An outstanding energy/climate scholar/communicator of our time is Marlo Lewis, Jr., senior fellow of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). I am moved to high-five my friend as I read his recent post, “Climate Change, Fossil Fuels, and Human Well Being,” as well as an older one, “[DOE] Secretary Chu Crosses the Line; Should Resign (October 2009).
Human Improvement, CO2 Enrichment
Regarding Lewis’s recent post, consider his framing question.
Climate campaigners demand ever-greater government control over energy markets, resources, and infrastructure. Many believe the best thing governments can do with fossil energy is “keep it in the ground.” They claim fossil-fueled civilization is “unsustainable” and headed for a climate catastrophe. Are they correct?
And his answer:
…Since 1950, fossil fuel consumption increased by 550 percent, annual global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions increased by 500 percent, atmospheric CO2 concentrations increased by about one-third, and the world warmed about 0.65 degrees Celsius.
“The ‘vast majority’ of CO2 pipelines carry carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery, according to US Department of Energy…. But this free-market niche is a now being joined [via the Carbon Capture Coalition] by a wholly new application for CO2 that is all about government mandates and subsidies.”
“As Wendall Phillips warned in 1852, ‘Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Power is ever stealing from the many to the few’.”
Government goes to those who show up. This aphorism explains the growth of government: those particularly advantaged by special government favor organize and lobby while the rest of us tend to our private business.
Such cronyism marks real-world government versus the romantic view wherein impartial legislators above the special-interest fray wisely block the entreaties of those who would injure the common interest of taxpayers and consumers.…
“Imagining a low-carbon world, then, means reevaluating our conception of freedom itself.”
– Audrea Lim, “The Ideology of Fossil Fuels.” Dissent, Spring 2018.
Audrea Lim in a recent issue of Dissent (a quarterly magazine for Left Progressivism) penned an essay, “The Ideology of Fossil Fuels.” The journalist/editor at Verso Books offers a rather bizarre view of the energy world. She writes in part:
Why is it so much easier, as the saying goes, to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? …. The most straightforward answer to the question, perhaps, lies in the sticky substance that fuels capitalism as we know it, and is daily bringing us closer to the apocalypse of the [doomsday] preppers’ imagination: oil.
“The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use,” writes the postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty in a seminal essay collected in Energy Humanities.…