On Saturday, I gave a 10-minute TED-style talk on energy humanism to about 300 high school students. The talk was part of an all-day event at the John Cooper School in The Woodlands called the Summit for Emerging American Leaders. The event was arranged by US Rep. Dan Crenshaw, the Republican and former Navy SEAL who represents Texas House District 2. The caption for my talk is the same as the headline above. In April, I gave a similar presentation to about 50 students at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas.
In both lectures, I explained that today’s students are inundated with messaging about catastrophic climate change and claims that we have to quit using hydrocarbons. My aim in the presentations was simple: to remind them that regardless of what they think about climate change, energy poverty is rampant and that the real challenge we face isn’t to use less energy. Instead, it’s to make energy more affordable and more abundant so that we can continue adapting to the weather (whatever it is) and help ensure that more people all over the world — particularly women and girls — can enjoy higher living standards.
I began with the photo above. As I explained in my latest book, A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations, Rehena is a resident of Majlishpukur, a tiny agricultural settlement located southeast of Kolkata. When I met her, she was 44 years old. A soft-spoken, elegant woman, she had her first child, a girl, when she was 16. Two other children, a boy and a girl, came shortly afterward. My friend, Joyashree Roy, a senior fellow at the Breakthrough Institute, explained in Bengali that we wanted to discuss electricity. Rehena replied that her modest home had been connected to the electric grid 14 years earlier. In A Question of Power, I wrote:
She immediately began talking about the difference that electricity had made to her children and their schoolwork. Thanks to electricity, her children were able to read books, practice their writing, and manage their school work at night. That had had a clear and positive result: one of her daughters was attending college in Kolkata, a fact of which Rehena was clearly proud. After we’d talked for a while longer, I asked Rehena: “If you had lived in a house that had electricity when you were growing up, would you have gone to university, too?” A brief smile flashed across her face and without a nanosecond of hesitation, she nodded her head to the right, in the way typical of many residents of West Bengal, and said, “Yes. I would have.” There was no remorse. No bragging. No what-could-have-beens in her reply. Only a direct, matter-of-fact response that was almost as if I’d asked her if the sun was going to come up in the east the next morning.
In the book, I continued:
That 15-minute conversation that I had with Rehena and Joyashree made me see the light: Darkness kills human potential. Electricity nourishes it. It is particularly nourishing for women and girls.
Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.
Robert Bryce is a Texas-based author, journalist, film producer, and podcaster. His articles have appeared in a myriad of publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, Time, Austin Chronicle, and Sydney Morning Herald.
Photo: by author.
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