Most sitting days a small band of activists gathers outside federal parliament, around an array of hydrocarbon-rich signs, demanding an immediate end to all fossil fuel.
One of their number identifies as a marsupial, kitted out in an ill-fitting polyester suit made from petrochemicals. She/he/it and the other millenarians congregate on a path, made with cement sourced from a coal or gas-fired kiln, as they urge passers-by to repent their carbon addiction or face oblivion.
One ominous black sign warns: Coal Kills Kids. Let’s check how the kids were doing in BC: the era before coal. The Australian Bureau of Statistics records that in 1900 there were 103 deaths in every 1000 live births. A century later that number had dropped to a tick over five per 1000. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports that children born in 2022 can expect to live around 30 years longer than those in 1891.
There is more than a casual link between widespread, affordable electricity and the increase in life expectancy. Of course, there are other factors driving it, such as access to plentiful food and better medical care.
In an enduring irony, the world’s ability to feed most of the eight billion people on the planet is due to the work of a German war criminal. Fritz Haber pioneered the use of chlorine gas in World War I and invented the process for making fertiliser from the air.
An unexpected casualty of his research on chemical weapons was his wife, Clara Immerwahr. An equally gifted chemist, she was so horrified by her husband directing the first use of chlorine gas at Ypres that she took his pistol and killed herself.
The same man, working in the same lab, invented a process that produced ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen. This is the foundation of modern synthetic fertilisers, which revolutionised food production. Without it, billions would starve.
So, despite what some activists say, you can, and do, eat fossil fuel. Canadian energy savant Vaclav Smil has calculated the embedded energy in a 125g Spanish tomato bought in a Scandinavian market at five tablespoons of diesel.
And, as noted here before, a paper in the American Journal of Public Health records that “nearly 99 per cent of pharmaceutical feedstocks and reagents are derived from petrochemicals”.
So, to quote the energy experts at Doomberg, energy is life. Harnessing fossil fuels, particularly oil, drove a warp-speed leap forward in human development in the past century.
The wealth of nations is directly linked to their access to coal, oil and gas. Your standard of living is a product of the amount of energy you get to use. Just because you can’t see the process doesn’t mean you are not using it. Poor nations and poor people are energy poor.
Britain’s economic dominance in the 18th and 19th centuries was fuelled by abundant coal, which powered the industrial revolution. The discovery of oil in Pennsylvania in 1859 fuelled the rise of the US to be the dominant power in the 20th century.
Stick a pin in 1990 and track the rise of China’s GDP and the country’s use of fossil fuel. Oil, coal and gas consumption and wealth rise in lock-step. China is now the world’s manufacturing superpower, burning 56 per cent of the planet’s coal, 15 per cent of its oil and 8 per cent of its natural gas.
Now look at what happens when you decide to abandon hydrocarbons. As Europe and Britain take the first tiny steps on the long path to weaning themselves off fossil fuel, they are becoming weaker, poorer and dependent on others for the energy they still need.
When Russia attacked Ukraine, the giant Ponzi scheme of Berlin’s much-vaunted Energiewende (energy transition) was exposed because Germany can’t run an electricity system on wind and solar harvesters without the life support of dispatchable fossil fuel. So it started burning coal to keep the lights on and scrambled around the world to find gas.
Germany’s trillion-dollar transition has purchased its citizens the highest electricity prices in Europe and a ticket to deindustrialisation. Its people grow restless and angry, and somewhere on the road to poverty they will revolt.
It is the exemplar of what not to do.
At this point some anguished voice usually cries: “But climate change is real.” That is not in argument here. This is about highlighting the inconvenient truth that if we are determined to continue on the energy course mapped by the federal and state governments it is a road to ruin. We will not become a green-energy superpower; a rich nation will become a poor one.
It is a terrifying truth that the cavalcade of politicians, billionaire energy hobbyists, scientists and activists demanding an energy transition are profoundly energy illiterate. They cannot even see the energy they consume. The world will not bend in the direction they demand because most of it wants to stay rich or get rich.
Let’s check their record of achievement. Since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 the world’s carbon emissions have risen every single year except for the financial crisis in 2009 and when Covid shut the planet. Those two events should be a big hint: cutting carbon emissions and destroying economies go hand-in-hand.
Do not listen to what nations say at yearly climate jamborees, watch what they do.
Last year coal, oil and gas consumption hit record highs. The only thing that has changed is where the fuel is burned. No matter what it says, China will continue to greedily burn every molecule of hydrocarbon we don’t want. So will Russia, India, Indonesia and countries in Africa.
And while the Biden administration lectured Australia about carbon emissions, the US grew to become a bigger oil producer than Saudi Arabia and to extract more gas than Qatar. Under Donald Trump America will “drill baby drill” and pull out of the climate accords. Argentina will follow it.
So what on earth are we doing? We have a choice: harness the energy under our feet, stay rich and use our wealth to adapt to a changing climate; or beggar ourselves and adapt to a changing climate.
And for those hellbent on the second path, who rage against the evils of fossil fuel, it’s past time you began living out the true meaning of your creed.
Start small. Spend just one day a week actively avoiding everything derived from hydrocarbons. Call it Fossil-Free Friday. There already is a TV show that will give you a sense of what that looks like. It’s called Naked and Afraid.
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