Thanksgiving: Giving thanks for fossil fuels

A guest commentary by Paul Mueller

Editor’s Note: On Tuesday, the Biden regime’s BLM (Bureau of Land Management) announced that it would stop any leasing of land for coal mining in the State of Wyoming, thereby ending all coal mining from federal lands in the State not later than 2041. Since 46.7$% of the vast majority of land in Wyoming in owned by the FedGov, this is a serious problem. So this article by Paul is very timely. (Note: this is longer than usual for TPOL.)

From travel to cooking to comfort, fossil fuels remain the foundation of your holiday feast.

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The holidays are a good time to count one’s blessings. As we celebrate Thanksgiving, we should take a couple minutes to give thanks for fossil fuels – crude oil, natural gas, and coal – for how they make our celebrations possible. From travel to food to fun, fossil fuels play an integral, if largely unseen, part of our festivities. More than that, fossil fuels have made, and continue to make, modern life possible.

If you will travel to a Thanksgiving gathering, you will use fossil fuels. Flights take place on airplanes powered by jet fuel, primarily refined from fossil fuels. Your car likely runs on gasoline – which is refined from crude oil. Even if you use an electric car powered by renewable energy, a lot of fossil fuel went into producing your vehicle. The mining equipment used to harvest rare earth metals for batteries use fossil fuels. Much of the electricity used throughout the refining and production process comes from fossil fuel combustion. Transporting the materials, whether by ship, truck, or train, relies on fossil fuels too.

Once you arrive at your Thanksgiving gathering, odds are quite high that you will enter a building heated by natural gas. The stove or oven you used to cook food may use natural gas too. And if you use a microwave or other appliance, or even turn on the lights, you’ll be using electricity. Even after decades of heavily subsidizing wind and solar power, chances are high that the electricity you use comes from a power plant fueled by coal or natural gas.

The food for your feast required fossil fuels. The tractors used by farmers run on diesel. The processing of grains and meat uses significant electricity. The food was transported by trucks running on fossil fuels. Much of the food you buy at the store was packaged in one form of plastic or another. Most plastics use by-products from crude oil or from natural gas. In fact, crude oil contributes materially to the creation of thousands of products from glues, sealants, adhesives, and Epoxy to asphalt to chemical products to batteries to cosmetics to a host of consumer goods. 

Plastic packaging has revolutionized how food is produced, transported, and stored. Food now lasts much longer with plastic sealing. Bacteria are kept off food because of plastic shielding. And plastic around food allows it to be frozen – making it easier to preserve and transport. This reduces waste due to spoilage. And of course, the convenience of plastic packaging is palpable to anyone who needs a bite to eat on the go. Similarly, the ubiquity of bottled water also speaks to its incredible convenience.

All these applications of fossil fuels have had the effect of creating relative abundance. Although it is true that Thanksgiving dinner costs more than it used to, we still have a lot to be thankful for from a historical perspective. Fossil fuels have been an integral part of medical advances, improvements in food and water quality, easier and cheaper transportation, and general technological advance.

When you think about it, it’s remarkable that humans found a way to take resources that were worthless or even noisome for most of human history and use them to create abundance. A farmer in the 1800s would have dreaded finding oil under his land – because it meant the land would not grow crops very well and there would be danger when digging of releasing sticky black oil into his fields. Today, oil is the equivalent of liquid gold and has made thousands of people fortunes because it has been used to improve the quality of life for billions of people around the world.

These benefits should not be ignored or understated – especially since we live in a time where significant forces work to eradicate our use of fossil fuels altogether. Since this holiday focuses on giving thanks, it might be worth reflecting what giving thanks entails. Gratitude begins with acknowledging what someone or something has done that we believe to be good. It means not taking such things for granted. And it certainly does not mean despising the source of our abundance. Unfortunately, many people in our society have been trained to do just that, to despise the sources of their material wellbeing, as somehow being the virtuous thing to do.

Climate alarmism has become rampant in western countries in recent years – creating “climate anxiety.” This alarmism has gotten so bad that many young people feel guilty about driving their car, traveling on an airplane, or even having children. Tens of thousands of people from around the world just wrapped up a two-week climate change conference in Azerbaijan. The theme of this conference and its predecessors was how to curtail greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible. Fossil fuel use has been cast as a blight on the environment and as an evil that needs to be eradicated. 

Afterall, aren’t fossil fuel use and consumption destroying the planet and causing suffering? Isn’t it irresponsible to enjoy consumption that comes at the cost of other people’s well-being? If these claims were true, it would be cause for concern. But much of the climate alarmism involves speculation, extrapolation, and just-so theorizing – like attributing every natural disaster or “superstorm” to climate change. The scientific connection between fossil fuel emissions and the litany of real and imagined harms is murkier than most people realize.

But the more important problem is not some theoretical future cost of using fossil fuels, but the large and tangible benefits we foreclose by restricting their use. Improvements in life expectancy everywhere, but especially in poorer countries, dwarf the purported costs people in those countries experience due to climate change. Furthermore, future benefits to people in those countries from economic and technological development enabled by cheap reliable energy will likely outweigh the future hypothetical costs of climate change – perhaps by orders of magnitude.

Consider, would you rather have temperatures be a degree or two cooler on average or would you rather have an air conditioner in your house? That’s the kind of tradeoff many people in developing countries face when it comes to policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the expense of economic growth. In developed countries, the tradeoff is whether you would prefer temperatures to be a couple degrees lower on average or your electricity bill to be hundreds of dollars rather than thousands of dollars. And having just spent time in Alaska, let’s remember that large parts of the world will become more habitable if the planet warms.

When it comes to natural disasters, would you rather live in a wealthy country with good infrastructure, abundant resources, and high building quality, even if the storms are more frequent or more extreme (at least according to some climate activists). I would. And immigration from less developed countries to more developed countries suggests many people feel similarly. 

The point is that the climate change problem is really an economic development problem. Better technology and more wealth are the best ways poor countries can ameliorate any real or imagined negative effects of climate change while simultaneously improving their standard of living. Wealth and technology require relatively free markets, free trade, and cheap energy. And while we shouldn’t oppose market-oriented entrepreneurship in producing more efficient sources of energy, at the moment cheap energy can only be sustained by utilizing fossil fuels aggressively.

So, as you give thanks this week (and hopefully throughout the year!), remember the benefits fossil fuels have generated. And remind those around you not to take our relative abundance for granted. While some regulation of emissions makes sense, we should resist the doomsday narrative of climate activists and their plans to reshape the global economy through government restrictions and wealth redistribution.

The future is much brighter than they think, especially if we continue to use fossil fuels to keep the lights on.

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Source: https://freedombunker.com/2024/11/28/thanksgiving-giving-thanks-for-fossil-fuels/