When fuel and gas began to rise sharply last year, but explanations were found ad hoc and convenient only after the invasion of Ukraine;

When the average price of gasoline for the last three months – April, May, June – was $4.59/gallon, the highest in the history of the United States;

When President Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office, and these days begged Saudi Arabia to increase oil production;

When the same American president proclaims the use of electric cars with unaffordable prices and insufficient number of charging stations as a miraculous solution to confront the dizzying spiral of gas prices;

When the United States Supreme Court ruled in West Virginia v. EPA on June 30, 2022, ruling that, absent another express statute of Congress, the EPA lacked the authority to institute a planned fundamental restructuring of the electricity generation sector, in the economy;

When Europe has not yet managed to get rid of Russian gas, and revenues from the export of Russian oil are higher than before the war, due to rising prices;

When Germany, the champion of “green” energy, on which it has spent almost 202 billion euros, continues to close its nuclear power plants in the midst of the energy crisis, and on the other hand, decides to reopen some of the old coal mines, , the proposed initiative at EU level;

When the EU voted for “green” natural gas, despite grandiose plans to impose European Green Deal;

As global coal-fired electricity generation rose to a record 10,244 TWh in 2021, surpassing the previous peak of 10,098 TWh set before the pandemic in 2018 and a “modest” generation of 3,748 TWh since 1985, although the General UN Secretary Antonio Guterres warn that “New funding for fossil fuel exploration and production is illusory”;

When an entire country – Sri Lanka – is plunged into hunger, violence and chaos due to a ban on the use of petroleum-based synthetic fertilizers;

When many, many other similar events are also happening in Africa, Holland, Canada, France, etc., we must ask ourselves:

Is the energy debate really about energy?

Unfortunately, this is not a new issue.

The American scene of the 1970s was shaken by three major events: two oil crises (1973, 1979) and a nuclear power plant accident. Three Mile Island near the city of Harrisburg, the capital of the state of Pennsylvania.[1] A few days before this accident, Hollywood released a thriller Chinese syndromean end-of-the-world utopia about a nuclear reactor core that, if completely melted, can penetrate the entire planet by the end offor example, from Pennsylvania to the Antipodes in China!

In 1982, General Electric engineer Bertram Wolf asked this question in an article published in the Bulletin of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Analyzing the content of the energy debate following the three events mentioned above, particularly the options for nuclear, fossil fuel, and/or solar energy, Wolfe made a very interesting observation: the energy debate striveto hide the philosophical motives underlying the arguments of the main participants.

To characterize the needles as clearly as possible, Wolff resorted to the analogy of the morality of pork consumption:

Anyone who believes that the future well-being of society depends on new domestic sources of energy will see great advantages in the development of nuclear energy, offshore oil resources and new sources of coal, even with certain risks and inconveniences.

Those who believe that society is suffering because we already use too much energy will not accept even minimal risks or inconveniences to provide more energy.

A public debate about energy development between groups with such opposing views is like a debate about pork consumption between farmers, butchers, and orthodox Jews and Muslims. We can talk about humane slaughter methods, but the real question is whether we should be eating pork.

40 years later, the current energy debate centers around the same dilemma: Is it moral or not to eat pork? In addition, Woolf identified three major themes that were present then and are present today mutatis mutandis in discussions between groups of “farmers and processors” on the one hand and “Orthodox Jews and Muslims” on the other.

Topic 1. There is a general distrust of a society with abundant energy reserves

In a 2018 article, I quoted the environmentalist false prophet Paul R. Ehrlich, an anti-nuclear environmentalist, who said in 1975:

… Giving society a large amount of cheap energy at this point would be equivalent to giving an idiot child a machine gun.

And Emory Lovins, prominent NGO member Friends of the Earth and who led the campaign to dismantle California’s Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, said in 1977:

It would be almost a disaster for us to discover a source of cheap, clean and redundant energy because of what we do with it. We must seek energy sources that meet our needs but do not give us excess concentrated energy that we could use to harm the earth or ourselves.

Years later, what was said in the 60s and 70s is widely present in the rhetoric today, as cohorts of activists and elites gather to warn us that we need to move away from excess, cheap, and safe energy to save the planet’s climate. and people from inevitable extinction. And what to put in its place? The same Amory Lovins has the perfect solution: romantic austerity in the form of a elegant economy.

This perspective can also be found in what I have called the primordial myth of Eden or Paradise Lost, where the earth and its climate are seen as a manifestation of Mother Nature, who was originally pure and righteous and was meant to remain so. , untouched by people. More precisely, I wrote the climate thus becomes something fragile and in need of protection or “rescue,” goals that have fueled, among other things, the romanticism and environmentalism of the past two centuries. In this context, man-made climate change is considered a sacrilege, an attack on the pristine purity of nature, a threat to the last remnants of the paradise desert.

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