Ronald Stein: Net-zero emission ideologies will be destructive to future generations.

[Note: Another excellent piece from Ronald Stein, co-authored by Yoshihiro Muronaka. Ronald will be my guest on tomorrow’s episode of the Energy Impacts Podcast, which will be livestreamed on my X, Linkedin, and Youtube platforms at 10:00 a.m. CT.]

The vast resources of underground coal, crude oil, and natural gas are all useless unless refined or processed into the fuels and products that support the lives of 8 billion people. Refineries, coal gasification, and coal liquefaction plants—though emission generators—remain indispensable to modern civilization.

In less than a few centuries, human ingenuity discovered more than 250 groundbreaking refining and processing techniques to convert those useless underground hydrocarbon resources of coal, crude oil, and natural gas into something useful for humanity. Today, more than 6,000 products and transportation fuels are derived from oil—plastics and synthetic rubber, fertilizers for agriculture, detergents, paints, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and a wide range of fuels such as LPG, gasoline, kerosene, diesel, lubricants, and asphalt for roads. Nearly half of the world’s population depends on synthetic fertilizers made from fossil fuels.