Quote:
Originally Posted by Table 5
Helping to bring millions of people around the world up to our standard of living is something to celebrate though. People focus on the environmental externalities, but forget how much having reliable access to abundant and affordable energy has played in improving people's standard of living in drastic ways.
We take energy for granted because we were lucky enough to be born into a society already built on its foundations, but there are plenty of countries who are still looking to climb the ladder. I mean we are ashamed that our energy isn't clean enough...while something like 2 Billion people in the world still cook and heat their homes on open fires with wood scraps and animal dung! It may not register high in the corporate ESG annual report, but going from burning frickin' dung, to having a steady stream of even our dirtiest oil and gas (or even coal) would improve the lives of these people tremendously.
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Sure, which is why I'm not against helping them get up to speed, but many of these countries are bypassing a lot of O&G and going straight to green tech. But I'd probably not criticize an third world country for doing what they need to. Which is kinda why we should have been doing more, so they stood a chance and didn't need to sacrifice cheap energy. We can't really use that excuse, unless we only care about profits and cheap stuff. Like I said, this is our current reality, so we may as well play it. But it's going to have some pretty large negative outcomes which we also have to expect.