“When I returned to work this past summer, I felt completely different. The noise at the refinery wasn’t just oil traveling through the pipes, it was the blood of civilization pumping triumphantly. Every day, humans continue to choose fossil fuel energy because it is one of the best forms of energy, and I work at a refinery, helping people to use that energy.”
Here’s the scene.
You’re at a party. You’ve just been introduced to someone and you’re making small talk and exchanging information. Where are you from? What brings you here? Work? What do you do for a living?
Easy questions, right? Not if you work in the oil industry—because you have every reason to expect a negative response when you answer them. You hesitate and shift your weight, preparing for the coming judgment.…
I’m debating Bill McKibben this November on the environmental impact of fossil fuels. Here is a preview.
99.9% of discussion of fossil fuels and our environment ignores the single most important fact about fossil fuels and our environment: fossil fuels have made our environment amazingly good.
The difference between a healthy environment and an unhealthy environment can be summed up in one word, and it’s not “CO2” or “climate” or “temperature.” It’s “development.”
Every region of the world, in its undeveloped state, is full of deadly environmental hazards such as indoor air pollution, bacteria-filled water, excessive cold, excessive heat, lack of rainfall, too much rainfall, powerful storms, disease-carrying insects, lack of sanitation, disease-carrying crops and animals, etc.
And yet some nations, such as the US, have the best air, water, indoor temperature, crops, sanitation, water supplies, storm-protection, disease-prevention, sanitation, and overall environmental quality in human history–while others are plagued by heat waves, cold snaps, drought, storms, crop failures, malaria and dozens of other dread diseases, filth, dung-burning fires, lack of clean drinking water.…
On November 5, I will be debating Bill McKibben, considered “world’s leading environmentalist” by some, on the proposition: “Fossil fuels are a risk to the planet.” I will be arguing that fossil fuels dramatically improve the planet for human beings.
This debate came about at the suggestion of MasterResource’s own Rob Bradley, who pointed me to McKibben’s article, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” , which received many rave reviews and not nearly enough criticism. My Center for Industrial Progress colleague (physicist) Eric Dennis and I decided to respond to the article with a video that addresses what we think is the root of the problem–not any given fact but bad thinking methodology. The problem that makes McKibben’s piece possible is that Americans have never been taught to distinguish science from pseudoscience–how to think critically about scientific claims.…