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.

What's Global Warming Like in San Marcos?

 

Strictly speaking, I can't answer that question, although I live in San Marcos, a town of some 50,000 people halfway between San Antonio and Austin.  The reason is that global warming (or climate change, whichever you prefer) is such a large-scale event in both space and time that it's hard to attribute any particular thing to it exclusively. 

 

Some people have seized on this fuzziness to assert either that it doesn't exist at all—you can always debate about how accurate climate models are and whether the scientists have neglected some factor they don't know about—or that its effects are so random on a small scale that you can't say for sure what it's doing.  For reasons that are not entirely clear, many people on this side of the argument are evangelical Christians.

 

Other people have used the same large-scale characteristics to reach the conclusion that humanity is headed straight to the wastebasket unless we revolutionize the world, including every level of government in every country, to stop global warming in its tracks, which itself would take several generations to do.  For reasons that are also not that clear, many people on this side of the argument don't believe in God, or at least don't believe God is going to bail us out of the looming mess at the last minute, anyway.

 

One person who combines aspects of both sides, and is highly qualified to speak on the topic, is Katherine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech in Lubbock.  Hayhoe has a Ph. D. in atmospheric science and has spent her professional career of two decades or more publishing both in the technical literature and in efforts to publicize the science of climate change in a way that the average person can understand.  She is married to a pastor, who co-authored a book with her (A Climate for Change:  Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions), is chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy, and holds an endowed chair in public policy and public law.  If anybody is qualified to talk about climate change to religious people, Hayhoe is.  And almost alone among people who talk a lot about climate change, she has a good attitude about it.

 

Attitudes are a lot more important than people give them credit for.  The unique thing about humanity, in comparison to the rest of the living beings on this planet, is that we can think about our situations historically over time and make long-term plans to deal with various challenges.  Plants and other animal species can adapt to changing circumstances to a degree, but not if all members of a species get killed by a sudden shift in the environment.  Only humans can anticipate something by looking at preliminary signs of its coming and plan to deal with it in advance.  But attitude will determine how well we do that.

 

Planning in advance is essentially what Hayhoe wants us to do.  In an interview she conducted with Tim Reckmeyer of SW Newsmedia last February, after Texas' Big Freeze, she pointed out that one side effect of global warming is to weaken the jet stream, because the Arctic is warming even faster than the rest of the world.  Weakened jet streams tend to wobble more north and south, and an unusually large wobble to the south was what let extremely cold air all the way down to Texas last February, leading to multiple power-generation failures and a week without water and power for millions of Texans, a couple of hundred of whom died as a result.  So, paradoxically, it is possible that global warming contributed to the extraordinary cold snap of last February.

 

On the other hand, my wife and I planted some tomato vines last March, once it got warm enough that we weren't worried about another freeze.  Our little cherry tomatoes in particular did very well this year, and the fall and winter so far have been so mild that we are still harvesting cherry tomatoes with only twelve days to go till January.  If this is global warming, it's good for cherry tomatoes, anyway.

 

Hayhoe points out that there are basically three kinds of things we can do about global warming:  mitigation, adaptation, and suffering.  By mitigation, she means doing something about the main things that cause global warming in the first place, chief among which is carbon emissions.  By adaptation, she means dealing with the consequences of global warming: rising ocean levels and all that means for coastal regions, and changes in crop patterns and weather cycles, including more of certain types of severe weather in some cases.  And the third thing, suffering, will happen without us doing anything about it. 

 

Hayhoe says that it's up to us to choose what mix we're going to have of these three things.  Obviously, if we ignore mitigation and adaptation and just pretend everything will be fine, she thinks we'll have more of the third thing—suffering.  And she may well be right, although suffering due to global warming is not always that easy to distinguish from suffering as part of the general plight of humanity since the dawn of time. 

 

Mitigation means things like carbon taxes and the panoply of world-government-like policies that the more extreme members of the Democratic Party would like to impose on the U. S.  I think Hayhoe would say about this that it doesn't have to be as painful as it looks, and there are plenty of opportunities to preserve economic growth for poor as well as rich countries if mitigation is done wisely.  If Hayhoe was in charge, that might work as well as she says, but not all government policymakers are as wise as Hayhoe.

 

And adaptation I think is something that everyone can agree on.  With CO2 levels doing what they're doing, we can fairly reliably predict that certain things are going to happen, and it's just carelessness not to prepare for them.  Conscious and planned adaptation is one of the things humanity does best, and sensible actions along these lines are probably what will get the most consensus among disagreeing parties.

 

We've enjoyed our cherry tomatoes this year, but it wouldn't surprise me if it all comes to an abrupt end in a world-beating cold snap.  Global warming won't change the old saying that goes "if you don't like Texas weather, just wait a few minutes."  It just may make it more true than ever. 

 

Sources:  I referred to Katherine Hayhoe's website (http://www.katharinehayhoe.com/) which has a link to the Reckmeyer interview at https://www.swnewsmedia.com/prior_lake_american/news/opinion/guest_columns/commentary-what-happens-in-texas-doesnt-stay-in-texas/article_e6acef32-9a24-534f-8005-bd105613ad93.html.