Posted on 12/01/2015 1:16:51 PM PST by Kaslin
In a recent interview, Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki compared the fossil fuel industry with American Southern slavery.
That's very powerful rhetoric, but it's a completely false analogy.
The slave economy involved a clear cause-and-effect relationship between behavior that is morally reprehensible in principle kidnapping and enslaving people and unambiguous harm to the victims, including captivity, family separation, frequent beatings, back-breaking labor without reward, and unsanitary living conditions.
The fossil fuel energy economy is nothing like that.
What's the difference?
First, the basic behavior of mining coal, oil, and natural gas and extracting energy from them to meet people’s needs is not by any stretch of the imagination morally reprehensible in principle.
Second, its consequences are far more beneficial than harmful.
Abundant, affordable, reliable energy from fossil fuels has lifted billions of people in the developed world out of poverty and the high rates of disease and premature death that invariably accompany it. It's given them access to pure drinking water, sewage sanitation, and the electric power they need for light and cooking and heating and cooling and refrigeration to prevent food spoilage and communications and all the myriad other things we in developed countries take for granted. It's done this at a cost of a few minutes a day of labor for the typical household. And the result has been, among many other benefits, a reduction in infant and child mortality rates from nearly 50% to under 1%, and an increase in life expectancy from under 30 years to nearly 80.
Compare that with the situation of the average sub-Saharan African household. There, the average woman spends six to eight hours a day hours she can't spend doing other productive things to raise herself and her children out of poverty just gathering wood and dung, which she uses as her primary cooking and heating fuels, smoke from which kills 2 to 4 million people a year, mostly women and children, and causes upper respiratory diseases and eye infections in hundreds of millions of others every year, diminishing their capacity to work and conquer poverty.
What the billions living that way desperately need is abundant, affordable, reliable energy, especially in the form of on-demand, unintermittent electricity, and in developing countries, fossil fuels are far and away the best way to provide that. Wind and solar power, because they lack the energy density and power density of fossil fuels and because they wax and wane and sometimes cease completely, can't provide that.
If there's any relationship between fossil fuels and slavery, it's that our learning to extract energy from fossil fuels made slavery economically obsolete. Instead of employing a few thousand calories per day of biological energy from each slave, farmers now use millions of calories of energy a day from fossil fuels to operate the machinery that enables them to feed and clothe not just themselves but scores more people.
Of course, Suzuki's worried about the warming effect of the carbon dioxide emitted when we burn fossil fuels.
But even if the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is right and a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration results after two or three centuries in a 3 degrees C increase in global average temperature (and recent empirical studies indicate the models exaggerate warming by two to ten times), the benefits of the energy fossil fuels give us will far outweigh whatever harems come from the warming.
Even the IPCC's own Working Group 3 predicts that at the end of both this century and the next, the countries that are now the poorest will be best off in the warmest scenario and worst off in the coolest because achieving the coolest (if it can be done at all) would require depriving them of the economic development the forgone fossil fuel use would have made possible.
Suzuki may not want it, but the real consequence of the policies Suzuki wants is to trap the world's poorest in their poverty and hunger, disease, and premature death for generations to come, and to push those in lower income brackets in developed countries back into grinding poverty. If Suzuki's looking for something to compare with slavery, the policies he wants are a far better analogy than fossil fuels.
I sure wish we would stop calling these “fossil fuels” ... they are not.
Immoral or not, if you tell someone that they are going to have to give up a massive source of income, they are going to look at you like you're crazy.
David Suzuki wa baka desu.
Kick-start him and drive him out of town....
Thank you! I was just about to write the same thing.
In the USA we use 21 million barrels of oil each and every day. A barrel is like 42 gallons.
There is no way that many dinosaurs or plants lived and died to create that oil. Also some oil is found three miles BELOW the Gulf of Mexico. So, the surface of the earth increased three or four miles and the diameter got bigger? And how and when did that happen?
Like global warming, the myth of how "fossil fuels" came to be is such baloney.
Crude Oil actually contains microfossils.
USING MICROFOSSILS IN PETROLEUM EXPLORATION
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/fosrec/ONeill.html
What about coal?
Do you understand what sedimentary rock and a sedimentary basin is?
It isn’t even layers placed all over the earth. The erosion that occurs on land is carried down rivers and deposited in a few locations. The entire earth isn’t covered in Mississippi Rivers. But at that delta, it certainly is building up.
A tiny amount like one inch every thousand years is over six miles deep over 400 million years.
Science Daily has a good definition for “Fossil Fuels” = Fossil fuel is a general term for buried combustible geologic deposits of organic materials, formed from decayed plants and animals that have been converted to crude oil, coal, natural gas, or heavy oils by exposure to heat and pressure in the earth’s crust over hundreds of millions of years.
Unlike nuclear fuel, wind generation, hydro generated power, or wood fuels, the key is: geologic deposits of organic materials, formed from decayed plants and animals.
I think coal and oil are natural materials that God put in the earth because He knew we would need them.
We have daily 100 car coal trains to feed our local power plant.
Think of the amount of plant and animal materials that would need to be compressed so densely in such a limited area to produce one vein of coal.
Think how much coal is used per day around the world, and then how much has been used in the last 150 years.
The dinosaurs would have to be livng in high rises to get that much density from dead bodies piling on top of each other to creat that coal.
And again, how does a coal mine exist 1000 or more feet underground?
Naturally occurring sedimentary layers?
And a lot of coal is found just below the surface—ie strip mining—where was the sedimentary compression to creat the coal there?
The earth produces over 100 million tons per year in organic carbon.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/281/5374/237
If only 0.01% of that become trapped in sediment on lake and ocean beds, it equals 4 trillion tons after 400 million years.
Fossil fuels helped end slavery in the united states and world wide. (well the parts of the world that was not Islamic )
While fossil fuel usage didn’t become widespread until the early 1900s, the usage of machines that predated them led to the automation of many jobs world wide that made slavery economically unfeasible. The machinery of the industrial revolution started steam and coal powered was easily adaptable to fossil fuels thus preventing a slide back to the usage of slaves as a viable economic model.
I know geologists love to talk in millions and millions of years.
But we have no clue how old the earth really is, and whether is it a new earth or an old earth.
But oil is found inland as well as by water.
Again erosion is fine, but the source material had to come to the delta from somewhere. To grow the diameter of the earth by three to six miles is an almost unimaginable amount of raw material. And if the mechanism is erosion, how is it that the earth has oil where sedimentary basins like deltas do not exist?
Even in Saudi Arabia, a desert, has trillions of barrels of oil underneath it, Where was the plant and animal material that created that, if it was from previous inhabitants of the earth.
You know oil, and you can quote chapter and verse how much oil is extracted daily from the planet and used.
And there are trillions of barrels left to tap and left to find.
I believe God placed these hydrocarbons for our later use.
The prevailing idea that the dinosaurs and plants created oil and coal leaves God out of the equation, and that makes it popular with man. God then has nothing to do with it.
To me, the entire earth speaks of the creative ability of God. The hydrological cycle, photosynthesis, etc. are evidence of a master design, not random events.
That is why I believe God created the earth and all that is in it. And I thank him for the oil and coal that has made life on earth far easier for the last 200 years than could be imagined.
The sheer daily quantities that are used up, being extracted currently, and found in reserve are so massive that there is no other real explanation.
From the article, the organic carbon produced is over the entire earth, whereas coal and oil are by popular definition, concentrated areas of organic materials.
They are hydrocarbons, and carbon is found over the entire earth.
It is nothing for God to use these chemical building blocks to create oil and coal for us to use.
Again,the density of strictly animal and plant matter required to produce a trillion barrel reserve of oil, such as off the coast of Israel, would be unimaginable in quantity.
But that does not fit the story of the dinosaurs falling in pits and plants falling over them and being squashed into oil and coal over hundreds of millions of years.
Methane cometh from the bowels of distant planets. Therefore, we should fear monsters from outer space. ;-)
Again, you have to think in geological time periods.
Generalized geographic map of the United States in Late Cretaceous time.
To grow the diameter of the earth by three to six miles is an almost unimaginable amount of raw material.
Again, it isn't everywhere. The whole earth is not covered in sedimentary basins. Just as oil isn't found everywhere.
how is it that the earth has oil where sedimentary basins like deltas do not exist?
There is no commercial oil production outside of sedimentary basins. All oil production is sourced to sedimentary rock.
Even in Saudi Arabia, a desert, has trillions of barrels of oil underneath it
It wasn't always a desert. Again, geological time frames.
The prevailing idea that the dinosaurs and plants created oil and coal leaves God out of the equation, and that makes it popular with man. God then has nothing to do with it.
First, the dinosaurs is just from advertising cartoons from early oil sales, oil that was laid down from the time of dinosaurs.
Secondly, God provides all. The marine life, such as algae and plankton that was trapped in sediment is provided by God; He is the source of that life. The microfossils of these creatures are contain in the oil and the layers of rock we drill down into to produce it.
Thank you for your patient explanation of geological timeframes and your always excellent charts.
Yes, God is all and provides all—on this we agree.
We just do not agree with the geological timetable.
Someday, you and I can sit at the feet of Jesus and He will instruct us both.
Please know I always enjoy your oil industry posts.
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