I HATE
FOSSIL FUELS.

✦ The wrong metric

The planet is fine. Humans are thriving. Those two facts are connected.

The standard anti-fossil-fuel argument measures only costs and ignores benefits. By virtually every metric of human welfare — life expectancy, child mortality, access to food, protection from natural disasters, income — the world has dramatically improved as fossil fuel use increased. Climate-related deaths have fallen 98% since 1920, precisely because fossil-fuel-powered infrastructure protects people from the climate's natural violence. A framework that counts CO₂ but not saved lives is not an honest accounting.

Sources: Our World in Data, EM-DAT International Disaster Database, Alex Epstein — The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels

✦ The math doesn't work

Eliminating fossil fuels today would kill far more people than climate change will.

Fossil fuels provide 80% of the world's energy. They power hospitals, heat homes, grow food (fertilizer is made from natural gas), purify water, and run every supply chain on earth. There is no credible scenario where replacing them overnight — or even over 20 years — doesn't cause catastrophic disruption. Energy poverty already kills millions annually through indoor air pollution, cold exposure, and food insecurity. Cutting energy access faster than alternatives can scale is not environmentalism — it's a humanitarian crisis dressed up as one.

Sources: IEA World Energy Outlook 2023, WHO, Vaclav Smil — Energy Transitions

✦ Cheap to build ≠ reliable to run

The price of a solar panel is not the price of electricity when you actually need it.

Levelized cost comparisons for renewables exclude the most expensive part: backup power for when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. Germany spent over €500 billion on its Energiewende transition and still has among Europe's highest electricity prices and most carbon-intensive grids when wind drops. Texas's February 2021 blackouts killed hundreds when renewables and gas both failed — but the solution was more reliable dispatchable power, not less. Battery storage at grid scale remains economically unproven for multi-day gaps. Cheap generation is not cheap electricity.

Sources: Fraunhofer ISE, ERCOT post-mortem 2021, Manhattan Institute — The "New Energy Economy" Examined

✦ Catastrophism ≠ science

Warming is real. Extinction is not on the IPCC's table. These are very different claims.

The IPCC — the most authoritative body on climate science — does not predict human extinction or civilizational collapse in its reports. Its worst-case scenarios project significant but manageable economic damages over a century, not apocalypse. The catastrophist narrative is a political amplification of legitimate science. Meanwhile, the same fossil fuels driving warming are also funding the technology, infrastructure, and agricultural systems that make humanity more resilient to every kind of threat — including climate. A poorer, lower-energy world would be far more vulnerable, not less.

Sources: IPCC AR6 2023, Bjorn Lomborg — False Alarm, Roger Pielke Jr. — The Rightful Place of Science

✦ The narrative outran the evidence

What oil companies actually said is far less damning than what you've been told.

The "Exxon knew" campaign was built on internal research documents that showed scientists studying the question with genuine uncertainty — the same uncertainty that existed in the broader scientific community at the time. Exxon published peer-reviewed research and funded climate science. What they didn't do was sound the alarm publicly — but neither did most governments, universities, or media outlets in the 1980s. Selective prosecution of one industry for shared societal uncertainty is politics, not justice. The more important question: what do we do now?

Sources: Benjamin Franta — Harvard Kennedy School, Geoffrey Supran reanalysis, Alex Epstein — Fossil Future

✦ Exactly backwards

The cruelest thing you can do to a poor person is take away cheap energy.

Access to affordable fossil-fuel energy is the single most powerful anti-poverty tool in human history. The countries that industrialized on coal and oil eliminated mass starvation, built sanitation systems, and enabled women to enter the workforce by replacing manual labor. Today, 800 million people lack electricity and 3 billion cook on open fires — causing 4 million deaths per year from indoor air pollution. Blocking fossil fuel development in the developing world in the name of climate justice condemns the poorest people on earth to perpetual poverty. That is the real injustice.

Sources: IEA Energy Access 2023, WHO Household Air Pollution Report, Alex Epstein — The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels

✦ Show the math

No grid-scale economy has done it. The ones that tried are cautionary tales.

Wind and solar are intermittent by physics — they produce power when weather permits, not when demand requires. A fully renewable grid requires either continent-scale transmission (not built), months of storage (not economically viable), or reliable backup — which means fossil fuels or nuclear. Germany's attempt produced the world's most expensive electricity and barely reduced emissions because it shut down nuclear while keeping coal. California, with the most aggressive renewable mandate in the US, has the highest electricity prices and chronic reliability problems. The engineering challenge isn't political will — it's physics and economics.

Sources: Energy Institute Statistical Review 2023, California ISO, Vaclav Smil — How the World Really Works

✦ Try telling that to Wyoming

These are among the highest-paying blue-collar jobs in America — and they're not going anywhere soon.

The average oil and gas worker earns over $90,000 per year — roughly double the median American wage — without a college degree. These jobs sustain entire communities in states like Texas, North Dakota, West Virginia, and Wyoming that have few alternatives. The promised "green jobs" replacement has consistently underdelivered: the US solar industry employs fewer people than the fossil fuel sector at roughly one-third the average wage. Telling a roughneck his job is dying and he should retrain for solar panel installation is not a transition plan — it's a class dismissal.

Sources: BLS Occupational Employment Statistics 2023, BW Research Partnership, EIA

✦ Wealthy nations' luxury opinion

Every rich country got rich on fossil fuels. Now they're pulling up the ladder.

No country has ever industrialized without fossil fuels. The "leapfrog" argument — that Africa and South Asia can skip coal and gas and go straight to solar — ignores that renewables cannot power steel mills, cement factories, fertilizer plants, or reliable hospitals. When the World Bank and Western governments pressure developing nations to forgo fossil fuel financing, they are making an energy policy for people who didn't vote for them, based on climate models, not the lived reality of energy poverty. Nigeria has more sun than Germany. It doesn't have Germany's standard of living. Energy density matters.

Sources: IEA Africa Energy Outlook 2023, Vijaya Ramachandran — CGD, Alex Epstein — Fossil Future

✦ Consensus on what, exactly?

Virtually everyone agrees warming is happening. Almost no one agrees on what to do about it.

The "97% consensus" figure — from Cook et al. 2013 — measured agreement that humans are causing some warming. It said nothing about magnitude, pace, catastrophic risk, or optimal policy. There is no comparable consensus on whether the impacts justify a rapid fossil fuel phase-out, what the right carbon price is, or whether the economic costs of aggressive climate policy are worth the benefits. Scientists who study the climate disagree sharply on these questions. Collapsing a complex policy debate into "the science is settled" is a rhetorical move, not a scientific claim.

Sources: Cook et al. 2013 (reanalysis), Richard Tol — climate economics, Roger Pielke Jr., Judith Curry

✦ The transition is a rounding error

After trillions in subsidies, fossil fuels' share of global energy has barely budged.

In 2000, fossil fuels provided 80% of global primary energy. In 2023, after two decades of the most aggressive renewable buildout in history and trillions in subsidies, fossil fuels still provide 80% of global primary energy. Wind and solar have grown, but so has total energy demand — especially in Asia. EVs displace oil but often run on coal-fired grids. The scale of the existing energy system is almost incomprehensibly large. Headlines about renewable milestones describe the margin, not the system. We are not past fossil fuels. We are more dependent on them in absolute terms than ever before.

Sources: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2023, IEA, Vaclav Smil — Energy and Civilization

✦ A definitional sleight of hand

Most "fossil fuel subsidies" are developing-world consumer price controls — not industry handouts.

The $7 trillion in annual fossil fuel subsidies cited by the IMF includes roughly $6 trillion in "implicit subsidies" — meaning governments not charging a carbon price the IMF thinks they should. Actual direct government payments to oil and gas companies are a fraction of that. Meanwhile, wind and solar receive direct subsidies of $300–500 billion annually despite being "cheaper." The US renewable energy industry has been continuously subsidized since the 1970s and still cannot survive unsubsidized merchant power markets. The subsidy narrative has the dependency relationship backwards.

Sources: IMF Working Paper 2023 (methodology note), EIA Federal Energy Subsidies, IRENA