Without Abundant Energy, Our Lives Would Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short

There is an emerging strain of center-left thinking that talks about “abundance,” and I have to admit they are on the right track when it comes to the future of liberalism. 

They are also well outside the mainstream of left-wing thought, where “abundance” is considered a dirty word. In fact, “Degrowth” is a much larger movement, alongside net zero, deindustrialization, the shutting down of energy production, the electrification of everything, and arguments for lowering consumption. 

The only “abundance” the typical liberal wants is an abundance of taxes on energy production. 

Sure, liberals will hand-wave about “green energy,” but the fact is that they know that theoretical “installed capacity” for wind and solar don’t equal actual production, often by orders of magnitude. What matters is how much energy is produced reliably, not what the theoretical maximum a project could produce under ideal circumstances. 

In other words, Western countries blow up power plants to replace them with promised energy production that is never realized, and that is the plan. It goes along with 15-minute cities, socialized transportation, reduced consumption, and even lower food production as farms are closed down for environmental reasons. 

Everything that humans do and everything that makes them happy requires energy.
No matter if it’s food production, traveling, entertainment, industry… everything.

“reshaping energy demand” is just an euphemism for artificial poverty and human suffering. pic.twitter.com/EH7YSwWY81

— Jannik 🐿️ (@kineyDE) April 27, 2026

The preferred path for the left is deindustrialization and reduced power consumption, because that aligns with their environmental ideology. It is an ideology that is fundamentally anti-humanistic, whatever they claim, and that ignores the fact that the primary reason that human lifespan, healthspan, and quality of life have skyrocketed over the past two and a half centuries. 

I have doubts about your ability to judge the quality of research. pic.twitter.com/fy2OXeZemw

— @camjenglish (@camjenglish) April 27, 2026

Harnessing fossil fuels is what made the modern world possible. And by that, I don’t just mean the ability to drive a car, refrigerate our food, live in climate-controlled environments, and all the conveniences of modern life. A simple check on the correlation between human lifespan and energy consumption shows that they are inextricably linked. 

It’s pretty clear that one of the biggest contributors to the extension of human lifespan has been the discovery and use of oil, without which the modern world would have been impossible. 

In the decades preceding Ehrlich’s famous 1980 bet with Julian Simon, the world had become much better at handling famine.

In fact, by the time Ehrlich made his bet, it had been mostly eliminated. pic.twitter.com/H0o3QED5X4

— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) March 16, 2026

And it’s not just lifespan; it’s the simultaneous explosion in the number of human beings who can successfully live on earth, and do so without facing famines. Famines outside of war zones are essentially extinct, and one of the biggest reasons is fertilizers based on fossil fuels. 

In the Malthusian era, population was cyclical: it would go up until reaching the carrying capacity of the land (“Point of Crisis” in this diagram), and then decline, generally with a slight overall slope around which this happened. pic.twitter.com/Zaigd1HVyw

— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) November 18, 2025

More than any other factor, the sudden exploitation of fossil fuels created the conditions that allowed the Malthusian trap to be escaped. For millennia, the fastest a human being could travel was at the speed of a running horse; the most common form of energy was harnessing the muscle power of animals. It would take months for a human being to cross North America or the Atlantic Ocean. Farmers would use oxen to plow their fields. 

The difference? It’s not just “technology.” It’s fossil fuels and energy abundance. We went from whale oil dimly lighting our homes to the electric light bulb in less than a century. Powered flight went from impossible to supersonic travel to landing on the moon due primarily to the availability of cheap, abundant energy. 

Western environmentalists and policymakers have lived so long in an energy-abundant world that they have forgotten how cheap energy powers prosperity. China, which until recently was anything but energy-abundant, knows the opposite is true, which is why it is building two coal power plants a week, 30 nuclear power plants, and amassing all the oil reserves it can.

The EU’s power production is declining, which is why its economies have stalled. 

When people talk about the more efficient use of energy, they mean imposing restrictions on energy use. Market economies will naturally maximize the use of resources over time without being forced to; every business in the world wants to reduce the cost of inputs and maximize output, so increased efficiency happens naturally, as the market balances the performance desired with the inputs necessary to achieve it. 

The centrally planned economy will always be less efficient and achieve worse results. And a centrally planned economy that aims at reducing consumption will kill economic growth, and eventually kill people. 

Counterpoint: https://t.co/dN5ygvyytX pic.twitter.com/Ck2Wo99Oay

— Chris Freiman (@cafreiman) April 28, 2026

With energy, more is always better. That energy doesn’t HAVE to come from fossil fuels, but for the moment, they are by far the most efficient fuels for achieving energy abundance. Nuclear energy has obvious advantages in some cases, but environmentalists essentially killed the nuclear industry in the West because they oppose energy abundance. 

Austerity is seen as morally superior, just as population reduction has been their priority rather than improving the quality of life for impoverished people. 

United Nations “Messenger of Peace” Jane Goodall tells the WEF that reducing the human population down to 500 million people—a massive 93% reduction from today’s numbers—would make the world a much better place. pic.twitter.com/Ux1YloydbG

— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) June 18, 2025

The left is hostile to human life at a fundamental level. It’s not that they want to die or be poor. They want everybody else to die and be poor. 

They don’t say that, and may not even consciously think it, but every “solution” to the world’s problems involves reducing the population through abortion, MAiD, rationing, central planning, and reducing the “human impact” on the world. 

It’s now common for younger folks to avoid reproducing to save Gaia. I know many people who have made that choice, and the polls show that this is widely held. 

This attitude is fundamentally anti-human. We should be dreaming of colonizing new worlds, not shrinking ours. 

Liberals think The Science™ says there should be fewer human beings consuming less of everything, but that’s silly. What scientists should focus on is not lecturing us about needing to live worse lives, but on solving problems as they emerge, so we can live better lives without creating unintended consequences. 

The greatest benefactors of mankind have been optimists who make producing more and better possible; those who don’t should quit griping and get out of the way. 

Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump’s leadership and bold policies, America’s economy is back on track.

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