Davos Man And The Hari Kari Economics Of The Green Energy Crusade, Part 4

As we have seen, the rise of fossil fuel use after 1850 hasn’t caused the planetary climate system to become unglued. But what the huge increase in the use of cheap fossil fuels has done is stimulate a massive acceleration of global economic growth and human well-being.

The chart below could not be more dispositive. During the pre-industrial era between 1500 and 1870, global real GDP is estimated to have crawled along at just 0.41% per annum. By contrast, during the past 150 years of the fossil fuel age global GDP growth accelerated to 2.82% per annum. That’s nearly 7 times faster.

This higher growth, of course, in part resulted from the larger and far healthier global populations and labor forces made possible by rising living standards. Yet it wasn’t human muscle alone that caused the GDP level to go parabolic as per the chart below.

It was also due to the fantastic mobilization of intellectual capital and technology. And one of the most important vectors of the latter was the ingenuity of the fossil fuel industry in unlocking the massive trove of stored work that Mother Nature extracted, condensed and salted away from the incoming solar energy over the long warmer and wetter eons of the past 600 million years.

Needless to say, the curve of world energy consumption tightly matches the rise of global GDP shown above. Thus, in 1860 global energy consumption amounted to 30 exajoules per year and virtually 100% of that was represented by the blue layer labelled “biofuels”. The latter term, of course, is just a polite name for wood and the decimation of the forests which it entailed.