Dear friends, welcome to the May issue of BIC Magazine. Ever heard the term “social cost of carbon”? The EPA defines it as a “comprehensive estimate of climate change damages and includes changes in net agricultural productivity, human health and property damages from increased flood risk.” They literally assign a dollar value per metric ton of carbon when doing cost-benefit analysis.
The idea of the “social cost of carbon” really bothers me. For decades, environmentalists have told us using fossil fuels is a self-destructive addiction that will destroy our planet. But I know fossil fuels are a net positive to society. Over the same decades of warning, by every measure of human well-being, from life expectancy to clean water, life has been getting better and better.
Most media and many business leaders push for a zero net carbon agenda, focusing little to none on the benefits of cheap, reliable energy from fossil fuels while center staging carbon’s potential harm.
In Alex Epstein’s book “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” he opines, “The ‘experts’ almost always focus on the risks of a technology but never the benefits, and on top of that, those who predict the most risk get the most attention from the media and from politicians who want to ‘do something.’ This is a failure to think big picture, to consider all the benefits and all the risks. … When we look at the data, a fascinating fact emerges: As we have used more fossil fuels, our resource situation, our environment situation and our climate situation have been improving, too.”
We all know about the global warming theories. Epstein deals with the issue in detail. He believes there is a greenhouse effect and temperature has increased very mildly and leveled off completely in recent years. He believes the climate-prediction models are failures, and many professional organizations, scientists and journalists have deliberately tried to manipulate us.
All of this I was familiar with, but here is what I learned that was new to me and very interesting: Epstein comments, “What’s most striking is that these extremely positive plant effects of CO2 are scientifically uncontroversial yet practically never mentioned, even by the climate science community. This is a dereliction of duty. To ignore the fertilizer effect and to fail to include it when discussing the impact of CO2 is dishonest.” Epstein points out the fertilizer effect results are not confined to the lab. Photos taken from orbit since 1958 show a 15-percent increase in the rate of growth of wild plants on Earth since that time. More carbon equals more plant growth. That seems like a social benefit of carbon to me.
If you are anti-carbon fuels, can you really care about raising the living standards of millions of citizens in developing nations? Besides growing more food, consider the rapid economic growth and reduction of abject poverty in China and India as they have become more industrialized. You can’t be a humanitarian and condemn the energy humanity needs. To oppose fossil fuels is ultimately to oppose the underdeveloped world.
If we look at what life would be without fossil fuels, mankind would be morally obligated to develop it. Epstein argues, “Fossil fuels are easy to misunderstand and demonize, but they are absolutely good to use. And they absolutely need to be championed. Mankind’s use of fossil fuels is supremely virtuous — because human life is the standard of value and because using fossil fuels transforms our environment to make it wonderful for human life.”
We are proud to champion fossil fuels here at BIC. In this issue, we feature interviews with Chad Burke, president/CEO, Economic Alliance Houston Port Region; James Rhame, plant manager, Flint Hills Resources Houston Chemical Plant; Texas Gov. Greg Abbott; and Nish Vartanian, president, North America, MSA.
We also have articles on an array of topics affecting industry, including effective asset communication, the war for skilled labor, operational readiness, personal responsibility in turnarounds and more.
In closing, we ask you please “readcycle” BIC, and share this issue with your colleagues, family and friends, and visit BICMagazine.com daily for the latest industry updates and events. We hope to see you at upcoming industry events, including the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston and the AFPM Reliability & Maintenance Conference and Exhibition in Austin, Texas!
tbrinsko@bicalliance.com
