Millions of People are Stuck in the Cage of Energy Poverty
The “unaccountable parasitic force” that are the NGO-Industrial Complex needs to check their damned privilege.
“If you turned the electricity off for a few months in any developed Western society, 500 years of supposed philosophical progress about human rights and individualism would quickly evaporate like they never happened.”
[Climate Activists] are some of the richest and most privileged people in the world, thanks to cheap and abundant fossil fuels. Some of them, like the heirs and heiresses to the Getty Oil and Rockefeller Oil fortunes, are more directly beneficiaries than others. And yet they are actively seeking to deprive others, both their fellow citizens and Africans, of those very fuels, as well as non-fossil sources of productive energy, like hydroelectric dams and nuclear power.
-Michael Shellenberger in The Infantilization of the Apocalpyse
It’s an unaccountable parasitic force that employs thousands of lawyers, strategists, pollsters, and fundraisers, many of whom will spend their careers treading the revolving door between academia, media, government, and the NGOs. It relies on technocrats who went to exclusive universities, live in heavily Democratic coastal cities, have never been to Branson, and don’t give a fuck about the people who live in flyover country, wear name tags at work, or turn wrenches for a living.
-Robert Bryce in The Anti-Industry Industry
Fiat fuels have arguably been more devastating for many undeveloped and predominantly preindustrial societies, countries with low levels of capital for which spending on these luxuries is an unconscionable waste. Poverty is the inevitable consequence and symptom of a lack of available power, and the only proven technologies for delivering high power on demand at low prices are based on hydrocarbon, nuclear, and hydroelectric energy. Yet the last three decades have witnessed a proliferation of development projects aimed at helping poor countries “transition” to renewable energies instead of investing in reliable energy. The track record of these projects has been dreadful. Western donors and “misery industry” bureaucrats get to write their virtue-signaling reports full of rosy language on the transformative potential of these energy sources, but the people who have to rely on them end up with unreliable low power available intermittently, and usually, they still have to pay enormous costs in debt servicing and maintenance. At a time when reliable power generation from hydrocarbons is becoming cheaper than ever, burdening the world’s poor with the expensive, useless, virtue-signaling toys of the West is no less than criminal.
-Saifedean Ammous in The Fiat Standard
Great piece. Did you catch the recent Bitcoin Standard podcast with Alex Epstein? They talk about the Misery Industry.
💯 thank you so much