'Fossil Fuels: The Greenest Energy'? How So?

 PragerU would tell you fossil fuels are wonderful, that they clean our water and lead us in the fight to overcome climate change. "Fossil Fuels: The Greenest Source of Energy." That's the title of one of their videos.

First off, a warning: PragerU has received much of its funding from the Wilks brothers (Dan and Farris), who made a lot of their money in the fracking business. There is a little conflict of interest in a company that has received so much money from the fossil fuel industry to be telling us that it is clean.

But, let's just listen to the video, and judge if it is correct. Let the video stand on its own. 

"Here's a graph you've probably never seen," says the PragerU host, as he unveils a graph showing the correlation of fossil fuel use and access to clean water. The graph takes us from 1990 to 2010, and shows that as the per person use of fossil fuels went up, so did access to clean water. "More fossil fuels, more clean water," says the narrator. 

Of course, he could just as easily made a graph showing that as fossil fuel use has increased, so has the world's population, and concluded that fossil fuel use is driving up the population. Correlation does not mean causation. Access to clean water is likely increasing because we are doing things to make it cleaner.

Or, he could have drawn up a graph showing that as we have used more fossil fuels, so has the percentage of the global population with clean sanitation also increased. Whoops, actually he did try that one. "More fossil fuels, better sanitation," he said. Somehow, it eludes him that the two might not be connected even though they are both increasing. Couldn't it be that we have greater sanitation because we are following better sanitation practices? Somehow, it seems those sanitation practices are going to factor in a lot greater than whether we have upped our use of fossil fuels.

"Okay, what about air quality?" he asks. "Here's a graph of the air quality trends in the United States." And, up goes a graph showing the downward trend of emissions in the U.S. from 1970 to 2010, "even as we used more fossil fuels than ever."  

I find that at odds with a statement from the Environmental Protection Agency: "Since 1970, CO2 emissions have increased by about 90%, with emissions from fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes contributing about 78% of the total greenhouse gas emissions increase from 1970 to 2011"

"Fossil Fuels: The Greenest Energy"? How so?

(Index -- Climate change info)