CFP: Environmentalists critical of electrified America must have mixed emotions this time of the year. It may be the season of good cheer and goodwill toward all, but it is also the time of the most conspicuous energy consumption. America the Beautiful is at her best when billions of strung lights turn darkness into magnificent glory, border to border, sea to shining sea.
Holiday lighting is a wondrous social offering—a positive externality in the jargon of economics—given by many to all.
While energy doomsayers such as Paul Ehrlich have railed against “garish commercial Christmas displays,” today’s ilk are shy to engage the issue. Yet holiday lighting is a glaring exception to their goal of reducing discretionary energy usage to help save the world from carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and other byproducts of modernity. If holiday energy guzzling is forgiven, why not excuse outdoor heating and cooling, one-switch centralized lighting, and instant-on appliances, not to mention hot tubs and SUVs?
Prancing around to turn on individual lights or waiting for an appliance to warm up wastes the scarcest, truly depleting resource: a person’s time. Surely extra energy use for comfort and convenience has priority over purely celebratory uses of energy.
So, what about the holiday humbug that celebratory electricity depletes energy minerals, fouls the air, and destabilizes the climate? Good tidings abound!
Resourceship: More from More
“Stronger oil and natural gas prices combined with continuing development of shales and low permeability formations,” the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently reported, “drove producers of crude oil and natural gas in the United States to report new all-time record levels of proved reserves for both fuels in 2017.” This result has made the US the world leader in the production of oil and of natural gas.
In terms of proved reserves (found and producible under existing technology and economic incentives), oil supply has doubled in the last decade and now stands above the record set nearly a half-century ago (1970). For natural gas, a one-third increase in found-and-ready supply was registered in the last year alone, resulting in an all-time U.S. record.
Globally, the news is positive despite statism wracking the petroleum industry in reserve-giant Venezuela. Between 1980 and 2017, despite growing production and consumption, world proved reserves of oil and of natural gas have grown by 148 percent and 170 percent, respectively, according to BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy.
Coal is even more abundant than oil and natural gas abroad and at home. World proved reserves increased one-and-a-half-fold between 1980 and 2016. U.S. coal supplies compose 21 percent of the world total, second only to China. Far from dead, the U.S. coal industry is enjoying an export boom to Asia, which has record consumption with much more to come.
Domestic coal reserves are greater on a Btu basis than oil and natural gas combined. In terms of domestic usage, our coal represents 350 years of present consumption. Far from a dying resource, world coal production increased 3.2 percent last year.
Political events can drive down supply and increase prices, but the raw mineral resource base is prolific—and expanding in economic terms thanks to inexhaustible human ingenuity, as well as increasing exploratory capital provided by a growing economy.
Ever greater mineral energy wealth will come with any moves toward worldwide energy privatization, beginning with subsoil rights to minerals, as advocated by the late Guillermo Yeatts. The energy upside from freedom is tremendous.
Improved Air Quality
Growing energy consumption has been accompanied by improving air quality. All told, emissions of the six principal air pollutants have dropped by 73 percent at a time when the economy and fossil-fuel usage have grown substantially. more here
In the land of plenty if you have it flaunt it!
Because we discovered it, we invented it, we use it cleaner than anyone else on the planet and it makes us happy! To all of yous environmentalist whackos out there, enjoy being dull and dim while we light up our lives… and say Merry Christmas everyone!
I got C7 & C9 big ole 1950’s type
lights in my yard and all the way up
my 80′ radio tower.Arcs-n-sparks when you
plug it all in like Christmas vacation movie…
If the cultists can spend $500 million for a giant carbon footprint trip to Europe to discuss how we dirt people are going to live, then I can spend a few extra cents to run a batch of energy efficient LED lit decorations on my property.
If the liberal AGW cultist wants to still complain, I’ll use the same line of BS they use when you ask them, for example, why they are driving a gas-guzzling SUV – “Hey I’m only one person, my individual energy habits are not going to change anything.”
Maybe they’d be OK with it if I used Christmas lights to spell out “Stop Global Warming Now” in letters big enough to be seen from the International Space Station?
The environmentalists can just stfu. I was a lectorr at Mass last night. It’s in the Bible!! Isaiah 9: 2.
The people walking in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of deep darkness
a light has dawned.
Merry Christmas everyone!
Most modern Christmas lighting is LED, so the enviro-wackos can suck a rotten raw egg.
LEDs are more energy-efficient
So I use a LOT more of them. 😀
Merry Christmas