Fossil Fuels: The Best-Kept Secret in Our World Today

By Jason Isaac in Real Clear Energy

Apparently, you can litigate anything these days, and it’s gotten far more insidious than suing McDonald’s over hot coffee being, you know, hot. A new climate activist group called Our Children’s Trust is suing state and federal government agencies on behalf of individual children, claiming that fossil fuel regulators are negligently ruining their future.

That children should feel entitled to come of age under a specific set of favorable environmental and political circumstances — and to demand punishment for individuals they disagree with — isn’t just a testament to the egocentrism dominating the 21st Century. It also exposes our culture’s deeply warped understanding of climate science, which, surprisingly to many of us, actually shows global warming has no meaningful negative effects on our lives or our environment.

Originally published on Real Clear Energy

In fact, we have fossil fuels to thank for the twenty-first century for being the best time in human history to be alive. Unfortunately, it’s the best-kept secret in our world today.

If we really want to earn “our children’s trust,” we should teach them the truth instead of foisting crippling and needless anxiety on an entire generation.

Contrary to the attention-grabbing clips of forests burning and shock-inducing statistics about record-high temperatures, modern climate science suggests that warming is likely to remain mild and manageable while our resilience continues to improve. In fact, despite average global temperatures increasing about 1° Celsius and our population quadrupling in the last century, climate-related disasters claim 99% fewer lives. Our resistance to severe weather events (which actually have remained consistent or even declined in recent decades) is actually growing at a faster rate than non-weather-related natural disasters like volcanoes and earthquakes. The alarmists want you to believe a changing climate is jeopardizing human lives; however, the opposite is true.

Our environment is also better than ever. The U.S. has cut air pollution by nearly 80% in the last 50 years and ranks number one in the world for access to clean drinking water. In fact, those infamous greenhouse gases may actually help the planet. Mild increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide create a “global greening” effect that stimulates plant growth, which both helps natural ecosystems and makes agricultural production more efficient.

Meanwhile, this is the best time in human history to be alive, thanks largely to widespread access to affordable, reliable energy. Children today have a far greater chance of living a long, healthy, fruitful life than ever before. Around the world, in both developing and developed nations, poverty has plummeted and people are enjoying the tangible, life-improving benefits of lower infant and child mortality, better nutrition, improved education, lower infectious disease rates, more economic opportunity, gender equality, and longer lives. It’s no coincidence that global quality of life spiked and has continued to improve consistently since the Industrial Revolution — or that communities without access to electricity are still plagued by poverty, danger, and disease.

For a group claiming to seek “Our Children’s Trust,” this activist group seems to be deliberately abusing children’s trust.

With nearly any factoid we could wonder about immediately accessible on our smartphones, how could we have possibly gotten it so wrong about climate change? The jury is out on whether the cultural cancer of climate alarmism is the result of a deliberate plot for political power by global elites or simple negligence by a society that accepts the claims of those in authority (or simply those who pop up in our Tik Tok algorithm) at face value.

I suspect it’s a combination of both. “Indoctrination” has become a political buzzword, and while there’s no denying there are bad actors out there in schools and governments with agendas to push at all costs, the real problem with the public’s view of climate change is far subtler — which means it’s also harder to root out.

The problem is that no political issue, including this one, is black and white, but few feel they have the time to educate themselves on the nuances and confounding variables of hundred- or even thousand-page research reports. It’s easier to accept grossly oversimplified top-line takeaways as gospel and reduce them to even less accurate headlines and soundbites. I’ve seen the consequences firsthand working with state education leaders on science curriculum standards. Few are truly setting out to put misleading or incomplete information in our classrooms, but the misinformation is pervasive and there’s simply so much information to sift through to get to the real nuggets of truth.

But we need to do better — for our children’s sake.