In this excerpt from Energy and Climate Wars: How naïve politicians, green ideologues and media elites are undermining the truth about energy and climate, Peter Glover and Michael Economides explain why energy consumption is the ultimate good and why governments shouldn’t prevent increased energy use. As they write, “energy demand is the cause of US wealth.”
Without modern energy Western civilization would grind to a halt, literally. Your refrigerator would no longer keep cheap food chilled for weeks and months; you would need fresh food daily, with all the extra costs and the journeys that entails. Private cars would be obsolete. You would have to read by candlelight. Your home would have to be heated by burning wood or, if you had a local source of hydrocarbon fuels—what we call primary—burning oil, gas, or coal. In short, you would be subject to the technology of the mid-nineteenth century.
At this point, an extreme idealist may naively insist that life was better in former generations than today. A less extreme idealist may claim that hydrocarbon fuels are no longer necessary and that we could switch, with the right social and political will, to alternative energy sources. The argument runs that, if only we could divest ourselves of our “addiction” to oil, gas, and coal (“fossil” fuels) we could, at a stroke, clean up our environment by making a wholehearted commitment to renewable, clean and “free” energy, wind, wave, hydro, solar, and geothermal power to solve our future energy needs. Only one problem with that: there’s more chance of Donald Duck becoming president of the United States.
Just try to make that particular energy switchover and stand back and watch the lights go out all over the world. True, some radicals want it that way. They think it would be “quaint” to return to dark ages lifestyle, the same “quaint,” often poverty-stricken, lifestyles to which they would doom other societies who today are desperate to industrialize, as the West has. This is an easy pastime, of course, when you are an armchair eco-liberal enjoying the fruits of a post-industrial society.