Climate Bait and Switch: Why Fossil Fuels are "Not Essential"

 

Writing in December's Scientific American, Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes has penned an essay with the title "Fossil Fuels Are Not Essential:  The industry argues that we can't live without its deadly products.  It is wrong."  How so?

 

She begins with a litany of climate bad news:  record high temperatures, floods, and Hurricane Helene.  All floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and indeed just about every adverse weather event except maybe blizzards and fog are now recruited as evidence for global warming.  Then she quotes a couple of fossil-fuel companies saying things like, "oil and natural gas remain vital" and that there is a "need for fossil fuels that will continue to play a central role in our lives."  That is the bait.  We are primed to learn how fossil fuels are in fact not essential, and we can live without its "deadly" products.

 

Then comes the switch.  Having told us that what these bad-guy corporate fossil-fuel behemoths are saying is wrong, she admits that a transition to renewables will take time, and then accuses them of working for decades to delay it.  In one sentence, the topic has changed from whether or not fossil fuels are essential (present tense) to whether fossil-fuel companies have tried to delay "the transition."  Then she spends the rest of her column summarizing the story of the gasoline additive tetraethyllead, abstracted from a new book with the heartwarming title Building the Worlds That Kill Us:  Disease, Death, and Inequality in American History.  From the 1920s until it began to be banned for health reasons in the U. S. in the 1970s, this toxic anti-knock compound was used in making "ethyl" gasoline.  Yes, General Motors and the oil companies said in 1925 that adding tetraethyllead to gasoline was "essential" because otherwise, the automobile engines of the time could not have used as high a compression ratio without knocking, leading to poorer fuel efficiency and less power. 

 

Admittedly, their use of the word "essential" was biased by their strong economic motives to shift an externality (a low level of lead poisoning in the entire populace) to the public at large in order to prosper the automotive and oil industries.  In 1925, there were 0.17 automobiles per person in the U. S.  One could have argued that autos were not essential in 1925, but they soon came to be, fueled by that nasty ethyl gasoline.  Except for some regrettable and avoidable industrial accidents, we will never know the specifics of how the widespread levels of lead affected public health in general.  If our culture in 1925 had decided the right way according to Oreskes, refused to consider using tetraethyllead, and sent the engineers back to the drawing board, we probably would have muddled through somehow, but with unknown consequences for both public health and the growth of the automotive industry.

 

But what of the assertion that fossil fuels are not essential?  All we get at the end of her essay is this:  "Leaded gas was not essential to civilization, and neither are fossil fuels.  What is essential to civilization is that we dramatically reduce our use of coal, oil and gas—the largest contributors to the existential threat of global climate change—and thereby set our planet on a path toward a safer future."

 

For a historian, Oreskes shows a remarkable lack of consciousness regarding the element of time, which is of course the only reason the discipline of history exists.  She clearly wants us to carry away the message that because the fossil-fuel industry and its allies exaggerated/lied about the essential nature of tetraethyllead in 1925, they are also exaggerating/lying about the essential nature of fossil fuels today.  She also wants us to believe that the two cases are parallel enough to validate her rhetorical point. 

 

Tetraethyllead did not make the automotive industry possible, it only improved its efficiency.  The world could have done without it.  Can the world do without fossil fuels today?  Can it do without them in five years, or ten years, or fifty years?  I call to the stand Vaclav Smil, an engineer and thinker who has studied the problem extensively and is well-versed in facts on the ground.

 

In How the World Really Works and essays derived from it, Smil agrees that global warming is real, bad things will happen if we do nothing to decrease it, and we ought to start doing something now.  So far he is at one with Oreskes.  But in contrast to Oreskes, who I suspect would simply ban or put a prohibitive tax on nearly all fossil fuels tomorrow, Smil's advice as to what we should do right now sounds a little odd.  The two most significant things we could do to abate global warming, he thinks, are to change building codes in cold-weather countries so that more insulation is required, and shift the automotive market away from SUVs toward smaller cars.  That's it.

 

Modern civilization, by which Smil means living in comfortable houses, buying your food instead of killing it, and having a good chance of living to see your grandchildren, is based on four material pillars:  cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia (the essential ingredient of fertilizer).  There is currently no practical way to make any of these materials at scale without using lots of fossil fuels and emitting carbon thereby.  Getting rid of fossil fuels right now means getting rid of cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia. If we quit producing all these things tomorrow, we'd have a disaster, all right:  a global depression that would make the one in the 1930s look like a blip.

 

Consequently, he believes that a realistic path to actually doing something about climate change involves small things like building codes and SUV discouragement now, moving toward renewables as they become economically feasible without punitive government intervention, and mitigating such harm as global warming causes in the future. 

 

Maybe some day modern civilization will do without significant amounts of fossil fuels, just as it was hard for the GM engineers in 1925 to imagine making good cars that didn't need ethyl gas. But the facts on the ground are that if we let Oreskes become global energy czar, we would be consigning billions of people to continued poverty rather than allowing them to benefit from the blessings of energy use that people in Cambridge, Massachusetts enjoy every day.  That alone is a reason to favor a more nuanced path than the one that Oreskes tries to get us to believe in by ignoring the passage of time that we will need to get there—which is an odd thing for a historian to do.   

 

Sources:  Naomi Oreskes' article appeared on pp. 84-85 of the December 2024 Scientific American.  Vaclav Smil's article "Beyond Magical Thinking:  Time to Get Real on Climate Change" appeared at https://e360.yale.edu/features/beyond-magical-thinking-time-to-get-real-about-climate-change in May of 2022.  The statistic on 1925 car ownership is from https://www.quora.com/What-percent-of-the-USA-population-had-an-automobile-in-1925-What-is-that-number-now.  The book Building the Worlds That Kill Us:  Disease, Death, and Inequality in American History by David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz was just published by Columbia University Press.  Vaclav Smil's How the World Really Works was published by Viking in 2022.

Get Real with Vaclav Smil

 

The headline doesn't really rhyme, because Professor Smil's last name is pronounced "smill" to rhyme with "will."  But getting real is what Vaclav Smil does in his latest book, How the World Really Works.  And the reality that he presents, with incontrovertible evidence in the form of wide-ranging statistics and little-known but vital processes and connections among global economic flows, show that the highly-touted future of a fossil-fuel-less economy in ten or even thirty years is a pipe dream.  Not that it shouldn't happen—Smil tries to avoid the familiar political grandstanding beloved by both sides of the climate-change issue, with fairly good success.  What he excels in is showing in great but fascinating detail how essential but little-known industries such as ammonia synthesis play critical roles in sustaining the eight billion or so people on the planet, and that realizing a global zero-carbon economy any time soon would cause mass starvation.

 

Who is Vaclav Smil?  In reading his columns in the professional journal IEEE Spectrum, I wondered that myself while admiring his unorthodox but always fact-based take on various technical issues of the day.  He recently retired from a distinguished professorship in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba.  He is the only academic I have come across recently who can lay some claim to being a Renaissance man, having published in areas as disparate as population demographics and energy policy.  In whatever field he chooses to write about, however, he likes to start from the facts.

 

For example, if you were asked what are the four material pillars of modern civilization, what would you say?  Silicon, because it's used in virtually all computers and information technology?  Glass, because it forms the material backbone of the Internet?  Smil would disagree.

 

His choices for the four pillars are steel, concrete, plastics, and—the oddest member—ammonia.  Why ammonia?  Because ammonia synthesized from nitrogen in the air and natural gas is the source of the vast majority of chemical fertilizers used throughout the world.  German chemist Fritz Haber figured out how to do that by 1911, and the Haber process still provides most of the world's supply of nitrogen fertilizer, without which you get things like the recent collapse of Sri Lanka, which was caused largely by an out-of-touch government ordering all the nation's farms to switch immediately to non-chemical-fertilizer farming.  But the Haber process needs hydrogen, which comes from natural gas.

 

Plastics, the second pillar of modern society, are made mostly from petrochemicals or sometimes what used to be called "coal-tar derivatives."  Either way, they come from fossil fuels.

 

Concrete, without which we couldn't build most of the large-scale built infrastructure we have, is made with Portland cement, which in turn has to be manufactured with large amounts of coal, or sometimes natural gas.  Anyway, you need fossil fuels to make cement.

 

And steel is made in blast furnaces fired with coke, which is derived from coal.

 

Besides these four pillars, which have to remain in place if the six billion or so people who live less-than-average-income lives hope to improve their lot, all airplanes and nearly all ships burn fossil fuels.  Battery-powered planes or ships to carry even a small fraction of the vital international trade on which modern society depends will not be available for many decades, if ever.  So for the foreseeable future, we are stuck with using fossil fuels for a wide variety of essential processes and products without which most of us would have to crawl away somewhere and die of starvation. 

 

So what do we do, just give up on fighting climate change and get used to wearing bathing suits in the winter?  No, Smil says there are some practical things we can do.  Conservation is a big one.  A surprisingly large fraction, on the order of 40%, of food worldwide is simply wasted—spoiled somewhere along the transportation chain, or simply not used before it goes bad.  And there are tons of opportunities to conserve energy around the world, starting with displacing coal-fired plants (which China is still building like there's no tomorrow) with natural-gas-fired ones, going to smaller cars rather than SUVs and electrics where possible, and building more solar and wind-generation facilities.  But here is Smil reacting to claims that we could decarbonize at least 80 percent of the global energy supply by 2030:  "Alas, a close reading reveals that these magic prescriptions give no explanation for how the four material pillars of modern civilization . . . will be produced solely with renewable electricity, nor do they convincingly explain how flying, shipping, and trucking (to which we owe our modern economic globalization) could become 80 percent carbon-free by 2030; they merely assert that it could be so."

 

Smil's book is full of cold-shower moments like that, but he is also refreshingly free of the tendentious us-versus-them tone that dominates most public pronouncements on these matters by politicians and other leaders.

 

He does not deny that global warming, or climate change, is happening.  In fact, he shows how the essentials of the connection between carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere and global temperature were worked out over a century ago, long before it became a contentious political issue.  When he sees global leaders convening an endless series of summits and proclaiming unrealistic and unreachable goals while letting things just go on as usual, he gets irritated that no one is working toward a more systematic and engineering-driven approach to the problem. 

 

What is needed, and what is so often lacking, is the wisdom to choose the right path, or combination of paths, and the courage to put the decisions into action.  That is the real problem Smil portrays in his book:  the fact that a truly global issue—climate change—will have to have a truly global solution.  And we haven't figured out how to do that yet.

 

Sources:  Vaclav Smil's How the World Really Works was published in 2022 by Viking.