The human population of the planet earth is now approaching 8 billion. This is a remarkable fact because for many centuries the world’s population barely grew at all. Scholars estimate that at the time of Christ, the planet supported about 230 million people. Well over a millennium later, when William the Conqueror prevailed at the Battle of Hastings (1066 AD), the world’s population approached 400 million. During the fourteenth century, the population significantly declined as the Black Death swept across Europe. Between 1347 and 1352 AD, bubonic plague killed approximately 25 million Europeans, roughly one-third of the continent. By the time Christopher Columbus sailed for the New World in 1492, the number of the earth’s inhabitants finally reached 500 million.
Thanks to the blessings of the Industrial Revolution (which began in England in 1760) the human population began to rise more rapidly, breaking the 1 billion mark in about 1805. This rise in population primarily occurred in Europe and the United States, where the wonders of machine labor and fossil fuels had worked their magic. However, the real upward surge in human population began around 1950, when industrialization spread to countries like China and India. Between 1950 and 2000, the world’s population expanded from 2.5 billion to 6 billion.
In last week’s blog, we saw how the energy provided by fossil fuels has made a decisive contribution to human well-being. Thanks to the blessing of fossil fuels, human beings are currently living far longer and far better lives than ever before. In fact, in developed nations where people enjoy abundance and wealth, this has dramatically changed patterns of human reproduction. In centuries past, women needed to have as many children as they could. Infant mortality rates were very high, and many babies did not survive into adulthood. Families desperately needed the labor that children could provide. As parents grew old and frail, their kids were the only security that they could rely upon. By contrast, in the prosperous modern world, women aren’t even having enough children to sustain the population. For instance, in Japan, the population is now slightly declining by a rate of 0.2% per year. Similar dynamics are noted throughout Europe; even China’s population is expected to begin diminishing within the next few years.
Overall, the world’s population will almost certainly continue to rise, although growth is substantially decelerating. It’s been predicted that by 2100, roughly 11 billion people will inhabit the earth. Population analysts expect that at the end of this century, population growth will cease and the world’s population will begin to slowly decline.
Sadly, the benefits of affordable power have not come to everyone. According to author Alex Epstein, roughly 3 billion human beings utilize only miniscule amounts of electricity, including 760 million people who lack electricity entirely. Those without electricity continue to suffer the same deprivations endured by our ancestors for thousands of years. Lacking electricity for cooking, they must spend hours each day collecting firewood or dung to stoke fires inside their meager shelters. Tragically, the same fire that they depend upon for cooking and heating fills their homes with smoke. This indoor air pollution is arguably the world’s foremost environment issue. The impoverished people inhaling smoke from indoor fires are at much higher risk of disease and death. One study published in the medical journal The Lancet estimated that in 2019, 2.31 million people died from indoor air pollution – accounting for 4.1% of all worldwide deaths. The World Health Organization is more pessimistic, attributing 3.8 million deaths to indoor air pollution.
Those who lack electricity are much worse off in many other ways. Dependent upon manual labor, their agricultural yields are far below those in the mechanized world. They lack modern irrigation systems to water their crops in times of drought. Without refrigeration, they struggle to preserve their food. They work by the sweat of their brow, condemned to a life of poverty and misery.
There is however much good news to celebrate, because the number of powerless people has fallen dramatically. As the chart above shows, in 1998, about 1.63 billion people lacked electricity, whereas 4.33 billion had at least some access. By 2019 those without electricity had fallen to 760 million, whereas an astounding 6.91 billion persons enjoyed at least some electrical power.
How has such amazing progress been achieved? Readers of this blog will no doubt be unsurprised to learn that the magnificent, life-giving benefits of electricity have been extended to billions of human beings thanks to the burning of fossil fuels! The chart below shows the growth of energy consumption worldwide. As is readily apparent, people around the world are using more energy with each passing year, and that energy is overwhelmingly coming from oil, natural gas, and coal. Hydro and nuclear power each make a modest contribution. Meanwhile, the darlings of the political left, solar and wind, hardly make any contribution at all, despite billions of dollars of government subsidies and mandates.
So where does this leave us? The affordable, plentiful energy provided largely by fossil fuels has tremendously improved human welfare. Those of us who live in the United States rightfully expect to have the abundant energy we need in order to thrive. Yet it’s also crucial that we do everything possible to provide the blessings of plentiful energy to every human being. This means that we have a noble challenge before us. There are only about 1.5 billion people worldwide who have access to “significant” amounts of electricity – meaning they use at least 1/3 the amount of electricity as the average American. Most of these live in the US, Europe or Japan. Yet there are those 760 million persons without any electricity and many billions more who require far more energy in order to flourish and reach their full potential. Where is all this power going to come from?
Unfortunately, many Americans have been badly misled when it comes to energy. They’ve been told that “renewable” energy sources like solar and wind power are going to come to the rescue. This is utterly false. Even in the wealthy US, where we’ve wasted billions of dollars attempting to boost renewables, solar (1.7%) and wind (3.9%) only provide 5.6% of our total energy! The stern reality is that over 82% of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels. In the US, this figure is nearly identical (81%) despite decades of global warming hysteria among the political left and their media allies.
Americans are often subjected to foolish claims that fossil fuels can be easily replaced with windmills and solar panels. This is nonsense. The brutal fact is that if wind and solar were not propped up by lavish government support, their contribution to our energy mix would be essentially zero. We shall more fully explore the shortcomings of renewables in a future blog. But for now, it’s enough to state that wind and solar power are expensive and unreliable. Even with massive government largesse, they’ve been unable to provide more than a small fraction to our current energy requirements. There is absolutely no possibility that they will magically meet the world’s growing energy needs in the future.
In the long term, nuclear power truly does have amazing potential to meet our energy needs. Nuclear power plants can provide astonishing amounts of cheap energy, with no carbon emissions! Moreover, nuclear plants produce only tiny amounts of spent fuel, which can be either reused or easily stored. Yet sadly, nuclear power faces serious opposition, almost exclusively from the political left. While it is true that there are important safety considerations related to nuclear power, these concerns are hugely exaggerated. In fact, many people are surprised to learn that nuclear energy is – by far -the safest form of energy over developed by humanity. One of the tragic ironies of our modern world is that those who pronounce our imminent doom due to rising CO2 levels are the same people doing all they can to oppose carbon-free nuclear power.
The truth is that for the foreseeable future, we need to do everything we can to encourage the use of fossil fuels in order to provide people with the energy they desperately need. No doubt the unhinged political left will vehemently disagree. They often claim that rising CO2 levels will make our world an inhospitable wasteland. Now it is quite true that atmospheric CO2 levels have modestly increased since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and that this rise has made some contribution to the gentle warming (1 Degree C) that the world has enjoyed over the past 170 years. However, as I’ve written before, the effects of more abundant carbon have been – on balance – beneficial to both humanity and the overall environment. There are very sound reasons to believe that this will be the case well into the future.
This issue is of no small consequence. The lives and welfare of billions of human beings directly depend on the energy that can only be derived from fossil fuels. We therefore have a stark choice before us: we can show God’s love to our fellow man by aggressively advocating for power on their behalf, or we can pursue policies which will drastically reduce or eliminate fossil fuel use, thereby keeping billions of people trapped in poverty, hunger, misery and death. So, if you despise humanity, by all means, support net zero.
