“Resources such as coal [oil and natural gas] are sufficiently abundant to allow an expansion of both economic activity and population to the point where they can generate sustainable wealth for all the people of the planet without hitting a Malthusian ceiling. The blinding brightness of this still amazes me: we can build a civilization in which everybody lives the life of the Sun King, because everybody is served by (and serves) a thousand servants, each of whose service is amplified by extraordinary amounts of inanimate energy…”
– Matt Ridley, “The Rational Optimist”