Alex Epstein goes against the grain in his book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. He makes a case that we should be using more, not less, fossil fuels, and at the risk of turning you off, dear reader, I dare say he made some good arguments.

The first thing to note is the goal or viewpoint he sets: the betterment of the human condition as measured by standards of living (health, wealth, happiness etc). I'm partial and sympathetic to this point of view, but I recognize that others may disagree, instead preferring to view success as something like keeping the earth as it would have been had humans not been around.

With that goal in mind, he then goes on the assert the powerfully positive impact fossil fuels have had on our standards of living so far. It's hard to argue with any of it. Cheap energy has allowed many of us to live better than kings of even the recent past, but without requiring the human and animal slaves that royalty has generally used to prop itself up.

For us, changing energy sources right now would cost more, but we can handle it. But there are huge portions of the world's population where this tradeoff is a matter of life and death. Here's an excerpt from the book about a hospital in The Gambia:

"...no matter how many times the technician suctioned out the nose and mouth, the infant did not utter a sound. After twenty five minutes the technician and nurse both gave up. The surgeon later explained that the baby had suffocated in utero. If only they had had enough power to use the ultrasound machine for each pregnancy, he would have detected the problem earlier and been able to plan the C-section. Without the early detection, the C-section became an emergency, moreover, the surgery had to wait for the generator to be powered on. The loss of precious minutes meant the loss of a precious life..."

and another:

"A full-term infant was born weighing only 3.5 points. In the U.S., the solution would have been obvious and effective: incubation. But without reliable electricity, the hospital did not even contemplate owning an incubator...she perished needlessly."

But maybe it's worth the destruction and loss of life we are/will cause to our planet's poorest by moving away from fossil fuels if we are making our planet unlivable. On this topic, however, Epstein believes climate models have consistently over-estimated the impact of C0₂, and as such we are not heating the globe as much we thought. It turns out the globe does not heat up linearly with C0₂, but rather logarithmically, meaning each additional unit we put up there has less of an impact than the previous unit. (Please note, these are his calculations; I have not verified his work.)

And though we are heating the globe, Epstein makes a case that with the help of energy we are able to deal with climate disasters better than we ever have. We have used fossil fuels to reduce loss of life from disasters by providing emergency assistance and transportation when required.

Alternative forms of energy have their own problems (other than nuclear), requiring huge investments in mining that have pollutive extraction methods that in some cases make them worse than fossil fuels in many ways.

Finally, while the negatives of climate change are often discussed, the benefits are never discussed. These take the form of increased plant life and more arable land as a result of higher C0₂ concentrations and warmer temperatures.

I don't know enough to have an opinion on climate change. I simply haven't done the work. But most people I know are quite against fossil fuels. I find it hard to believe that so many people have done the work in what is undoubtedly a very complex subject, so I suspect they are just going along with what everybody else thinks. I expect to do the work on this topic going forward. If anyone has any favorite resources I should check out, please leave them in the comments.