The underlying research is suggesting that air pollution is the primary cause of 1/6 deaths worldwide [1], and fossil-fuel air pollution specifically 1/15. I'm not sure it passes the sanity check (wouldn't we have noticed sooner?). If air pollution is really responsible for 1/6 deaths then we've got a massive low-hanging fruit to greatly improve our life expectancy and quality of life that we should take advantage to remedy with gusto! But—I would like to see the counters and follow up studies with more conservatively tuned variables to see if they've over-projected by an order of magnitude or more. Regardless, we should reduce air pollution, but the science should inform our level of resource allocation and intensity. If it's really responsible for 16% of all deaths, then resources at least equal to those spent fighting comparable sources of death should be spent eliminating air pollution.
Fossil fuels are the single greatest cause of everything that separates how we live today from how people lived at the beginning of the 19th century up to and including the huge surge in sustained human population.
Look to the Haber-Bosch process for just one example of this sustainability.
> There’s no free lunch. It came with side effects.
Yes, and it's largely positive since we have a much larger population that can actually survive thanks to the benefits across the board that fossil fuels have brought (mobility, agriculture, commerce, etc...). To reduce their negative side effects the first thing would be to get away from coal.
Yep. Haber-Bosch unleashed synthetic nitrogen used essentially in all of agriculture (worldwide). Certainly made it possible to feed the hug surge of people.
The world was already facing a fertilizer shortage which would have resulted in famine. That was the impetus for developing Haber-Bosh. The fact that petroleum is plentiful and cheap resulted (eventually, and in conjunction with other factors) cheap, plentiful, reliable food production no one at the time dreamed of.
How does that give you any perspective? A huge percentage of the air pollution in NYC is from the same couple dozen buildings that were grandfathered into not needing to meet air pollution laws, as well as things like construction vehicles and cruise ships, which are completely unregulated. There is almost zero relationship between the benefits from fossil fuel use and the deaths from air pollution due to fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels are responsible for a majority of our current heat and electricity generation as well as logistics for medications and emergency transportation.
We technically could transition, but doing so would be massively expensive (whether we went with nuclear or renewables), and some industries would simply not be cost effective or would be eliminated entirely.
The consequence of that cost is the stress of financial burden and a slower economy- leading to a spike in suicide and all manner of diseases that can be induced by such stress.
Alternatively, massive taxation and wealth redistribution schemes could be tried to alleviate the self-inflicted poverty, but it would require rewriting the laws and constitutions of many countries to do so effectively across the world, and there's no telling what the consequences of that would be.
> There is almost zero relationship between the benefits from fossil fuel use and the deaths from air pollution due to fossil fuels.
You don't actually get one without the other, and understanding the cost of the alternatives is how it is "put into perspective".
The bit about NYC was largely irrelevant, imho, to the rest of the discussion, given that the issue is far larger than one city's bad policies and lack of jurisdiction over cruise ships. Also, NYC isnt going to be going without construction vehicles anytime soon.
> You don't actually get one without the other, and understanding the cost of the alternatives is how it is "put into perspective".
The benefits of fossil fuels come from the energy output. The air pollution deaths come (mostly) from fine particulates. You could easily get the exact same set of benefits with like 99% fewer fine particulates.
>There is almost zero relationship between the benefits from fossil fuel use and the deaths from air pollution due to fossil fuels.
I think you'll find this is not true. Yes there are some low hanging fruit that could significantly reduce pollution but if you want the levels of production we enjoy today you are going to produce too much pollution. We are getting better, we are getting greener but this has been built on the back of extremely polluting industrial revolutions.
It's raining energy, and all we have are forks. It isn't all that easy to transition from a fossil fuel based economy to one that uses solar (direct) or wind (indirectly also solar).
The costs are substantial (though coming down quite a bit), the logistical problems plentiful and the grid that we have today is not well suited to decentralized generation, though that too is work in progress and improving.
I'm a pretty big fan of renewables, at the same time it is always good to be aware of the practical limitations of a technology.
Also, note that heating your house with renewables is a lot harder than say powering the lights or our low power tech demands. By the time you want to replace that oil/gas furnace or you want to power your baseboard heating system (quite common in the US) strictly with renewables it is suddenly not all that simple unless you are willing to pay a very substantial premium.
Seems that if reducing the amount of deaths involved with generating energy is the goal, nuclear energy is still the number 1 choice [0]:
> That’s right – even when including seemingly catastrophic incidents such as Chernobyl and Fukushima in the calculations, the math says that the amount of energy generated by nuclear is so vast that it more than outweighs these incidents over the long-term.
> The reality is that nuclear energy is much more comparable to renewables like solar or wind, in terms of safety. More importantly, it’s on the polar opposite of the spectrum from coal, which manages to kill 4,400 people daily in China alone.
These numbers are especially interesting when considering that nuclear seems to provide more energy (4.9%) compared to wind (<1%), solar (<1%) and hydro (2.5%) combined. Total deaths per 1000 TWh of wind, solar and hydro amounts to around ~2000 while nuclear amount to ~90.
Everyone would die sooner. You'd expect a 20% drop in life expectancy on average (that's using the massive gains in medicine etc we have already made using fossil fuels)
The rich in the West, would lose years, the poor would lose decades.
People don't cook with wood, which then kills them early, because the cooking is bad. The wood cooking extends their life, but if you could get them to coal power, then it extends their life more.
Also the research is BS, a lot of the air pollution deaths are not Fossil Fuels.
A lot, perhaps most, are renewables like wood smoke and dust and pollen and manual work that creates airbornes. I'd almost include smoking, since people need to know dust is the same as smoking.
Forbes also just ran a piece claiming California’s renewable energy push caused the recent rolling black outs . This new article seems better supported but the one on California was a pile of unsupported and even just false claims.
Like when it blamed jerry brown for being the cause of SONGS, the nuclear plant, shutting down. No mention of competitiveness or the years of repair need led or massive repair bill contributing, only jerry brown was the cause as far as the Forbes article was concerned.
But this article seems more based in reality, but coming from Forbes doesn’t help it. I just find it weird they publish opposite articles without any reconciliation or quality control on at least one of them.
I think talking about deaths is too binary when we are looking at air pollution, since I would imagine most of the deaths are from peope who have other conditions that air pollution is making worse, as opposed to things like car crashes where even very healthy people are killed. Looking at how much air pollution reduces life expectancy is a better measure, and is what they talk about in the study linked to by this article. According to the study:
Finally, we calculated to what extent LLE from ambient air pollution could be reduced by removing the avoidable anthropogenic emissions in our atmospheric model. We find that the global LLE of 2.9 (2.3–3.5) years (Table 1) could be reduced by 1.7 (1.4–2.0) years through the removal of all potentially preventable anthropogenic emissions and by 1.1 (0.9–1.2) years through the removal of fossil fuel-related emissions alone.
So they estimate air pollution from fossil fuels lowers the average life expectancy by 1 year worldwide. Pretty significant.
> So they estimate air pollution from fossil fuels lowers the average life expectancy by 1 year worldwide. Pretty significant.
There is also quality of life issues with things like asthma and lung disease. That's harder to quantify than excess deaths and years of life lost but very real. I also had the experience as a kid of living in LA for two years. There was something icky and gross about the air in LA compared to Santa Clara. Which itself wasn't great. So that's also real.
>So they estimate air pollution from fossil fuels lowers the average life expectancy by 1 year worldwide. Pretty significant.
Surely it doesn't need to be said that all of the industry facilitated by the fossil fuel use, raises average life expectancy by a lot more. I mean, we will do well to move beyond it, but this article saying it's "staggering" etc. is akin to saying that human activity vs. no activity causes staggering impacts.
> So they estimate air pollution from fossil fuels lowers the average life expectancy by 1 year worldwide. Pretty significant.
At the same time the opposite point can be made: fossil fuels have disproportionately increased life expectancy worldwide from pre-industrial levels, and made us able to sustain way more human beings on Earth.
Talking only about the negative aspects is only half of the discussion.
I think most people can agree that up until this point, burning fossil fuels have been a net positive. But as renewables get cheaper and more useful, at some point it becomes worth it to pay the cost of renewables rather than continue to have a ~1 year reduced life expectancy. So I think the most important comparison is renewables vs fossil fuels.
> But as renewables get cheaper and more useful, at some point it becomes worth it to pay the cost of renewables rather than continue to have a ~1 year reduced life expectancy
Why is nobody talking about nuclear though? The energy density of nuclear blows everything else out of the water, and so far it's been CO2 free for the most part and safer or at the same level of safety as renewables (btw there is no such thing as 'renewable' energy, it's an abuse of language).
Nuclear is dead because nobody is willing to pay for it. Building safe nuclear reactors is just a money thing. Disposing of waste is all about money. Decommissioning unsafe reactors is also just a matter of money.
Before you tell me that regulations are a waste of money think about the two easily preventable nuclear accidents we have already had in the past simply because the people responsible weren't willing to spend money.
Here is my advice. Build products (read reactor designs) that people are willing to buy today and you'll find lots of customers.
Kurtis Baute is actively protesting against pipelines by camping betwixt two trees. In the video he shares some envelope math on how many lives we'll lose from using the fuel that the finished pipeline would transport:
We really need to ramp up on nuclear. Either by building more traditional fission power plants, figuring out fusion, or capturing more of the energy from the giant, infinite nuclear reactor in the sky.
It's too late for nuclear. If the last 30 years had seen R&D anything like wind and solar we'd be in a much better place. And the battle for public opinion is lost.
Unfortunately, there's no time left for nuclear (fission), so the best we can do is jump on the renewables bandwagon.
People have been making that argument for at least 30 years; renewables have always been just a few years away from being cheaper than coal and obsoleting nuclear. I remain skeptical.
And the battle for public opinion is lost.
I also question this. Countering FUD about nuclear power seems much more feasible than the Green New Deal approach of trying to ram through trillions in spending and substantial lifestyle changes.
> renewables have always been just a few years away from being cheaper than coal
Because coal costs money wind farms are cheaper to operate than a coal plant and have been for many years. So then the question becomes is it cheap enough to offset the cost of building and installing the turbines? And in many places the answer to that has been "Yes" too for some time now.
Energy producers in the sector can profitably build and run an onshore wind farm in the UK on the expectation of being paid about £50 per MWh which is a pretty typical market price. If it gets much cheaper it starts to compete with the open market price for coal ignoring the price of a power plant to burn it, and staff to run the plant.
Natural gas is more competitive, because that's more efficient (more electricity for the same price of fuel), but it also doesn't cause air pollution deaths (it just drives climate change because it's shoving CO2 into the air) unlike coal which causes huge amounts of death and disease.
Also: I've seen several reactions in this thread that express doubt that it can possibly be this bad, surely if burning coal emitted poisonous fumes that kill people we'd have noticed. But We did that's why that coal power plant has big chimneys, when people first built large coal powered machines they discovered the fumes are incredibly toxic and began choking people and so they... built taller chimneys to send the problem further away. But the problem wasn't gone, it was just dispersed. 5000 people get lung problems in the surrounding counties instead of five people choking to death in front of your eyes.
"New CSIRO, AEMO study confirms wind, solar and storage beat coal, gas and nuclear"
I've seen stories like that for at least a decade as well. If true, then how is climate change not a solved problem? Build lots of solar and wind, decommission all coal and natural gas (and apparently nuclear), profit! Yet according to the most prominent environmentalists, we need massive new spending and regulations, and we'll have to significantly change our lifestyles and give up on the idea of economic growth.
The amount of curtailed energy produced by renewables is like a sad joke in Germany. It's not enough to deploy renewables, you also need to shut down the existing coal plants.
There's been much R&D, 4th gen coming. Third gen is ready. Public opinion is lost because of posts like yours, and it adds up in terms of costs. Millions of people dying every year from carbon burning power stations cannot wait for a 100% renewable cycle.
I really hope 4th gen succeeds since in high-population areas without much land for wind/solar it's badly needed. However the fact it's taking so long suggests there are serious challenges. For example, there is the neat idea of a fail-safe freeze-plug to stop a damaged molten salt reactor - but what happens next? The corrosive nuclear fuel needs to be safely contained for a long time or safely removed for re-processing.
It's taking long because it's absolutely taboo to even discuss these topics. We're suffering a series heat wave in California, power shutdowns loom, and we're asked to turn down the AC and don't use appliances. Sacramento voted to close a nuclear power plant not that long ago.
And the same people that complain about the power outages vote against the only reliable, carbon-free energy source we have now.
>...Unfortunately, there's no time left for nuclear (fission)
France was able to go from nothing to getting almost all of their electricity through nuclear in a couple of decades.
It is possible that we will be able to ramp up grid storage enough that we don't have to rely on natural gas to make up for the intermittent nature of renewables, but there is no guarantee that will happen.
Saying "it is too late" or "there is no time" for other options ignores the fact that we only have a fraction fo the grid storage we would need if we want to eliminate burning natural gas.
>...And the battle for public opinion is lost.
Even with a growing anti-science movement in the US, people are about evenly divided on nuclear power which is about a 5% improvement since 2016.
It seems like China could change this -- they have a dire need for vastly more energy as their per-capita GDP grows, and they are well aware of the problems caused in the big cities from burning coal.
Nuclear could provide far more power and improve air quality. The government could simply prioritize development of modern nuclear power without much worry about NIMBY pushback.
Is that a reference to these? "...The first new nuclear power plant to be licensed and begin construction in the United States in more than three decades." We've closed a few dozen plants over the same time.
Could you offer some insight into why you believe this is the case?
As someone in my 20s, I don’t think I know anyone who is opposed to nuclear. From my vantage it’s not clear why this would be considered a lost battle.
In my opinion, the biggest issue with nuclear energy is that you have to trust the competency of both the companies running the plants and the governments of the countries those plants exist in. The Fukushima disaster is a good example. The plant was set up to switch to backup power generators in the event of an earthquake, but those generators were located in basements that would flood in the event of a tsunami. Since a tsunami is usually caused by an earthquake, this was a bad plan. A Fukushima employee testified that the vice president of the company running the plant knew from a 2008 safety test that the sea walls were too low, but ultimately scrapped plans to improve the sea walls [1]. If this can happen in a country like Japan, how can we assume nuclear power plants in countries with struggling governments can be maintained safely? https://www.newsweek.com/fukushima-nuclear-plant-owners-face...
At that point the entire plant should have been shut down and decommissioned and a new one should have been built in its place. It would have been the one best investments in the entire history of the Japan. Fukushima is just a bottomless money pit now.
I think he's saying that research is far behind on fission because it hasn't been supported, and since it takes so long (and so much money) to spin up new plants, that it's better to invest that money into renewables.
That's the impression I got. I don't know enough about the specifics to say if I agree with it or not. The opposition to nuclear was so effective in the 70's and 80's that they shutdown any further development on it. That's probably why you don't know anyone opposed to it. It's not really even an option anymore.
How will renewables keep people warm all winter? Perhaps we could hope for a planet-scale superconducting grid, or a cheap way to make methane from sunlight, but those seem less practical than nuclear, which already works. Though it'd be nice if we poured more investment into "walk away safe" reactor designs.
Too bad we can't count the number of deaths which will result from each of our todays that we stall off on eliminating that death trap. Because it'll make that number into a rounding error.
1. No, that is huge in a vacuum. If there were a no-cost/no-tradeoff way to save 7% of deaths then it would be a huge priority.
2. Obviously, ending use of fossil fuels is nowhere near no-cost/low-tradeoff. So abandoning fossil fuels probably would not reduce deaths by 7%. Or possibly even cause a lot more death especially in the short term. But again, if it did, that would be a huge deal.
I tried looking up pollution from heating. Found one source that said PM2.5 from oil fired furnaces in New York creates 50% more PM2.5 than auto's, trucks, and buses. Also noted that even Nat Gas furnaces produce NOx.
That's probably not the right way to go about countering the argument. Nuclear is the real baseline power option right now. Most renewables don't have the continuous output capability needed. Enhanced hydro power and nuclear build out could help to move things in a better direction relatively quickly.
[1] 8.8 million per year in abstract: https://academic.oup.com/cardiovascres/advance-article/doi/1... over 55 million globally annually