The freer the people, the more seriously they take their environmental responsibilities.
Catalyst (3/28/23) reports: "Recently, my colleague at the Institute for Energy Research, David Kreutzer, and I published a new paper called the Environmental Quality Index. In the paper, we used Yale’s Environmental Performance Index to calculate the weighted environmental impact scores of the average barrel of oil and Bcf of natural gas from the U.S., and from the next 20 largest producers. We found that the score for the next 20 oil producers was 39, as compared to a score of 51.1 for the U.S., and for natural gas, the average was 38.6 to 51.1 for the U.S. These conclusions show the wide gulf between the United States and the next highest producers on environmental quality. This aspect of the paper tells an important story. The environmental impacts of production have significant variation depending on where that production occurs, and attempts to restrict domestic production rarely take those impacts into account. But the environment isn’t the only thing that suffers when production is exported by restrictionist policies. There is a human freedom element to consider as well. Many other major oil and gas producing countries have both terrible human freedom ratings and governments that control and profit from their industry. In this paper, we focused on telling two stories in particular about this. Russia, the third largest oil producer, and second largest natural gas producer in the world, has unsurprisingly low rankings on human freedom. It has a Freedom House rating of 19, compared to the United State’s ranking of 83. Spending on Russian oil and gas gives its authoritarian government the resources it needs to continue the war in Ukraine and other incursions on the freedom of its people and neighbors. Blocking United States production through diminishing leases or any other means does not create a concomitant reduction in global oil or gas demand, rather, it simply takes that production elsewhere. "
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"The same politicians and voters who don’t seem to have noticed how much better the human condition has been in America in the 21st century also haven’t realized how much worse it will be if they achieve their goal of eliminating human use of fossil fuels. In fact, the dream of ending 'inequality' directly conflicts with the dream of ending reliance on fossil fuels."
– Jane Menton,
Manhattan Contrarian
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