As a trained engineer, I like to diagnose problems. Because the turbulent winds blowing across the American landscape these past couple of months have caused me some dizziness, I have been thinking a lot lately about how, as a nation, we found ourselves in this current political moment. It has been a difficult knot to untie.

Two weeks after the presidential election last year, I took a first pass at a post-mortem. Many people said at the time that racism, sexism, wokeism and culture wars were the major factors that doomed Vice President Kamala Harris’s candidacy. I disagreed somewhat with that thinking. I argued that high inflation was the real killer.

In the period since that initial analysis, I have intently followed discussions among people from across the political spectrum about the issues that drove voter choices in the election. While I still hold the view that inflation was dominant, I realize now that I may have underestimated the influence of the culture wars. What I have learned is that large numbers of people, not only on the right, but also independents and even some Democrats, had been so deeply angered by the intransigence of the extreme left that they were willing to take a chance on Mr. Trump, despite his many flaws. The rapidly expanding speech codes and cancel culture, which large segments of the electorate felt had severely constrained their ability to speak freely about issues, had effectively radicalized some voters. It was a frustration I shared because I have been canceled before.

Ghana, my native country, has perennially struggled to provide reliable electricity to its citizens. The reasons are many and varied. For many decades after it became independent in 1957, the country’s only source of electricity was a hydroelectric dam. Only a small percentage of the population was connected to the grid initially, but as more parts of the country became electrified, the power plant became stressed. A series of droughts compounded the problem. The dam’s water level fell perilously low so frequently that the grid was always on the verge of collapse. The result was constant blackouts.

The nation clearly needed to diversify its fuel sources for power generation. Even a small economy such as Ghana’s requires baseload power—the steady, reliable type—to operate. Until a couple of decades ago, that type of electricity could only be generated using coal, nuclear power, or water in a large dam. It was only recently that natural gas became a viable option with the emergence of combined-cycle technology and, in America in particular, cheap gas produced by hydraulic fracking.

Few countries in the world have the capability to operate nuclear power plants. For a small nation like Ghana, nuclear was not a practical option so coal was about the only other choice available to it when the electricity situation became dire around 2014. The then government floated the idea of building a small coal-fired power plant. I wrote an article, which was published in the national daily newspaper, in support of the plan.

Not long after the article’s publication, I directed two people to my website. I had only recently met them, but had already engaged in some highly positive conversations with them regarding assistance I was seeking for a writing project. Then, things suddenly changed. They stopped returning my phone calls and responding to my emails. Unbeknownst to me, I had made a grave mistake by introducing some of my writings to them. After several more calls and emails to both of them went unanswered, I reluctantly ended my communications with them.

A few months later, I learned that my article in support of a coal plant was the cause of their sudden silence. Both individuals, who didn’t know each other, are white American liberals. For some on the extreme left, advocating for use of any fossil fuel, particularly coal, is now considered a capital offense. I was canceled for that crime.

I have undergraduate and graduate degrees in electrical engineering. When I studied for my master’s at Purdue University, I did research under the supervision of a world-renowned professor of power engineering. I specialized in energy sources and systems. Since then, I have had three decades of professional experience in the energy industry, working for much of that time in the power sector. Therefore, I knew what I was talking about in that article, but those two liberals clearly thought otherwise. They were non-engineers, and didn’t have any scientific backgrounds. I am not sure they were aware of the extreme arrogance they had displayed.

These militant attitudes on the part of some Western liberals regarding the use of fossil fuels in Africa has been a particularly sore point for me for quite a while. I wholeheartedly agree that the world needs to significantly reduce carbon and other noxious emissions into the atmosphere. But, as I argued in that article, for every choice we make in life, we have to weigh the costs against the benefits.

Relative to the emissions from coal use by countries like China, India, the U.S. and other major economies, whatever would have been released into the atmosphere from that plant in Ghana, had it been built, would have amounted to a speck of dust. But the benefit of that baseload power to Ghana and its struggling citizens would have been enormous. Anyone who knows anything about energy will admit that the much-touted solar and wind energy are nowhere near ready to solely power any factories or sustain any meaningful economic activity. Those intermittent energy sources can be deployed effectively only in places that have robust electricity grids that act as giant batteries.

From my front-row seat in the American energy industry, I see a lot of forecasts. Every projection I have seen in the last decade says that in 2050, the target date for net-zero emissions, the world will still require a substantial amount of fossil fuels for its energy needs. And yet, some radical environmental activists have been saying that we should get rid of all fossil fuels immediately and rely exclusively on renewable energy.

It is injustice of the highest order for the large and powerful nations to have the freedom to do whatever they want when it comes to energy production, while some liberals, even if they do it inadvertently, constrain economic growth in places like Ghana by forcing small countries to rely on unreliable solar and wind power. Even after all these years of annual COP meetings and talk about net-zero targets everywhere one turns, economic dispatch still features prominently in every electricity market in the developed world today. I always find that quite interesting.

Because coal emits about twice as much carbon into the atmosphere as natural gas does, coal is the fuel that everyone insists should be eliminated from the power generation stack as quickly as possible. However, what happens in practice often runs directly counter to this goal.

Electric utilities everywhere are mandated by their regulators to produce electricity at the lowest possible cost. Consequently, grid operators dispatch power generation plants based on their cost-competitiveness, which is largely driven by the price of the fuel they use. When coal price is lower than that of natural gas, coal-fired plants take precedence over gas-fired ones, a reordering known as gas-to-coal switching. The reverse, coal-to-gas switching, occurs when coal becomes more expensive than gas. This preferential selection based on fuel cost is what industry professionals refer to as economic dispatch. Because energy prices are extremely volatile, this back-and-forth reshuffling sometimes occurs daily.

Whenever those two liberals return home from their outings and switch on their lights, they have absolutely no idea how the electricity was generated. I am also quite certain that they like their utility bills to be as low as possible. They are lucky to live in a society where regulators, and the brilliant engineers who operate the grids, work diligently together to keep energy prices down for consumers. Not only that, they enjoy all of the other macro-economic benefits that the reliable grids bring. It rankles me greatly to think that I was canceled for wanting the same things for the poor citizens of Ghana.

In that “offensive” article, I also made the case that the coal plant that the Ghanaian government was proposing to build would actually have a net positive effect on the environment. The population of Ghana is predominantly rural. Most people in villages there still cut down trees for firewood. Not only does that drastically reduce the carbon-absorption capacity of the nation’s forests, burning of the wood also emits tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That is double harm to the ecosystem. On top of that, because most families cook in tight, enclosed spaces, the smoke from these wood-burning fires is a constant hazard to human health. I grew up in a small village in Ghana so I know a lot about that problem. All those details didn’t matter to my accusers.

In my case, I was actually lucky. Those two liberals didn’t team up with their friends to launch an online campaign against me for my “crime against humanity.” There have been many stories in the last few years about online mobs hounding employers to fire people in their organizations who have deviated from certain orthodoxies. In some victims’ cases, the sin was as simple as uttering some word that somehow had become “unacceptable” to use. People cannot be this overbearing and not expect others to have deep resentment toward them and their enablers.

Looking back now, I realize that those of us in the rapidly shrinking political middle in this country did a rather poor job of confronting what these extremists were doing. I did write a couple of articles in the last year questioning the wisdom of some of the things I saw coming from the extreme left of the Democratic Party. But collectively, the response was clearly insufficient. On their part, Republicans like to talk loudly about the radical left. Surely, they have seen the people on the far right in their party. They are equally obnoxious, if not worse.

By not standing up to the radical left when their party held the White House and the Senate in the last four years, leaders of the Democratic Party squandered much of the moral authority they badly need to mount an effective opposition to some of the craziness we are seeing in Washington today. As things stand, we are relying on Congressional Republicans to keep this White House in check. But they seem to be going along with everything the administration is doing because they say the Democrats didn’t speak up either when extremists in their party were imposing their orthodoxies on others.

Fighting for social and environmental justice is a laudable pursuit. But it has to be done tactfully and with a good dose of humility. Unfortunately, some activists have been too extreme at times, needlessly turning off too many people.

The beauty of American democracy is that defeated parties in elections, even if their time in the wilderness is long, eventually get fresh opportunities to govern. When the Democrats regain power at some point, it will be interesting to see whether they learned the right lessons from what voters said about them in the last election. Hopefully, they will exert control over the radicals in their party. It should also be clear to everyone by now that the responsibility to call out the extremists, on both the left and the right, falls on all of us.