The water wheel saving women from waking at sunrise for the mind-numbing task of grinding grain to make bread is just one more example of how technological advances throughout history have arguably benefited women even more than men.
Harnessing energy and mechanizing labor has unshackled countless individuals from exhausting toil—a liberating process that is ongoing in many countries as more households gain access to electricity and labor-saving devices such as laundry machines. Given how many tasks now delegated to electric machines traditionally fell to women, perhaps it is unsurprising that many prominent advocates of an energy-abundant future fueled by nuclear power are women, or as Zubrin alliteratively puts it, a “fine friendly force of fierce feminine fission freedom fighters.”
Of course, as Zubrin would likely agree, energy access alone does not create freedom, even if it may help to counter the scarcity mindset that is so often freedom’s enemy. One need only look to the Gulf petrostates featuring both massive oil fields and authoritarian political systems to find proof that energy abundance is insufficient to spread liberalism or gender equality.
Oil-rich Saudi Arabia did not even issue driver’s licenses to its female citizens until five years ago. It is clear that freedom leads to energy abundance. It is more doubtful that energy abundance necessarily leads to freedom broadly understood—although it at least defuses scarcity-based rationales for limiting human liberty. (Sadly, authoritarians have invented many other justifications for restricting freedom.)
While energy abundance and freedom may be somewhat mutually reinforcing, if humanity were to pick only one, the choice seems clear: institutions and policies of freedom. History shows that free people in lands devoid of natural resources can innovate their way to high living standards. (As Zubrin points out, “It is human ingenuity that turns natural raw materials into resources.”)
Consider Hong Kong’s whirlwind free market transformation from a barren island into a gleaming metropolis in the 1950s and the 1960s. Freedom is the wellspring of prosperity and innovation, and the energy needed to power modernity. As Zubrin notes, when it comes to environmental challenges, once again, “Freedom is not the problem. Freedom is the solution. Prosperity is not the problem. Prosperity is the solution.”
Zubrin also writes that “human progress must and will inevitably entail continued exponential growth of human power generation.” Whether humanity generates that power with nuclear reactors or finds an even better solution, the relationship between many aspects of freedom and energy is worth pondering.
Zubrin’s book shows the urgency of unleashing energy abundance. He argues convincingly that a future of bountiful energy could help preserve the liberty that scarcity often imperils. Embracing freedom is the surest way to power the future.