Human Flourishing

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Let's talk about human flourishing and let's have the news guide our conversation today. And this is going to lead us to talking about oil markets, gas markets, fossil fuel extraction, engineering, and the needs and politics of energy. So starting with a claim that you're going to hear from a lot of people in the oil and gas space, including our soon to be secretary of energy, Chris Wright. And that line is about that energy betters human lives.

The company Mr. Wright currently leads is called Liberty Energy, and that company even published an investor-focused report called "Bettering human lives". You might even hear others say that they enable "human flourishing".

There's a lot to pull apart here and we're going to get to it all, but let's start with an admission:

Mr. Wright is right.

There is a strong and direct correlation between quality of life and access to energy. There is a strong and direct correlation between quality of life and access to energy. One of the unappreciated stories of the past 30ish years has been the dramatic rise and rapid expansion of the global middle class. The World Bank estimates that since 1990, over 1 billion people have risen out of extreme poverty.

While China accounts for 800 million or about 80 % of this growth, another 200 million people elsewhere have done the same, predominantly elsewhere in Asia. From a perspective of human happiness and flourishing, this is, unalloyed, phenomenally great news.

And one of the key components of entering the global middle class is a drastic and significant increase in energy consumption. Things that you and I take for granted as Americans, even our working poor is our access to energy. You listening to me right now use energy at a level that the wealthiest people in history couldn't have even dreamed of. And that the people of the developing world think luxurious. A favorite factoid of mine is that your refrigerator as an American sitting in your home right now uses about 10 times the electricity from the American grid that the average Nigerian uses in their entire lives from their grid. And frankly, who am I to tell anyone that they're not allowed to have a refrigerator?

Energy, to be blunt, has enabled human flourishing.

Now let's talk about how the talking points that Mr. Wright likes to share start getting pretty leaky when you look at it with a deeper analysis. The first and most obvious to me is that I doubt that anyone that subscribes to an "America First" mentality cares at all about the wellbeing of the Chinese people.

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