Both the jayhawk and the man eat chickens, but the more jayhawks, the fewer chickens, while the more men, the more chickens.
—American Economist Henry George
Fossil fuels are extraordinarily versatile. Natural gas has been essential for the dramatic increase in the global food supply of recent decades, as has the carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. Natural gas and petroleum are also the raw material for thousands of synthetic fibers and a dizzying array of new materials from waterproof clothing to plastic heart valves.
Paul Ehrlich’s Dire Predictions
In 1970, Paul Ehrlich wrote:
The death of the world is imminent. . . . Because the human population of the planet is about five times too large, and we’re managing to support all these people—at today’s level of misery—only by spending our capital, burning our fossil fuels and turning out fresh water into salt water. We have not only overpopulated but overstretched our environment. We are poisoning the ecological systems of the earth. . . .
He stands in a grand apocalyptic tradition, beginning with Malthus in the eighteenth century and continuing with Al Gore in our own day. Mass starvation is always a few decades away. Since 1800, however, agricultural productivity has increased by as much as the rest of the economy. The number of people fed by one hectare of land (2.5 acres) increased from 1.9 in 1908 to 4.3 in 2008.1 “While the 20th century population total has grown 3.7-fold, the global harvest of staple cereal crops, as well as the total production of crop-derived food energy, has expanded seven-fold,” observes Vaclav Smil.2 See Figure 7.1. How did that happen? The late economist Julian Simon explained it best: “Minds matter economically as much as or more than hands or mouths. Human beings create more than they use, on average. It had to be so, or we would be an extinct species.”
When Malthus warned of impending famine in 1798, the world population was around one billion. That figure doubled by the early 1920s and then doubled again by the early 1970s, when Ehrlich, author of the bestseller The Population Bomb, was predicting that “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs.”3 In 2012, the year Brown published Full Planet, Empty Plates, the world population reached seven billion, with no famine in sight, except for those intentionally caused by repressive governments.
Not one of Ehrlich’s many predictions ever came true. Food supply per person has dramatically increased, while the rate of population growth has substantially declined in those developing countries most contributing to the rapid increase since 1950. While the human population rose 3.7-fold in the twentieth century, the food supply, measured by global harvest of food grains, rose seven-fold. To anyone who’s not a misanthrope, the achievement of twentieth-century agriculture is breathtaking.
In the 1960s, India produced only about two tons of rice per hectare, a quantity that tripled by the mid-1990s. And the price of rice fell from about $550 per ton in the 1970s to about $200 per ton in 2001.4 India is now a major rice producer, exporting almost 106 million tons in 2013.5 The astonishing leap in agricultural production in the twentieth century, known as the Green Revolution, could not have occurred without abundant, affordable fossil fuels. Indeed, the Green Revolution is simply a later chapter of the energy revolution on which the Industrial Revolution relied.
FIGURE 7.1
Agricultural Gains
Source: Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth, p. 201
Natural Gas–Derived Fertilizer
The topic of agricultural fertilizers may not intrigue the 81 percent of the U.S. population that now resides in urban areas. Even as we take it for granted that grocery store shelves will be filled with diverse, fresh, and convenient food from across the world, most of us give little thought to agriculture. The development of natural gas–based fertilizers, however, is one of the most important stories in human history.
Natural gas is the main raw material in synthesized nitrogen fertilizers. Without such fertilizers, the phenomenal expansion of the food supply would not have occurred.6 A study published in Nature Geosciences in 2008 found that this type of fertilizer fed 48 percent of the world’s population.7 The Agronomy Journal reports, “The average percentage of yield attributable to [natural gas–derived] fertilizer generally ranged from 40–60 percent in the USA and England and tended to be much higher in the tropics.”8 Synthesized nitrogen has enabled the developing world to avoid the famines that so many predicted. From 1950 to 1984, global production of cereal grains increased by 250 percent. “As a result,” notes Vaclav Smil, “never before have so many people—be it in absolute or relative terms—enjoyed such an adequate to abundant supply of food. Continuing malnutrition is now caused by unequal access to food rather than by absolute supply shortages.”9
The upsurge in agricultural yield in the industrial West that began in the early twentieth century reveals the potency of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, although application of the Haber-Bosch process was limited until after the Second World War, when refinements to the manufacturing process reduced its cost.
Norman Borlaug: The Father of the Twentieth-Century Green Revolution
The first name to mention in any discussion of the agricultural achievements of the twentieth century is that of Norman Borlaug (1914–2009), the father of the Green Revolution, whose work led to stunning increases in crop yields. Often called “the man who saved a billion lives,” he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contribution to an unprecedented expansion of the world’s food supply, which prevented the widespread starvation in developing countries that the Neo-Malthusians had predicted.10
The term “Green Revolution” could be applied to the entire twentieth century, but it typically refers to the second half of the century, when agricultural productivity rose by leaps and bounds. Most importantly, those gains were achieved in the poorest countries of the world, where malnutrition, hunger, and starvation were still commonplace. Borlaug developed cultivars (plant varieties produced by selective breeding) of wheat, rice, and other cereal grains that maximized the energy stimulus of fertilizers, increasing their yield.
Borlaug’s high-yield grains played the same role in the agricultural revolution that James Watt’s steam engine had played in the Industrial Revolution. The steam engine converted heat energy into mechanical energy, while the high-yield food grains converted the chemical energy in fertilizer into food energy. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1970, Borlaug explained what he had done:
If the high-yielding dwarf wheat and rice varieties are the catalysts that have ignited the Green Revolution, then chemical fertilizer is the fuel that has powered its forward thrust. . . . The new varieties not only respond to much heavier doses of fertilizer than the old ones but are also much more efficient in its use. The old tall-strawed varieties would produce only ten kilos of additional grain for each kilogram of nitrogen applied, while the new varieties can produce 20 to 25 kilograms or more of additional grain per kilogram of nitrogen applied.11
Borlaug’s genius was to figure out that smaller, stubbier plants could increase output of the edible portion of the plant. Fertilizer produced more grain in the head of each stalk, but tall-stalked plants could not support the heavier heads. When the stalks collapsed, farmers suffered a complete loss. So Borlaug developed strains of disease-resistant wheat with short, stubby stocks that could withstand the weight of much heavier heads, tripling or quadrupling the output of an acre of land.
One of the first countries in which Norman Borlaug developed his “semi-dwarf” wheat varieties was Mexico. Against the longest of odds, Mexico increased its wheat output by a factor of six in the early 1960s and became a net wheat exporter by 1963. Borlaug had similar success with rice and other cereal grains in India, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat output nearly doubled in India and Pakistan.12
Comparing doomsaying Neo-Malthusians like Paul Ehrlich with doomslaying humanitarians like Norman Borlaug, we might ask ourselves whose team we’d want to join. Ehrlich’s remedy for food shortages, pollution, and now supposed man-made global warming is for all-powerful government to reduce the number of human beings, who are despoiling the natural world, going so far as to oppose emergency shipments of food to alleviate crises until the rulers of those starving people get “the population under control.” His followers supported some of the most inhumane acts of genocide in history, their population-control ideology leading to forced abortions, sterilizations, one-child policies, and other statist dictates on human reproduction. Thanks to China’s demographically distorting one-child-per-couple policy, tens of millions of girls are missing. Women were abused and sterilized in Egypt, China, and Africa, all in the name of population stabilization and saving the planet. From what? Many rich Americans who profess to believe in reproductive rights of women and the “right to choose” hypocritically fund these controls that are now euphemistically called “family planning.”
Borlaug was a liberator and one of the great life-savers in history. The Malthusians were and are oppressors, some of them even mass murderers. The history of what happened in China under Maoist thuggery is no longer a secret. Yet the United Nations gave an award to China for the effectiveness of its evil one-child policy.
Another instructive contrast is that between Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution in agriculture and the green revolution in energy for which the environmental Left longs. Borlaug’s work vastly expanded available food energy and may have saved the lives of a billion harshly impoverished human beings. A low-carbon energy transformation, on the other hand, would make the energy scarcity that now afflicts the low- and fixed-income population of some European countries a universal misfortune.
Increased Atmospheric Concentrations of Carbon Dioxide Increase Agricultural Yield
Global warming alarmists refuse to acknowledge a fundamental truth about carbon dioxide. This natural molecule, which Secretary of State John Kerry calls a “weapon of mass destruction,” amplifies life.
Carbon dioxide is essential to the growth of plant life on which all human and animal life depends for food. The physical life of the human body is part of the carbon cycle in which plants inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen. Human activity over the past two centuries has inadvertently enriched the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. At the same time, fossil fuels have shrunk the human footprint on the natural world by amplifying the food supply per acre of arable land through natural gas–based fertilizers and other fossil fuel inputs. Spread the news! Man’s carbon footprint shrinks his physical footprint on the earth.
The environmental Left, including America’s senior policy makers, resolutely ignores the benefits of a fossil-fueled civilization. Without fossil fuels, the amount of land devoted to agriculture would have to increase by 150 percent.13 As the world’s population was tripling from 1961 to 2007 and the food supply per person was increasing by 27 percent, the amount of cultivated cropland increased by only 11 percent.14 Vaclav Smil states it dramatically: “In effect, in 2007, the global food and agricultural system delivered, on average, two and a half times as much food per acre of cropland as in 1961.”15
The Environmental Protection Agency now calls carbon dioxide a pollutant. Yet atmospheric carbon dioxide—the chemical compound from which plants construct their tissues—is the “gas of life.” Human use of fossil fuels has increased the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide from approximately 280 parts per million (ppm) at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to approximately 400 ppm in 2015. To put those figures in perspective, consider that in an ordinary greenhouse, which uses heightened levels of carbon dioxide to stimulate the rate and quality of plant growth, a carbon dioxide concentration of 1,000 to 1,200 ppm is considered ideal.16
According to hundreds of scientific studies, the relatively slight increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has enhanced native and cultivated plant productivity, growth, moisture retention, and resistance to pests. An increase of 300 ppm in the air’s carbon dioxide content enhances herbaceous plant biomass by 25 to 55 percent.17
The fertilizing effect of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide has been recognized for a long time. A conference at Duke University in 1977 noted such benefits as increases in plant photosynthesis, less water loss, greater leaf area, and increases in plant branch and fruit.18 Another conference in 1992 concluded that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would increase photosynthesis in plants by 50 percent.19
Craig Idso’s analysis of the social benefits of atmospheric carbon dioxide offers a welcome scientific retort to the federal agencies’ wildly speculative scenarios about carbon dioxide’s harmful cost to humanity. “Numerous studies conducted on hundreds of different plant species testify to the very real and measurable growth-enhancing, water-saving, and stress-alleviating advantages that elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations bestow upon the Earth’s plants.”20 Unless feeding the world’s seven billion human residents is not a priority, the increased atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide attributable to human activity is unquestionably a huge social benefit.
Although fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation, and new plant varieties spurred the twentieth century’s agricultural revolution, substantial credit also goes to the addition of man-made carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The bureaucrats who created out of thin air a yardstick to calculate the so-called “social cost of carbon”—an official estimate of the economic damages associated with man-made emissions of carbon dioxide—ignore this benefit.21 This hazy and speculative calculation purports to monetize the cost of rising emissions of carbon dioxide up to three hundred years into the future. Predictions of economic conditions centuries ahead are notoriously flimsy, but surely the value of increasing food supply on the same amount of land is of high social value.
In a carefully researched paper, Idso challenges the EPA’s estimates of the social cost of carbon with evidence, offering an estimate of the direct monetary benefits of atmospheric carbon dioxide’s contribution to past and future global crop production. Using historical data from the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization,22 Idso arrives at an annual monetary value of ambient carbon dioxide enrichment from 1961 to 2010 of $3.5 trillion.23 And he projects that the future gains in the value of global food production resulting from higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide through 2050 will be $11.6 trillion.
Yet the truth about carbon dioxide and food production has been turned on its head. The Left now says that a warmer planet will reduce food production. Here is some of the representative propaganda of the Union of Concerned Scientists from its global warming website:
Climate-related threats to global food production include risks to grain, vegetable, and fruit crops, livestock, and fisheries. [The threats include r]educed yields. The productivity of crops and livestock, including milk yields, may decline because of high temperatures and drought-related stress.
Really? A colder, not a slightly warmer, planet would be the real and obvious threat to agriculture. Alaska doesn’t produce much food. Think about it this way: How can a “greenhouse effect” reduce food production?
Other Fossil Fuel Contributions to Agriculture
In addition to fertilizer and carbon dioxide enrichment, the dazzling productivity of modern agriculture depends on energy intensive pesticides, machinery, refrigeration, packaging, and efficient transport—all of which require large amounts of fossil fuels.
The agronomist E. C. Oerke estimates that 50 to 77 percent of wheat, rice, corn, potatoes, and soybeans grown from 2001 to 2003 would have been lost without the use of pesticides, which kept losses to between 26 and 40 percent.24 Cotton, which accounts for 48 percent of natural fibers, is particularly vulnerable to pests. Oerke calculates that the application of pesticides in 2001–2003 kept global cotton crop losses to 29 percent instead of the 80 percent that would have been lost without pesticides.
Irrigated farm land achieves crop yields more than three times those of dry-land farms. Aside from locations where it can be accomplished with natural gravity, irrigation requires energy to pump water. The wonderful array of equipment that powers modern agriculture—tractors, planters, seeders, spreaders, sprayers, sorters, rollers, rotators, cotton pickers, harvesters, threshers, mowers, rakers, swathers, wagons, bale lifters, wrappers, winnowers, backhoes, front-end loaders, skid steers, and milkers—runs on fossil fuels.
The rapid transport of agricultural products is essential to make food available, both in the developing world and in highly developed countries. This transportation system by road, rail, and air allows food surplus to be shipped to regions with temporary food shortages. On the other end of the spectrum, grocery stores in affluent countries now feature fresh products from all over the world twelve months of the year. The coldest of winter weather is no longer an obstacle to enjoying asparagus. Jets, trucks, and tankers crisscross the world to fill our stores with an epicurean bounty that a king couldn’t have dreamt about two centuries ago. Affordable fossil fuels make this transportation system possible. Refrigeration, packaging, and containers reduce food waste that can otherwise eliminate around one-third of food supply.25 Whether providing fuel for cooling and freezing or synthetic material for packaging, fossil fuels reduce loss of the food supply.
From Omnivore to Locavore
Standing athwart the energy-enriched global agricultural revolution yelling “Stop!” are the “locavores,” champions of eating locally grown foodstuffs.26 Representing an uninformed choice for energy regression, the locavore movement could arise only among affluent urban and suburban populations. Yearning for the imagined agrarian simplicity of an earlier epoch when lots of people went hungry, locavores prefer a “ten-mile” diet, limited to food grown in their own locale. But billions of human beings in developing countries prefer the ten-thousand-mile diet of affordable, fresh, and safe food made possible by global agricultural, transportation, and storage systems. That is their own choice, and next they may choose to grow their own food.
The locavores’ agenda covers everything from smoother skin to world peace. Eating locally, they believe, is a way to “heal the planet,” create jobs, enjoy healthier food, and enhance spiritual and societal health. As one conservative devotee of locavorism, Rod Dreher, writes, “Learning the names of the small farmers and coming to appreciate what they do is to reverse the sweeping process of alienation from the earth and from each other that the industrialized agriculture and mass production of foodstuffs has wrought.”27 What about eradicating hunger for billions of people? Doesn’t that reduce alienation as well?
Locavorism may not be spreading like wildfire, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture likes it. Through an initiative called “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food,” the USDA has established hundreds of “food policy councils” to promote locally grown food and closer relationships between producers and consumers.28 Support for small farms and local farmers’ markets is, of course, a harmless diversion for American urbanites, but billions of people around the world rely on the productivity of U.S. agriculture—productivity that depends on energy-enriched farming and ranching on a large scale.
Ethanol: The Folly of Food as Fuel
The world’s elite may not have a keen interest in the global supply of basic cereal grains, but rice, corn, and wheat are the basic foodstuff for the majority of the human beings with whom we share the planet. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization estimates that 842 million people still live in chronic hunger worldwide.29 Diverting a vitally needed food grain, such as corn, to transportation fuel is taking food from the mouths of hungry millions.
The ethanol policies of the United States, which transform a basic food into an optional fuel, have been widely condemned by international institutions devoted to eliminating hunger. Before the federal ethanol mandate took effect in 2007, the price of corn had averaged less than $2.50 per bushel for many years. In 2008, the price of a bushel of corn rose to almost $8, provoking food riots in Mexico, the Middle East, and Asia. Some commentators attributed the beginning of the Arab Spring to popular unrest stirred by soaring food prices.
Although the recession and some bumper crops lowered corn prices for a few years, the price rose again to $8 in 2012 and remained over $4 for several years. The high price of corn motivates many farmers to dedicate more acreage to corn instead of other food grains. The devotion of more cropland to corn and less to other basic cereal grains—wheat, soybeans, and rice, for instance—drives up the prices of those other grains.
The world has long depended on exports of corn from the United States, the world’s largest producer. For decades, U.S. exports of corn have accounted for about 40 percent of all corn exports. But consider how much of the American corn crop is now going to fuel instead of food. In 2015, the federal ethanol mandate diverted—quite unnecessarily—40 percent of the U.S. corn crop to ethanol, an extremely inefficient and environmentally questionable transportation fuel.30 Gasoline now sold in the United States is roughly 10 percent ethanol—the maximum blend at which auto makers are willing to warrant engine function. A category of engines called “Flex Fuel” is warranted for using “E85”—a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 25 percent petroleum fuel. Good luck finding a station that offers E85 unless you live in Iowa.
If ethanol were to replace conventional gasoline, corn would have to be planted on five hundred million acres of land—substantially more than the 442 million total acres of American cropland.31 And ethanol is a far less efficient fuel than gasoline refined from crude oil. Ethanol’s energy density is 34 percent less than gasoline’s, and it delivers one-third fewer miles per gallon than gasoline. The bi-partisan majority of Congress that enacted the Renewable Fuel Standard in 2007 was reacting to rising oil prices and increasing dependence on imported oil. Within a year, however, the shale revolution took off, and by 2014 the United States was producing more oil than we could store. Yet the ethanol mandate persists.
Ethanol policy occupies a strangely prominent role in our country’s politics because the first contest of each presidential campaign is in Iowa, where corn is king. The Hawkeye State has forty-two of the nation’s 189 ethanol plants and produces 25 percent of all ethanol distilled in the United States.32 It is nearly impossible for a candidate from either party to win the Iowa caucuses without supporting ethanol mandates. This political factor alone has perpetuated the counterproductive and ethically dubious Renewable Fuel Standard.
Promoters of ethanol pitch it as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yet research has shown that ethanol probably increases such emissions. According to a study published in Science, biofuels may generate “17–420 times more carbon dioxide than the fossil fuels they replace.”33 At each step of the process before combustion in a vehicle—planting, fertilizing, watering, harvesting, distilling, and transporting exclusively by rail or truck—ethanol production indirectly generates carbon dioxide as well as genuine pollutants.
Using hundreds of millions of acres of fertile agricultural land to produce transportation fuel is a throwback to a time when our needs for food, mechanical energy, and fuel competed for the produce of a fixed amount of land.
A couple of generations ago, human hunger was a major concern. During the depression of the 1930s, poverty and hunger were visible on many American streets. How fast the human condition has changed! Now we worry about an epidemic of obesity, which is more prevalent among the poor than among the wealthy.34 In many countries of the world the latest nutritional worry is “pet obesity.” You know people are well fed when they are worried that they are feeding too much to their pets. Perhaps Europe and America are literally lands of “rich fat cats.” Still, hundreds of millions of people across the world rely on corn, wheat, or rice for their daily caloric intake. Only the elite in the most affluent countries, insulated from the human face of subsistence poverty, could devise and mandate policies to shrink the supply of basic food commodities like corn.
The Versatility of Fossil Fuels: Synthetic Materials
We thought we would spare you a full chapter about the wonders of asphalt, plastic, and polyester. Synthetic materials like these, however, are yet another incalculable benefit of fossil fuels. How these materials would be replaced in a decarbonized world is a question left unanswered by environmental extremists, who are uninterested in something as mundane as plastic. The importance of these ubiquitous materials in everyday life, however, is undeniable. Our homes, offices, hospitals, and drug stores are packed with these materials and fibers derived from hydrocarbon.
Versatility is one of the distinctive advantages of oil, coal, and natural gas. The combustion of these materials in transportation, industrial processes, and the generation of electricity accounts for a huge volume of energy, but it is only the tip of the hydrocarbon iceberg. Supplanting fossil fuels with nuclear power or with renewable fuels like wind and solar is imaginable, if currently impracticable. But how would we replace the plastic, synthetic fibers, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, asphalt, and other materials derived from fossil fuels?
Plastic, Asphalt, and So Much More
From petroleum or crude oil, when refined and separated, we can make gasoline, kerosene, asphalt, chemical feed stocks, and pharmaceuticals. The last two categories cover almost all consumer products. Everything “plastic” derives from petroleum or natural gas, including cellophane tape, shotgun shells, soccer balls, guitar strings, pacifiers, aspirin, rubbing alcohol, artificial limbs, fabric softener, hair color, lipstick, shaving cream, electric tape, and Plexiglas.35
Fossil fuels enabled huge increases in the volume of materials available for the production of basic consumer goods. In 1900, 144 million metric tons of materials were used to make basic consumer goods in the United States. That figure rose twenty-six-fold to almost four billion metric tons in 2006.36 Most of this increase was in materials derived from fossil fuels and nonrenewable chemicals. The volume of renewable materials declined from 46 percent in 1900 to 5 percent in 2006. Once again, fossil fuels shrank man’s footprint on the natural world. See Figure 7.2. And that 5 percent of materials must be processed, shipped, and moved with energy from fossil fuels.
FIGURE 7.2
Renewable, Nonrenewable, and Total Material Usage in the U.S., 1900–2006
Source: Grecia R. Matos, Use of Minerals and Meterials in the United States from 1900 through 20O6, U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2009-3000, http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2009/3008.
Textiles
The majority of textiles and clothing are now made of synthetic fibers derived from fossil fuels. Synthetic alternatives to natural materials are the primary reason for the mind-boggling abundance of consumer goods. Clothing and household furnishings—the most personal consumer goods—are a compelling example. Until the late 1800s, all clothing and textiles were made from natural materials such as plant fiber (cotton); wool from sheep, goats, or wild animals; animal skins; and silk from worms. Synthetic fibers derived from fossil fuels currently account for 60 percent of global fibers.37
Polyester is the raw material for 80 percent of synthetic fibers, while vinyl, nylon, and acrylic account for 18 percent of synthetics.38 All these fibers, derived from petroleum, have reduced the cost of clothing across the world and improved the warmth and affordability of winter clothing. For insulation, water repellency, and lighter weight, synthetic fibers are better than natural.
Green Energy = Income Inequality
For many years now, much of the political debate in Washington has centered on income inequality. Thomas Piketty’s bestselling economics book, Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, is nothing more than a discussion of the gulf between the rich and the poor. Capitalism leads to inequality, we are told. America’s most famous socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders, ran for president in 2016 on the theme that “almost all of the gains of the economy in recent decades have gone to the top 1 percent.”
Our point isn’t to question the wisdom of Piketty’s and Sanders’s policy prescriptions. Readers who want to be educated about income inequality can read Steve Moore’s book Who’s the Fairest of Them All? Rather, we are struck by the irony that so many on the political Left who want to redistribute wealth are the same people who want to abandon cheap, safe, and efficient forms of power production in favor of much more expensive, unreliable, and even ecologically damaging forms of energy.
Take a close look at Figure 7.3. It shows the correlation between per capita income and energy consumption by country. Poor countries consume very little energy. Rich countries consume a lot. Cheap energy is one of the greatest economic equalizers in history. It has enabled even those near the bottom to enjoy a better lifestyle than kings had two hundred years ago. It is essential for making food, housing, clothing, technology, healthcare, education, travel, and entertainment affordable for nearly everyone.
FIGURE 7.3
The Correlation between Energy Use and GDP
It’s astonishing how many young people (and many older people too) to whom we give speeches don’t have even the most basic understanding that the chair they are sitting in, the heating system that keeps the room warm, the laptop computer they are tapping on, the iPod they are listening to, the car they drove to get there, the light in the room, the Nikes they are wearing, the apple they are chomping on, the shampoo they used to wash their hair, the textbook they are staring at, and the eyeglasses on their head are all ubiquitous in our society because of affordable energy. Young people—God love them—are idealistic, and they want to save the planet, so it’s cool on college campuses to be in favor of green energy. But it isn’t cool or smart or “fair” to make energy more expensive—it is impoverishing. The young take what they have as a given, not as the gift of hundreds and thousands of years of the evolution of human knowledge and century upon century of learning by doing.
Every generation stands on the shoulders of its ancestors. Our ancestors have harnessed energy to steadily improve the state of the world. The green agricultural revolution of the last century was, as we’ve said before, an energy revolution. There is a very good evolutionary reason advanced peoples don’t use sun panels and windmills to power their societies. It’s called the evolution of knowledge. We use coal and gas instead of windmills for the same reason that wheels aren’t made of stone anymore. Windmills are to power generation what carrier pigeons are to communications.
One of the surest ways of increasing inequality and hindering the fight against hunger, disease, pollution, malnutrition, poverty, and deprivation is to make energy more expensive, because doing so makes everything more expensive. The rich can afford to fill up their tanks for $75. The poor can’t. The rich can afford to pay an extra $150 a month in higher utility bills. The poor, and even the middle class, can’t. The rich can afford to pay an extra $200 for a life-saving drug or vaccine. The poor can’t.
Fossil fuels have been one of the greatest anti-poverty programs in history, improving the human condition more than all of the trillions of dollars of government welfare programs and foreign aid programs combined. By contrast, most forms of green energy aren’t green at all. They’re a prescription to make the poor poorer.