Some people who are not well versed in human history believe that fossil fuels are inherently evil, costly and harmful to human health. They ignore the side of the accounting ledger that documents the incredibly beneficial effects concentrated fuels have provided to overall human freedom, happiness, self actualization and reduction of dependence on nature.

Those benefits, however, have not been universally or equitably shared.

Kathleen Hartnett-White, one of the co-authors of Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy, is fully aware of the beneficial effects of hydrocarbon extraction and use as a fuel to empower major portions of the human population. She joined me on July 6th for a spirited discussion about the importance of abundant energy that can be converted to reliable, focused power.

We talked about the ways that concentrated energy sources have given people some of the comforts, nutritional options, free time and freedom of movement that used to be only available to the very thin slice of the population that owned or controlled both beasts of burden and large numbers of other human beings.

Hartnett-White described the way that the shale revolution in both natural gas and oil has changed the world’s available energy balance and altered people’s assumptions about the future availability of conventional fuel supplies. We disagreed a little in our view of the sustainability of that revolution and its need for substantially higher prices to keep it viable.

We talked about the way that some people believe that the risks from climate change are so dramatic that they require human society to depower and devolve back into a less free, less mobile, less comfortable and less prosperous mode of living.

As a project of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the Fueling Freedom Project is unabashedly aimed at changing the public conversation about energy from one that seeks to keep fossil fuels away from people into one that seeks to continue intelligent use of concentrated fuel resources as a way to improve the human condition.

Hartnett-White noted that the way most climate change activists treat nuclear energy provides evidence that their primary motivation is to depower the people rather than to reduce CO2 production. As she noted, if reducing risks from an atmospheric build up of CO2 was their primary concern, they would rethink their stubborn opposition to nuclear energy. Instead, they promote unreliable and uncontrollable sources of power like the wind and the sun even while fully recognizing that those sources are incapable of providing the same quantity and quality of power that people purchase today.

It’s nearly impossible to find an advocate of a 100% renewable energy supply system that does not begin the conversation by stating that their goals cannot be reached without a drastic reduction in power consumption. Mark Jacobson’s oft touted “solutions project” prescriptions rest on the assumption that we already use about 40% more energy than we should use in 2050. Here’s links to two example states in the US, Virginia (42%) and Florida (43%). Even more egregiously, the Solutions Project expects the same kinds of reduction in energy consumption in countries like India (43%) where enormous swaths of the population don’t use any commercial quantities of fuel or power.

Jacobson’s team at the