Michael Novak over at National Review makes some excellent observations about energy usage:

The left’s figures depend on what is meant by “energy.” Before the founding and development of the United States, “energy” meant the human back, beasts of burden, windmills, waterwheels, burning wood, coke, and coal, and the like. The United States is certainly not using 25% of the energy generated by those means today. I don’t think so, although it might be. The darn country is just so efficient.

But if we mean by “energy” only the modern sources of energy – electricity, the Franklin stove, the steam engine, the piston engine propelled by gasoline (and now by electric and/or hydrogen batteries), the processing of crude oil into gasoline, nuclear energy, the jet engine, the development of ethanol and other fuels derived from plants, and other devices – all of these except one were invented by the people of the United States, as their gift to the world. (The exception was the steam engine, invented by our cousins in Britain, and further developed here as well as there.)

In other words, the United States has invented nearly 100% of what the modern world means by “energy.” And it has helped the rest of the world to use 75%.

I’m sure the development of many of those technologies was supported by venture capitalists supplying the resources needed to develop the technology. Those capitalist were smart enough to see those technologies as being useful to people(consumers). These are the same capitalist the left wishes to tax because they believe their wealth resources are more efficiently applied to the state then to technologies that make energy cheap for even the poorest of the poor.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 24th, 2008 at 1:44 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.