Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Alex Epstein correctly states that to make a proper evaluation of fossil fuels, all the benefits must be evaluated along with all the risks. He is also correct that currently the risks are being emphasized much more than the benefits. Of course, to do such an evaluation properly, the evaluator must start with an open mind and let the facts determine the outcome. A book written from that perspective would have been useful. Unfortunately, as the title The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels suggests, the author does not start with an open mind; he states explicitly that he wants to show that the benefits of fossil fuels significantly outweigh the risks. He concedes that human-influenced warming is occurring but claims the effects are too slow to be of critical concern. I found many logical fallacies in the book, but concluded that almost all the errors could be attributed at least in part to “cherry picking”: selecting those facts and interpretations that agree with your position. For example, in evaluating the predictive accuracy of climate models, he compares the predictions James Hansen made in 1988 with actual temperature measurements and compares temperature measurements taken in the mid-troposphere in the tropics with current global models for the low troposphere. So in the first case he ignores the fact that models have significantly improved in 27 years, and in the second case he compares apples and oranges. But since the models in these two cases disagree with the observations, he conveniently concludes that climate models cannot predict future temperatures accurately and therefore can be ignored. He does not even acknowledge the fact that CO2 stays in the atmosphere for years so if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t significantly decreased, the impacts will get increasingly larger. Epstein states he is a “humanist”, which he defines as “someone who treats the rest of nature as something to use for his benefit.” He sets up a false dichotomy by defining a “nonhumanist” as “someone who treats nature as something that must be served” or saved from any harm, thus leaving no room for those of us who respect nature but also acknowledge that sometimes it may be necessary to harm nature. He proceeds to destroy this nonhumanist strawman with a selected set of extreme quotes. Now he can ignore all environmentalists. Epstein cherry picks an interesting set of parameters for evaluating the benefits and risks. Since for him using the past for evaluation is important, he shows some plots of the life expectancy and GDP per capita increases in India and China alongside plots of fossil fuel use (p 14). Not surprisingly, the shapes of the plots are similar. He then implies that all of the gains were due to the increased use of fossil fuels (falling for the correlation-equals-causation fallacy). Now I agree that fossil fuel use has been responsible for major improvements in our lives -- but certainly not for all of it. And many of us hope that to increase the standard of living in developing countries, renewables such as local solar will be used instead of implementing the infrastructure needed for fossil fuels, just as cell phones have eliminated the need for land lines. According to Epstein, the “key statistic” for measuring climate-change harm from increased fossil fuel use is the number of past climate-related deaths, which he plots from 1900 to 2000 (p 24). One form of cherry-picking is selecting graphical techniques that lead to a desired interpretation. Presumably to emphasize the decrease in deaths, he uses a 30-year moving average (i.e., almost one-third of the total range is included in each point). In fact, from just looking at the individual points on the graph, I found the worst year had about 5 million deaths; only 12 years spread across the time period had more than a half million deaths; and most years were indistinguishable from zero. So I don’t consider that this plot gives any real information. Even if it were meaningful, this is a very limited measure of harm, since it doesn’t include injuries or property damage. In addition, by considering only the past, he does not have to deal with the future costs of adaptation and recovery from climate-change impacts. In dealing with sea level change, Epstein shows plots of sea level for various cities between 1900 and 2000 ranging from steep decreases to shallow rises (p 107). Upon investigation, it turns out all of the decreases are in the near-Arctic and, ironically, result from the land rising due to the decreasing weight of melting glaciers and ice caps. Cherry picking can also be done by omitting something. For example, it appears that technology driven by fossil fuels can do everything, including adapting to any impacts of climate change, but for some unspecified reason would be incapable of solving the storage problem to make solar and wind power viable. These are just a few examples of the types of errors I found. Clearly I do not recommend that anyone read this book.