American Oil and Gas Reporter - January 2015 - 193

The Presidential Papers
generations have been taught to think of
our natural environment as a friendly,
stable place-and our main environmental
contribution is to mess it up and endanger
ourselves in the process. Not so. Nature
does not give us a healthy environment
to live in-it gives us an environment full
of organisms eager to kill us and natural
forces that can easily overwhelm us."
Then there is his point that oil and gas
advocates concede the moral high ground
if they concentrate too much on detailing
their critics' factual errors (which are legion) without refuting their basic moral
argument. "This implies that the argument
is right, your opponents just need to identify your evils more precisely," he writes.
Reframing The Debate
Where Epstein transitions from telling
it like I know it is to bringing me around to
his way of thinking is mainly through his
case for how to reframe the debate. Working
from his imminently defensible position
that an activity is moral if it is fundamentally
beneficial to human life, Epstein makes
the powerful case that concerns about greenhouse gas emissions should be minuscule
when compared with the realization that
inadequate supplies of affordable energy
translate into scarcer, more expensive food.
This leaves human beings at the mercy of
the temperatures and weather, and pretty
much reserves all the goods and conveniences
of modern life-from running water to hospitals, and mobile phones to automotive
transportation-to an elite few with enough
money or power.
Anyone who wants to make the case
that renewables (a term that Epstein skillfully demonstrates basically is nonsense)
are on the verge of providing that volume
of energy must face the fact that every
day we wait on a supposed imminent
breakthrough is another day much of the
world remains in grinding poverty.
Cost, density and scale are not minor
hurdles. Consider that sources such as
solar and wind-after 50 years of government subsidies-provide less than 1 percent
of the world's energy, Epstein notes, then
consider that in a world where more than
1 billion people lack electricity, that for
everyone in the world to use the same
amount as Germany would require doubling world energy production.
Therefore, he argues we should not
consider fossil-fuel opponents as legitimate
participants in a constructive discussion

about energy unless they concede the
economic and environmental primacy of
cheap, plentiful and reliable energy.
Epstein goes on to make a case for a
values-based communication strategy that
entails several key principles:
* Challenge/triumph storytelling;
* Emphasizing the audience's need
and our achievement;
* Technologizing our industry;
* Personalizing the value we create;
* Humanizing our people; and
* Normalizing our hazards.
Outreach according to these principles
will not impact everyone the same way, of
course, but Epstein characterizes the goal
as persuading honest citizens interested in
a good-faith energy discussion to progress
along a spectrum of opinion. When it comes
to such persuasion, he seeks to neutralize
attackers, turn nonsupporters into supporters
and to turn supporters into champions.
That may sound ambitious, but Epstein
offers the examples, such as the cultural
transition on campus after he gave a pres-

entation at Vassar College (hardly a stronghold of conservative, free-market thought)
that was based on another one of his
books, Fossil Fuels Improve the Planet.
The anti-fossil-fuel "greens" walked out
of his presentation, but in doing so they
engendered considerable backlash from
most of their fellow students, and almost
immediately lost influence and prestige
as a powerful voice on campus.
Have I simply rewritten "The Moral
Case For Fossil Fuels" in my 2015 Presidential Paper? Hardly. I merely have attempted to provide what I hope is a
halfway adequate summary. Get your
hands on a copy of the essay by visiting
the Center for Industrial Progress website
at http://industrialprogress.com.
Of course, it's possible the essay only
scratches the surface of Epstein's book
of the same name, which is published by
Penguin Publishing and runs 248 pages.
I intend to find out, and I may just buy
some extra copies to share with people
who may benefit from reading it.
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JANUARY 2015 193

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