again.
Are there critiques of this thoroughly excellent book? A few, though it will be acknowledged ahead of time that the criticism could just be misunderstanding, or just rooted in assumptions about what was written, or not written.
The book’s introduction was arguably the least compelling chapter. It read as a compromise. There’s a line about a “conclusion of the world’s leading climate economist, Nobel Prize winner William Nordhaus, that 2 degrees Celsius is not catastrophic and that passing policies to prevent it would do more harm than good.” Such a passage implies that if “the world’s leading climate economist” felt differently, that the taking of freedom in concert with broad, economy-sapping market interventions would be justifiable. Which is hard to countenance. Freedom is its own virtue. To then even imply that it should be situational is dangerous. As humans we’ve evolved to adapt, and as Epstein’s book makes clear, economic progress that results from freedom to produce continues to improve the world around us while elongating our lives.
Furthermore, we saw from political and expert panic over the coronavirus what happens when we make our freedom situational. The results are tragic, and very anti-human. Argued at the time by your reviewer in op-eds, speeches and in a book about the political crack-up was that statistics about how lethal the virus was were actually the worst approach to the virus of all, and this was true even though they supported a stance against lockdowns. A statistical, death-rate strategy was the worst simply because such an approach implies that IF a deadly pathogen rears its ugly head in the future, politicians have the right to lock us down. No thanks to the latter, and no thanks to Nordhaus’s comforting pat on the head about why we don’t need political action in response to what some believe is human-instigated warming.
Epstein makes plain his support for nuclear power. About it, let free markets and free people decide. At the same time, he didn’t much get into whether nuclear makes economic sense. Certainly its use to power the U.S. Navy proved good for the U.S. Navy, but the costs were astronomical. My understanding is that the cost of nuclear remains astronomical. This reader wanted to know if what was wildly expensive still is.
Toward book’s end Epstein expresses fear that the powers-that-be in places like North America will “significantly eliminate fossil fuel use.” This seemed a little bit alarmist not because many of the elite don’t want to eliminate fossil fuels, but because there’s no way Americans will ever be willing to go to back to the Stone Age based on a theory. Put another way, rich Americans and political elites can talk about eliminating fossil fuel use because they know it’s not going to happen, and it’s not going to happen because we want to live well. Epstein knows this well from having grown up in Chevy Chase, just outside of Washington, D.C. While many of his neighbors surely feared global warming, one bets they ran and run their air conditioners despite hysteria about energy consumption among warming’s true believers.
Lastly, about halfway through Fossil Epstein wrote that “In 2007, the U.S. imported over 400 million gallons of oil per day. In 2019, the U.S. was a net exporter.” Ok, but who cares? Imports not only reward production, but they, like the fossil-fuel powered automation that Epstein so rightly cheers, help us Americans to specialize. Oil isn’t different, and it never was different.
Indeed, a myth persists to this day that OPEC’s “embargo” caused the “oil shocks” in the 1970s. Except that it didn’t. Americans continued to consumer “OPEC oil” as though it had bubbled up in West Texas given the basic truth that there’s no accounting for the final destination of any good. What was true in the 1970s is true today.
All of which speaks to the biggest critique of Fossil: Epstein never discussed the dollar’s outsize impact on oil’s price. This is crucial given one of the certain drivers of oil’s demonization: its volatile, occasionally nosebleed price. All of which calls for readers to Google “oil price history.” If so, you’ll come across countless charts. Or just click to this write-up, and scroll down to the bottom. Look at the price of crude in the 20th century, and right on up to 1971. It was near flat. And it was flat because the dollar had a fixed definition. Oil and other commodities weren’t even much traded before 1971. This is no coincidence, plus it’s relevant to Epstein’s book.
For one, the occasional spikes in the price of oil (once again the world’s ultimate “alternative energy” in the eyes of your reviewer) have brought needless harm to a commodity and industry’s reputation. For two, it’s useful to point out that during periods of a strong dollar (think 1980s and 1990s) oil was both cheap, and easy to import. When the dollar is strong fracking isn’t economically feasible because the price of a barrel is too low. In other words, if we’re extracting oil stateside (in the 1980s and 1990s when a barrel fell as low as $9, the U.S. energy industry was near non-existent) it’s a sign that Americans are suffering a falling currency. For three, when Americans are heavily employed in the energy sector, they’re not dividing their work up in ways that lay the foundation for Epstein’s brilliant book. Think about it. As mentioned earlier, Epstein is laudably channeling Adam Smith in making his wonderful case that oil powers the machines that free up talented humans to relentlessly improve the world in ways that include mastering weather extremes. It’s so true and so important, at which point we must ask what we’ve lost in the 21st century as the world’s most advanced country rushed backwards into the extraction of a commodity (oil) essential to our existence, but also one ably provided in the closing decades of the 20th century by some of the most backwards (think Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, Equatorial Guinea, Russia) countries on earth.
While freedom to produce is yet again essential, it cannot be stressed enough that a weak dollar suffered by every American was what revived a U.S. energy industry that had largely vanished in the 1980s and 1990s. Was oil expensive then? See the previous paragraph. Imports are always the reward, including with oil. Again, what have we lost in the 21st century as the most economically dynamic country on earth pursued the economically bankrupt notion of “energy independence” over leaving extraction of crude to others? None of this is to shrink oil as fundamental to staggering progress. Of course it is. The only quibble is that if the dollar were strong and mostly stable as it was in the ‘80s and ‘90s, we would be importing what is globally plentiful and what will always be globally plentiful, thus freeing the world’s greatest minds to produce future wealth over the extraction of existing wealth necessary to power the future.
Still, these are quibbles. Epstein’s book is a must read precisely because it will teach readers how to think about the world’s most important commodity. If you read Fossil Future you will think differently, while seeing clearly that oil and other fossil fuels make abundant sense now and well beyond now precisely because they free us to rush an unimaginably great, “climate mastered” future into the present.
