Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Think about the climate you live in. Think about how much the temperature changes every day and how
uncomfortable or endangered you would be without climate control. Think of what even a garden-variety
thunderstorm could have done to a farm or a home two hundred years ago—and then remind yourself that
1.3 billion people have no electricity today.
There is a group of people who are working every day to make sure that the machines that can make us
safe from our naturally dangerous climate and enable us to thrive in it have all the energy they need. These
people work in coal mines, on oil rigs, in laboratories, in boardrooms, all devoted to figuring out how to
produce plentiful, reliable energy at prices you can afford—because that is what their well-being depends
on and, in my experience, because they believe that it is the right thing to do. Those are the people in the
fossil fuel industry, who are dehumanized in the media on a daily basis, who are tarred as Big Oil or, in
the case of workers, such as coal miners, are portrayed as dupes who don't know what they're doing, who
aren't wise enough to know they're making our climate unlivable through the work that supports them-
selves and their families.
Actually it is the top environmentalist intellectuals who lack climate wisdom. Because they are unwill-
ing to think in an unbiased way about the benefits and risks of fossil fuels according to a human standard
of value, they are blinded to the fact that the fossil fuel industry is the reason they're alive and not “help-
less at the mercy of that wind in the middle of some such plain.”
I wrote earlier that we owe the fossil fuel industry an apology for the way we've treated it on climate
and that we owe them a long-overdue thank you. I meant it.
