In this blog, I am going to try to link Quality of Life and Economics. Read on and see if it helps your understanding of current politics and economics.
I am going to start back in the beginning with the cave man. The quality of life for the cave man was not too good. They had to go out and gather food just to keep alive like most animals do today. What separated cave men from animals was that they were much smarter and one day a cave man came up with a club that could be used to kill and thus harvest animals for food. Now the quality of life for the cave man started getting better. If he could keep this up, he could make the quality of life for cave men better and better.
Next the cave man figured out how to domesticate animals, like horses, sheep, goats and chickens. This made his quality of life even better. He had a stable source of food now and did not have to hunt down each meal. Some of the animals he domesticated could be harnessed and made to work and do things that humans used to have to do with their own muscles. The only problem was that the cave man had to share some of his food with his domestic animals so there was a limit to how many cave men an area could support.
The cave man kept developing new and more productive tools and only a very few could be powered by his animals. I am talking about things like plows and hauling people in wagons, At this same time due to the intelligence of humans they were able to figure out how to boil water and create a compressed gas, call steam, and then use the energy in the steam to push a piston similar to how a cannon shoots a cannon ball. If you did not realize that, now you know. This allowed the development of the steam engine and the "food" was cheap coal. The food that had been used for the horse could now feed more humans and that is exactly what happened, I think you can see how this simple invention improved the quality of life for many more humans.
It as not long before these same humans figured out how they could use oil in place of coal and avoid the boiling water and just use the hot air from burning the oil in a chamber like a steam engine. Since the new fuel was liquid it could more easily the stored, transferred and used. This meant that smaller engines could be made, including airplanes. Just look at how this improved the quality of life for those people and countries that had oil or access to oil.
Now, I am getting to my punch line and exactly what is that? The Green movement. Now it seems if we use either coal or oil it is bad and only energy from the Sun is allowed. Based on the history of improvement of quality of life is a function of cheap energy, if we take that away, we turn back the clock and decrease the quality of life. Isn't that crystal clear?
