Wall Street Journal
Anyone
on an investment committee has likely spent untold amounts of time discussing
ways to mitigate the impact of climate change, but they’ve likely never heard
anyone state one simple and incontrovertible fact: The widespread exploration
and production of fossil fuels that started in Titusville, Pa., not quite 170
years ago, has done more to benefit the lives of ordinary people than any other
technological advance in history.
Before fossil fuels, people relied on burning
biomass, such as timber or manure, which was a far dirtier and much less
efficient source of energy. Fossil fuels let people heat their homes in the
winter, reducing the risk of death from exposure. Fossil-fuel-based fertilizers
greatly increased crop yields, reducing starvation and malnutrition. Before the
advent of the automobile, the ability for many people to venture far from their
hometown was an unfathomable dream. Oil- and coal-burning transportation opened
up access to education, commerce, professional opportunities, and vital
services such as medicine. There has been, and remains, a strong correlation between
the use of fossil fuels and life expectancy.
Limiting the availability of fossil fuels in the
name of climate activism would cut off many of the world’s poor from these
benefits. Climate activists worry about a potential “existential crisis” decades
down the road, but poor people, really poor people, face an existential crisis
every day. Even for those who aren’t among humanity’s most unfortunate, rising
energy prices force serious economic trade-offs. Purposely eschewing America
and Europe’s own natural resources increases costs to consumers, raises the
cost of doing business, and limits economic growth. Viewed with this in mind,
the debate over emissions seems like an upper-class problem.
If Chinese belligerence and increasing
authoritarianism over the past two years have taught us anything, it is that no
amount of trade and international cooperation will instill what are generally
considered to be Western values in other civilizations who have no real desire
to adopt them. Trusting China to do anything other than what is directly in its
own best interests, especially when it comes to the trade-offs between economic
development and climate issues, would seem to be in direct conflict with
history and common sense—and it poses serious geopolitical risks to the
international democratic order. The war in Ukraine has emphasized how leaving
European and American fossil fuels in the ground can put the West at the will
of dictators, increasing the risk of atrocities, war or even the use of weapons
of mass destruction. An easing of regulations on drilling in the U.S. and
easier regulations on liquefied natural gas exports to flood the global market
with oil and natural gas would do far more than any sanctions to stop Vladimir Putin’s barbarism.
The climate-change solutions the West is pursuing
also pose a danger to the environment. The lodestar of the environmental
movement today appears to be electric vehicles. One would be hard-pressed to
find a product more dependent on resources from extractive materials. An
electric car requires almost four times as much copper as an automobile powered
by an internal combustion engine. The widely accepted goal of having 30% of the
world’s vehicle sales be electric by 2030 would require enormous
investments in mining industries that are decidedly not eco-friendly.
And whatever emission cuts America and Europe
manage to make by forcing electric vehicles and other inefficient technology on
consumers will be negated by emissions from other nations. Regimes like Russia
and China won’t put aside their geopolitical ambitions for climate activism;
developing countries like India won’t sacrifice economic development and their
peoples’ well-being in the hope it’ll slow global warming.
Sadly, environmentalism has grown into a secular
religion in which reasonable debate is regarded as heresy. But if politicians
and voters can approach climate change with an open mind, they’ll see that
economic growth is likely to solve the issue without heavy-handed government
intervention. History has shown that free markets produce incredible leaps in
human ingenuity. The greater access the world has to all sorts of energy
sources, the faster humanity will discover new technologies that are more
environmentally friendly. Rationing fossil fuels would only retard the process
of decreasing carbon emissions and cost lives in the process.
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