Years ago, I wrote a post about how cheap air travel to Europe was ruining America. My point was that the Americans visiting Europe were confusing what they experienced as a tourist with the reality of life in Europe. These progressive American fans of two-hour lunches and 6 months of maternal and paternal leave didn’t have a clue about how average Europeans lived. Indeed, a couple of years later, the Foundation For Economic Education came out with a study that showed the poorest 20% of Americans were better off than the average European. Basically, the average European suffers from high taxes, high prices, tiny homes and cars, and, increasingly, less freedom. But tourists sipping tea in London or shopping in Paris rarely, if ever, see this, or understand it if they do.

Nonetheless, with little understanding of economics or history, they decide that America must become Europe. Socialism, Obamacare, and gay marriage are just some of those European imports that Americans have to deal with today.

We are seeing something similar play out on a grander, global scale—or at least in the West, where prosperity has dulled the brains of much of the population.

Naturally, I’m talking about the green energy hoax. Here in the West, we have people so spoiled by prosperity that they have the luxury of pining for a time when we weren’t poisoning our earth with fossil fuels or risking apocalypse with nuclear power.

On both sides of the Atlantic, you have a perfect mix of brain-dead green energy cultists and fascist elites who seek to harness the power of that cult to control everyone. That’s a toxic combination because energy controls pretty much everything.

Image by Vince Coyner.

The reality is that inexpensive, reliable energy is the single biggest driver of prosperity in all human history. And it’s not even close. Inexpensive, reliable energy drives virtually everything that we Westerners enjoy: Our food, iPhones, transportation, heating and cooling of homes, televisions, hospitals, schools, movies, plumbing, video games, Starbucks, and the Zambonis at hockey games! Everything.

It’s not that energy didn’t exist previously. It did. But the difference is that it was inefficient, hard to get, and expensive. The first significant source of fuel for humans was wood. That lasted for tens of thousands of years. Although the first recorded use of coal was in China between the 4th and 3rd millennia BC, in Europe, for two thousand years, coal remained an insignificant source of energy. Change came in the 17th century because England had felled most of the easily accessible trees and was in need of energy. With the advent of large-scale mining, coal rapidly became the most significant source of energy in Europe.

This would be the status quo for the next 300 years until the first successful oil well, drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859. Over the following decades, tens of thousands of wells would be drilled and, by 1900, the US alone would be producing 20 million barrels of oil a year. That oil was first used to produce kerosene for heating and lighting homes, then gasoline for automobiles and, eventually, powering electricity plants as well, although coal was the dominant fuel for powering electricity production well into the late 20th century.

In the latter half of the 20th century, nuclear power emerged as a viable vehicle for producing electricity and was joined by fracking-driven natural gas early in the early 21st century.

Of course, renewables had been around for centuries, first with windmills and watermills, then hydroelectricity and, eventually, solar. Renewables always remained a small sliver of the power generation, however, only becoming slightly material in recent years due to heavy regulation and subsidies.

But now, for the first time in human history, we have a segment of the population, largely Western liberals, who want to restrict the use of inexpensive and reliable energy.

For the last 400 years, mankind has been marching forward in the direction of increasing the amount of energy we consume. As a result, lifespans have increased dramatically, prosperity has flourished, technology and sciences have advanced dramatically, and lives have become exponentially more varied.

Believe it or not, all of that is held together by a tenuous electricity grid. Not sure? In 2019 the Air Force said the following about an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) attack:

A successful EMP attack on the U.S. could lead to a nationwide blackout of the electric power grid and a shutdown of critical infrastructure reliant on the grid, including, but not limited to, communications, transportation, food and water supply, and sanitation. Such a shutdown could last as long as a year, and without such critical infrastructure, a large fraction of the America could die from starvation, disease, or the effects of general societal collapse.

That gives some indication of how dependent Americans are on energy. But it’s probably not going to be an EMP that cripples America and the West. It’s going to be the fiction of green energy.

In 2011, Angela Merkel announced that Germany would shut down all 17 of its nuclear reactors. Last year, the last three were shuttered. In 1990 Germany generated 25% of its electricity from nuclear; now it’s finally zero. And it shows.

While harassing citizens to conserve energy, Germany has gone from a net exporter of energy to a net importer. In addition, in 2010, German GDP growth was ahead of every single nation in the EU and double the average. By 2022, it was half the EU average and, over the next six years, it’s predicted to be dead last in the EU and behind only Belarus and war torn Russia and Ukraine on the continent. This is all in pursuit of the goal of cutting CO2 emissions 65% below the 1990 level by 2030.

On this side of the pond, we have California banning the sale of gasoline-powered cars by 2035 and a wave of blue states lining up behind them. This at the same time the state is asking existing electric car owners not to charge their cars while leaning on fossil fuels to stave off the return of rolling blackouts.

The reality is that the green energy revolution is a fiction. Green energy is incapable of providing the energy requirements developed nations require and the green energy movement is a cult. In fealty to that cult, Western nations are wasting hundreds of billions of dollars every year on “green energy” programs—most of which fail. Between 2020 and June of 2023, Western nations spent $1.34 trillion on green energy “investments“ while private companies spent tens of billions more annually.

Basically, for no discernable benefit, and arguably with many negative consequences, Western nations are setting fire to 2% of their GDP annually and expect to burn even more going forward. That would essentially mean that GDP would have to grow at 2% annually just to tread water, an unlikely prospect in the face of tightening energy supplies and skyrocketing costs.

And this is all because people with no understanding of science, economics, or history operate under the illusion that civilization is a virus on the pristine earth. Western civilization as we know it will not survive the economic suicide of the green revolution.

Perhaps that’s why Western elites are inviting into their countries tens of millions of third-world “migrants” who aren’t familiar with inexpensive and reliable energy. At some point, those who do remember them will become the minority, and the elites can finally drop the fiction of concern.

Follow Vince on Twitter at ImperfectUSA, or you can visit his new website Gratitude for America.