Power Up
A powerful summer storm swept through Northern Virginia a few years ago, leaving more than a million homes without electric power for days. One of those homes belonged to the Moore family. The sweltering July temperature hovered around a hundred degrees, and it was so humid you felt like you needed gills to breathe.
“Sure, we’re miserable,” Steve joked to his three children, “but look at the bright side. Think how much we’ve reduced our carbon footprint! Consider it a life lesson in what it means to live green.” They saw no humor in that. Without Facebook, ESPN, and air conditioning, they felt like they had surrendered their basic human rights.
One night the family all sat on the couch, sweating and talking. At first, it had been a rustic adventure. Grilling their food on the barbecue. Reading by candlelight. Playing flashlight tag inside the house. But the novelty wore off quickly. “What did people do before the age of electricity?” one of the kids asked. “I would have killed myself,” he moaned, only half joking.
Electrical power is the central nervous system of our modern economy and our twenty-first-century lifestyles, and living without it for a few days is a reminder of how vulnerable we are to being sent back to a pre-industrial age. Yet every initiative of the so-called green movement is intended to reduce our access to electrical power—although they never admit that explicitly.
The power outage that gave the Moore family a new appreciation for the electricity that powers our lives was caused by Mother Nature. But we are convinced that rolling brownouts are coming—especially in states like California, which are trying to rely on unreliable green energy sources—thanks to the radical environmentalists who have achieved a choke-hold on our politics.
Green groups, for example, have declared war on coal, which still produces nearly 40 percent of our electricity. The Obama administration is listening and has slammed the brakes on coal production. Technological progress is making this cheap and domestically abundant energy source cleaner all the time. Yet the global-warming alarmist James Hansen, a scientist at NASA, has compared the railroad cars carrying coal across our country to the “death trains” that transported Jews to Nazi concentration camps.
Natural gas is our second major source of electrical energy. The technological miracle of hydraulic fracturing—“fracking”—has given us hundreds of years’ worth of this clean-burning fuel that reduces greenhouse gas emissions. But the Sierra Club is vowing to shut down natural gas too. Regulations by the Environmental Protection Agency against methane (natural gas) could seriously impair our use of natural gas. The anti-fracking movement spreads (groundless) fear about contaminated water, but as the Moore family discovered, when you lose electricity you often lose access to potable water.
Of course, Big Green hates oil and nuclear power too. That’s why we’re not drilling for oil in many parts of Alaska or on other energy-rich federal lands and waters and why we’re not building the Keystone XL pipeline. This is public policy that is not just anti-growth but dangerous to our health and safety.
Sadly, schoolchildren are the target of propaganda about “saving the planet” with alternative energy sources. If global warming is a threat, we will be saved not by building windmills or riding our bicycles to work, but by applying advanced technology and electrical power to find ways to keep the planet cool. That isn’t going to happen because of regulatory dictates from the United Nations or the White House.
Many Americans believe the green fairy tale that things were better in the past than they are now. Sure, the economy has been weak for many years now—poverty is too high, wages are stagnant. But seventy-two hours without air conditioning, TV, a dishwasher, a hair dryer, and Google taught the Moores how much progress has been made in the past twenty, thirty, and fifty years. Today the percentage of people below the poverty line who have air conditioning is higher than the percentage of middle-class families who had it in 1960.
Anyone who thinks that we can get the power we need for our modern society from “clean, renewable” sources like wind and solar power is living in a world of make-believe. After tens of billions of dollars in subsidies, these sources provide 4.3 percent of our electricity. Most of the rest comes from fossil fuels. A rapid rush to renewables in Germany has led to retail electric prices three times the average U.S. rate. You can’t power a $15-trillion economy with wind and solar power.
The Master Resource
The story of human advancement is the story of the discovery of cheap, plentiful, and versatile energy. Fossil fuels are the ignition switch to modern life. Almost all other inventions—the steam engine, the printing press, life-saving medicines, the microchip, the iPhone, you name it—are derivatives of electric power. Where electricity is in wide use, there is prosperity. Where electricity is lacking, poverty and deprivation are the norm.
For many centuries mankind relied on what is now called “renewable energy”—windmills, wood, water, and the sun. The notion that green energy is “in its infancy” is laughable. These sources of energy go back thousands of years. And the data recently gathered by economic historians surveyed in this book show that wind and water wheels never provided much power. It wasn’t until man harnessed fossil fuels—predominantly oil, gas, and coal—that industrialization achieved unprecedented productivity.
Fossil fuels proved to be abundant sources of energy, scalable and reliable in a way that many forms of renewable energy are not. Christopher Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute likes to say that you can build windmills with steel, but you can’t build steel with windmills. The great steel works of Pittsburgh could not have built America’s industrial framework if their power had come from windmills. Detroit’s automobiles could not have replaced horses (and horse manure) if they had run on solar power.
Energy, in short, is the wellspring of mankind’s greatest advances.
With this book we aim to document and explain the extent to which fossil fuels have vastly improved human life across the world, releasing whole populations from abject poverty. Virtually everything needed to sustain the life of a human being—food, heat, clothing, shelter—depends upon access to and conversion of energy. The productivity fueled by hydrocarbon energy sources, coupled with economic freedom, allowed the emergence of an enduring middle class for the first time in history.
Today, hundreds of years after the Industrial Revolution began, most of the human population is dependent on fossil fuels for 80 to 90 percent of its energy supply. That will surely be the case at least for many decades. The long-held superstition that America is running out of oil and gas has been disproved with the latest shale oil and gas revolution.
Throughout history, elites, of course, have enjoyed comfortable wealth. They were rich; they could afford expensive energy. They weren’t the ones who did without light or heat or transportation or enough food and leisure time. Someone else did the back-breaking and time-consuming work for them. The women and children would spend hours every day fetching the water from the river. But for all but the very wealthy, life before fossil fuels was grindingly difficult. Cheap energy narrowed that quality-of-life gap as no one could have imagined.
But now that energy is more abundant than ever, it has come under severe and unrelenting assault. The unprecedented stakes in today’s contentious energy policy debates about carbon are not just economic but moral. Europe has started deindustrializing. The governments of many of the most developed countries in the world have mandated as rapid a transition as possible from carbon-rich energy to zero-carbon energy like wind, solar, and biomass. The inherent limitations of wind and solar are physically intractable. We are facing a regression to the limited energy horizons of pre-industrial societies.
Never before have the rulers of a society intentionally driven it backward to scarcer, more expensive, and less efficient energy. Every previous energy transition has made electric power and transportation fuels cheaper and more efficient. What goes by the name of a green energy revolution will for the first time in modern times disrupt energy reliability and raise prices for financially-strapped families. And these people call themselves “progressives”!
Green energy policies assume centralized control of the sources, production, and consumption of energy, and that means centralized control over all economic activity and consumer choice. Name a product that doesn’t depend on affordable and reliable energy. United Nations bureaucrats talk about “wisely planned [energy] austerity,” guided by apparently omniscient “planetary managers.” Not only is our material prosperity in peril; freedom itself is at stake.
Please read on and make up your own mind. We have two energy paths to choose from. With the facts before you, we’re confident the right choice will be obvious.