In the media business, there’s a simple truth. Good news does not sell.
And sadly, it seems to be true on YouTube as well, which is why there is so much negative clickbait everywhere you look. But I’m going to try and prove that Maxim wrong today by sharing a good news video and hoping that a bit of good news can go viral just as much as bad. Because the good news is that life is good. Actually, life is great if you zoom out a little bit out of all the minutiae and the noise and you take a look at the grand sweep of history. The recent past of the human race has been fantastic. And actually, the future of the human race looks great, too, if we don’t allow governments and power mad globalists to stuff it up for the rest of us.
This is the 200th official episode of the Topher project. Actually, it’s more like the 250th, but I didn’t used to give numbers to my interviews early on, so they didn’t actually count in the cumulative total, but whatever. This one gets the number 200. And I thought this would be a great time to bring you you some great news, some good news about the world, because honestly, things are getting better. And I mean like way better in really meaningful ways. And it’s true to say that the world has never been better than what it is right now.
I know. I know. There’s a lot of fearmongering in the media and prophets of doom who want your donations so that they can save the lesser spotted nute from the effects of climate change on their gender transition surgeries or whatever it is this month. But the numbers don’t lie. Humans as a species and the planet itself have both never had it better than what we do right now. And yes, both of those things can be true at once. The planet and people. The modern-day prophets of doom are saying that our cheap abundant energy in the form of coal and gas are going to destroy the human race. But the opposite is true. Cheap abundant energy has already saved the human race. We just forgot about it because we got used to it.
We forgot what life used to be like before the harnessing of coal power in the form of the steam engine, which sparked the industrial revolution and quite literally saved the human race.
My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project. And yeah, this isn’t quite what I normally do, but it’s not that far off. So, if you appreciate a bit of good news today, then please help me to keep the Topher project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you haven’t had a look, then check out my books, DVDs, and merch at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.
So, I’m saying that cheap, abundant energy in the form of coal and oil has saved the human race. Okay, then saved us from what? Well, kind of saved us from everything. Let’s start with something basic like death, specifically child mortality, which is the percentage of newborns who died before they reached the age of five. Obviously, the further back in time you go, the less precise the data becomes, but we don’t need it to be precise to know that the infant mortality rate before the industrial revolution was horrific. More than one in every three children born would not make it to their fifth birthday.
It was common for families to have a dozen children or more because they had no contraception and no TV shows to waste their evenings on. And it was normal for four or five of those dozen children to die as children. Today, child mortality worldwide is below 4%, which is still high, but that’s mostly because there are countries which haven’t fully caught up with our standard of living here in Australia. Speaking of Australia, our child mortality rate since we started keeping records in the late 1800s has dropped from between 15 to 20% just 150 odd years ago down to 0.4%. That is good news. That is what progress looks like.
And we see that progress in life expectancy as well. In the year 1800, no major region in the world had an average life expectancy of more than 40 years of age. And the global average was below 30. Now, it must be said that that was in part because infant mortality was so high. There’s lots of people who did live into their 50s and even into their 60s, but so many died as children that, that dragged the average down below 30 years of age globally. Now, well, globally, even taking into account the parts of the world that are still lagging behind, the average globally in 2023 was over 73 years of age. And since records began, the life expectancy in Australia has gone from less than 50 years of age, yeah, right here in Australia, to more than 80.
The question has to be asked, why? Well, mostly it’s due to sanitation, basic engineering and infrastructure combined with medicine and an understanding of germ theory. Now, we might roll our eyes when our mothers tell us to wash our hands, but that really is life-saving advice when you view it in its full historical perspective. But actually, that infrastructure, the sanitation, the infrastructure, the medicine, all of that was made possible by energy because energy is work. And if you go back before the steam engine, all work had to be done, as in all energy had to be provided either by human muscles or animal muscles, and they both have to be fed.
The more work an animal could do, the bigger it tended to be, and the more it needed to be fed.
So subsistence farming was the norm. Working to make food so that you had the energy to work to make food so that you had the energy to work to, etc. You get the idea. People today object to working a 40-hour week, but before coal fired steam power, you worked 12 hours a day, 6 days a week if you were lucky. We look back on the working conditions in early coal mines and in early steam powered factories, and we say, “How barbaric.” But that was an improvement.
People went and worked, looked for places like that by choice because they were better off and their families were better off than they had been. Subsistence farming. That’s how far we’ve come. That what used to be considered progress and opportunity now looks barbaric to us. Now, let’s say the same kind of thing a bit of a different way. The percentage of the population which is now directly engaged in food production has dropped massively over the centuries. Many estimates claim that more than 80% of the world’s people used to be primarily employed in food production. We don’t have a lot of historical data on this. It’s kind of anecdotal out of diaries and comments made in historical records. But we know that in the UK, for example, it was at least 55 to 60%.
But keep in mind that even the people who were not primarily employed in food production would normally have kept their own chickens or veggie patches, and almost no one back then was growing no food at all. Everyone made food. Today, worldwide, there’s still about 25% of the world’s population directly employed in food growing. But that’s again because there’s a lot of countries that are yet to catch up with basic industrial aids like tractors and fertilizer and you know energy. So their productivity is still incredibly low. But in Australia where we produce vast amounts of food just 3% of the population is directly involved in that food production leaving 97% of the population free to do other things. Secure in the knowledge that someone out there is making the food that we all need to eat.
And it’s the free to do other things that has led directly to the incredible progress that we’ve seen in sanitation, infrastructure, and medicine, which has now saved so many lives. People living in poverty and barely surviving don’t care about a sewage system. They’re not building better roads or inventing new technologies or studying microbiology. They are surviving, hunting for their next meal. That’s all they’re doing. It’s as we as a species were liberated from subsistence living by energy, specifically coal in the first instance, but oil later on. That’s when we started to see real progress because energy is work.
And that energy meant that fewer human beings were needed to feed and clothe and house the human population, and more human beings began to turn their mind and effort and talents and energy to other things. And despite fewer human beings working in food production than ever before, we today are making more food per person than ever before in human history. And yes, to be clear, that’s per person. So this already factors in the huge increase in the human population that we’ve seen in the last couple of hundred years as well.
The supply of calories per person has increased by about 30% since the 1960s, which is why famine and absolute poverty are at the lowest levels they’ve ever been in human history. The share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty, which used to be above 90% if you go back far enough, has dropped from over 40% to under 10% in the last 35 years alone. Even though we’ve added another 2.5 billion people to the human population in that time, what humans have accomplished thanks to cheap energy is truly extraordinary and is cause for celebration. Abundant and cheap coal and gas powered energy is not going to kill us. It’s already saved us.
But some people say, is it going to kill our planet? No. In fact, there’s strong evidence for exactly the opposite. Firstly, there are people who claim that all this human progress, this increase in wealth and food abundance for our growing population has caused us to deplete the globe’s resources. But what’s actually happening is that energy and technology are allowing us to do more with less to be more productive using fewer inputs, less resources in the first place as long as we have that all-important cheap, abundant energy. It’s a fact that globally the amount of land being used to feed the human population has now peaked and is declining despite the fact that our population is still growing. So, not only are we making more food per person than ever before, we’re doing that not only with less land per person, but actually with just less land in total.
Now, simultaneously, our planet is re-greening thanks in large part to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide,
which has increased from 280 parts per million before the industrial revolution to over 420 parts per million today, which is a boon to plant life on Earth and not only improves growth rates and just in case you weren’t aware, according to the US Department of Agriculture, we’re on track to set yet another new all-time record for global food production this year so, it does most certainly improve growth rates, but it also improves the water efficiency of plant growth, meaning that farmers are not only seeing record yields from crops, but they’re doing it with no more water than what they used to need.
But some people object, isn’t this all coming at the expense of all kinds of terrible climate disasters? Well, again, we’ve forgotten our history. Climate disaster deaths averaged per decade are the lowest they’ve been in well ever. And again, it was the abundance of energy which allowed better buildings, better air conditioning, flood mitigation works, and more, which have led to the historically low level of climate deaths that we see today.
But actually, the climate disasters kind of aren’t happening. Sea level rise continues at its steady, slow pace, not really causing any issues. Wildlife burn wildfire burned area is down. Global hurricanes and cyclones are steady or down. The Great Barrier Reef, long heralded as a canary in the climate coal mine, is doing better than ever over the last 5 years. The apocalypse that we’re supposed to be seeing as a result of us digging up and using all of this cheap abundant energy that apocalypse just isn’t happening. And even the predictions of the terrible cost of climate change into the future are actually predictions of reduced growth in our wealth, not an actual decline in wealth from where we are today.
So even if the prophets of doom are right and the missing disasters magically start to appear, all it will do is slow down the rate at which the world is getting better it won’t actually make the world worse. And that’s according to them. The truth is there’s only one thing that’s going to make the world worse if it can. And you guessed it, that’s government. Government is genuinely the only force known to man that can drive us back to subsistence living and starvation with violent, brutish, and short lives. And we know that it can do that because that’s exactly what it has done time and time again when government has been allowed to grow to the point that it plays God with people’s lives.
The USSR, Zimbabwe, China’s Great Leap Forward, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba. The examples are tragically numerous. These are human tragedies that cost a combined total of somewhere between 100 million and 300 million lives in the last 120 years alone. Cheap, abundant energy is the greatest force for good in the world today. It has literally set the human race free from poverty. And that’s why government hates it so much because all too often we see that government is the greatest force for evil. And it knows that people in poverty are much easier to control.
So, as promised, this is a good news video. What the human race has accomplished in just 250 odd years is astonishing. And what the future holds for us is unimaginable wealth, health, lifestyle, and technology if we can stop the government from buggering it up for the rest of us. And that well, that’s why I do what I do. My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project and I help busy people like you to make sense of the nonsense that surrounds us.
I am 100% viewer supported and you can help me to keep the Topher Project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you appreciate my perspective on the world, then check out my books, DVDs, and merch at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.
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