Fossil Future - by Alex Epstein

ISBN: 9780593420416
Date read: 2025-07-04
How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
(See my list of 430+ books, for more.)

Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.

Fascinating. I highly recommend this if you want to practice changing a long-held belief. It argues that because fossil fuels are still the most cost-effective energy, essential for human flourishing, and billions of people are suffering for lack of cost-effective energy, we should not discourage their use. While I don’t care much about this specific subject, I loved learning about the knowledge system that takes (1) raw research, (2) summarizes it, (3) disseminates it to the public and decision-makers, and (4) evaluates what actions we should take — but each of steps 2-3-4 can distort the expert knowledge from step 1.

my notes

Fossil fuels are a uniquely cost-effective source of energy.
Cost-effective energy is essential to human flourishing.
Billions of people are suffering and dying for lack of cost-effective energy.

When what we’re told the “experts” think is very wrong?
It is not because most of the actual expert researchers in a field are very wrong about their field.
It is because the system we rely on to tell us what experts think is significantly distorting what actual experts think.

Whenever we hear about what the “experts” think, we need to keep in mind that most of us have no direct access to what most expert researchers in a field think.
We are being told what experts think through a system of institutions and people that performs four crucial functions:
(1) engage in expert research about the world
(2) synthesize the essentials from expert research
(3) disseminate essential expert knowledge to the rest of us
(4) help evaluate what actions to take on the basis of expert knowledge.

The foundation of any knowledge system is its researchers: people or institutions that engage in highly specialized research about different aspects of the world.
New research is challenging, error-prone work.
There is significant uncertainty and disagreement.
To spot a very common distortion of research:
Cherry-picking the controversial new conclusion of some researchers and portraying it as the view of all expert researchers.
Take the common occurrence of a confident new claim that “scientists have found” — leaving the impression that all qualified scientists are on board

Researchers in any field generates a near-limitless amount of specialized knowledge.
To be made useful to as many people as possible, it needs to be synthesized: organized, refined, and condensed.
Synthesizers can make major mistakes with even the best of intentions.
Manipulation of synthesizing bodies is far more destructive.
Because synthesizers are so influential, they are major targets for companies, activist organizations, and power-seeking politicians who want to change policy in their favor.

Once synthesizers do their job, however well or poorly, the essentials of their syntheses need to be disseminated.
Disseminators are the institutions and people that disseminate the essentials of synthesized research to the general public and decision makers, including policymakers.
The dissemination of synthesized research is frequently distorted.
The massive distortions of the UN’s IPCC synthesis reports by disseminators are due to a combination of the difficulty of dissemination and the motives of disseminators.

Evaluators are the institutions and people who help us evaluate what to do about what disseminators tell us is true about the world.
We should absolutely listen to the factual conclusions of qualified scientists regarding their area of expertise.
But those scientists are not qualified to tell us what policies to adopt, because determining what policies to adopt always involves considerations from multiple fields.
The “listen to the scientists” refrain is almost always used to get us to accept a given policy evaluation without critical thinking.

We want to avoid not “climate change” but “climate danger”.
We want to increase “climate livability” by adapting to and mastering climate, not simply refrain from impacting climate.

Failure to consider the full context: opposing something on the basis of its side-effects without considering its massive benefits.
Exclusively focused on the negative side-effects of coal and oil, while the role of coal and oil in radically extending lives and increasing opportunity for literally billions of people is ignored.

Over 3 billion people use almost no energy, including electricity.
The unempowered: almost 800 million people have no access to electricity.
2.4 billion people, mostly part of the unempowered world, use primarily wood and animal dung to cook and to heat their homes
1.5 billion people use at least one third as much electricity as the average American.
Almost 3 billion people are between unempowered and empowered.

When I’m considering an argument, I want to familiarize myself with the best version of that argument.
I went directly to the source: the leading experts.
Designated experts are individuals and sometimes institutions, often but not always researchers in a particular field by background, whom a knowledge system designates and prominently features as public spokespeople for the best expert knowledge and evaluation on some issue.
Designated experts are frequently quoted and consulted because they are considered the people who have synthesized the best research and can both explain it clearly to us (dissemination) and help us decide what to do with it (evaluation).
As hybrid synthesizer-disseminator-evaluators, they embody the mainstream knowledge system at a given time on a given topic.

Nuclear energy harnesses a naturally stored, concentrated, and abundant form of energy.
It has a track record of producing relatively low-cost, extremely reliable electricity around the world.
Nuclear energy emits no CO2 and has the best safety track record of any form of energy.
Since the advent of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1975, no new nuclear power plant in the U.S. has been conceived and completed.

What we are told the “experts” think is very wrong.
Not because all researchers are wrong — far from it — but because the people our knowledge system is designating as experts, along with the knowledge system itself, are engaging in an indefensible method of evaluation: calling for the elimination of something based on its side-effects without considering its massive, life-or-death benefits.

Experts predicted catastrophic global cooling.
This claim became popular in the late 1960s and through the 1970s when, despite rising CO2 levels, the world was cooling due to other climate variables.
Predictions of rapid, catastrophic global cooling the mainstream knowledge system’s disseminators promoted confidently.
The Guardian, 1974: SPACE SATELLITES SHOW NEW ICE AGE COMING FAST
New York Times, 1978: INTERNATIONAL TEAM OF SPECIALISTS FINDS NO END IN SIGHT TO 30-YEAR COOLING TREND IN NORTHERN HEMISPHERE

Water quality has gotten far better around the world — thanks in large part to fossil fuels.
Water-pumping systems and water-purification systems.

While we have no desire to make animals suffer, we prioritize the countless lives that animal testing saves.
Advancing human flourishing serves as the standard by which we evaluate what’s good.

Anti-human policies — such as slavery, racism, religious dictatorship, communism, and Nazism.
Nazi Germany supported the extermination of Jews, not because it was unaware that extermination would kill many people, but because its goal and standard was the opposite of human flourishing: the triumph of one group of people, Aryans, and the subjugation of Jews and other non-Aryan groups.
Anti-human goals often win widespread adoption by being disguised as somehow pro-human.

Animal welfare can mean both:
(1) pro-human concern with the welfare of animals, such as opposition to unnecessary cruelty and
(2) anti-human concern with the welfare of animals, such as the animal-equality opposition to testing them for medical research.
Many people embrace “animal welfare,” thinking that they’re just embracing opposition to unnecessary cruelty, but end up in practice supporting the whole animal-equality agenda, including opposition to animal testing for medical research.

Eliminating human impact, not advancing human flourishing, is the primary moral goal driving our knowledge system in the realm of energy.
Eliminating human impact is an anti-human moral goal.
Human beings survive and flourish by impacting nature.

From a human flourishing perspective, we embrace massive, pro-human, productive impacts on nature, such as building homes, roads, and factories.
We want to eliminate or minimize only anti-human, self-destructive impacts on nature, such as pollution or the needless destruction of the most beautiful parts of nature.

The widespread elimination of the lifesaving, malaria-destroying compound DDT.
This compound has saved 500 million lives from malaria death.
But it has been largely eliminated from the poor world by way of pressure from rich nations that were up in arms about reports that DDT has a side-effect of thinner bird eggshells.
Countless millions of people have died to eliminate our alleged impact on eggshells.
(The impact-on-eggshells claim also proved to be wildly distorted.)

Seeking to eliminate some form of human impact, which is considered to be the epitome of morality.

Going from factual conclusions to evaluations of what policies to pass always involves some method of evaluation.
The goal we are operating on determines what we focus on and what we don’t focus on — what we are looking at and thinking about and what is “out of sight, out of mind.”
When our goal is eliminating human impact, human flourishing is barely considered.

Every expectation and prediction involves assumptions about cause and effect.
False expectations or predictions are always based on false assumptions.
An effective way of identifying false assumptions behind predictions is to ask:
What expectations are at work in these predictions?
What false assumptions are behind those expectations?

Delicate nurturer assumption:
False assumption that Earth, absent human impact, exists in an optimal, nurturing “delicate balance” that is as stable, sufficient, and safe as we can hope to expect.
Earth is not a naturally nurturing “delicate balance” but rather a naturally (1) dynamic, (2) deficient, and (3) dangerous place that we must massively impact if we are to survive and flourish.

Consider instead:
“Improving our environment” instead of “saving/protecting the environment”.
“Improving our world” instead of “saving/protecting the planet.”
Improving requires massive, intelligent, productive impact.
Think about our surroundings from a human-centered perspective — as a human environment.
Think of potential global climate change from human impact as a change not from safe to dangerous but from dangerous to dangerous.
End the self-righteous plague known as the “sustainable development” movement, by which the empowered world spreads anti-impact, anti-development policies in the unempowered world.

A zero-degree day is a negative in most places for most purposes, but with modern homes built, insulated, and heated with fossil fuels, it barely causes an inconvenience.
In unempowered places it can mean rapid death.

The 1911 heat wave was possibly the worst weather disaster in New England’s history, with estimates of the death toll as high as 2,000.
Over the last two decades found that deaths from cold have been many times more numerous than deaths from heat.
The Great Frost of 1709 swept across Europe.
Two thousand Swedish soldiers died in a single night, and the cold and subsequent famine killed an estimated 600,000 in France.

In most places around the world wildfires are decreasing, despite a warmer planet and longer wildfire seasons — and this can be traced directly to fossil-fueled wildfire-mastery abilities, including fire suppression.
California’s and Australia’s problems are the result not of an inability to master wildfires but of anti-impact policies that make mastering wildfires illegal.

And unempowered world, drought-related deaths, once the leading form of climate-disaster death, have gone down by an incredible 99 percent in the last century.
Flood-related deaths have decreased by over 99 percent since the peak of reported flood deaths in the 1930s.
A flood that hit Europe in 1362 is estimated to have killed up to 100,000 people, and the central China flood of 1931 by some estimates took the lives of close to four million.

The average person on Earth is 50 times less likely to die from a climate-related disaster than they were in the 1°C colder world of one hundred years ago.
Climate-related disaster deaths have plummeted by 98 percent over the last century, as CO2 levels have risen from 280 ppm to 420 ppm and temperatures have risen by 1°C.

If you want to make the world a better place, one of the best things you can do is fight for more fossil fuel use — more burning of oil, coal, and natural gas.
The negative climate impacts of fossil fuels will be far outweighed by its benefits.
Billions of people will have the opportunity to flourish, to pull themselves out of poverty, to experience higher environmental quality and less danger from climate.