Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 276 of the 1993 Third Edition of the late Carlo Cipolla’s 1976 book, Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000-1700:

Between 1780 and 1850 an unprecedented and far-reaching revolution changed the face of England. From then on the world was no longer the same. Historians have often used and abused the word “revolution” to mean a radical change, but no revolution has been as dramatically revolutionary as the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution opened the door to a completely new world, a world of new and untapped sources of energy such as coal, oil, electricity, and the atom; a world in which man found himself able to handle huge masses of energy to an extent inconceivable in the preceding rural world.

DBx: Indeed so.

Today’s environmentalists – able to obsess about the environment only because of modernity’s immense innovation- and energy-fueled prosperity – want to return humankind to the dark and desperate days when humans relied for energy only on water, gravity, wind, sunlight, vegetation, animals, and themselves. Although most ‘green-energy’ fanatics are too clueless to realize the implications of their demands, their policies – were these adopted on a huge scale – would literally return what survives of humanity to the dark ages.