Fossil fuel is the catalyst for modernity: coal, then oil and gas, have driven the mechanization and industrialisation responsible for lifting billions out of agrarian poverty, and all in the space of little more than a century.
A reliable supply of electricity allows the impoverished to escape the daily drudgery and misery of a life without it.
Spend a week gathering dung and twigs to cook meals over a smoky fire in an unlit hut, and you’ll soon be screaming for fossil fuels.
The miserable misanthropes and neo-Marxists reckon that fossil fuels are an evil to be driven back to the depths from whence they came. Except, of course, when it comes to their own selfish energy needs. Think pontificating actors, wannabe princesses and their royal beaus lecturing us about our energy use, as they traverse every inch of the globe in their private jets.
Amongst the anti-human, anti-progress squad, ranting and raving about coal and gas, as some mythical evil force to be vanquished, is all the rage.
See above, a pair of dimwitted princesses doing just that at the Mid-Winter Ball for pollies, held at Parliament House, Canberra a couple of weeks back.
The shrew on the left, Claudia Perkins, is the misanthropic partner of the equally misanthropic Greens-cult leader, Adam Bandt. The harridan on the right, Sarah Hanson-Young is the Greens-cult Senator for the State of South Australia.
Both witless brats have First Class Masters in Hypocrisy from the University of Pointless Virtue-Signalling.
Like every other Green-authoritarian, they jet around the country in business class comfort, while viciously berating anyone else with the temerity to enjoy some of the trappings of our modern, civilised world.
Which brings us back to the central part that coal, gas and oil play in our lives – lives that have never been as peaceful or prosperous in the broad sweep of human history – a state of being which is critically dependent upon the energy those natural wonders provide.
Don’t believe us?
Drop in on your wind and solar powered German cousins this coming February, when they are sitting, freezing in the dark – whenever the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in.
Eric Grover has no trouble explaining the role that fossil fuels have played and continue to play in our lives in the piece below.
Fossil Fuels Are Vital to Human Flourishing
The American Spectator
Eric Grover
2 September 2022
Energy is the economy’s lifeblood.
It’s fundamental to everything we produce and consume. Yet President Joe Biden is bent on eliminating fossil fuels, which provide almost 80 percent of America’s energy. He set the tone on the first day of his presidency when he canceled a permit critical to the Keystone Pipeline, effectively killing it. His regulatory eco-myrmidons have blocked new oil and gas leases on federal lands and offshore.
Anti-energy climate change zealots have framed the terms of energy policy debate or, too often, non-debate.
Alex Epstein’s Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas – Not Less brings much-needed clarity to the issue and its attendant stakes. He offers a powerful, rational, and moral framework for thinking about and making energy policy. Epstein argues human flourishing should be energy policy’s paramount goal and, toward that end, that fossil fuels have enormous benefits.
Current energy policy, however, is largely made in a political environment in which fossil fuels’ benefits are ignored or trivialized and their impact is catastrophized.
Fossil fuels are low-cost, on-demand, versatile, and scale to serve billions of people. They’ve made greater prosperity and improved health care possible. In addition, they have rendered Mother Nature less dangerous.
Fossil fuels have enabled billions of people to climb out of poverty and enjoy longer, higher-quality lives. Since 1920, with increased use of coal, oil, and gas and their consequent rising carbon dioxide levels and economic growth, climate-related disaster deaths have plummeted by 98 percent. Energy-rich 21st-century man can better deal with droughts, floods, blizzards, hurricanes, tornados, bacteria, and viruses, scourges that were deadly for his energy-poor forebears.
However, fossil fuels and man’s success in mastering nature have been demonized.
Epstein observes that our knowledge system — the people and institutions that synthesize and disseminate information, framing how we think about issues and make policy, has an abiding hostility to fossil fuels. They have a near-religious agenda to eliminate human impact in the realm of energy.
Reigning dogma holds that carbon dioxide emitted from burning gas, oil, and coal causes global warming and catastrophic climate events.
Fossil fuels are viewed as sinful.
Notwithstanding decades of ecological doomsaying over increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, the world isn’t in or on the brink of entering a Mad Max post-climate-apocalypse dystopia. For most people on the planet, life has never been better.
While it’s a secondary greenhouse gas, increased atmospheric carbon dioxide has historically lagged behind global warming. Physicists Will Happer and William van Wijngaarden’s research, moreover, suggests that at carbon dioxide’s current atmospheric concentration, there is a saturation effect dramatically reducing its greenhouse effect.
More carbon dioxide makes the world greener, reduces plants’ need for water, and boosts agricultural productivity. A warmer world is good for plants and for most people.
Epstein makes his cogent case painstakingly reasonably. He aims to persuade those who have casually accepted climate change orthodoxy but aren’t fundamentalists.
Inexpensive reliable energy is critical for economic growth, particularly for the billions of people who are energy-impoverished. Fossil fuels and nuclear are the only viable sources of mass incremental energy necessary to power growth economies in the 21st century.
Epstein is also a fan of nuclear power. It’s the densest energy source, has the smallest environmental impact, and is cheap and reliable.
Moreover, for those genuinely worried about anthropogenic carbon dioxide who don’t want to destroy the global economy, it ought to be a silver bullet.
But Greens doggedly oppose nuclear almost in lockstep. Even, however, if the world were tomorrow to embark on a nuclear power plant construction blitz, most countries will still be highly dependent on fossil fuels for many decades, if not the rest of the century.
If electricity and gas prices were lower, the world — billions of people — would be better off.
But Green fundamentalists don’t want mass cheap energy.
Centralized power foe Amory Lovins captures their zeitgeist. He warned, “It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.” The billion-plus people using less electricity than a refrigerator would beg to differ.
Greens piously advocate “net zero,” i.e., eliminating anthropogenic carbon dioxide. Abolishing man’s principal source of energy in service of net zero would devastate the developed world’s standard of living and cause a catastrophe and hundreds of millions of deaths in the developing world. Behind the mask of Green anti-fossil fuel virtue is misanthropy and moral abomination.
Every American should read Epstein’s tour de force Fossil Future to appreciate how critical fossil fuels are to their, their children’s, and their grandchildren’s futures.
Better-informed citizens will bring political heat to bear on anti-energy politicians and utility and energy industry executives pandering or bowing to climate change religionists and anti-energy sentiment.
Fossil fuels are not evil; in fact, they’re vital to maximizing human flourishing.
The American Spectator
via STOP THESE THINGS
October 3, 2022, by stopthesethings