On a recent road trip with my 18 year-old daughter, I asked if
it was true that her peers were anxious about the future. “They’re terrified,”
she replied.
“Why?”
“Because they all know that everything’s getting worse. Poverty, the environment. They think it’s hopeless.”
Adults often lament that children and students don’t listen, but in this case, it seems far too many young people have internalized the doomsday message of schools and media. This side of paradise, problems will always abound, but why do young people and their adult teachers think the state of humanity and the planet is getting worse? Why do they ignore the evidence that science, technology, and human ingenuity have made us vastly better off in almost every way? And that these “ultimate resources” are not usually the problem but almost always the solution?
It turns out that many progressives are dangerously opposed to progress. In its November 2019 issue, The Atlantic asked a big question: “If you could go back in time and change one thing, what would it be?”
One reader from Ellicott City, Maryland,
answered, “The creation of the Interstate Highway System, which killed train
travel and enabled urban sprawl, pollution, and inequality.”
Another reader from Ann Arbor, Michigan, said
history’s biggest mistake was the discovery of shale energy and its development
through the technologies of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or
“fracking.”
A history professor from Rutgers, however,
identified the real root of our problems:
“the invention of agriculture.” That’s right. Agriculture, she writes,
led to longer work weeks, poor health, “environmental degradation,” and “income
inequality. Hunter-gatherer life isn’t sounding so bad.”
Think about it. No agriculture, no industrial
revolution, no highways, no fracking, no electricity, no smartphones, and thus
no Twitter addiction. Without agriculture, no urban sprawl, no obesity, and no
billionaires. For that matter, no thousandaires. Under the Rutgers hunter-gatherer
plan, both Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax and the Green New Deal would be
totally unnecessary. Earth’s 10 million inhabitants would be blissfully
ignorant and skinny and equally cold and poor.
Because energy is ultimately a central source
of all progress, the anti-energy propaganda poisoning the minds of our children
is especially alarming.
A new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) estimates that in the wake of the tsunami-induced Fukushima meltdown, shutting down all of Japan’s nuclear power plants actually killed far more people than it saved. Radiation from Fukushima resulted in a grand total of zero deaths. The overly cautious evacuation of the surrounding areas, on the other hand, resulted in 2,202 deaths, according to a 2018 report by Japan’s Reconstruction Agency. The NBER paper adds that without nuclear power, higher energy prices between 2011 and 2014 resulted in some 1,280 more deaths due to lack of home heating. In the years since, cold-related deaths likely grew.
Over the last dozen years in the US, fracking has more than doubled American oil production and unleashed abundant, cheap natural gas for perhaps centuries to come. The oil explosion reoriented world geopolitics to America’s advantage, and the natural gas boom reduced heating and electricity bills and made US industry more competitive.
Those worried about carbon dioxide (CO2)
emissions can also celebrate. The wide scale replacement of coal with natural
gas has reduced American CO2 emissions from electricity generation to a level
not seen since 1986. This was a result of ingenious technology and risky
investment, no UN climate mandates required.
Regardless, the CO2 panic, which adults have now pushed on two unnecessarily anxious generations, will soon be a chapter among history’s extraordinary popular delusions. The rise of our atmosphere’s CO2 concentration from 0.0003 to 0.0004 was innocuous, indeed probably beneficial, and the latest CO2 sensitivity estimates suggest the alarmist models were wrong and further emissions will have only the tiniest, unharmful effect on temperature.
As we move up the technology stack —
agriculture, steam power, metallurgy, light, combustion engines, antibiotics,
nuclear, silicon, software, internet, robotics, genomics, quantum computing,
and fusion — new technologies not only generate new wealth and possibilities
but will also help solve the inevitable imperfections of the previous regime. With
a climate that is always changing, by far the best way to mitigate nature’s
disturbances is to generate enough wealth and technology to adapt.
The anti-agriculture, anti-air travel utopians
point us down a dirt path to nowhere.
A techtopia, on the other hand, for all its uncertainties and complications, can be an imperfect, never-ending, and hopeful ascent of human progress.
My daughter texted last night: “Dad, been talking with [my friend] . . . explaining your spiel . . . She feels much better now!” I guess that’s progress.
The post Who needs agriculture and airplanes? The scandalous inhumanity of the anti-technology intelligentsia appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.