How many thousands get to not die because of use of fossil fuels? Just for perspective...
Look to the Haber-Bosch process for just one example of this sustainability.
There’s no free lunch. It came with side effects.
Or... Haber-Bosch made it possible to have that huge surge in people?
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.
Typically you don't make plans for the future by assuming nothing ever improves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] http://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/PressBriefings/Pages/MEPC-...
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.
[1] https://phys.org/news/2020-08-black-silicon-photodetector-ef...
At least I wondered about how this could be applicable to mass produced solar panels when I read it. Dunno. Maybe in 20 years?
> 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.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-safest-source-energy...
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.