Bill Gates has gotten a lot of criticism for endorsing--or at least for not opposing--poor countries’ use of cheap, plentiful, reliable energy from fossil fuels to improve their lives.

Here’s the background: In a post on his “Gates Notes” blog entitled “Two Videos That Illuminate Energy Poverty,” Gates recommends that readers view two videos by the Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg entitled “Fighting Poverty with Fossil Fuels” and “Saving Lives with Fossil Fuels” (they’re worth watching, and each is barely over a minute). Poor countries, says Gates,


Thus, even though Gates believes that human beings’ impact on climate is a major negative, he believes that the positive of using more fossil fuels, in the case of poor countries, is worth it. He opposes “putting constraints on poor countries that will hold back their ability to fight poverty” and calls for technological improvements as the solution: “we should be investing dramatically more money in R&D to make fossil fuels cleaner and make clean energy cheaper than any fossil fuel.”

Does this approach of weighing benefit and risk sound reasonable, even if you disagree with his weights (which I do)? Not in today’s climate discussion, where serious weighing of the benefits and risks of using fossil fuels vs. not using fossil fuels rare. Instead, it is all too common to treat fossil fuels’ climate impact as an apocalyptic risk and treating the economic benefits of fossil fuels vs. solar and wind as nonexistent. And to attack anyone who says otherwise as an irresponsible ignoramus.

Take the prominent LinkedIn blog post “Sorry Bill Gates, But You’re Wrong on This Issue,” by Jigar Shah, a businessman in the solar industry.


Instead of giving a careful explanation to Bill Gates of why he is weighing the benefits and risks of fossil fuels incorrectly, Shah uses the all-too-common approach of intimidation-by-appeal-to-experts. In this case, Shah appeals to his own expertise and the fact that Gates is not in the energy industry.

Bill Gates, writes Shah, has “zero qualifications to understand energy and its costs.”

Not true.

Bill Gates and anyone else, including you, is perfectly capable of reading the works of various experts in the field, getting a sense of the quality of their arguments and evidence, and forming a big-picture impression of which forms of energy work best and why. We need to consult experts, absolutely, but we need them to explain what they know and what we don’t know, so we know which views of which experts to act on. And that means we should be extremely suspicious of “experts” such as Jigar Shah, who use intimidation in place of explanation.

Jigar Shah, in his entire post, “Sorry Bill Gates, But You’re Wrong on This Issue,” never refutes Gates’s core argument: that solar and wind are unaffordable and impractical for the poor, while fossil fuels can be affordable and practical. Instead he just asserts it in passing while attacking Bjorn Lomborg: “Lomborg has a stubborn refusal to acknowledge the fact that renewable energy is cost competitive with fossil fuels as an energy source.” Apparently, Shah regards himself, and expects us to regard him, as authoritatively knowledgeable on these subjects. He repeatedly exmphasizes why Gates is unqualified to hold energy opinions: Gates “doesn’t know much about energy outside of his vested interests in nuclear power,” and possesses a “depth of ignorance that poses a serious problem given Gates’ stature.”

Even if Shah were a renowned energy scholar rather than a competitor in the energy industry arguing for his own technology, and even if Shah were right and Gates were wrong, this combination of insult and intimidation would still be exactly the wrong way to go about educating people. Shah should use whatever expertise he has to carefully explain how Gates (and perhaps the reader) got it wrong and how to properly think about the issue. To elaborate, as I put it in The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, we need to treat

experts not as authority figures to be obeyed but as advisers to one’s own independent thought process and decision making. An adviser is someone who knows more than you do about the specifics but knows only part of what you need and can be wrong. An honest and responsible expert recognizes this, and so he takes care to explain his views and his reasons for them clearly, he is upfront about any reasons there may be for doubting his conclusions, and he responds patiently to questions and criticism.

Shah and too many experts-turned-intimidators do the exact opposite. And one reason is that their views don’t hold up in the face of questions and criticism.

If you survey the works of different scholars in energy, and the evidence they cite, you will see massive amounts of evidence for three conclusions: 1) Fossil fuels are by far the world’s leading fastest growing source of energy. 2) Solar and wind have proven fundamentally unreliable sources of energy that depend on cheap, plentiful, reliable energy from fossil fuels. 3) Life has gotten much better in poor countries with massively increased fossil fuel use.

1) Fossil fuels are by far the world’s leading and fastest-growing source of energy.

If we want to know which technologies are practical and which aren’t, a good place to start is to ask: what are the real trends? It's easy for proponents of, say, solar panels to argue that they have a bright future, just as Amory Lovins, the most renowned energy scholar of the 1970s, did in 1976 when he said: “Recent research suggests that a largely or wholly solar economy can be constructed in the United States with straightforward soft technologies that are now demonstrated and now economic or nearly economic.”

Here is the actual trend of energy use in the last 30+ years. (This and the other graphs are taken from The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, based on the publicly available data sets cited below.)

Test Forbes 2