How Long Should People Live?
Maybe that is a weird question, but that’s the moral dilemma of policy makers at the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The IEA forecasts the world’s energy demand, often through 2050 or beyond. They also predict our need for oil in a recent report: , where they (again) predict peak oil by 2030. Often, these predictions are tainted by “wishful thinking” - that the outcome of reality may be affected by that prediction. And there most certainly is a causality - for example by limiting investment in the energy sources that the IEA believes should go away.
But as Alex Epstein so clearly stated in his landmark book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, there are moral consequences - also for these predictions.
Energy affects everything in our lives - including life expectancy. As you can see in the below gapminder.org chart, there is a power-law relationship between the two. I have taken 2021 as an example, but understand that COVID temporarily messed up life expectancy in many rich societies and that this trend will likely be steeper in the future.
Life expectancy and income are correlated - listen to Hans Rosling. There is also a very good correlation between income and energy consumption - there are no energy-poor rich societies and and energy-rich poor societies. I used raw data from Gapminder.org to construct the graph below.
World oil demand has grown by almost a million barrels of oil per day every year for more than 50 years. While renewable and natural gas have grown faster than oil, its long-term demand growth has helped build longer, healthier lives. For example, in Germany in France, both total energy and oil demand per capita is about double what it is for an average citizen of the world. The energy - health correlation shows that access to twice as much energy makes people live, on average, about 5 years longer.
With their peak oil prediction, the IEA appears to think the current 73 years average life expectancy is “good enough”. Should they revisit their peak oil “prediction” from the standpoint that everyone in the world should enjoy the energy-rich lives of the French and the Germans?
Precision is always better. Quoting Robert Bryce based on the statistical review of world energy, "Between 2011 and 2024, global energy use increased by about 91 exajoules. As seen above, nuclear energy barely grew at all over that time frame.. Hydropower outout grew a little bit (3.5 EJ). Meanwhile, coal, solar, and wind all contributed about the same amount of energy, about 7 EJ each. However, the biggest growth occurred in oil and gas, with gas use surging by 32.1 EJ. Thus, by itself, gas accounted for 35% of the total increase in global energy use since 2011."
Renewables have not "grown faster than oil," as you stated. Their growth rate is larger but that is not the same thing as growing faster in absolute units. They have a larger fractional increase (higher growth rate) because they started at a low base.
You’ll eat bugs and use less and like it if the globalists get their way.