The moral case for fossil fuels
- Peter Lorenzi
- Nov 20, 2023
- 6 min read
NOTE: There is no small irony in the continuing abuse of the English anguage, when Alex Epstein speaks of the power and potential threat of our climate and our 'environment,' he is MIS-labeled as a 'climate denier.'
Here is the fundamental problem: Before the Industrial Revolution, hard human physical labor provided ninety percent of the energy needed for humanity to survive. Today, fossil fuels provide ninety percent of the energy need for eight times the number of people to survive.
In effect, human progress was very slow when most of human labor was needed just to survive. While technological and mechanical innovation over the past three hundred years has eased some of that burden, fossil fuels provided the energy that freed human labor to do many other things other than to simply work to survive. Simultaneously, fossil fuels, technology and mechanical innovation improved man’s capacity to not only to survive but to thrive.
In drafting my Managing sustainable development manuscript in 2014, what Alex Epstein has captured recently in a deeper moral and practical argument for fossil fuels, I identified in the first chapters of my manuscript. Basically, while the elites tell people today that ‘sustainability’ means to protect, preserve or maintain the natural, non-human environment, history tells us that for most of human history, sustainability meant humans finding a way to survive the threats – not the bounty – of this ‘natural’ environment. These threats were widespread and persistent, including floods and draughts, forest fires, lightning strikes and mud/landslides, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, pestilence and disease, virus and infections, wild animals, poisonous plants and creatures, deserts and quicksand, extreme temperatures, and more.
In contrast, the quantity and quality of human life has improved due to the ability of people to thwart these threats and to enhance nature so as to provide more food, modern medicine, asfer homes, cleaner water and streets, and more.
My introduction to sustainable human sustainability included a thorough critique of the often mis-used and misunderstood, Tragedy of the Commons.
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Tragedy of the Commons
As coined by William Forster Lloyd[1] and later used by Garrett Hardin, the term and concept of the tragedy of the commons describes a situation where individuals acting independently and rationally according to each's self-interest behave contrary to the best interests of the whole by depleting some common resource. In 1833 Lloyd, the Victorian economist, wrote and essay on the effects of unregulated grazing on common land and made widely-known much later by an article written by Hardin in 1968. "Commons" in this sense has come to mean such resources as atmosphere, oceans, rivers, fish stocks, an office refrigerator, energy or any other shared resource which is not formally regulated, not common land in its agricultural sense.
The tragedy of the commons concept is often cited in connection with sustainable development, meshing economic growth and environmental protection, as well as in the debate over global warming. It has also been used in analyzing behavior in the fields of economics, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, game theory, politics, taxation, and sociology.
The environmentalist Derrick Jensen claims the tragedy of the commons is used as propaganda for private ownership.[11] He says it has been used by the political right wing to hasten the final enclosure of the "common resources" of third world and native indigenous people worldwide, as a part of the Washington Consensus. He argues that in true situations, those who abuse the commons would have been warned to desist and if they failed would have punitive sanctions against them. He says that rather than being called "The Tragedy of the Commons," it should be called "the Tragedy of the Failure of the Commons".
The program is unnecessary given the heavy regulation that exists. And last month NOAA informed us that, beginning on Jan. 1, groundfish fishermen must pay an estimated $710 a day when a monitor is present. That fee covers the monitors’ training, mileage to and from the fisherman’s boat, supervisor salaries, data processes and all other administrative costs. It also covers a set profit margin for the three companies providing the monitors. What those margins are, neither NOAA nor the companies have disclosed.
Groundfishermen are not big, commercial operations that can absorb these costs. On a typical day I catch about $1,500 worth of fish. After covering all of my boat’s expenses and paying my crew, I take home around $300 per trip. That’s not a lot, but it’s enough to make a living. Adding $710 in new costs means I’ll lose money on every monitored trip.
The greatest tradegy of the commons is the misapplication of the metaphor. A ‘commons’ describes a resource publically shared and not privately owned. It best applies – if at all – to the atmosphere, oceans, and space, all of them natural, limited resources. A privately owned resource is more likely to be sustained than the publically owned resource. To wit, when everyone is repsonsble for magaing a resource, no one ends up acting responsibly. The shared problem is always someone else’s problem. See the Russian horror of Magnitogorsk [NOTE] for a compelling example. A variation on this theme today can be found in the Kyoto agreement, where many governments ‘pledge’ to reduce their carbon footprint, there is little incentive and no accountability or obligation to do so. Or in the case of the Swedish teen advocate for ‘fighting’ climate change, she shares her message with those with either little impact or making progrewss, ignoring the countries that are needed to make a difference. Worse, multinational firms will succumb to political pressure and make decisions that harm shareholders, the economy, and their profits, often with little sustainable progress to show for it.
The ‘commons’ in the ‘tragedy of the commons’ is tragic because there is a private, market solution. Second, the ‘commons’ concept relies on a fixed amount of wealth concept, where resources can not be increased, and the gain of any party can only be at the expense of another. Third, the tragedy metaphor unwittingly condemns socialism while generally being accepted as a critique of capitalism, especially the idea that capitalism – unlike socialism, of course – promotes and is based on greed. Capitalism is not about hoarding or acquiring capital; capitalism is about invetsting and growing capital. Fourth, the tragedy metaphor ignores the possibility of a private solution to a ‘public’ problem. Government and regulation are not necessary for a solution to the commons problem. Finally, there is a simple but timeless aphorism, “When everybody is responsible, no one is responsible.” Assigning collective responsibility creates incentives for free riders, finger pointing, and shunning of responsibility, i.e., “Someone else can do it, not me.” It also underscors the fundamental error in socialism: To assume that producers and responsible parties will contine to produce and be responsible without being able to retain a reasonable amount of the fruits of their labor. This applies to the factory worker as well as to the entrepreneur and the corporate CEO.
In 1974, the general public got a graphic illustration of the “tragedy of the commons” in satellite photos of the earth. Pictures of northern Africa showed an irregular dark patch 390 square miles in area. Ground-level investigation revealed a fenced area inside of which there was plenty of grass. Outside, the ground cover had been devastated. The explanation was simple. The fenced area was private property, subdivided into five portions. Each year the owners moved their animals to a new section. Fallow periods of four years gave the pastures time to recover from the grazing. The owners did this because they had an incentive to take care of their land. But no one owned the land outside the ranch. It was open to nomads and their herds. Though knowing nothing of Karl Marx, the herdsmen followed his famous advice of 1875: “To each according to his needs.” Their needs were uncontrolled and grew with the increase in the number of animals. But supply was governed by nature and decreased drastically during the drought of the early 1970s. The herds exceeded the natural “carrying capacity” of their environment, soil was compacted and eroded, and “weedy” plants, unfit for cattle consumption, replaced good plants. Many cattle died, and so did humans.
The rational explanation for such ruin was given more than 170 years ago. In 1832 William Forster Lloyd, a political economist at Oxford University, looking at the recurring devastation of common (i.e., not privately owned) pastures in England, asked: “Why are the cattle on a common so puny and stunted? Why is the common itself so bare-worn, and cropped so differently from the adjoining enclosures?”
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Alex Epstein (Energy Talking Points) (Twitter) is well worth following:
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