January 17, 2024

Years ago, I wrote a post about how cheap air travel to Europe was ruining America. My point was that the Americans visiting Europe were confusing what they experienced as a tourist with the reality of life in Europe. These progressive American fans of two-hour lunches and 6 months of maternal and paternal leave didn’t have a clue about how average Europeans lived. Indeed, a couple of years later, the Foundation For Economic Education came out with a study that showed the poorest 20% of Americans were better off than the average European. Basically, the average European suffers from high taxes, high prices, tiny homes and cars, and, increasingly, less freedom. But tourists sipping tea in London or shopping in Paris rarely, if ever, see this, or understand it if they do.

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Nonetheless, with little understanding of economics or history, they decide that America must become Europe. Socialism, Obamacare, and gay marriage are just some of those European imports that Americans have to deal with today.

We are seeing something similar play out on a grander, global scale—or at least in the West, where prosperity has dulled the brains of much of the population.

Naturally, I’m talking about the green energy hoax. Here in the West, we have people so spoiled by prosperity that they have the luxury of pining for a time when we weren’t poisoning our earth with fossil fuels or risking apocalypse with nuclear power.

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On both sides of the Atlantic, you have a perfect mix of brain-dead green energy cultists and fascist elites who seek to harness the power of that cult to control everyone. That’s a toxic combination because energy controls pretty much everything.

Image by Vince Coyner.

The reality is that inexpensive, reliable energy is the single biggest driver of prosperity in all human history. And it’s not even close. Inexpensive, reliable energy drives virtually everything that we Westerners enjoy: Our food, iPhones, transportation, heating and cooling of homes, televisions, hospitals, schools, movies, plumbing, video games, Starbucks, and the Zambonis at hockey games! Everything.

It’s not that energy didn’t exist previously. It did. But the difference is that it was inefficient, hard to get, and expensive. The first significant source of fuel for humans was wood. That lasted for tens of thousands of years. Although the first recorded use of coal was in China between the 4th and 3rd millennia BC, in Europe, for two thousand years, coal remained an insignificant source of energy. Change came in the 17th century because England had felled most of the easily accessible trees and was in need of energy. With the advent of large-scale mining, coal rapidly became the most significant source of energy in Europe.

This would be the status quo for the next 300 years until the first successful oil well, drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859. Over the following decades, tens of thousands of wells would be drilled and, by 1900, the US alone would be producing 20 million barrels of oil a year. That oil was first used to produce kerosene for heating and lighting homes, then gasoline for automobiles and, eventually, powering electricity plants as well, although coal was the dominant fuel for powering electricity production well into the late 20th century.

In the latter half of the 20th century, nuclear power emerged as a viable vehicle for producing electricity and was joined by fracking-driven natural gas early in the early 21st century.

Of course, renewables had been around for centuries, first with windmills and watermills, then hydroelectricity and, eventually, solar. Renewables always remained a small sliver of the power generation, however, only becoming slightly material in recent years due to heavy regulation and subsidies.