Energy Abundance Is Not the Enemy. Energy Scarcity Is.

Capital Research Center recently published a report worth everyone’s attention: Enemies of Energy: The Myths, the Movement, and the Money. Its findings deserve a wider audience because they run counter to nearly everything Americans are told about energy today.

For much of the last century, America understood a simple truth. Abundant, affordable, reliable energy formed the foundation for every other national success.

Our economic strength, manufacturing base, technological leadership, and rising quality of life all rest on the same footing: energy we can count on. It powers our factories, heats our homes, keeps commerce moving, and fuels our prosperity.

Somewhere along the way, parts of the environmental movement lost sight of that.

Conservation was once about protecting America’s natural treasures while embracing human ingenuity. The early Sierra Club fought to save the landscapes and creatures people cherished, helping to give us our national parks and foster the return of the bald eagle. Today, too many influential activist organizations have adopted a different mission. They oppose nearly every major source of reliable energy that powers modern life.

The report puts hard numbers to that shift. It profiles the fifteen largest anti-energy nonprofits in America, whose combined annual revenue tops $2 billion.

That works out to an average of $5.4 million per day spent making energy scarcer. Their largest donors include some of the wealthiest people on earth, several of whom cross oceans on mega-yachts that burn more fuel in a single year than hundreds of middle-class people do.

That shift carries real consequences because energy touches everything.

The price a family pays to heat a home. Whether a manufacturer builds a factory here or overseas. The cost of groceries. The competitiveness of American business. The reliability of the grid we all depend on.

Energy is not just another political issue. It is the foundation beneath nearly every other one.

Much of today’s debate is driven less by curiosity than by certainty. Americans are told the country must rapidly abandon oil, natural gas, and coal, and increasingly even nuclear power, in favor of systems that depend on the weather, heavy subsidies, and technologies still wrestling with storage and transmission.

Meanwhile, China continues to expand conventional energy at a staggering pace. By 2024, it was burning nearly 12 times as much coal as the United States and accounting for nearly a third of the world’s industrial carbon emissions, even as some of the same American groups praised it as a responsible climate leader.

That should trouble anyone who cares about both prosperity and honesty.

Consider nuclear power, which the report singles out for a special defense.

It is America’s largest source of emissions-free electricity and one of the safest sources of any kind. Across nearly seventy years and more than 20,000 reactor-years of operation worldwide, nuclear accidents have caused fewer than thirty radiation deaths. Yet all fifteen of the anti-energy groups profiled in the report oppose nuclear power, either outright or by amplifying fears about safety and waste.

If we were serious about cutting emissions, we would be building reactors at scale. Instead, the nuclear industry’s own tally does not credit the U.S. with a single full-scale power reactor under construction, and total American nuclear capacity has been flat for more than two decades; only a few small demonstration reactors have recently broken ground.

This is not an argument against protecting the environment. Just the opposite. Americans want clean air, clean water, healthy forests, and thriving wildlife. Those goals should unite us. The real question is whether we pursue them through innovation and human ingenuity or through policies that make energy pricier and less reliable.

There is a meaningful difference between conservation and opposition.

Conservation seeks balance and recognizes that a growing economy and a protected environment can strengthen each other.

Opposition seeks elimination and often measures success by how much reliable energy production it can shut down, whatever the cost.

America deserves better than false choices.

We do not have to choose between a strong economy and a healthy environment, or between reliable electricity and cleaner technology.

The U.S. has repeatedly reduced emissions through innovation while remaining the world’s leading energy producer.

Our per-person carbon emissions are now lower than they were in 1940.

Advances in natural gas, cleaner industrial processes, and next-generation nuclear all show that progress comes from unleashing human ingenuity, not restricting it.

What we need is an energy strategy rooted in realism rather than ideology. Produce oil and natural gas responsibly. Expand safe nuclear power. Invest in new technologies where they make economic sense. And keep American families, not activist organizations, at the center of our energy policy.

Reliable energy should never be a partisan issue. It is the lifeblood of a modern economy.

The nations that lead this century will not be the ones that deliberately make energy scarce. They will be the ones who produce it abundantly, efficiently, and responsibly. America has every opportunity to remain that nation. The question is whether we still have the confidence to remember the lesson that built our prosperity in the first place. Energy abundance is not something to apologize for. It is something to protect.

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