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A 2014 bestseller with 964 Amazon reviews averaging 4.7. Well written, readable, and I recommend it.

YOHO EDITORIAL NOTE: I have returned to this subject repeatedly because climate fables—like Covid—are one of the globalist strategies to control, terrify, and impoverish us. There are academic debates about some of these issues, but most of what follows from Epstein’s book is obvious to any serious student.

Eighty-seven percent of all energy use on earth is from coal, oil, or natural gas. For over 30 years, “experts” and media have been saying that these practices would soon burn us or drown us as sea levels rose. But the predicted Biblical-scale apocalypse of resource deprivation, pollution, and climate degeneration never happened. What did happen is that as billions more people obtained access to cheap, reliable energy, both the environment and the quality of human life improved.

Although fossil fuel use increased 80 percent between 1980 and 2012, Epstein shows that we will not run out of our plentiful coal, oil, and natural gas energy for possibly thousands of years.

Fear-mongering about global cooling preceded the current fad of global warming. And sea levels rose dramatically 10,000 years ago, but today’s are not changing much if at all. The most malignant and unhinged part of this story is that the modern fashion is to regard humans as cancer on the earth.

Solar and wind energy do not work for several reasons. They need expensive storage batteries because the source inputs are episodic and unreliable. The claims that they are economically viable are solely supported by calculations made during brief, ideal conditions (witness the claims about Germany). They do not take into account that the machines required have expensive components. Manufacturing them requires costly fossil fuels. The result is that generation of power with solar and wind is a net waste of energy compared to any other source. Despite this, pundits claim that this expensive, unreliable, and unscalable source will somehow be magically rendered cheap, reliable, and scalable.

Third-world countries on the edge of destitution—and ultimately starvation—cannot afford to toy with these ideas. To lift themselves out of poverty, they need conventional, reliable energy sources. It is life and death for them.

“Biomass” fuels such as alcohol from corn can scale and have produced more energy than solar or wind. However, they are expensive and their production drives food prices up.

Hydroelectric and nuclear energy are viable alternatives to fossil fuels but are hated with an irrational fervor by environmentalists.

In the free world, commercial production of nuclear energy has not led to a single death to date. But demagogues equate it to the hazards of hydrogen bombs even though the reactors used are uniquely safe. The power plants cannot explode and do not release consequential radioactivity. This industry has been rendered expensive because protestors have forced management into government hands. Nuclear is scalable, but we do not know how much less it would cost without the burden of the pseudoscientific opposition.

Coal is the most plentiful fossil fuel and recent advances have made burning it much cleaner.

The world population has doubled in my lifetime, yet we are far better fed than ever because of advances in food production due to genetically modified crops and the plentiful fossil fuel energy used to farm them.

CO2 has a greening or fertilizing effect on all plant life on earth. It makes the earth more livable. Denial of this established fact allows the claims that “when you use fossil fuels, you have to take into account all the environmental costs.” This is wrong—there are net environmental advantages.

The warming or greenhouse effect of CO2 is modest if any. Epstein credits the possibility that it has such an effect, but other authors think CO2 effects are tiny compared to those of a much more common substance, water vapor.

The CO2 in the atmosphere has gone up from .03 to .04 percent (300 to 400 parts per million) since the industrial revolution, and the temperature has gone up less than one degree Celsius. And there has been no increase in the world’s average temperatures since the late 1990s. And pundits who claim this is a catastrophe are plentiful but fraudulent. Great rewards await those who get media attention, and the easiest way to do it is by proclaiming doom.

Climate predictions are notoriously unreliable in every direction because there are too many variables. Epstein says, “Every climate model based on CO2 as a major climate driver has been a failure.”

Fracking. Objections to this based on flammable gas ejected into the drinking water are sensationalized lies, and the oft-filmed show of lighting water on fire from a tap involves common superficial groundwater gases such as methane. Fracking occurs many thousands of feet deep.

The biggest problem in the world today is that billions of people are starving and dying because they lack enough energy to feed themselves.

The common narrative is driven by people like Obama, who claimed on Twitter, “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree, # climate change is real, man-made, and dangerous.” Actually, they do not agree that it is dangerous, nor was it all scientists, it was the climate scientists. The 97 percent figure came from a woke website devoted to climate apocalypse.

Human life and death are not important standards for these disaster-mongers. They seem to believe that all of our impacts are wrong and envision an ideal earth with far fewer or even no people. They rarely acknowledge that the slightly elevated CO2 levels are producing global greening, a fertilizer effect and that this is a wonderful good for mankind. Epstein says that we should apologize to the fossil fuel industry because increased fossil fuel usage correlates with increased lifespan, income, and other positive effects.

17 Comments

  • Avatar A Midwestern Doctor says:

    I am a committed environmentalist, and I was an environmental studies program when the whole global warming thing really took off and the first Toyota Prius is entered the market. My sense at the time was that it was a corporate PR operation to redirect focus on environmental activism from serious environmental pollution to a nebulous unreachable target of “reducing carbon dioxide emissions. “It was remarkably depressing to watch all of the traditional meaningful environmental stuff get dropped, and at this point in time I feel the environmental movement is a shell of what it used to be because it’s been tracked into focusing so much on the fossil fuel problem.
    My own opinion is that the simplest solution to all of our energy issues is to develop green nuclear power systems (such as thorium reactors). My general perspective at this point in time is that the energy sector is like many other areas in society where the ultimate goal is to monopolize a life essential resource and make it scarce so that the supply of it is extremely limited.
    I don’t believe the current green technologies we are focusing on actually will have a meaningful impact on the environmental footprint humans are creating, but rather are transforming energy to a much scarce resource which is dramatically easier to essentially manage and thereby control the population.
    The issue I personally have with a lot of this green technology is that it gives off a lot of EMFs I am irritation I experience from that it’s not worth what I save for fuel costs.
    Overall, if the powers that be were serious about transitioning to a green economy, assuming no exotic suppressed technology exists (which very well may), the simplest and best solution would be to deploy an effective Power grid that runs off of thorium reactors, and then develop the infrastructure to use fuel cell cars, as they represent a dramatically denser, more environmentally sustainable and cheaper energy storage medium then any battery technology ever will.

    • Avatar Robert Yoho MD (ret) says:

      Use of fossil fuels and increasing CO2 is good for plant life and the earth, We were near extinction-level low atmospheric CO2 levels at the start of the Industrial Revolution, and we are still at (geologically speaking) historic lows. Nuclear works fine, has never produce a single fatality in the western world, but is not needed. It has been demonized because the “environmentalists” have equated it with bomb technology. We have enough fossil fuel for possibly thousands of years.

    • Avatar Robert Yoho MD (ret) says:

      I sent you Patrick Moore’s Kindle book.

  • Avatar Kat Bro says:

    u201CIu2019ve honestly tried staying away from Substack – itu2019s been shown that not all information on that site is accurate.u201D From my 30yr old niece. Iu2019m honestly loving alternative ideas Iu2019m getting from the intelligent writers here. Iu2019ve learned more in the last 7mos than I have in years. Thank you for posting this! I agree with his viewpoints. Wind turbines are so awful to look at and Iu2019ve heard they want to put them in Lake Michigan. Sad times. Incredibly selfish ppl with too much money and time.

  • Avatar Gene Adaway says:

    I havenu2019t seen a natural cloud for months.

    • Avatar Rosalind McGill says:

      I have, in central Florida. I swear Lockheed Martin is keeping Syracuse New York area in clouds, constantly. Not like that in the 1970u2019s & 80u2019s.

    • Avatar Robert Yoho MD (ret) says:

      what does this mean?

      • Avatar Gene Adaway says:

        The kind that are formed over water, from evaporation. The thick, billowy (heavy) clouds full of water vapor that are capable of producing rainfall. The single layer, dry powder being sprayed from aircraft contain no moisture, and are incapable of producing any precipitation. Iu2019ve been a skywatcher for fifty years; and I can tell you that natural clouds grow in size, while man-made clouds disperse and spread out, disintegrating into a haze, making the deeper blue sky behind them appear pale blue.

  • Avatar ABIGAIL REPORTS says:

    Now you can add baby formula, and food. And we are Nullifying the 2nd Amendment, so only criminals own guns. And only a select few will rule, you peons are just slaves to keep us in the life styles WE WANT. The new NEA mantra is SEL Socialize, Emotional Learning. Propaganda.

  • Avatar Rosalind McGill says:

    I was in elementary school during Carter Presidency. The only thing that changed is we now have islands of plastic in our oceans. We were going to be underwater by the time they pulled off 9/11.
    Hysterical how Obama and Mike bought on Hawaii and Martha vineyard & the boys are big on pushing climate change/ global warming for the little people.
    As a kid I thought weu2019d have solar everywhere and reusable grocery bags and glass bottles and wax paper. Hoax , & a way for money laundering for the sold out politician both parties.

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