Humanity Unbound: How Fossil Fuels Saved Humanity from Nature and Nature from Humanity
The analysis is available here:
http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa715_web.pdf
I highly recommend his paper. Goklany provides essential data and analysis, much of which should be generally known but is not. At least, it is not taught in the schools or presented by the media. Maybe people take fossil fuels for granted, or maybe it's just easier to criticize than to deal with facts, but the concepts Goklany articulates here must be widely understood by the citizens and politicians if we are to make informed, wise policy decisions.
However, to some degree the paper is premised on a straw man attack. One commentator expressed it this way: That fossil fuels are bad for people and the planet is a cardinal tenet of both mainstream and radical environmentalism.
If this is, in fact, Goklany's premise, then I disagree. I'm unaware of any serious commentators who argue that fossil fuels are bad for people. The attack on fossil fuels, such as that from 350.org, is premised on the argument that burning fossil fuels is bad for the planet, and, by extension, eventually will be bad for people. Ironically, they also complain that fossil fuels are nonrenewable, which is an admission that they are good but we just don't have enough of them. That's a discussion for another day. But Goklany, in addressing the straw man, takes his argument too far when he argues that an increase in carbon dioxide by three orders of magnitude is an improvement. Why not recognize that the utility of fossil fuels is accompanied by a detriment that needs to be better managed?
This leads to my second criticism of Goklany's work. He largely overlooks a fundamental point: the political system, and the ethical approach it represents, is determinative.
Fossil fuels alone don't account for the improvement in human longevity and standard of living. This should have been apparent from the fact that the Soviet Union and Maoist China (not to mention most of the Muslim world) had access to fossil fuels for decades while their citizens' standard of living did not improve significantly (or at least not as much as in the western world). Still today, there is tremendous disparity among countries with respect to standard of living, health, and longevity, even though fossil fuels are ubiquitous.
In Figure 11, Goklany includes a graphic titled "The Cycle of Progress" that omits any reference to political systems or ethics.
He does allude to this, however:
But ideas are not enough. They need to be translated into practical technologies that are adopted and used, and can be sustained in the marketplace. Equally important, for every “good” idea there is at least one or more “bad” ideas. For example, a spectacularly bad idea is that the state should control the means of production. Yet, despite access to significant levels of human capital, some societies have tried to implement this bad idea.
Maybe it's a good idea to focus on the data instead of the politics, but in my view, Goklany errs in giving too much credit to fossil fuels themselves. Still, here are a few key quotations I hope motivate people to read his paper.
Fossil fuels helped transform the human world from one that was dependent on living nature for virtually its entire well-being, and thereby trapped in nature’s Malthusian vise, to one that escaped that vise.
Virtually every indicator of human well-being—such as levels of hunger, infant mortality, life expectancy, education, economic freedom, and child labor—improves as income rises.
In 2008, fertilizer made from from synthetic nitrogen was responsible for feeding 48 percent of the world’s population.In 2007, the global food and agricultural system delivered, on average, two and a half times as much food per acre of cropland as in 1961.
Humanity’s reduced susceptibility to weather and climate is confirmed by the longterm decline in aggregate global mortality from extreme weather events, including droughts, extreme heat and cold, floods, landslides, waves, wildfires, and storms of all kinds.
Not only are biofuels unable to pay for themselves (hence the subsidies and mandates), but these subsidies
and mandates have helped increase food prices, which has added to hunger and poverty worldwide.
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