Carbon week: The G7’s immoral no-carbon pledge | Financial Post

Carbon week: The G7’s immoral no-carbon pledge 

Carbon week: The G7’s immoral no-carbon pledge

Alex Epstein, Special to Financial Post | June 16, 2015 11:33 PM ET

Michael Kappeler/AFP/Getty ImagesGermany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper talk during the G7 Summit in Germany.

Energy, and especially fossil fuels, is the key to individual empowerment and human well-being
Any time world leaders gather for strategic planning, their number one goal should be identifying and executing the policies that will most further human progress, based on the best evidence we have.
If the G7 had adhered to this goal, its recent summit would have announced a resounding conclusion about energy: humanity needs far more fossil fuels.
Reviewing the evidence, the G7 would note that for the last 35 years, doomsayers have predicted that our use of fossil fuels would cause catastrophic global warming, catastrophic pollution, or a catastrophic shortage of fossil fuels themselves.
Fortunately, it would note, none of those catastrophes has materialized. Predictions that increasing atmospheric CO2 from .03 per cent to .04 per cent would cause runaway warming were met by the reality that CO2 causes mild, manageable, and arguably desirable warming—and certainly a desirable increase in plant growth. Predictions that pollution would be ever-worse were met by the reality that human technology can progressively purify our endeavours.

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U.S. air pollution has declined radically in recent decades despite a 25 per cent increase in fossil fuel use. Predictions that we would “run out of fossil fuels” were met by the reality that there are many, many times more potential resources underground than we have used in the entire history of civilization—and that technologies like shale energy and oil sands energy are making those potential resources into actual fuel that heats our homes, powers our tractors, and runs our hospitals.
Looking at this evidence would cause the G7 to fundamentally question the people, institutions, assumptions, faulty thinking methods that led to the shockingly false predictions, and to suspect that they have a bias against fossil fuels that causes them to exaggerate or fabricate threats and ignore benefits.
And, the G7 would observe, what benefits there have been. Since 1980, the world has increased its use of coal, oil, and natural gas by 80 per cent. At the same time, the average life expectancy of our world population of 7 billion individuals has gone up 6 years—6 years of precious life! Every other metric of human well-being has also improved, from income to access to health care to nourishment to clean water access.
This is no coincidence. The energy industry is not just any industry; it is the industry that powers every other industry. When there is more cheap, plentiful, reliable energy in the world, more individuals are empowered to use machines to improve their lives. That is why as China and India each increased fossil fuel use fivefold, hundreds of millions got their first light bulb, their first refrigerator, or their first decent-paying job. To the extent energy use is restricted, fewer people are empowered.

Germany’s entire solar and wind apparatus delivers guilt alleviation while adding no net energy

Germany, a member of the G7, would have honestly told of its story of failure trying to run a country on solar and wind. Germany’s entire solar and wind apparatus is not a productive energy source, it is an absurd consumer expenditure—which delivers prestige and guilt alleviation, while adding no net energy and subtracting reliability.

We have been told for decades that the climate is becoming ever more dangerous. In 1985, Barack Obama Science Advisor John Holdren predicted that “carbon dioxide climate-induced famine could kill as many as a billion people” by 2020. But according to the international disaster database, climate-related deaths are down 98 percent over the past 80 years. In 2013, there 21,122 such deaths worldwide compared to a high of 3.7 million in 1931, when world population was less than a third of its current size. How is this wonderful development possible? Because fossil fuels aren’t taking a naturally safe climate and making it dangerous, they’re taking a naturally dangerous climate and making it safe—through energy that enables us to produce sturdy homes, heating, air-conditioning, mass irrigation, drought-relief convoys, and advance warning systems. The G7 should announce to the world that if we want to make more people safe from climate, we need to liberate fossil fuel use.

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Unfortunately, the G7 did none of this. Instead, it declared that the world needs to make illegal up to 70 per cent of today’s fossil fuel use by 2050—in a world where half the people have virtually no energy, and where 2 billion more people are expected to join the population! They did nothing to rebuke the wildly irrational anti-nuclear movement, which claims to want to limit CO2 emissions but opposes the most efficient non-CO2-emitting technology. Instead, they declared that we will be forced to use on a large scale the same forms of unreliable energy that are ruinous on a small scale. And it invoked more outlandish climate predictions based on the same assumptions the last bunch were based on.
The people of the G7 member countries—and even more so, developing nations that are to be most victimized by the G7—need to unite against this assault on progress. The 20th century was full of “elite” nations inflicting horrific ideas on the world—Communism, eugenics, DDT bans. In the 21st, they are trying to inflict one of the most horrific ideas possible: the abolition of lifeblood of our present and our progress. Those who truly value human life must be willing to declare proudly: Humanity has a moral obligation to use more, not less, fossil fuels.
Alex Epstein is President and Founder, Center for Industrial Progress, and author, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.