By Katie Tahuahua DailyWire.com “Save the Planet, Eat the Children,” reads a T-shirt at a congresswoman’s townhall. Meanwhile, a teenager skipping school and in obvious emotional distress makes the Nobel Peace Prize shortlist for berating world leaders about a supposedly looming mass extinction. The most privileged generation in human history — enjoying the longest, healthiest, wealthiest, and most comfortable lives men and women have ever lived — thinks the world is collapsing around us. What a time to be alive — literally. By nearly every measurement, from child mortality and life expectancy to poverty and education, quality of life around the globe is better than it’s ever been. In much of the world, subsistence living is a thing of the past and humanity is flourishing — especially those with ready access to electricity. The Industrial Revolution, when an unprecedented boom of technological innovation transformed agrarian America into the nation we know today, wasn’t just a time of economic change and scientific progress. It propelled humanity to the most prosperous time in our history. Once a rare treasure, electricity now powers everything we touch. It provides the essentials like clean running water and warmth in the winter and the luxuries like Instagram and Amazon Prime. It powers the institutions we depend on: Our banks, law enforcement agencies, doctor’s offices, farms, plants, stores, and schools. Similarly, affordable and dependable cars allow us to travel freely, farther, and more often than our ancestors could have fathomed, giving us the ability to do business over long distances and travel for mere pleasure. Not everyone in the world enjoys these benefits. Nearly a billion people still don’t have access to electricity or any of the benefits that come along with it. These are communities where medieval-sounding diseases like cholera and dysentery still reign — where life expectancies lag 20 to 30 years behind
