How do you know when your life is under assault?  When Obama pirates your health care.  After all, it constitutes about 18% of GDP — not only a sizable grab on your vitality but a confiscation of control over a good chunk of the nation's economy.

How can you tell when all your freedoms are under assault?  When Biden goes after your energy — all of it.  And what easier way to mask an energy grab than to tuck it under the solemn shroud of climate?  "Climate change," a vacuous term mindlessly embraced by equally mindless leaders, is an easy sell.  Openly throttling the energy essential to the mindful masses is a heavier lift.  So, under the veil of public virtue, petroleum is spirited off the power menu, swapped out for green notions barely amounting to a diet salad.

Energy is so deeply embedded into society that it is largely taken for granted — that is, until we're all mugged by rising fuel costs as well as inflated prices for everything manufactured or delivered by energy — which amounts to everything.  Even a cursory review of cosmology, the study of the history and contents of the universe, reveals that everything in the known universe is a function of how it receives, processes, and emits energy.  From diminutive quarks to immense galaxy clusters, dial up or dial down their energy, and everything changes.  On a human scale, and within our lifetimes, the global spread of energy has levitated a billion people worldwide out of poverty.  They won't be happy with a round trip.  Energy is — in a word – everything.

Control of energy is the control of everything — and everyone.  For political progressives, the climate is their ruse, the big shiny object to be revered and chased at all costs, a notion contrived to induce fealty in the populace.  But the very idea that people can outwit the sun is arrogant folly.  Our home star is the ultimate energy source guiding the Earth through innumerable historic phases, from water-world to snowball and everything in between.

The universal role of energy recasts any cost-benefit analysis of climate policy into the cold light of the fundamentals of life.  The benefit of the current climate policy is theoretical, or minimal at best.  The cost is the loss or misallocation of the energy resources driving our free pursuit of progress and quality life.  In short, the cost amounts to...well, everything — everything we value, from the progress achieved over centuries to the priceless unalienable rights that slip away with any loss of hard-earned control of our energy destiny.

There is no greater power-grab.  We should all toast our fireplaces with the reams of legislation spewing from Washington, led by any remaining sensible members of Congress.

Dean Kedenburg is a physical anthropologist.

Image: Marco Verch Professional Photographer and Speaker via Flickr.

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