Energy & Labor Saving Day

This national holiday weekend presents another opportunity to appreciate the labor-saving qualities of energy, the master resource. The utility of affordable, plentiful, reliable energy is not a partisan issue except to a fringe anti-industrial sect (see below).

Note how leading climate alarmists do not question the importance of energy for the masses. “A reliable and affordable supply of energy,” stated John Holdren, Obama’s two-term science advisor, “is absolutely critical to maintaining and expanding economic prosperity where such prosperity already exists and to creating it where it does not.” [1] The father of climate alarmism, James Hansen, has stated:

Let’s be clear: the frequent comparison of the fossil fuel and tobacco industries is nonsense. Fossil fuels are a valuable energy source that has done yeomen service for humankind. [2]

Energy as Bad?

Then there are the anti-industrial Deep Ecologists, who demote human betterment to the interests of a static, Nature-first world. ““Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature,” stated one in the Los Angeles Times, “some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” [3]

American population biologist Paul Ehrich once remarked that “giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” [4] And: “In the long run, energy should be made expensive, especially for large users, as an incentive to conservation. [5] Jeremy Rifkin stated in a 1989 newspaper op-ed that cheap energy would be “the worst thing that could happen to our planet.” [6] Why? As interpreted by one editorialist:

Inexhaustible power, [Rifkin] argues, only gives man an infinite ability to exhaust the planet’s resources, to destroy its fragile balance and create unimaginable human and industrial waste.

Inanimate energy does the work on countless humans and animals of yore. But the term “energy servants” (or “energy helpers”) to quantify the utility has been twisted into a negative by some energy critics. In The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude, Andrew Nikiforuk wrote:

Both Aristotle and Plato described slavery as necessary and expedient. We regard our new hydrocarbon servants with the same pragmatism. To many of us, our current spending of fossil fuels appears as morally correct as did human slavery to the Romans or the Atlantic slave trade to seventeenth-century British businessmen.

Surely the author was not trying to evoke pity for anthropomorphized chunks of coal and barrels of oil. And it is beyond odd when “freeing” such “servants” means returning to the drudgery of a human- and animal-powered world. Nikiforuk then mentioned yours truly (me!) as a trafficker of such “pseudoscientific absurdities” as open-ended progress fueled by energy growth. Nikiforuk stated:

Bradley … claims that the world’s material progress is “the result of advances in energy technology made by people living in freedom” and so will continue unerringly…. Bradley does, however, acknowledge the importance of inanimate slaves. Thanks to hydrocarbons, the proportion of industrial work performed by human hands in the United States has fallen over the last hundred years from 90 percent to 8 percent. This blessed emancipation has given each American the fossil-fuel equivalent of about three hundred slaves, and Bradley predicts that the number of virtual slaves will only grow.

I stand by my view, then and now. And I agree with Julian Simon who concluded “the cheaper the energy the better.” Happy Labor Savings Day!

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[1] Holdren, “Memorandum to the President: The Energy-Climate Challenge,” in Donald Kennedy and John Riggs, eds., U.S. Policy and the Global Environment: Memos to the President (Washington, D.C.: The Aspen Institute, 2000), p. 21.

[2] Hansen, “Fighting the Battles: Winning the War” (June 1, 2021)

[3] David Graber, ” Mother Nature as a Hothouse Flower,” Los Angeles Times (October 22, 1989).

[4] Paul Ehrlich, “An Ecologist’s Perspective on Nuclear Power,” Federal Academy of Science Public Issue Report, May-June 1975, p. 5.

[5] Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich, The End of Affluence (Rivercity Press, Riverside, MA, 1974, 1975), p. 48.

[6] Quoted in Paul Ciotti, “Fear of Fusion: What if It Works?” Los Angeles Times (April 19, 1989).

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