A special thanks to all those who labor every day to make our lives immeasurably easier.
Institute for Energy Research (9/5/22) blog: "Labor Day can be celebrated as energy labor-saving day. Human productivity is enabled by the appliances and machines that run on mineral (dense) energies, whether petroleum for transportation or natural gas for industrial firing and home and commercial use. Electricity, too, is cheaply generated from natural gas, coal, and oil. Energy is defined as the capacity to do work. Work is labor, and the more tasks that inanimate energy does, the greater human productivity and resulting leisure time. For much of human history, the ability to do work was limited by human and animal muscle. It once took countless laborers to provide the luxuries now taken for granted. Approximately 400 prepared the meals for King Louis XIV and his guests at Versailles in the late 17th and early 18th century, for example, from hunting and gathering in the fields to serving plates of bountiful food. Today, the supermarket has far more food choices than King Louis XIV had in the world’s richest city in Le Grand Siècle (the Great Century). Beyond sustenance, today’s energy-powered world would hardly be recognizable to a John D. Rockefeller or John Pierpont Morgan at the turn of the twentieth century in terms of communication, travel, and other goods and services."
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