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Alex Epstien, who is widely despised, has written, in The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels that to withhold cheap abundant energy, and the technology it enables, fro
by grb423 10y ago
Alex Epstien, who is widely despised, has written, in The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels that to withhold cheap abundant energy, and the technology it enables, from the world's emerging populations is immoral and fundamentally anti-human. Supported by people who think this Earth would be a much better place if Man never set his filthy foot upon it.
- ArkyBeagle 10y agoI have second-order Facebook contacts who are overt environmentalists. Some of them are self-consistent enough to actually admit that they think human population level is the root of all these problems. That is in itself probably true, but I can't quite be hypocritical enough to attack a phenomenon that supports my very existence. To that: "There are too many people." "You first." But they don't have good operating knowledge of population dynamics and current birth rates. It's rather that they bought prior exponential analyses of exponential human population growth and never fully discarded it. They also appear to know that fossil fuels are a part of this phenomenon. So there are Druids who walk amongst us.
- quadrangle 10y agoMisanthropy is easy to come by when evidence supporting it is widespread. The best thing to send to anyone worried about population is: https://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-end-poverty/ https://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-end-poverty/
- ArkyBeagle 10y agoMisanthropy is dangerous.
- quadrangle 10y agoI wasn't advocating it.
- ArkyBeagle 10y agoUnderstood.
- dredmorbius 10y agoEpstein is an idiot and coal shill. If you'd like a more nuanced version of that argument, I'd suggest Vaclav Smil, who's written at length on the topic of humans' interactions with the environment. I'm wrapping up his Energy and World History right now, which makes a similar case that fossil fuels have tremendously improved quality of life ... for a small fraction of humans currently alive. The impacts for others range from markedly less to net negative. The larger problem is that the situation isn't long-term tenable -- it will last so long as those fossil-fuel sources are cheap and abundant, and the sinks for their and associated effluvia are capable of absorbing insult without returning injury. Neither condition can be reasonably argued. (Yes, Epstein argues for both, he's not reasonable, and incapable of credible reasoned thought.) The ultimate problem with Epstein's argument is that, in the face of limits to growth, the lives made possible through increased fossil fuels will only add to the deaths and suffering removal of that energy subsidy will result in. Yes, overpopulation and overconsumption are problems. Systemic dynamics make addressing this exceptionally challenging.