Posted on 02/06/2016 7:52:31 AM PST by Kaslin
How many calories do you consume each day? If you answered something like "2,000" or "3,000," you're kidding yourself. You consume about 60 to 90 times that many.
True, you probably eat only 2,000 to 3,000 calories a day, but most of the calories you consume aren't from food. They're the energy you use when you turn on a light or computer, drive your car, use your cell phone, or do anything else requiring energy.
If you're like the average American, you consume about 186,000 calories a day, and over 98% of it is machine energy. It serves you, minute by minute, day by day, uncomplaining. It is largely responsible, because it powers everything that makes us healthier and safer, for the fact that Americans born today can expect to live about 80 years--compared with under 30 before the Industrial Revolution.
Very few--perhaps 1 in 100--of our ancestors consumed that much energy in a day--mostly in the form of animal and slave labor. The animals and slaves got all their energy from food. Now we get most of our energy from fossil fuels (about 87% worldwide), and most of the remainder from hydro (7%) and nuclear (4%), and only 2% from wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, and biofuels combined.
Harnessing energy through machines instead of animals and slaves enables us to benefit from a level of energy consumption that only a tiny minority had three centuries ago--even while abolishing slavery.
Today, however, environmentalists, and politicians like President Obama, call our use of fossil fuels an "addiction" analogous to drug abuse. They warn that we're causing dangerous global warming--though the computer models behind their claims predict two to three times the observed warming over the relevant period. They demand that we curtail our fossil fuel use--even stop it completely, even at a cost of trillions of dollars (over $100 trillion to eliminate fossil fuels by 2030) that we could use otherwise to reduce hunger and disease and increase housing, transportation, education, health care, and other benefits worldwide.
One might as well demand that someone cut his food intake from 2,000 calories a day to 300 because the other 1,700 are his "addiction." Abundant, affordable, reliable energy is indispensable to lifting and keeping whole societies out of poverty, and fossil fuels are and for decades to come will remain our best source.
Contrary to Green-sponsored myth, we can burn oil, natural gas, and coal to generate energy, as we do in America, without causing harmful pollution levels. The wealthier a society gets--partly by energy from fossil fuels--the more it reduces pollution. Poor countries where biomass remains the main cooking and heating fuel for some 2 billion people, causing 2 to 4 million premature deaths and hundreds of millions of respiratory illnesses annually, desperately need this cleaner, affordable upgrade.
Time to break our "addiction" to fossil fuels? Far from it! Time to spread their use throughout the developing world, lifting billions out of poverty and into healthier, longer lives.
You said it
Nothing complex. When I was young, cold, wet, hungry was tolerable. Now, not so much.
If others, particularly the Left, want to live in caves and eat nuts they find on the forest floor, more power to them. I'm old and selfish. If they want to try to force me back into the trees, I'll kill 'em.
Simple, Isn't it? If I feel a twinge of conscience about it, I'll deal with it.
I don’t consume fossil fuels since I travel in squadrons of one or two Boeing 747s accompanied by two to four C17s and they don’t use any fuel.
On the ground I ride in convoys of eight to fifteen Cadillac limos and SUVs with accompanying local escorts and they are all powered by squirrels on treadmills. The thousands of vehicles sitting motionless awaiting the passage of my royal procession never consume fossil fuels of any kind either.
It’s time to make all provisions necessary to promote, enable and secure a consistently expanding, maximally efficient, and economically thrifty flow of so-called “fossil” resources for the foreseeable future. Energy is the life blood of the economy.
“Today, however, environmentalists, and politicians like President Obama, call our use of fossil fuels an “addiction” analogous to drug abuse. “
The addiction I worry about is their addiction to power.
“Today, however, environmentalists, and politicians like President Obama, call our use of fossil fuels an “addiction” analogous to drug abuse. “
The addiction I worry about is their addiction to power.
SOOOO—these ‘leaders’ want to eliminate the machines???
Not a damn one of them knows how to hitch up a horse or make a wagon by hand.
More nuclear please. Passive solar heating works. Geothermal heat-sinking works. Photovoltaic sources are cheaper than the cost of line maintenance in remote forested areas... The one thing I can't abide is turning topsoil into fuel.
The real point is: deregulate energy and put risk management back into the hands of insurers.
Wisdom! This needs to be on billboards and internet pop-up ads around the USA
Um, did you read the article? It was arguing for the expanded use of fossil fuels.
If you dont wish to buy any fossil fuels, then dont. If you do not wish to use any forms of energy or transportation that use fossil fuels... then dont. Leave the rest of us alone.
OK, no problem barry. You first, and let me know how it go’s!!
Thank God a majority of the American people can see past this scam, and will punish left leaning candidates this year.
Is that photoshopped?
If not, who were the Freepers carrying the sign?
I wonder how many Dems will embrace Baraq’s $10/bbl tax on the campaign trail? They certainly need to be asked early and often.
Unfortunately the idiot, err I mean uninformed voters will not see past this scam and will vote for either Hillary Clinton, or Bernie Sanders.
This is an excellent reply and I agree with it 100%. However I have not seen Pif’s explanation yet, or can’t he answer on his own?
That was definitely worth repeating (even if you didn't mean to.)
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