Book review: “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels”. Really?
I first heard about Alex Epstein’s book ‘The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels’ via an unsurprisingly fawning review over at the SkeptEco blog. Its premise is so ludicrous that normally I wouldn’t read it, never mind review it. There is no “moral case for fossil fuels”, just as there was no “moral case for slavery” in 1860. But given the alarming rise, in the US and elsewhere, of the climate sceptic/pro fossil fuel lobby (witness, for instance, Sen. James Infoe’s ludicrous attack on climate science in the US Senate recently) it feels important to look a bit closer at the arguments presented here.
Epstein recently started something called the ‘Center for Industrial Progress’, and lectures on the need to keep fossil fuels as a key driver for the economy. At other times he can be found, among other things,defending child labour or arguing that animals have no rights. He likes to paint himself and the fossil fuel industry as the misunderstood underdogs, holding the line against the far more influential “greens”. He’s a curious character, as can be seen in this video of him standing in the middle of the hundreds of thousands of people who attended the Peoples’ Climate March in New York last year, heckling them with inane comments like “you know, your clothes are fracked!”
“As you read this”, he writes, “there is a real, live, committed movement against fossil fuels that truly wants to deprive us of the energy of life”. This painting of the oil industry as the good guys, as the misunderstood heroes being undermined by uninformed idiots (i.e. you and I), is the first, but by no means the last, place where Epstein parts company with reality.
He bemoans the fact that fossil fuel companies “have had to fight daily for permission to empower billions of people”. Try telling that to the communities in Ecuador affected by the oil spills for which Chevron was fined $19 billion, people in Richmond, California who live in the shadow of the Chevron refinery which exploded in 2012, communities living near mountaintop removal coal plants, people living near fracking sites, or First Nation people living near the Tar Sands in Alberta. He continues:
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