Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
In this topic, I have quoted extensively from certain environmental thought leaders—Paul Ehrlich, Al
Gore, Bill McKibben, Amory Lovins, John Holdren—precisely because they are thought
leaders:
They
have had tremendous influence throughout the culture.
We've seen that these thought leaders not only come to certain deadly
conclusions
and
policies,
but also
keep using the same faulty
method of thinking:
they exaggerate the negatives of fossil fuels and ignore or
greatly understate the positives.
Notice that they, and practically all other environmental or Green leaders, express little enthusiasm for
the value of cheap, plentiful, reliable energy or the unique ability of the fossil fuel industry to provide it;
instead, they keep claiming, without evidence, that expensive, unreliable, unscalable energy will somehow
become cheap, reliable, and scalable—unconcerned by what will happen if and when they are wrong and
nothing can make up for the energy they've taken away from us. They also cannot see much positive in
nuclear or hydro. They claim to care about climate but are indifferent to the climate mastery fossil fuels
give us and the opportunity to give that mastery to billions more, but they will use every fallacy in the
topic to make us terrified of fossil fuel-related climate change. They claim to care about a clean environ-
ment but have nothing but scorn for the industry that gave us the ability to create the cleanest, healthiest
environment in history. They claim to care about abundant resources, but are indifferent to the fact that
the fossil fuel industry is itself producing new resources and helping every other industry produce new
resources—and that restricting fossil fuel use would bring us that much closer to the resource poverty that
has been mankind's condition for all but a recent sliver of history.
Thought leaders are usually extremely bright men and women, and all of these thought leaders are
bright. At the same time, all of them have been confronted, in one way or another, with the data I have
presented in this topic. Yet they still say fossil fuels are catastrophic and seem to have absolutely zero fear
of the nearly infinite risk of
not
using fossil fuels at this stage of history.
Why?
It goes back to the issue of
standard of value.
The environmental thought leaders' opposition to fossil fuels is not a mistaken attempt at pursuing hu-
man life as their standard of value. They are too smart and knowledgeable to make such a mistake. Their
opposition is a
consistent
attempt at pursuing their actual standard of value: a pristine environment, un-
altered nature. Energy is our most powerful means of transforming our environment to meet our needs.
If an unaltered, untransformed environment is our standard of value, then
nothing could be worse than
cheap, plentiful, reliable energy.
I'm saying that if fossil fuels created no waste, including no CO
2
, if they were even cheaper, if they
would last practically forever, if there were no resource-depletion concerns, the Green movement would
still oppose them.
This is hard to believe. Which is why you need to know the following story.
For many decades, the ultimate energy fantasy has been what's called nuclear fusion. Conventional
nuclear power is called nuclear
fission,
which unleashes power through the decay of heavy atoms such as
uranium. Nuclear fusion unleashes far more power through fusion of two light atoms, of hydrogen, for
example. Fusion is what the sun uses for energy. But all human attempts at fusion so far have been in-
efficient—they take in more energy than they produce. But if it could be made to work, it would be the
cheapest, cleanest, most plentiful energy source ever created. It would be like the problem-free fossil fuels
I said the Green leaders would oppose.
In the late 1980s, some reports that fusion was close to commercial reality got quite a bit of press. Re-
porters interviewed some of the world's environmental thought leaders to ask them what they thought of
