Defending the moral case for fossil fuels

I read Alex Epstein's book on The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels and fully agree with him.
This is a response to The Immorality of Arguing That There's a Moral Case for Fossil Fuels
Which argues that Alex's book and a book written by Kathleen Hartnett are wrong.
There's lots of introductory stuff in the article, so I'm only responding to the parts I disagree with.

In the first place, any accolade due to our high quality of life should be given to the inventions that utilize various fuels

Yes, that's what they do, specifically when you quote Kathleen Hartnett saying

When innovative minds developed a steam engine which could convert the stored heat energy in coal into mechanical energy.

Are you really going to nitpick on the title?
Alex agreed in interviews that adding a word to the title could clear up this confusion.

The Moral Case For Using Fossil Fuels

This single man isn't transformed into an agricultural Superman by oil, but by the machine, a machine that could just as easily and efficiently run on an alcohol-based fuel

No, that has to be produced in a much less efficient way, it would not make the advances of gasoline and coal possible.

So you can't applaud coal for its role in making life better via the steam engine because of all those centuries of deprivation prior to the invention of the steam engine.

Of course the innovation of steam engines and many other inventions are part of a larger development. Like escaping from religion that freed the mind and increases in economic freedom in general. The moral case for fossil fuels is that it's moral to use fossil fuels as part of this development. That it speeds up this development, empowers humanity and has far more positives than negatives. In modern culture there's a culture to always and only talk about the negatives of fossil fuels (and greatly exaggerate them), while ignoring the positives. Alex's book is a refutation of that culture.

An interesting side-note to the general understanding of how we are enslaved by, and chained to, a dependence on fossil fuels is that coal mining in the early days of the industrial revolution was literally legal slavery.

There's no enslavement to fossil fuels, that's just a myth made up by alarmists to fear monger about fossil fuels. They're simply the best fuel we have available to us. Climate alarmists are often also against nuclear energy, which has almost no CO2 production, so apparently they don't really care that much about CO2. We have enough known and reachable fossil fuel deposits for thousands of years. A link to a law in the 18th century is included. I think everyone understands slavery being involved in the coal mining then had more to do with the time than the particular work they did.

if you want to actually credit anything with the success of the steam engine ... the credit should go to water

Many components in the enlightenment where necessary for it to happen. Using fossil fuels is one of them, in many different forms, but humanity would be much worse off without them. We can see that with the electric car. It existed before the fossil fuel car and Ford thought it was better, but fossil fuels turned out to be much better. After 100 years of technological progress; electric cars require government subsidies and ideological conviction to compete with fossil fuel driven cars.

Moving forward - technologically - to internal combustion engines, coal is irrelevant, gasoline is irrelevant, and petroleum diesel fuel is irrelevant.

Every form of energy is important. Each resource can only be used one time. If you don't use coal for heating, that means you need more of another resource to meet your heating needs, etc.

Samuel Morey, Nicholas Otto, Karl Benz, and Henry Ford never said to themselves, "Oh good, now that there's gasoline and diesel fuel I can invent the car."

Having more options allows you to use the best option for each case and more fuels lowers the price. All of this allows people to be more productive, working later after daylight has gone because they can afford artificial light. All of this supports human ingenuity to flourish. Even if there's no direct link. That's why technological progress tends to accelerate. Human progress in the last 100 years has been as much as in the 1000 years before that.

The fact is that fossil fuels have been the cause of wars, disease, and ecological and environmental disasters.

This is complete nonsense. Humans have waged wars all throughout history, even monkeys and ants wage wars. Read The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, violence has gone down enormously. Of course with oil being the best method to empower humans it's going to be a factor in war. But to say the war is fought for the oil is ridiculous. The US has lots of oil in their own country. If they wanted oil it would be much cheaper to simply harvest it themselves or buy it from Iraq than stealing from Iraq.

And if you're the type of person that considers other animal life to be essential, how can the literal slaughter of birds, fish, dolphins, turtles and other animals from the wars and environmental disasters be anything less than wicked and depraved?

I'll agree that this empowerment has resulted in wars that are more destructive to the environment. Where ancient wars would leave fields of dead soldiers for the animals to eat.
Environmental disasters are more likely caused by government regulation, like with the BP oil spill. Environmentalists got Obama to ban oil production near the coast, supposedly to reduce the damage from potential spills. So BP started drilling far away from the coast which was far more difficult. Government inspectors where fine with the safety precautions and government also protects the company from having to pay the bill for the cleanup.
But environmental damage from oil goes far beyond oil spills. Oil naturally occurs in the environments. There used to be tar pits in forests and in a marsh like in Florida oil still seeps into nature on a regular basis. By taking the oil out of nature, you greatly reduce the pollution levels. And fossil fuels empower humans to cleanup nature in many other ways. Even though there are exceptions where it goes wrong.

And then I would have added that neither a solar source of energy nor a wind source of energy is unreliable and intermittent. Indeed, should the day(s) ever come in which the darkness of night doesn't turn to a lightened day then our entire existence on planet Earth would come to an end. And since wind currents are a direct result of a revolving planet and the same solar source, wind is a totally reliable source of energy. The only requirement is that the solar collectors be sufficiently sensitive to cloud covered days, and that the wind generators be positioned in places where there is always wind. But these requirements are virtually no different than the requirement for fossil fuel electric generating plants to be located within proximity to users.

"Renewable" energy sources have massively increased the price in countries where they used them:

So this story about alternative energy sources being great is a fairy tale. They only exist at scale because of subsidies and other government programs.

To the point that only fossil fuels can provide cheap and plentiful energy, I would have reminded him (informed him) that ethanol could have, should have, and would have been the fuel to provide cheap and plentiful energy had the oil industry not bought their way into the dominant position.

Bio-fuels compete with food production and require a lot more land and resources to be produced than extracting oil from the ground. It's no surprise that food prices doubled when governments increased subsidies for bio-fuels. If bio-fuels are so great, why don't profit driven companies produce them without subsidies?

Gasoline and petroleum diesel fuels are poisonous.

Lets get them out of nature.

It is now five months after I originally challenged Alex to a debate and corresponded with him. I have still not heard back from him, and have never heard anything from Kathleen Hartnett White.

This is very disappointing the last debate Alex did was 2 years ago - on his own website - and none are scheduled. I haven't seen any debate on these issue's in years. Very disappointing. I'd debate you, but I have no public visibility.

Ultimately I do totally agree with Alex that we should have freedom and there should be no government meddling with energy. People can best decide what to do in freedom.