Climate Realism and a Positive Vision for American Energy

Everything that is grown, made, used, or moved needs energy. We want our energy to be affordable, available, secure, and sustainable. Twentieth century America is largely a story of achieving the first three qualities, and the last fifty years has been an attempt to achieve the fourth. To that end, climate idealists have presented data on the unsustainability of oil, gas, coal, and nuclear to justify climate and energy policies that categorically reject these disfavored forms of energy while subsidizing favored forms: wind, solar, and batteries. But climate idealists have failed to appreciate the full benefits of fossil fuels: how fossil fuels have been critical to powering industry, producing modern materials, and securing the United States' geopolitical position. At the same time, they exaggerate the unsustainability of fossil fuels, ignoring the strides we have already made in pollution reduction and conflating the reality of climate change with evidence of an imminent apocalypse. Such an approach is myopic and thus fails to see the costs of the energy transition, not just to the affordability of energy, but to its availability, security, and even sustainability.