Most of the world’s population is already living without the products and fuels from petroleum, while the healthier and wealthier countries are focusing efforts to reduce their emissions from the use of fossil fuels, natural gas, and coal with extensive subsidies to accelerate their countries intermittent electricity from wind and solar renewables.
Before jumping too quickly into the proverbial snake pit of the “green” religious movement, greenies should take time to answer: How we can maintain our lifestyles and economies without regressing back to what the world looked like before the 1900s?
It’s almost impossible to understand that almost half the world— over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day. Today, across southern Asia, portions of Europe, and parts of Africa and Australia, there are families attempting to live on virtually nothing.
A complex trade-off associated with policy choices of moving too quickly into the GND is that abandoning fossil fuels will further deprive and/or delay the six billion in this world living on less than $10 a day, from access to the 6,000 products we enjoy in the wealthy and healthy countries that are all made from oil derivatives, most of which did not even exist in the developed countries before the 1900s.
For your viewing pleasure, a chart of Life Without Oil, and a short YouTube video of Life Without Oil, i.e., not as simple as one may think. It may be time to believe in indisputable science.
Renewables can only generate electricity, and intermittent electricity at best. The undisputable science is that renewables CANNOT manufacture any of the oil derivatives that are the basis of the thousands of products that are the foundation of societies and economies around the world.
The trade-off to eliminate fossil fuels too quickly is allowing 11 million children in the world dying every year from preventable causes of diarrhea, malaria, neonatal infection, pneumonia, preterm delivery, or lack of oxygen at birth.
Those children in poor countries still lack purified drinking water, sewage sanitation, adequate nutrition, reliable electricity (or any at all), adequate health care, and the infrastructures and products we take for granted that are all based on deep earth minerals and fuels.
And by the way, adults in those poor countries barely live past 40 years of age.
The focus should be toward sharing all those products for which we have yet to discover clones or generics for almost 200 years, with underdeveloped countries so they can enjoy similar lifestyles enjoyed by those in the wealthy and healthy countries.
The wealthier developed countries also have access to heating, air conditioning, and insulation that has virtually eliminated weather-related deaths.
The current passion to convert into a world with intermittent electricity is oblivious to the unintended consequences of a world without fossil fuels.
The signatories to the green movement have failed to imagine how life was without that industry that did not exist before 1900 when we had NO medications and medical equipment, NO vaccines, NO water filtration systems, NO sanitation systems, NO fertilizers to help feed billions, NO pesticides to control locusts and other pests, NO communications systems, including cell phones, computers, and iPads, NO vehicles, NO airlines that now move four billion people around the world, NO cruise ships that now move 25 million passengers around the world, NO merchant ships that are now moving billions of dollars of products monthly throughout the world, NO tires for vehicles, and NO asphalt for roads, and NO space program.
Looking back just a few short centuries, we have come a long way since the pioneer days. Climate change is important, but so is economic survivability.
In case you do not remember, we also had virtually no military aircraft carriers, destroyers, submarines, planes, and tanks around the world before 1900.
A primary reason that both WW I and II were won by the Allies was that they had more oil, petroleum, and coal than the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan to operate their military equipment of aircraft carriers, battleships, destroyers, submarines, planes, tanks and armor, trucks, troop carriers, and weaponry.
Also, before 1900, the world had very little commerce and without transportation, there is no commerce.
The two prime movers that have done more for the cause of globalization than any other: the diesel engine and the jet turbine, both get their fuels from oil. Road and air travel now dominate most people’s lives.
Post-1900, we now have medications, electronics, cosmetics, plastics, fertilizers, transportation infrastructures, and thousands of products that come from the derivatives of crude oil, including every part in solar panels and wind turbines as well as the various fuels to the world to operate planes, trucks, construction equipment, merchant ships, cruise ships, and automobiles.
The questions that anti-fossil fuel protesters from both the Democratic and Republican parties should take the time to answer is two-fold:
1) How can we allow 11 million children in the world to die every year in developing countries from preventable causes? And,
2) How will we adjust to lifestyles that regress us back to a time when wealthy countries had no access to those thousands of products that are now made from oil derivatives and the fuels needed by airlines, merchant ships, transportation infrastructures, and the military, that were not in existence before the 1900s?
Read more at CFACT
Without Fossil Fuels you would be living in a empty field cold hungry thirsty and total’y naked
The inclusion of Australia in the list of worst poverty-ravaged areas is highly questionable to say the least.
Australia has a very generous social welfare program. We have a generous Medicare system. These are products of the Australian centre left, to which I was proud to belong when such a political force actually existed (ie. before the hard left takeover and things got ridiculously out of hand). Indeed, things are so out of hand now that the welfare rollouts are far and beyond that which most Democrat voters would likely expect from a Biden administration.
Young Aboriginal Australians, in particular, may avail themselves of even more opportunities than are available to youth in general. These little extras, alone, cost a lot, lot, lot more per annum than the average African will ever see in total over the same period.
The relative poverty amongst remote Aboriginal communities is real and systemic, with many causes, but a lack of welfare spending is not one of them though and the poverty-trap is not the same as in the third world. In short, Australia has opportunity for all.
If the remote community existence is different from the experience of their kinfolk in the major urban centres, it is one of cultural choice, remoteness and societal problems (which shouldn’t be discussed here).
While their inner-urban leftist community kinsfolk routinely talk of absolute poverty and disadvantage, they are actually busily utilising the myriad of Indigenous-specific opportunities that are available for them to get ahead. That includes positions in the media where one is expected to complain about climate change on a daily basis.
They don’t seem to care that fossil fuels are truly important to their substantially less well-off remote community kinsfolk and their standard of living. The non-traditional food trucked into these communities is moved by diesel. Electricity is largely generated by diesel. Health care and education is delivered by fossil fuel energy.
The inner-city hard-left elites would wilfully destroy the fossil fuel economy, however. If Australian remote Aboriginal communities are to be as impoverished as this article wrongly implies they already are, it shall likely be the hard-left’s obsession with carbon dioxide that delivers such a terrible outcome.
That much is true. It may also be both true and ironic that the author’s understanding of poverty in Australia has been coloured rather too much by the hard left themselves. Nothing else could explain it.
Those who wan us to end all uses of Fossil Fuels thiose Keep it in the Ground iidots had better think of the Consiquinces of ending the use of all Fossil Fuels time for t hem to take off their Eco-Freak Gasses
Given energy imperatives, perhaps a simpler question can & should be directed at anti-fossil fuel activists on a regular basis: “What CLEAN, SCALABLE & SUSTAINABLE alternative do YOU propose to REPLACE 80% of the U.S primary energy and the THOUSANDS of useful products that support your modern lifestyle? Nobody ever challenges the creditability or feasibility of slogans like “100% renewables by X Date” or “Zero carbon emissions by X Date.” You have to have VIABLE alternatives. Otherwise, energy poverty rather than diminishing will be “coming to a theater near you”…