The media are abuzz with the news that the United States and China have agreed to their first-ever joint carbon emissions reduction plan. The plan, as outlined by the White House, will cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 28 percent of 2005 levels by 2025, while China said it would hit peak carbon emissions “around 2030.” This plan has been hailed by the New York Times as “an enormously positive step in the uncertain battle against climate change.”
The Times is right — but only in its use of the word “uncertain.”
Increasingly, the scientists and other experts behind climate catastrophism are being disproved. Nor have they properly accounted for the economic and environmental issues that will occur if America and the world shift away from use of fossil fuels.
Let’s start with the “experts” that helped lay the groundwork for the U.S.-China deal. Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich, perhaps the world’s most prominent ecologist, warns that our planet is being depleted by the “overconsumption of natural resources” and polluted by “the use of unnecessarily environmentally damaging technologies.”
James Hansen, the world’s most prominent climate scientist, warns that “If we allow the planet’s energy imbalance to increase and the ocean to continue to warm, we will pass a point of no return.”
Physicist John Holdren, who as President Obama’s chief science adviser is the most prominent scientist in politics, warns that negative climate changes are “happening faster than was expected.”
All argue that fossil fuel use should be restricted to only a small fraction of what it is today.
What none of these prominent experts mentions, though, is that they have been making these same predictions and prescriptions for over 30 years — and been completely wrong. In the past 30 years, our fossil fuel use has nearly doubled — and life has gotten much, much better.
Consider Ehrlich. Just as he predicts catastrophic depletion and pollution today, so he has for decades. In 1974 he declared: “America’s economic joyride is coming to an end: there will be no more cheap, abundant energy, no more cheap abundant food.” In 1970, he said that air pollution “is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”
Instead, we got more resources and a cleaner environment. America now uses record amounts of coal, oil and gas, thanks to innovations such as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, and yet we aren’t running out of supply. Reserves are higher than ever. As for air pollution, thanks to improved pollution-reduction technology it has been steadily declining since the 1970s, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, even as domestic fossil fuel use has increased 25 percent.
Water quality here and especially around the world has improved even more dramatically; according to World Bank data, access to clean water increased from 76 percent of world population in 1990 to 89 percent in 2012. This amazing growth can be attributed in part to the increasing use of fossil fuels, which give us the energy to purify water and transport it to more people.
Hansen has been equally wrong. Just as he confidently predicts runaway global warming today, so he has for three decades. In 1986, he made headlines by claiming that, according to one report, “Average global temperatures would rise by one-half a degree to 1 degree Fahrenheit from 1990 to 2000 if current trends are unchanged” and “the global temperature would rise by another 2 to 4 degrees in the following decade.”
But according to data from Hansen’s own department at NASA, the increase during those two decades was not between 2.5 and 5 degrees, as he promised, but 0.29 degrees. And as carbon dioxide emissions have accelerated, warming has decelerated to the point of virtually flatlining for 18 years.
Finally, we come to Holdren. Just as he predicts an increase in climate danger today, in the 1980s he predicted that carbon-dioxide, climate-induced famines could kill as many as 1 billion people before the year 2020.
Contrary to Holdren’s predictions that we are heading toward a billion climate-related starvation deaths, fossil-fueled agriculture has given billions of people more nourishment. Malnutrition in the developed world has plummeted 39 percent since 1990.
More broadly, according to EM-DAT, the leading international disaster database, climate-related deaths — from extreme heat, cold, storms, floods, wildfires and drought — have plummeted as fossil fuel use has skyrocketed. Climate-related deaths are down 98 percent over the past 80 years, and last year saw a record low of 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. Thank sturdy homes, heating, air-conditioning, mass irrigation, drought-relief convoys, and advance warning systems — all made possible by affordable energy.
Across the board, the trend is striking: Increased fossil fuel use correlates with improvement in every metric of human well-being, from life expectancy to income to nourishment to clean water access to climate safety.
Why did the doomsayers get it wrong, and what does that mean for the future?
There is a commonality in the failed predictions of the past and their dubious equivalents in the present. The popular experts almost always focus on the risks of fossil fuel use while ignoring its benefits. At the end of the day, fossil fuels are cheaper and more reliable than their alternatives — and human ingenuity is a deep well that has and will continue to be tapped to solve any problems such fuels may have.
Imagine if America’s policymakers had followed the advice of the leading environmentalists and severely restricted the fossil fuel energy usage. The result would have been tragic. Billions of people would have remained mired in poverty due to a lack of cheap energy. Hundreds of millions of people would have prematurely died as energy usage curbed humanity’s ability to innovate. The world today would be a darker place, figuratively and literally, had policymakers taken environmentalists’ advice 30 years ago.
The situation is the same today. Fossil fuel energy is the only energy that can currently meet the needs of all 7 billion people on this planet. It has risks and side-effects, but those can be overcome through human ingenuity, as they have before. Energy poverty is a poor substitute for a better life.
This puts Obama’s new climate deal with China in perspective. It also helps explain why China only agreed to the vaguest of statements about its plans to curtail fossil fuel usage. America, meanwhile, is now dedicated to abandoning the same energy sources that have powered our economic growth, lifted tens of millions out of poverty, and made us the envy of the world.
Alex Epstein is president of the Center for Industrial Progress. He is the author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions for editorials, available at this link.
