— Bill McKibben, leading environmental activist, 1989
I came across this quote, along with many others of comparable value, while reading Alex Epstein’s just-published book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. But Epstein’s book is much more than a fantastic collection of such delightfully mad environmentalist pronouncements — although that part alone is worth the purchase price. Rather, what Epstein presents is a powerful, systematic, and relentlessly logical philosophical case for the moral value of the fossil-fuel industry, and the fundamentally immoral basis of the movement that is seeking to demonize and destroy it. In short, the book is unique, and utterly terrific. Epstein is a clear-minded philosopher, so he begins by stating the ethical standard of his case. “This book is about morality, about right and wrong. To me, the question of what to do about fossil fuels and any other moral issue comes down to: What will promote human life? What will promote human flourishing — realizing the full potential of life? Colloquially, how do we maximize the years in our life and the life in our years?” He then proceeds rapidly through a great number of well-known data, demonstrating the powerful historical link between increased fossil-fuel use and rising living standards, increased life expectancy, decreased infant and child mortality, and so forth, as well as some surprising material showing drastic drops in climate-related misfortunes, including deaths from droughts and storms. He has a nice section dealing with the global-warming debate itself, where he cleanly separates the truthful introduction to the climate alarmists’ argument — that enriching the atmospheric CO2 content will cause the trapping of some infrared emissions from the Earth’s surface in the troposphere — from its completely unsupported and demonstrably false conclusion that this phenomenon will generate self-accelerating feedbacks with catastrophic consequences...more
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