Even the most passionate defenders of free-market capitalism seem to rest their case on its efficiency rather than – or at least in preference to – its transcendent morality: that of all economic systems, the free market has done the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
It’s particularly appropriate today to make the same point about fossil fuels: that they represent not merely the cheapest, most plentiful, most scalable energy source in a rapidly developing world, but that they remain, on this 49th Earth Day, the most moral one.
This is the case definitively made in one of the most important books I’ve ever read on any subject: Alex Epstein’s 2014 classic, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.
There are, in big round numbers, seven and a half billion humans on the planet. Of these, about three billion are classified by the International Energy Agency as having insufficient access to electricity. Of those, upwards of one billion have no electricity at all. It does not seem to be too much to say that the most implacable enemies of fossil fuel use are determined to see that they never get it – or at least not until the great gettin’-up morning of renewables, decades hence.
For this, as Mr. Epstein demonstrates, is the central human issue: the war on fossil fuels is in its practical application a war on electricity. Yet abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in history. Electrical appliances freed women to work outside the home. Electricity got children into schools, powers modern health care, improves hygiene and nutrition, irrigates fields, cooks and refrigerates food, and provides a reliable flow of indoor hot water. Simply stated, electricity powers all economic development.
If, therefore, our standard of morality is a human standard, then fossil fuels are not just most efficient, but most moral. And, Mr. Epstein asks: if our standard of morality isn’t human…then what can it possibly be?
One hopes that the millions of people demonstrating around the world this Earth Day will have the self-awareness to turn off their refrigerators, microwave ovens, computers, water heaters, lights and TV for these 24 hours. (And, as another writer has suggested, pop down to the local hospital to shut off all the incubators and the cardiac care unit.)
Or they might consider remaining in their warm homes, sitting under to a soft, bright reading light, and perusing Alex Epstein’s indispensable The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.
© 2019 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Nick’s classic book for clients, Simple Wealth, Inevitable Wealth, has just been published in a new, revised twentieth anniversary edition (www.nickmurray.com, click on “Books”).