For over 150 years oil and natural gas have bestowed upon hundreds of millions of humans the blessings of mobility, warmth, economic growth, comfort, and freedom, just to name a few.

During all that time we have increased our use of fossil fuels and can continue to do so for a long time to come. Yet climate alarmists, rather than recognizing oil and gas as blessings, see them as curses.

After having relied on oil and gas for a century and a half our proven reserves are larger than ever. They are, in fact, expected to continue expanding. How is that possible?

What makes it possible is the fact that fossil fuels are abundant. After all this time of reaping the benefits of oil and gas, new deposits continue to be found. New reserves have recently been discovered in Guyana, Brazil, and Columbia. They will not be the last. The supply of fossil fuels continues to outpace the demand.

In addition, new technologies and innovations such as fracking and horizontal drilling further expand recoverable oil and gas.  As time goes on, we use more and more oil and gas, but not nearly as fast as we discover new reserves and methods for accessing and recovering those reserves already known.

An important benefit of abundance is scalability -- defined as “a businesses or other entity’s capacity to grow to meet increased demand.” It would be hard to list all the positive implications of that feature.

Abundant resources are keys to “living life abundantly.” The twisted logic of Democrats and the rest of the Left makes abundance something to fight against and feel guilty about rather than celebrate. They resist abundance because it makes them less important and makes their freedom-robbing mandates and regulations unnecessary.

Their cherished electric vehicles and solar panels require raw materials that are not abundant and not scalable -- lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, and copper, among others. If the demand for these critical minerals increases substantially, so would their prices. They would quickly become unaffordable.

Ethanol takes fertile farmland away from food and fodder production. Using farmland to produce energy is an asinine idea and a gross misallocation of resources. It will do absolutely nothing to stop climate change, and would never happen except for mandates and trillions of dollars of subsidies. That’s true as well for solar farms and windmills. Windmills spoil our vistas and kill an estimated million birds annually, many of them raptors. Radical environmentalists want us to believe we must destroy the environment in order to save it.

The proof of the abundance of fossil fuels is how little their prices have increased over the century and a half of widespread and increasing usage. Inflation-adjusted, their prices have been virtually flat for that entire time.

Even more important and significant than the abundance of any single resource is what the economist Julian Simon called “the Ultimate Resource:” human creativity.

Human creativity is not just abundant, it grows and multiplies itself exponentially. It is almost magical in the countless ways it can increase the abundance and efficiency of virtually every other resource beneficial to humans. The clearest recent example is “artificial intelligence.” As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed long ago, “Invention breeds invention.”

On Thanksgiving consider adding abundance to your list of things to give thanks for.

Ron Ross Ph.D. is a former economics professor and author of The Unbeatable Market (soon to be available on Audible). He is a member of the C O2 Coalition and can be reached at rossecon@aol.com.

Image: NASA