Carbon-Based Energy Makes Our Modern Life Possible

Why would we recklessly give up the advantages human ingenuity fought so hard to win? That isn’t progress. It’s just stupid.

Ah, remember the good ol’ days when each of spent time cutting down trees; splitting the wood to dry it out; and using it to heat our homes, cook our food, and, along with animal fat, light our nights. The pure simplicity of dedicating our lives to survival instead of things like productive work, art, science, and other silly pursuits. It truly makes one yearn for the days when the infant mortality rate was above 50% and life expectancy was under 50 years old. As Thomas Hobbes noted, life was nasty, brutish, short, and ugly. Wasn’t that great!!!

Only in our modern world full of the conveniences that come with abundance and the leisure time bought with the riches derived from the widespread adoption of carbon-based energy do our pampered elites decide the best next step for humanity isn’t to go forward; rather, it is to return to an age in which the elite can buy physical indulgences to use private jets like their ancestors received spiritual indulgences from corrupt clergy, as the rest of mankind wallows in an energy-scarce Mad Max-like existence.

In Ruy Teixeira’s excellent column “Why Democrats Will Become Energy Realists,” he highlights a report, “Halfway Between Kyoto and 2050: Zero Carbon Is a Highly Unlikely Outcome,” by math genius Vaclav Smil in which Smil points out the following realities about a move to a non-carbon-based energy world:

In terms of final energy uses and specific energy converters, the unfolding transition would have to replace more than 4 terawatts (TW) of electricity-generating capacity now installed in large coal- and gas-fired stations by converting to non-carbon sources; to substitute nearly 1.5 billion combustion (gasoline and diesel) engines in road and off-road vehicles; to convert all agricultural and crop processing machinery (including about 50 million tractors and more than 100 million irrigation pumps) to electric drive or to non-fossil fuels; to find new sources of heat, hot air, and hot water used in a wide variety of industrial processes (from iron smelting and cement and glass making to chemical syntheses and food preservation) that now consume close to 30 percent of all final uses of fossil fuels; to replace more than half a billion natural gas furnaces now heating houses and industrial, institutional, and commercial places with heat pumps or other sources of heat; and to find new ways to power nearly 120,000 merchant fleet vessels (bulk carriers of ores, cement, fertilizers, wood and grain, and container ships, the largest one with capacities of some 24,000 units, now running mostly on heavy fuel oil and diesel fuel) and nearly 25,000 active jetliners that form the foundation of global long-distance transportation (fueled by kerosene).

On the face of it, and even without performing any informed technical and economic analyses, this seems to be an impossible task given that:

• we have only a single generation (about 25 years) to do it;

• we have not even reached the peak of global consumption of fossil carbon;

• the peak will not be followed by precipitous declines;

• we still have not deployed any zero-carbon large-scale commercial processes to produce essential materials; and

• the electrification has, at the end of 2022, converted only about 2 percent of passenger vehicles (more than 26 million) to different varieties of battery-powered cars and that decarbonization is yet to affect heavy road transport, shipping, and flying.

In other words, short of putting the world’s people back to a pre-Industrial Age environment, a non-carbon-based energy world is little more than an unrealistic dream of elite crackpots and their “green" energy cult followers. 

As a friend often reminds me, energy disruptions have always preceded economic recessions and energy abundance has often fed economic recoveries. Why then is the Left so dead-set on forcing America and the world to transition from abundant, reliable, and inexpensive carbon-based energy to scarce, unreliable, and expensive non-carbon-based energy? Why are the places and people still reliant on biomass (that is a fancy word for wood and dung) far poorer, polluted, and unhealthy than the places and people neck-deep in natural gas and nuclear energy? If the oceans are going to rise several feet, why did Barack Obama buy not just one multi-million house on a beach, but two? Why has the world become literally GREENER (i.e., more trees and plants) over the last three decades, which would seem to indicate Mother Earth just might like more carbon dioxide for her hungry plants—the dinosaurs sure loved how big it made them?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about doing what makes economic sense to make and keep our world as clean as we can. Every week my family’s big recycle trash can is far fuller than our landfill trash can. If I see litter, I’ll pick it up and throw it away. I turn lights off when not needed. I just don’t get why we should ignore the math and science when it comes to energy. Non-carbon-based energy is worse for the environment than carbon-based energy due to all the dirty and polluting acts required to bring that energy to fruition. Instead of spending trillions of dollars on some unnecessary transition, we should invest in making natural gas and nuclear energy as abundant as we can and even cleaner than it already is. Our internal combustion engine vehicles are already fairly clean, so we should push hybrid technology to make them cleaner while keeping them reliable, inexpensive, and less environmentally destructive than lithium-battery vehicles.

One of the greatest achievements of mankind is that we’ve built a society that can withstand almost anything Mother Nature can throw at us (volcanoes and asteroids remain challenging). A hail storm can’t wipe out a natural gas or nuclear energy plant, but it can decimate a million acre field of solar cells in seconds. Why would we recklessly give up the advantages human ingenuity fought so hard to win? That isn’t progress. It’s just stupid.