Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
THE “ARTIFICIAL” FALLACY
One of the big accusations against fracking is that it “uses chemicals.” This is a funny way of putting it.
Everything in our world uses chemicals, because our world is
made
of chemical elements.
The accusation is implying that fracking uses “artificial” or
man-made
chemicals, and the accusation
assumes, and expects us to assume, that man-made means dangerous.
But it is simply untrue that “natural” is safe and man-made is unsafe. For example, fossil fuels are nat-
ural, organic, plant-based fuels whose pollution challenges stem from natural ingredients like sulfur and
nitrogen and heavy metals. Arsenic and cyanide are natural substances, and many natural plants are pois-
onous.
The fact that we
didn't
make something shouldn't make us feel safe. And the fact that something is
made in a laboratory shouldn't make us afraid. With every substance, we need to look at its nature and
dosage in the context of human life.
One additional note: It
especially
doesn't make sense to be biased against man-made things, because
they are
deliberately
made by a human mind, usually to promote human life. While man-made things can
be bad, it is perverse to single out the man-made as bad per se. To be against the man-made as such is to
have a bias against the
mind-made,
which is to be against the human mind, whose very purpose is to figure
out how to transform our environment to meet our needs.
A HUMAN-CENTERED VIEW OF ENVIRONMENT
Fossil-fueled development is the greatest benefactor our environment has ever known. This needs to be
mentioned in our environmental discussions, and so-called environmental groups need to be taken to task
for omitting it. The only way fossil fuels are a net minus for “the environment” is if by “the environment”
you mean our surroundings not from our perspective, but from a
nonhuman
perspective. From the per-
spective of organisms we need to kill or use to survive, such as the parasite, the malarial mosquito, the
dangerous animal, or the trees we clear to build a road,
we
are a negative for the environment. (At the same
time, we are positive for many other species. But as far as
our
environment goes, there is no environmental
quality without development. And there is no global development without fossil fuel energy.
As we have seen, in using fossil fuels to improve our lives, including our environment, we create new
environmental problems to solve—far fewer than those of undeveloped nature but real and important non-
etheless. It's a fact of life that new technologies will bring problems that, by definition, would not exist if
the technology didn't exist. There were no computer problems before computers. And just as we use com-
puters to help solve computer problems, so we can use fossil fuels to help solve fossil fuel problems—to
transform waste from a more dangerous form to a less dangerous form, or even to a benefit, by using en-
ergy and ingenuity. The energy we get from fossil fuels enables us to improve our environment—including
mitigating or negating our own negative contributions.
This point belongs front and center in every discussion of fossil fuels and environment. All discussions
of environmental issues need to recognize the phenomenon of
environmental improvement through devel-
opment.
