Global warming is going to devastate humanity and earth as we know it!  Why?

I would wager that you are likely to know someone who is suffering a material level of psychological trauma because of their fear of a warmer planet.  I have seen this manifest itself in people I personally know.  The anxiety is real.

I’m here to tell you: it’s going to be ok.

How can I be so certain?

Well, let’s think about this in three simple questions:

Question 1:  Is the earth warming, and if so, are humans the primary cause of this warming?  (Anthropogenic Global Warming)

Question 2:  Assuming that the earth is warming primarily through human causation, is this a good thing, a bad thing, or a mixed bag of good and bad?

Question 3:  Assuming that human causation is primarily driving global warming, and global warming is a significantly bad thing, are the measures that humans could realistically take worth the price paid to effect material change?

I won’t bore you with facts about how other planets in the solar system have seen similar temperature patterns to the earth due to solar cycles (different climates, but same ball of fire in the middle of us).

Nor will I bore you with the fact that human CO2 production amounts to about 3% of total global CO2 production, and that CO2 isn’t anywhere as influential of a greenhouse gas as say… water evaporation.

Let’s just assume the worst case scenario.  Humans are driving global warming.  Let’s assume that somehow, humans push global temperatures so high that the ice caps entirely melt (up to two miles thick in Antartica).

In this imagined new world, sea levels rise 124 feet approximately.

That is a lot!

That stated, to melt such a large amount of ice would take not just a few years, but thousands if not tens of thousands of years.  We would have time to move inland.

A much more drastic change in sea level actually took place from the end of the ice age some 10,000 years ago when peak ice levels covered large portions of North America and Europe to when the melt off was mostly complete (note: it’s still in process, e.g. glaciers still melting) the sea rose 400 feet.

No doubt that was a dramatic melt off!

Recent discoveries seem to point to a celestial event (perhaps meteor(s) or an extreme solar event) as triggering a massive melt-off at the end of the Ice Age.

Global warming alone would have taken a much, much longer time to melt such large concentrations of ice (as is the case today) only that today the bulk of the earth’s ice is soundly secured at the south pole where it just doesn’t get that warm, ever, and melt-off would take millennia.

So, even if the relatively small amount of ice remaining from the ice age were to melt off, we would have time to deal with it.  Again, that is the highly unlikely worst case scenario.

Not that I want anyone to worry about something they have no control over, but if we are to worry about environmental disasters likely to be cause by mankind we should look no further than nuclear power (possibility of meltdowns making areas uninhabitable for generations) and nuclear war (possibility of destroying more human, wild, and plant life than all previous wars combined).

Why these are no longer major concerns to most is a bit baffling.  We are coming up on 75 years into the nuclear age, and there have been a handful of catastrophes and other major close calls.

Thankfully the worst hasn’t materialized, but I think we are far from being out of the woods.

I’ll leave that nuanced discussion for another time.

Now, regarding the title of my article in relation to fracking (hydraulic fracturing):  The American economy (and by extension the world) has hugely benefitted in the last several years due to this innovate practice.  Fracking has vastly increased the production and future supplies of both natural gas and petroleum.

I realize that the environmental impact of this practice can indeed carry risks, and has resulted in some concerning outcomes in many cases.

I don’t want to minimize those, and hope that better techniques will come into place to deal with risks for underground water contamination and the potential to destabilize seismically active areas.

Nevertheless, it has also had a positive environmental effect by significantly replacing coal with (now) less expensive and much cleaner burning natural gas (more on that below).

With that said, here are some of the amazing positives that have come from the use of fracking for more than 10 years:

US oil production increased from approx. 5 million barrels per day in 2008, to approx. 12 million barrels per day in 2019.  About half of current production comes from fracking operations.

US oil consumption was relatively steady during this time period (about 20 million barrels per day), meaning that imported oil was reduced from about 14 million per day in 2008 to 8 million per day in 2019.

The extra 6 million barrels per day from fracking certainly has lowered the price of oil (over $100 for most of 2007 to 2014 to the current level at about $60 per barrel).

It’s not a stretch to imagine that in a world without fracking, oil would be at least double the current price, and the US would be bleeding economically to fund importation of overseas production to a far greater extent than it does today (this pull on overseas oil would also drive up costs for the rest of the world that competes for the same supply).

Fracking has also increased natural gas production in the US by 60% during the same 2008-2019 timeframe.

Importantly, this has driven the price of natural gas to historic lows (currently a fifth of historic highs from 2008), making it affordable to replace far dirtier fuel feedstocks such as coal.

In fact, the large increase in natural gas production has been specifically for that purpose, to replace coal electricity generation with electricity produced by clean-burning natural gas.

It is difficult and highly speculative to guess, but I would argue that the savings to the American economy over the last twelve years (in oil costs/imports and electricity cost savings from natural gas) would easily surpass any other technological or industrial development of that same period.

Assuming double the price of oil and gas (which I believe is conservative), the US economy is about $2.73 trillion richer over the past 12 years because of fracking.  Assuming a worse-case scenario where prices are triple, that grows to $5.46 trillion (or about $455 billion more to the US economy per annum).

US GDP is currently about $20.5 trillion per year (2018), the above savings alone could nearly match the component of growth for the most recent year (2.9% growth in 2018, or about $595 billion in growth over the previous year).

I think the above teaches a valuable lesson.  The lesson is that (absent destructive forces such as war or destructive policy implementations such as communism), markets and technology provide ever better solutions to difficult problems.

Battery technologies will continue to improve, solar energy technologies will continue to improve, more cars sold will no longer use fossil fuels, other unforeseen advances will take place, and 12 years from now I imagine it will be far more difficult to still sell the public on the anthropogenic global warming catastrophe that they’ve been trying to sell us ever since I was a child.