Greg

“There are some quotes from a story in the Los Angeles Times called “Fear of Fusion: What if It Works?” Leading environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin: “It’s the worst thing that could happen to our planet.”13 Paul Ehrlich: Developing fusion for human beings would be “like giving a machine gun to an idiot child.”14 Amory Lovins was already on record as saying, “Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.”15”
― Alex J. Epstein, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels

“I live in the United States, in Southern California, which is naturally a near desert where I would have died of drought (or not lived here) in previous generations. But thanks to irrigation, air-conditioning, sturdy homes, and other technological advances (especially high-energy transport, which enables me to trade with people far away for goods I could not create under the local circumstances), this is one of the most wonderful places on Earth to live: I can enjoy warm, temperate, low-humidity weather without the downsides of the desert.”
― Alex J. Epstein, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels

“Technology enables us to live in practically any climate. Consider that in the United States, a large country, we are home to every type of climate imaginable: from polar Alaska to desert California to swampy Florida to scorching Texas. And yet in each state we have a life expectancy of over seventy-five!11”
― Alex J. Epstein, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels

“The environmental thought leaders’ opposition to fossil fuels is not a mistaken attempt at pursuing human life as their standard of value. They are too smart and knowledgeable to make such a mistake. Their opposition is a consistent attempt at pursuing their actual standard of value: a pristine environment, unaltered nature. Energy is our most powerful means of transforming our environment to meet our needs. If an unaltered, untransformed environment is our standard of value, then nothing could be worse than cheap, plentiful, reliable energy. I’m saying that if fossil fuels created no waste, including no CO2, if they were even cheaper, if they would last practically forever, if there were no resource-depletion concerns, the Green movement would still oppose them.”
― Alex J. Epstein, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels