Shellenberger opines that the root cause of climate change, say many activist leaders, is economic growth. “How dare you!” Greta Thunberg told the United Nations last September “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth!” And yet it was economic growth that lifted Thunberg’s ancestors out of agrarian poverty, raised life expectancy from 40 to 70 years, and liberated women and girls from feudal patriarchy. Without Sweden’s economic growth, and the fossil fuels upon which it depended, the person who is Greta Thunberg would not exist.
Some climate activists acknowledge the need for poor nations to burn more fossil fuels if they are to achieve decent standards of living. Thunberg herself suggested as much in her January 2019 TED talk. But in the name of fighting climate change, powerful first-world organizations including Sierra Club and Greenpeace, whose annual revenues nearly total $500 million, have forced World Bank and other banks to divert lending from cheap and reliable energy sources like hydroelectric dams and natural gas power plants to expensive and unreliable ones like solar panels and industrial wind turbines, [and back-up batteries]. And, last year, Thunberg and other student climate activists even sued Brazil, where per capita incomes are just 25% that of Sweden, for supposedly not doing enough to restrict greenhouse gas emissions.
As for climate change, it results fundamentally from people wanting to improve the quality of life for themselves and their loved ones, not from “greed.” “Three billion people in the world today use less electricity than what’s used by my kitchen refrigerator,” notes journalist and Forbes columnist Robert Bryce in “Juice,” a humane and moving new documentary on iTunes that I appear in briefly. “Darkness kills human potential while electricity nourishes it.”
Jumping to near the end of Shellenberger's Editorial, he says that one of the most touching scenes in “Juice” is of Bryce in parts of Puerto Rico. Parts of the island were still without electricity seven months after the island was hit by a hurricane. “They were American citizens on American soil and they were powerless,” said Bryce. “So they did what they had to do: they ran a small gas generator to run the refrigerator and power the lights at night. But the noise from their Chinese-made generator was awful and so was the air pollution.”
Electricity in Sweden, by contrast, is produced with vanishingly little pollution. Eighty percent of Swedish electricity comes from large hydroelectric dams and nuclear power plants, which Thunberg opposes. Though accused of hypocrisy, Thunberg has not backed away from her blanket condemnations of nuclear power plants, economic growth, and industrialization by poor nations. “We have simply moved our factories to different parts of the world, and a significant portion of our emissions overseas,” she lamented recently. While Thunberg traveled extensively across the United States, visiting national parks with her father, she has yet to do what Bryce and Culver did in “Juice,” which was to visit poor rural communities in developing nations to better understand what life is like without reliable electricity.
I hope she does so, and soon. If Thunberg does, she will discover that for the vast majority of women and girls, economic growth is indeed a fairy tale but one to which they aspire, not fear. [Question: Since when are we influenced by the energy policy views of a 17-year old teenager?]
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