Haven't read the book, but I'm a cleantech consultant with a materials science and physics background. I spend my days helping companies find and adopt and strategize around new technologies.
It's a good question and worth engaging with. I'll start by saying that, first of all, we need to consider that climate change is not an existential risk. It's a serious risk where not adapting fast enough can cause large amounts of suffering for billions of people, but it won't wipe us out or prevent the continuance of technological civilization unless we do incredibly stupid things in response to said suffering. Which is not impossible. But Earth isn't going to become Venus, or anything like that.
I'll follow that up with an observation that in the excerpts of this and the author's other books that I've found, he mostly accurately represents a number of misunderstandings and misrepresentations from the past and present of environmentalism, but he also misrepresents many aspects of the technological and economic state of competing energy sources, and of the current state of climate science. He makes some very isolated demands for rigor, like complaining about nuclear being expensive relative to fossil fuels without (AFAICT) noting that this is because it's held to a uniquely high regulatory standard way out of proportion to it's actual risks in ways that drive up construction times, financing costs, and plant engineering requirements, while preventing scale-up from letting industry grow enough to realize experience curve cost reductions and preventing plant design iterations over time. The sections I've been able to access read like someone who decided their bottom line before they decided what to write above it.
More concretely:
I'd encourage you to read Fossil Future, because Alex addresses a lot of the points you make.
One of the points he emphasizes is that (quoted from my response below)
large portions of the energy we need have nothing to do with the grid. Specifically, transportation (global shipping, flight) and industrial process heat (to make steel, concrete, etc.) comprise a large percentage of our energy needs and solar/wind are pretty useless (far too inefficient) for meeting those needs.
He talks extensively about how nuclear power is the best option, and has only failed...
… climate change is not an existential risk… Earth isn't going to become Venus, or anything like that
Last I heard, the big question was what positive-feedback “tipping points” exist, and at what CO2-level they become triggered. This would give quite wide error bars on what average heating is caused by a given quantity of cumulative emissions. If we can burn all the fossil fuels, turn the rainforests to desert, and vaporise all the methane clathrates, and still not end up like Venus, that’s… reassuring, I guess
If Epstein’s thesis is, broadly, “cheap energy from fossil fuels is awesome and climate change isn’t that bad”, weaknesses would be likely to fall somewhere under these, classified in increasing controversy:
I have not read the book. Nonetheless, I would like to point out two things:
Thanks for the response!
As far as I remember (but it is a while ago that I read that paper), the paper I linked to does not include CO2 externalities but focuses on the effects of local air pollution on the United States itself. So no, if anything the negative externalities derived in the paper are too low, and net value added would be even lower if climate change was taken into account. What is your criticism of how the benefits of the industries are calculated?
From the paper you linked to:
For all values of the social cost of carbon, emissions of CO2 have the largest percent impact on the damages from natural gas–fired power plants (40 percent to 90 percent). This is because natural gas–fired power plants generate very small amounts of the local pollutants. In contrast, the CO2 share of GED* for both coalfired and oil-fired power generators is between 5 percent and 40 percent. Although coal-fired plants generate a great deal of CO2, they generate greater damages due to other pollutants
So it does go into CO2.
As for the Value Added, they seem to be using the straightforward economic value of the industries in question, which omit positive externalities just as much as they omit negative externalities.
Positive externalities is a bit of an odd way to phrase it--if it's just counting up the economic value (i.e. price) of the fossil fuels, doesn't it also disregard the consumer surplus? In other words, they've demonstrated that the negative externalities of pollution outweigh the value added on the margin, but if we were to radically decrease our usage of fossil fuels then the cost of energy (especially for certain uses with no good substitute, as you discussed above) would go way up, and the tradeoff on the margin would look very different.
Yes, the statement that switching off coal-fired power plants etc. is only true at the margin. However, for the OP's question, it seems that the sign of "marginal social benefit - marginal social cost" seems crucial.
Yes, I misremembered - but the CO2-based calculation is not driving the main results; instead, it is an extension calculated for one sector (electric power generation). See these two paragraphs from the introduction:
"We then turn to the estimation of damages by industry. We find that the ratio of GED/VA is greater than one for seven industries (stone quarrying, solid waste incineration, sewage treatment plants, oil- and coal-fired power plants, marinas, and petroleum-coal product manufacturing). This indicates that the air pollution damages from these industries are greater than their net contribution to output. Several other industries also have high GED/VA ratios. We also present the overall size of GED by industry. Five industries stand out as large air polluters: coal-fired power plants, crop production, truck transportation, livestock production, and highway- street-bridge construction.
In order to explore the robustness of our results to certain assumptions in the integrated assessment model, we conduct a sensitivity analysis. The analysis shows that the level of GED is sensitive to assumptions about the value of mortality risks, how this value varies by age, and the adult mortality dose-response function for particulate matter. A final analysis examines the fossil fuel electric generating industry in detail. It presents a more detailed calculation of GED for coal-fired power plants and it includes the impact of carbon dioxide (CO 2)."
The 184 bn $ (in 2011) do not include CO2 (see first paragraph of section B)
Concerning positive externalities: Yes, the authors note that this is not part of the calculation. But it is completely unclear what the relevance of this is. Every economic action may have a positive externality, but why exactly should this favor fossil energy sources in particular? And why should I assume these externalities to be so large that they are relevant=
I haven't read Fossil Future, but it sounds like he's ignoring the option of combining solar and wind with batteries (and other types of electrical storage, like pumped water). The technology is available today and can be more easily deployed than fossil fuels at this point.
If you only have solar + wind + batteries, you have a problem when you have a week of bad weather. Batteries can effectively move energy that's produced at noon to the night but they are not cost effective for charging batteries in summer to be used in bad months in the winter.
While I think Epstein's treatment of solar/wind and batteries is too brief, his main points are:
Any argument against fossil fuel use must argue that its side effects (CO2 warming the planet) overwhelm the good they do by providing cheap energy. These side effects must be so bad that it's worth compromising the safety and flourishing of billions of humans to curtail their use. Such an argument must also prove that those negative side effects are beyond what humanity is capable of adapting to or overcoming, given cheap energy provided by fossil fuels.
It looks like you are using a double standard here.
Any argument against fossil fuel use must argue that its side effects (CO2 warming the planet) overwhelm the good they do by providing cheap energy.
Seems reasonable. If someone wants to build a new coal plant, I agree with you that, to know if it is a good decision, we need to compare the coal plant, including its benefits and its side effects, to alternatives (another source of electricity, or even no plant at all).
Such an argument must also prove that those negative side effects are beyond what humanity is capable of adapting to or overcoming, given cheap energy provided by fossil fuels.
This part sounds like an unrealistic standard. Assuming that, in the same scenario, taking into accounts benefits and side effects, the coal plant is not the best alternative, then it should not be chosen. If you want to claim that we should discount or ignore the negative side effects, based on the fact that we could overcome those, then you need to prove it, you need to bear the burden of proof.
It looks like you are using a double standard here.
Could you elaborate? I'm not sure I follow.
Epstein spends a large portion of the book going into how human ability to master the dangers of the earth's climate have grown with our ability to deploy cheap energy and machines. He argues that the dangers of CO2 emission, in particular, are entirely masterable with fossil fuel energy.
I'm not prepared to do service to his entire argument here; I'd encourage reading the book for yourself if you haven't.
Let's say Alice wants to support some fossil fuel project, ans Bob is against it. What evidence does each character need to provide, according to you?
Purely looking at evaluating the book Fossil Future, I'd want Alice to provide evidence that the project she supports delivers energy at market or below-market rates, while avoiding any sort of obviously terrible pollution (e.g. dumping toxic waste into a river). I'd want Bob to provide evidence that the project will impact human beings and the environment so terribly that the energy generated by the project is insufficient to account for the damage done.
Of course, outside of evaluating the book I'd only make sure that the project wasn't doing anything obviously terrible and then be all for it; our society is heavily biased against action, and so I try to be biased towards action to correct for it.
Thanks for your answer.
It seems to me that it is not what you said though. Quoting you:
Any argument against fossil fuel use [...] must also prove that those negative side effects are beyond what humanity is capable of adapting to or overcoming, given cheap energy provided by fossil fuels.
That is, even if evidence of terrible impact is provided (e.g. dumping toxic waste into a river), you will require Bob to prove that this impact cannot be mitigated/adapted to/...
To reiterate, you will not ask Alice "How do you plan to solve the dumping toxic waste into a river problem?". Instead, you will ask Bob "Can you prove that the dumping toxic waste into a river problem cannot be solved?".
Since it is very difficult to prove that a problem cannot be solved, the standard for Bob is orders of magnitude harder to reach than the standard for Alice.
I see your point, and part of this is the difficulty I'm having distinguishing - and communicating the differences - between the book Fossil Future and my own personal views.
I think your interpretation might actually be correct when it comes to Alex Epstein's answer to the question. He shows that dangers from climate are consistently surmountable, and we should expect to continue to be able to surmount them.
Granted, he certainly wouldn't support literally dumping toxic waste into a river, but that isn't really what the book is about, or indeed what the modern conversation regarding fossil fuels is about either.
Previous eras of environmentalism focused on pollution - acid rain, the ozone layer, toxic waste, etc. Today's environmentalism focuses on greenhouse gases, largely because we've basically solved all the previous problems. Epstein argues that greenhouse gases are not a sufficient reason to stop the use of fossil fuels.
Today's environmentalism focuses on greenhouse gases, largely because we've basically solved all the previous problems.
That's not true. We have research like what's described in https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/09/fossil-fuels-pollution-deaths-research that suggest that fossil fuel emissions kill over a million people each year.
We also have other enviromental problems like nitrogen accumulation in the ocean, PFCS and microplastic.
Sure there are other environmental problems, but my experience of the main concern of modern environmentalists is climate change, largely because it's seen as apocalyptic in scope and thus the most deserving of concern.
As for deaths resulting from fossil fuel pollution, I suspect Epstein's response would be that we should be evaluating fossil fuel use in its full context. How many lives were saved/improved by access to the energy generated? How many people were lifted and kept out of poverty?
The largest effect in the article is also found in East Asia, which deploys large amounts of coal.
I think Epstein would prioritize lifting people out of energy poverty, at which point they would have the slack and the wealth to get to work on pollution, following a similar trajectory as we did in the US.
I'm currently most of the way through Alex Epstein's Fossil Future, and I find the arguments within very convincing.
In (extreme) brevity, they are:
Does anyone (preferably those who've read the book, although I don't want to restrict answers to just those people) have an opposing view/opinion, and if so why?
I'd like to do my intellectual homework on this one, and actively seek disagreement, given how convincing I've found the argument so far.