Environmentalists have spent decades lamenting the Industrial Revolution. In their view, we all lived in Eden once. Then noisy, smelly machines came along and ruined paradise.
Canada’s David Suzuki, for example, says that because automobiles run on fossil fuels and emit carbon dioxide, they’re nothing to celebrate. In his view, everything industrial, large-scale, or efficient generates pollution and is, therefore, a curse.
The “path we embarked on after the Industrial Revolution,” he insisted in a 1997 book, “is leading us increasingly into conflict with the natural world.”
Research analyst Luke Muehlhauser presents another perspective. He’s the author of an essay titled How big a deal was the Industrial Revolution? The short answer is that it was the single most important thing ever to happen to humanity.
Muehlhauser has visually charted six lines across multiple centuries:
- Life expectancy at birth
- GDP per capita
- Percentage of people who’ve escaped extreme poverty
- Access to energy (for cooking, lighting, heating, and for producing tools and clothing)
- Technological developments
- Political freedom (the percentage of people who live in democracies).
These lines speak volumes. For the vast majority of human beings who’ve inhabited this planet – generation after generation, century after century – life was precarious. Almost everyone was poor.
In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, human lives improved dramatically. Muehlhauser says the history textbooks to which he was exposed in school discussed at great length:
The transformative impact of the wheel or writing or money or cavalry, or the conquering of this society by that other society, or the rise of this or that religion…or the Scientific Revolution.
But they could have ended each of those chapters by saying “Despite these developments, global human well-being remained roughly the same as it had been for millennia, by every measure we have access to.” And then when you got to the chapter on the industrial revolution, these books could’ve said: “Finally, for the first time in recorded history, the trajectory of human well-being changed completely, and this change dwarfed the magnitude of all previous fluctuations in human well-being.” [bold added]
His one sentence summary of human history:
Everything was awful for a very long time, and then the industrial revolution happened.
David Suzuki is right, to some extent. Many industrial processes produce pollution. But then something else occurs.
Human populations that emerge from desperate poverty soon acquire sufficient good health, education, and financial means to clean up that pollution.
Once we humans have enough to eat, once half our children no longer die before age five, we start to care about the environment.
The crucial point is that, in order to get to stage B, you first need to pass through stage A.
Read more at Big Pic News
Suzuki is just like Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio their minds wander and they go off the deep end into mindless nonsense like their a million miles away from reality
Just one aspect – say, no more automobiles. Start rounding up all those BLM wild horses in Nevada and get them trained to carry business men to their offices; beer delivery by wagon; we’ll need those 101 Dalmatians in the fire stations; response time for medical and law enforcement? “Not gonna happen.” You can’t put the Genie back in the bottle…..
The left will ALWAYS ignore the obvious
when it does not conform with their
pre-conceived predilections
That’s why the leftist pigs exist
To Deny Reality
Some environmentalists would like us to go back in time to the pre-industrial era. They are not smart enough to know there was no way that technology could feed as many people we have today, and there would be mass starvation with billions of people dying.
Donna Laframboise left out a seventh item that should have been on her list, advanced medical technology. This has saved my life twice now, which is very important to me.
She also left out something even more important : near universal literacy !
Pre industrial human societies were characterised by very low levels of literacy. After all peasants did not need to read & write.And were not encouraged to either.
Reminds me of a scene from Monty Python’s Holy Grail.
Peasants wallowing in muck see King Arthur riding by. “He must be the King, because he’s not all covered in sh!t, like us.” Would Suzuki give up the benefits of the Industrial Revolution? He hasn’t. He travels the planet while his lackeys follow, banging coconuts together.
The chart would be more helpful if there were some incremental labeling on the x axis.
Donna Laframboise’s list and those in the comments are all very important. However, there are some luxuries made possible by the fossil fuel power industry that people don’t even think about. These make a big difference in our quality of live.
Imagine yourself at 2:00 in the morning in your pajamas. It is way below freezing out side and the snow that fell almost two months ago is still on the ground. You put on a coat and grab a flashlight to go outside to use the out house.
Taking a bath was very different. After heating water in a number of pans on the stove, and adult would stand in large washtub and bathe them self. As a six year old child I was luckier because I was small enough to sit in the washtub.
Ten years earlier in that same house there was no refrigerator. The few things that were kept cold were hung on a rope and let down in the well which was 150 yards from the house.
If Al Gore’s so called solders or the Ocasio-Cortez joins climate change protesters were to live in the older live style due to non-utilization of fossil fuels, most would have a different attitude.