Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the American Postliberal on October 23, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
In the aftermath of Hurricanes Helene and Milton progressives have jumped on the climate change rhetoric to explain the disaster. Nowhere do they mention the draining of disaster relief funds prior to Helene, rather we must focus on “climate change action.” They blame climate change for the supposed intense hurricane season and insist that we have to “go green” to avoid future catastrophes.
It is fallacious for the climate change activists to act as if the climate is some monolithic state that we must maintain. We should obviously care for the environment—which richer societies are far more able to do—but to act as if the Earth’s temperature is in some steady state is absurd. It is well recorded that the earth has undergone ice ages and tropical breaks. Earth’s temperature is not some static equilibrium that only gets broken by the evil acts of humans.
The earth appears to naturally change temperatures as geologic and spatial events occur. To act as if humanity has some sacred role to make sure temperatures never move beyond our arbitrary range is absurd. It is to fight basic scientific realities. We can also know with certainty that fossil fuels and sound energy policy make humanity better off, in fact far better off than the eco-terrorists that call themselves environmentalists.
The clearest way to see how important fossil fuels are to hurricane responses, and frankly our entire way of life, is understanding them as capital goods. Capital goods are those goods that are not directly serviceable to our desires, towards our wants and needs. Think of the graphite used to make pencils. The graphite itself is not valued because we are using it directly, but because we use it to make consumer goods, in this case a pencil.
Fossil fuels are examples of capital goods. Our accumulation of them is not to directly consume raw oil, but rather in service of creating those goods we consume. The difference between our industrial society and a destitute one is our accumulation of capital goods. Capital goods allow us to create more consumer goods. If our forefathers had not created fishing poles to make fishing easier they would not have been able to free up more of their time towards creating other goods, and so on so forth. Capital accumulation brings more material prosperity.
Fossil fuels have become one such thing, because we have relied on them and we are able to enjoy greater material prosperity and respond to hurricanes. Because we have fossil fuels we have been able to create greater sources of energy—nuclear energy—and those very things that make the unlivable places of the world livable.
So, what does “Big Oil” have to do with hurricane recovery? This is not meant to be a libertarian screed. To harness fossil fuels in the first place is the result of thousands and thousands of years of humans slowly accumulating capital goods. We then use fossil fuels to make electricity, gasoline, and to do nearly everything we have today. If we trace back every consumer good we have today, eventually we will reach fossil fuels higher up in our capital structure.
If we discard fossil fuels we get rid of a vital point of our infrastructure. Goods that rely on them will become significantly difficult to obtain. Less goods get made overall and less people are sustained. More people die. It is no wonder that JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon pushed back on Rep. Rashida Talib’s request that he cease giving loans to fossil fuel companies with a simple remark: “Stopping new oil and gas funding? That would be the road to hell for America.”
Aside from that alone, it is because of fossil fuels themselves that we are able to respond to natural disasters today. Fossil fuels allow us to create the very goods that will let us respond to disasters. Because of our more efficient fossil fuel harvesting we are able to harvest more efficiently metals and bring them together to make tools.
This includes access to gasoline which enables us to go long distances with vehicles for disaster relief or to escape disasters. We are able to construct better escape mechanisms and infrastructure that can withstand hurricanes and tornadoes. It is precisely because of fossil fuels that we have air conditioning. Does anyone seriously believe people would be living in Phoenix, Arizona absent the ability to bring down temperatures thanks to fossil fuels?
Even if fossil fuels causes some modicum of change to the climate in some way, we are better able to respond to nature and combat its excesses because we have fossil fuels. The only energy provider that outpaces it in energy output is nuclear, but even nuclear cannot replace every use of fossil fuels. It is no wonder that since the beginning of the 20th century the number of climate related deaths has plummeted.
Fossil fuels are our allies in the fight against hurricanes. Contra-climate activists, fossil fuels actually make us safer. To try to replace all of our energy with green alternatives by discarding fossil fuels will end poorly. Fossil fuels are an integral part of our propulsion towards a safer world for humanity. We should embrace fossil fuels and a strong energy policy to help fight severe weather.
The climate activists miss the crucial part fossil fuels play in civilization, in creating the world we have today, and keeping humanity alive. Embrace strong energy policy, not green policy.
Image by Hitesh — Adobe Stock — Asset ID#: 907036955
The problem is that a human lifetime is but a mere second in terms of climate time — just because we have no living memory of storms a century ago doesn’t mean they didn’t happen.
As to hurricanes, does anyone remember what happened to Galveston Island, Texas in 1900? Or the 1935 Labor Day hurricane in Florida? Or the 1938 hurricane that went up the Connecticut River — after coming ashore with a THIRTY foot storm surge? Or the twin hurricanes of Carol & Edna in 1954, or the other hurricanes in the 1950s?
And as to New England Nor’Easters, the Great Portland Gale of 1898 and the Blizzard of 1978? And as to flooding, the records in Massachusetts were set in the 1930s.
It’s asinine to blame current storms on C02 when there were worse storms in the era before humans put CO2 into the atmosphere.