Fossil Fuel Free Is No Country for the Poor
March 28 | Posted by mrossol | Economics, EnvironmentAs I have posted before: Fossil fuels have done more to improve the lot of the poor than ANYTHING ELSE in the past, or ANYTHING proposed by the benevolent elite.
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By Donald J. Boudreaux
March 27, 2015 5:56 p.m. ET
Richard Branson,Arianna Huffington and several other business icons recently called on world leaders to commit to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Such a commitment, they vow, would “drive innovation, grow jobs, build prosperity and secure a better world.”
This isn’t merely impractical; it’s nonsensical. Fossil fuels are the bedrock of modernity, generating cheap energy and widespread wealth. Environmental crusaders who would do away with these fuels fail to acknowledge the stark results in a world forced to rely solely on renewable energy.
Altogether, renewable energy sources—including wind, solar, hydropower, geothermal and biomass—generate one-tenth of the energy Americans demand. Without fossil fuels to fill that 90% gap, the economy would collapse, commodity supplies would dwindle, jobs would disappear, and households would remain cold, dark and haunted by hunger.
As domestic oil and gas production rise in the U.S., utility bills fall. The average American household saved $1,200 in disposable income in 2012 because of lower energy costs, according to the research firm IHS. By the end of 2015, these savings could grow to $2,000.
A gallon of gasoline cost, on average, $3.52 last March. Today it costs just $2.42. This year, theEnergy Information Administration expects the average U.S. household to spend about $550 less on gasoline than last year.
In asking less-developed nations to ration carbon emissions, environmentalists are essentially demanding that they forgo the most revolutionary shift of the modern era: machines. Every day, as energy expert Alex Epstein observes in his new book “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” the average American relies on machines that exert the equivalent energy of 93 physical laborers. As a result, our lives are more leisurely than our ancestors could have ever imagined.
For hundreds of millions of desperately poor people in China, energy-fueled industrialization is the best hope for a better life. Asking the Chinese government to reduce carbon emissions means asking them to commit millions of their people to poverty, condemning them to a hand-to-mouth lifestyle. “Many people think that China should take the lead for driving the clean [energy] revolution,” Wang Yi, a climate-change expert at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told a United Nations forum on sustainability in 2012. “But China is facing a lot of challenges.”
It’s fashionable to bash fossil fuels. But these fuels have provided a better life for untold millions of people. And they offer the best hope for pulling billions more out of poverty.
Mr. Boudreaux is a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center and a professor of economics at George Mason University.
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