Why clean power is about people, not sacrifice //
We tend to talk about energy as if it’s a niche technical problem; something for engineers, utilities, and climate wonks to argue about at conferences. I’ve been guilty of this myself, spending time discussing reactor designs when I should have been talking about the people and institutions that actually do the reacting. Megawatts, grids, emissions targets, and levelised costs all matter, but they’re not the whole story, and simply not part of the broader story that appeals to most people. Energy isn’t just an input into the economy; it’s the thing that sets everything else in motion. It’s the backbone of civilisation. It’s the foundation of modern human flourishing. Hence, energy is life.
This becomes obvious the moment you look at the data. Wherever reliable electricity shows up, a familiar pattern follows, of higher literacy, lower child mortality, higher incomes, better health outcomes, and more education for women. That’s not ideology, but correlation after correlation, across countries and decades. Energy access doesn’t always guarantee prosperity, but the absence of it certainly guarantees poverty.
It’s also worth remembering something that news headlines rarely emphasise: by almost every measurable metric, including life expectancy, child survival, poverty reduction, and education, the world is far better than it was a century ago. That progress didn’t happen by accident, but because we learned how to produce vast amounts of cheap, reliable energy, and because human societies reacted by building everything else on top of it. The mechanism isn’t mysterious. Energy powers clean water systems, hospitals, vaccines, heating, lighting, refrigeration, agriculture, and the internet. Take energy away, and modern life quickly starts to fall apart.
And yet. Hundreds of millions of people still have no access to electricity at all. Billions cook with solid fuels that damage their lungs. Even in rich countries, people die every winter because they can’t afford to heat their homes properly. These aren’t lifestyle choices, but the consequence of political choices that enable energy shortages.
Psychologists have known for decades that humans are bad at judging risk. We overestimate dramatic, low-probability dangers and underestimate slow, high-probability harms, through a mix of availability bias and negativity bias. This bias has real consequences. Nuclear accidents loom large in the public imagination, even though, measured per unit of electricity produced, nuclear energy is far safer the alternatives.
As I have said before, the uncomfortable consequence is that fear of nuclear energy has often caused more harm than nuclear energy itself.
