Fossil Future by energy expert Alex Epstein is required reading for anyone open to an incredibly more informative perspective on energy and relative environmental issues than is standard today.
This well-researched book is outstanding, not just because of Epstein's many fact-filled positions countering mainstream narratives on these issues, but primarily for how to think more clearly and contextually about them.
The author weighs the pros and cons of all major energy sources while highlighting the enormous benefits of carbon-based fuels that otherwise are virtually ignored. He demonstrates how those who wildly catastrophize their side effects evade this objective method to push renewables (wind and solar) as viable alternatives, which he shows should more aptly be named “unreliables.”
Epstein evaluates these issues by reframing the catastrophists’ fundamental thou-shall-not-impact-nature premises. Instead, he contends that if human flourishing is our standard, then cheap, reliable and plentiful fossil fuels must remain our primary energy source for the foreseeable future.
Citing science, he contends that while global temperatures have risen marginally since the advent of fossil fuels (1° Celsius), apocalyptic man-made “climate change” is virtually impossible. Fittingly, his book underscores the doomsayers’ many decades-old predictions of climate catastrophes that never came remotely true.
Meanwhile, fossil fuel-fed machines and technologies, from cooling to heating systems, have made us unprecedentedly safer from climate dangers, writes Epstein, who notes that climate-related deaths have plummeted 98 percent in the past 100 years. He also calls for empowering billions of people worldwide with carbon-based systems, three billion of whom live on the energy equivalent of the average American refrigerator.
Fossil Future is a bold, controversial answer to what Epstein calls our broken mainstream knowledge system, from which many anti-freedom, human-harming environmental and economic policies have flowed for decades.
Read Fossil Future critically but prepare for it to seriously challenge your views on these issues. You’ll undoubtedly be intellectually empowered by the experience.