By Don Aguiar

Mumbai, Sept 1, 2022: Countless times during the girls’ adolescence, usually around music preferences or sartorial choices, I got the sardonic question, “Dad, seriously?”

Often these days one has that same reaction, listening to a number of national debates over topics that stir strong passions but weak prescriptions. It leads one to worry that the vaunted Indian practicality — the do-what-it-takes instinct that has served the nation so well — is being superseded by an impulse that values winning an argument more than actually improving the world or solving a problem.

It isn’t necessary to dispute the sincerity of an opponent’s viewpoint to be exasperated by its indifference to plain facts, or to any credible ideas about how to improve the outcome at issue. It’s distressingly easy to find examples of the syndrome on both sides of our partisan and cultural crevasse.

Consider the essential goal of feeding a growing world population a far better diet than has been within its reach historically, and doing so in ways that protect the planet and its resources. Modern bioscience and agricultural technologies can enable huge improvements in pesticide reduction, insecticide reduction and water conservation, all while producing more and better food on less land, food with more nutritional value and even therapeutic benefit.

However, many of those proclaiming their commitment to feeding the world take every opportunity to deprecate and obstruct the use of these proven safe technologies. Let’s postulate their sincerity; the problem is they aren’t serious.

Or the unwillingness of those who, with full justification, call for reasserting control of our borders but have no realistic suggestion about the millions of immigrants already here illegally, many now with firm roots in this country.

Or those who lament an obsolete, decaying national infrastructure but insist on the wage laws and absurd permitting requirements that make rebuilding impossibly slow and expensive. Or those bemoaning the massive, truly dangerous state of the government’s debt but are unwilling to advocate the far- reaching entitlement reforms without which no combination of policies can make much difference. Sincere, but not serious.

The global energy crisis is a wake-up call for our elites. Only last year, world leaders gathered in Glasgow for COP26 to celebrate their plans to rid the world of fossil-fuel energy. Yet now, as energy prices soar to unprecedented heights, these same leaders are scrambling to issue new drilling licences for oil, to tap new gas and to bring coal power stations back online. Is the penny starting to drop that humanity still needs fossil fuels? And will our green elites finally start to prioritise our energy needs over their climate goals?

On the one hand, they want to continue this anti-fossil-fuel and anti-human agenda. And on the other hand, they want to be popular, in part because they need to be popular in order to impose that agenda. But the problem is, in practice, nobody likes the results of the agenda.

The narrative around the anti-fossil-fuel movement has now had to switch from ‘life without fossil fuels is going to be better’ to ‘it’s going to be worse, but we have to get rid of fossil fuels anyway’. In truth, the green narrative has always been dishonest. It says that if we act to eliminate humanity’s impact on the planet, somehow our lives are going to improve. That’s a contradiction. The way we make life better on Earth is through our impact on it, including by using the most cost-effective sources of energy, which most of the time would be fossil fuels. Meanwhile, ‘minimising’ our impact on the planet will lead to economic recession and human suffering.

But on at least one front, we are seeing some green shoots of practicality.

After decades of blocking the development of nuclear power, some of those most dedicated to the goal of reducing net carbon dioxide emissions to zero have begun to recognize that the goal is a fantasy without nuclear power as a major factor.

This growing awareness is fortified by a host of positive technological developments. New modular designs incorporate passive safety systems obviating the risks of human error or mechanical failure that remain possible in earlier generation plants. Smaller than the plants of today, assembled by experienced workers in dedicated facilities and transported to the site of operation, these small modular reactors, or SMRs, should be far less expensive to build.

The environmental benefits go far beyond the primary goal of carbon dioxide reduction. Eliminating fossil fuels without deploying more nuclear energy would entail massive degradation: huge new mines to extract minerals like copper, aluminium and lithium, vast land areas to host the wind and solar capacity of which some advocates dream, toxic disposal challenges of batteries and worn-out windmills and solar panels on a scale that makes handling nuclear waste seem trivial.

The ever-escalating demand for more electricity is a global phenomenon, but few places experience it more directly than a growing, research-intensive university launching an exploration, led by scientists, engineers and other experts, to examine whether an SMR might be the best long-term way to achieve net-zero carbon while meeting the tests of affordability and reliability. Sincerity requires that we give it a serious look.

You can look at the past 50 years and you can see that there has been endless catastrophizing about the future. We were told that the world is going to get worse, when actually it has got better at an unprecedented rate. But, just as in the case of the energy crisis, the people who got this wrong do not want to admit it.

The reason our elites keep making these catastrophic predictions is that they have a totally false view of nature. They assume that Planet Earth exists in a delicate, nurturing balance that is stable, sufficient and safe – and that this is being ruined by humanity’s impact. In reality, Earth is dynamic, deficient and dangerous. And our impact on the planet generally makes it much better. When you believe in this idea of the delicate, nurturing planet, you assume two things – that human impact is going to eventually cause the apocalypse and that reducing human impact is going to be good for you and the planet.

I don’t expect the apocalypse. We will live a good many more years on Earth and I know that there is all the raw material and potential on the planet to do that. I’m not afraid of the natural world – but I do fear what governments are doing, as they restrict our freedoms and our capacity to make the Earth a safer and even more abundant place to live.

We must defend cheap and reliable energy not as a necessary evil, but as a good in itself, as the basis for the good life and for human progress. And we must do so in opposition not just to our green elites, but also to an environmentalist pseudo-left that doesn’t seem to understand it is a walking contradiction – demanding better living standards one minute and eco-austerity the next.

Even in the midst of this dreadful present, we need to fight for a better future – something our clueless elites are clearly incapable of delivering.

Maybe if someone isn’t prepared to be serious about the means of solving a problem, they weren’t really all that sincere after all.