Cheap, Plentiful, and Reliable: How Fossil Fuels Stand for Virtue

Dear President Donald Trump,

How did the 2019 TIME Person of the Year, Greta Thunberg, become so influential? How has an entire generation of young people immobilized to fight the “evils” of fossil fuels? How does she not know the morality of the very essences that have transformed this world for human good? How does she continue to denounce, decry, and denigrate the individuals who make up this vital industry? How dare she?

Fossil fuels are more than the lifeblood of the world. They are the organs and central nervous system which literally power our lives. And not only that. Take a minute. Go ahead don’t be shy. Look around the forest, the ice, the living room, the skyscraper, wherever you may find yourself on this planet, that place has been positively impacted by fossil fuels. Everything from the shoes on your feet or the water at your well or the fuel in your generator, it all has come from fossil fuels.

Coal, oil, and natural gas have all provided billions of people medical care, electricity, warmth, coolness, clothing, and peace of mind. While they are not fossil fuels, nuclear and hydro power have also contributed to the makeup of the modern world. Something like coal which is most plentiful in the United States, is among the “dirtiest” of the fossil fuels. But without it, birth rates, life expectancy, and overall life enjoyment would be impossible.

Arguably the most controversial fossil fuel is oil. It has been maligned but has provided the most amounts of energy from something that was considered useless gunk only a few centuries ago. Like an intelligent student who is chastised because he achieves high marks while his fellow students flounder, oil has a similar history. The sad part is that the student chastises himself and appeases his fellow students because they throw out incomplete, erroneous, or flat out lies about him. Oil is the change agent that has lifted billions out of poverty, improved the living conditions of those billions, and permitted the profound growth of the human race.

Humans in caves who had to breathe in noxious smoke in those caves or die from frigid temperatures and risk being gobbled up by a predator outside of them have always faced these choices. Fast forward to nineteenth century London and the many coal burning facilities that darkened the skies like a black Magic Marker squeaking across a board. But look at the gap from the primitive man to one of the most advanced societies ever. Man rose from the caves to be placed in a time period where they could expect to live to be 50 or 60 instead of thirty-five.

And it is the fossil fuels that cleaned up London, not the droves of sign bearing Green affiliates (signs produced by fossil fuels, by the way) taking to the streets. In fact, those same streets streaked by the droppings of horses saw the revolution of the internal combustion engine that put a stop to such filth.

And consider the “alternatives.” Wind turbines and solar panels remain the dreams of some who wish that fossil fuels would become a thing of the past. But how were these blades and panels produced? Was it a wind farm and a sun soaked roof that made these things? No. You’ve guessed it, fossil fuels provided these unreliable and non-scalable challenges to coal, oil, and natural gas.

Without weighing the facts or understanding that some “scientists” have claimed that we will be living in a Mad Max (1979, 2015) style dystopia by now, one would side with the Green zealots. In the 1960’s, these thinkers came up with the idea that by the late twentieth century, there would not be enough food to nourish Earth’s people. At least they had concern about humanity in this situation even though it was wrong and misguided. Then, in the mid nineteen-seventies, intellectuals claimed that the globe was cooling. That’s right. With all of the talk about global warming nowadays, leading thinkers once held that Earth had been placed on a path to cool over time. Like the example of food deprivation of the 1960’s...what happened? In the former, fossil fuels provided farmers and other professionals the ability to produce large quantities of food that would feed entire continents. In the latter, these thinkers just came up with non-data, non-ideas, and non-facts. Which leads us to global warming.

The earth might be heating they preach...now. The same scientists who screamed about global cooling switched up their positions and went hog wild on betting against fossil fuels instead. So is earth getting warmer? Did man play a significant role in such a phenomenon? Who cares? The Green movement factions don’t even care. They just wanted a scapegoat to satisfy their taste for complaining about something. Fossil fuels represent morality and virtue because they advance human life. While we ought to employ private property to leave certain areas pristine and “untouched,” humans must live in areas that have been adapted to their needs. Fossil fuels are the only way that man has lifted from the hut to the multi-million dollar mansion. In the time that man has been able to consider the wheel cart to the International Space Station (ISS), fossil fuels have been the spat upon quiet prime mover of human progress. Fossil fuels have lit up cities at night and sent more people around the globe and launched space vessels to distant planets.

Politicians will cower and capitulate reason just to get votes. They will say that fossil fuels are an addiction that is a problem but is needed. In order to save the environment, such rhetoric implies that nature is something that must be seen as a delicate Fabergé egg. In reality, volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other phenomena have taken millions of lives over time. We need to be saved from the natural environment. And the antidote to this sickness are fossil fuels. They consist of substances that make life possible, enjoyable, and long lasting.

Look up at the sky above a refinery or some chemical plant. The symbol of defaming fossil fuel use, smoke stacks, actually exist on a long chain of productive energy and thought. The factory or other installation produces a product, maybe synthetic socks, maybe non-stick pans, maybe oil, and large clouds of smoke billow from the plant. That smoke represents the final issuance of the chemicals that have helped to produce something. It is clean and efficient. For all the shouting and stomping that goes on to stop chemical plants and refineries, it is important to remember that fossil fuels keep the mind and heart of these places active.

While it may appear from oil company commercials themselves which talk about algae and how many after school programs they help and anything but oil, one ought to remember that it is oil, coal, and natural gas that lift humanity to ever greater heights of prosperity.

It is pure emotion that leads people to denounce fossil fuels. The first thing that someone might think is, “eww...it’s black and chalky” or “it’s black and gooey.” While these are true visible and tangible attributes of coal and oil, they speak nothing of the deep meaning behind their usage. “Natural gas...I’ll suffocate!” a Green person may yelp. In reality, natural gas has contributed to making the cleanest air in all of human history. Absent reason, it is easy to believe that fossil fuels cause cancers, poison plant and animal life and make life not worth living. If an honest “environmentalist” just took a moment to consider the human environment, then they would be able to see just how glorious fossil fuels can be. If you’re wearing clothes, drive a car, live in a house, drink water and eat food, then there is a definite correlation behind fossil fuels and all of these activities. Coal, oil, and natural gas constitute the entirety of the modern world. So why do people hate them so much?

The contempt held by people within the Green movement has very little to do with fossil fuels qua fossil fuels. They don’t have the Vietnam War to protest anymore, the wars and Iraq and Afghanistan have largely ended and is ending (as of this writing) respectively, and life is rather great. It’s so great that people get bored and seek out campaigns to get worked up about instead. So, they choose the “environment.” They feel that a raccoon or a glacier is of greater importance than their own newborn infant in the next room. They feel that CO2 emissions are choking the very air that everyone breathes. In reality, raccoons will take care of themselves, babies are far more important than them, and there aren’t enough refineries in the world that could pump CO2 into the atmosphere to make it toxic.

What needs to be clarified is the fact that fossil fuels correspond with the other things that the Green movement folks love. They enjoy documentaries, right? How many fossil fuels had to be burned to produce the cameras and the lighting and to provide for a crew? Green people like food right? Unless they’re literally going into forests and picking foliage from trees or hunting bears bare naked with a spear and net, chances are that they employ fossil fuels. So, they say that this is absurd. Is it? The next thing that they’ll claim is that we can “reduce” the use of fossil fuels. That’s absurd. We should be pushing for more and more oil, coal, and natural gas, because it benefits us. All of the wealth in the world is a result of the usage of fossil fuels. Articles play on the word Green usually to refer to marijuana but also to the “environmentalist” movement. Writers ask whether there is more money in wind turbines and solar panels. This is where things get interesting. The same people who would yell about how oil companies are “greedy monopolies” who stomp on throats just to turn a coin, now want a piece of the power action. The truth is that the unreliable solar and wind industries aren’t even in the same league as fossil fuel companies. But don’t let the average CEO of a fossil fuel company tell it. He or she will most likely diminish their own corporation to aid one of the Greens. In this moral fight for the right to use fossil fuels, one must never lose sight or let the opposition deter you from answering the need for rationality in this entire situation.

You, Mr. President, remain in a position to further educate yourself about the virtues of fossil fuels. By exiting the United States from the Paris Accord, you have taken the first steps to illustrating just how desperately America and the world need fossil fuels. And this is not an addiction but a healthy diet of fuels that power our very existence. There is no way to cap the bottle on coal, oil, and natural gas. And that’s a good thing. They should be able to be introduced to our climate which has been changing for billions of years. It will continue to change while we’re here or exploring places like the Moon and Mars.

Fossil fuels have sustained us for centuries. Rather than fighting against them, we ought to embrace them and accept the fact that they have enriched all of our lives. Why would anyone continue to be Green? The very idea that a color that should be associated with going against coal, oil, and natural gas is green is ironic. The forests which provide the wood to build homes and other structures see the planting of trees to replenish the landscape. Again, this whole process involves the hands of fossil fuels guiding mankind. Or the water that would be full of the bad kind of bacteria gets to be cleansed through the purification plants that run on coal, oil, and natural gas.

Mr. President it is of supreme significance that you know what literature is out there. Mr. Alex Epstein’s The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels (2014) inspired this very writing and if you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend it. It is a beacon amongst a wasteland that the Greens would love to ban. It is a valuable tool like fossil fuels, that ought to illuminate any doubts, frustrations, or misconceptions that you may have harbored.

There is an opportunity for you to affect change from your position. As the leader of the semi-free world, you hold the power to influence some of the brightest minds and vice versa. If you allow yourself to realize that fossil fuels develop human minds and bodies, you will be afforded the chance to improve the lives of the people of the United States. In turn, the upward mobility and advancement of Americans will signal a way for the rest of the world to flourish as well. Because of the crucial nature of this matter, never let any of these Greens stop you on the road to claiming how good fossil fuels are and how they will forever affect our lives for the better.