From Europe’s Age of Enlightenment and Reason to the EU’s Age of Green Dogma

Stephen Heins 

 

 

European politics, philosophy, science, and communications were radically reoriented during the long 18th century as part of a movement whose participants called it the Age of Reason, or simply the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers in Britain, in France and throughout Europe questioned traditional authority and embraced the notion that humanity could be improved through rational change.

The movement produced books, essays, inventions, scientific discoveries, laws, wars and revolutions. Its ideals directly inspired the American and French Revolutions. Then it faded into 19th-century Romanticism.

That history is not a museum piece. It is a measuring stick. Hold it up against today’s dominant green ideology, and the contrast is stark. What began as a confidence that reason, evidence, and human ingenuity could lift people out of misery has, in the hands of modern Green Ideologues, become something closer to its opposite: a moralized, anti-growth dogma that treats energy abundance as the problem rather than the solution.

The Enlightenment’s core claim was simple and radical. Knowledge is power.

Observation beats superstition. Progress is possible if we test ideas against reality instead of against sacred texts or court fashion. Newton’s laws, Locke’s arguments for limited government, Voltaire’s assaults on orthodoxy, the American Constitution and Declaration of Independence, the scientific method itself—all rested on the premise that the human condition is not fixed by fate or original sin. It can be improved by understanding nature and applying that understanding.

Energy was always part of that story, even if the word was not yet used as we do. The Industrial Revolution that followed the Enlightenment was not a betrayal of reason; it was reason applied. Coal, steam, later oil and electricity turned muscle power into machine power. Life expectancy rose. Famine receded in industrializing societies.

Ordinary people gained time, mobility and material comfort that would have looked like magic to their grandparents. The Enlightenment bet that rational inquiry plus practical application would better the human lot. For more than two centuries the bet paid off.

Today’s Green Ideologues have reversed the polarity. They still speak the language of improvement and planetary stewardship, but the substance is different.

Moral absolutes have replaced rational change. Traditional authority—once the target of Enlightenment critique—has been reconstituted as climate science consensus, NGO orthodoxy, and regulatory fiat. Question the models, the timelines, or the opportunity costs, and you are not a skeptic practicing Enlightenment habits; you are a denier. The very method that once demanded evidence is now used to police dissent and name-calling.

Consider the practical results. Net Zero timelines and renewable-only mandates treat intermittency as a minor technical detail rather than a fundamental engineering constraint. Reliability is subordinated to symbolism. Grid operators in Europe and parts of the United States have already faced the consequences: higher prices, strained capacity, and the quiet reintroduction of coal, nuclear and gas when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine.

In the developing world, the cost is measured in continued energy poverty. Hundreds of millions still cook over open fires and live without reliable electricity. Women and children bear the heaviest burden of indoor air pollution and the daily labor of gathering fuel. A philosophy that claims to speak for the planet while accepting that outcome has abandoned the Enlightenment’s concern for actual human welfare.

The same pattern appears in the treatment of nuclear power. An energy source with high energy density, near-zero operational emissions, and the capacity to run for decades is frequently sidelined or delayed by the same movement that demands rapid decarbonization. That is not reason. It is aesthetic preference dressed up as science.

The Enlightened mind would have asked which technologies deliver the most energy per unit of land and also practical environmentalism. The Green Ideologue often asks which technologies feel pure.

Romanticism, not the Enlightenment, supplies the deeper emotional current. Nature is treated as sacred and fragile rather than as a system to be understood and managed.

Human ambition is viewed with suspicion. Economic growth is framed as a threat rather than the historical engine of longer, healthier, freer lives. The older Romantic impulse to flee the machine and return to an imagined pastoral harmony has been updated with satellite data and carbon accounting, but the underlying posture remains. Progress is the problem.

Heins Energy Humanist Thinks:

This inversion matters for a straightforward reason. Energy is not a lifestyle accessory. It is the foundation of modern health, sanitation, food production, communication, and the capital formation that funds everything else. Abundant, reliable, affordable energy expands the realm of the human possibility. Scarcity strangles it.

Policies that deliberately raise the cost of energy in the name of planetary virtue act as a debilitating tax on people experiencing poverty and the working class—exactly the people the Enlightenment project was supposed to liberate from arbitrary limits.

The Midwest understands this in its bones. We have lived through the benefits of reliable power and the costs of its absence. We have watched factories close when energy prices spike and when regulatory uncertainty makes long-term investment foolish. We have also watched the same voices that demand sacrifice from American workers remain strangely silent about the coal plants China continues to build and the absolute carbon emissions that keep rising even as intensity targets are met.

Rational accounting would notice the difference. Green ideology prefers the narrative.

None of this requires denying that the climate is changing or that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. It requires refusing to treat those facts as a blank check for any green policy that claims the climate label. The Enlightenment standard was always higher:

Does the proposed change actually improve the human condition when measured against evidence, alternatives, and trade-offs? By that standard, much of today’s green program fails. It substitutes moral urgency for engineering realism. It privileges modeling exercises and obscure environmental studies over economic development and operational experience. It treats dissent as heresy rather than as the necessary solvent of error.

The way back is not nostalgia for powdered wigs and coffeehouse debate. It is the recovery of the original confidence that reason, applied to the physical world, can still expand human possibility. That means treating energy as a system to be optimized for abundance, reliability, and cost rather than as a moral ledger.

It means keeping nuclear, natural gas, and, where appropriate, coal and hydro in the mix while demanding that intermittent sources compete without permanent subsidy.

It means measuring success by whether people in Africa, Asia, and the American heartland gain access to modern energy services, not by whether Western governments hit arbitrary percentage targets on a spreadsheet. There is an inhumanity about it all.

The Enlightenment did not promise utopia. It promised that systematic inquiry and practical application could make life less nasty, less brutish, and less short. That promise is still the right one. The Green Ideologues of our time have borrowed the language of improvement while discarding the method that once made improvement real. Restoring the enlightened methods is not nostalgia. It is the only humane path left.