Excerpts:
"How much of a positive difference does fossil fuel energy make to environmental quality? Let’s look at modern trends in three key areas of environmental quality: water, sanitation, and air.
Here’s water quality—measured by the percentage of world population with “access to improved water sources.”"
"If you were to turn on your faucet right now, in all likelihood you could fill a glass with water that you would have no fear of drinking. Consider how that water got to you: It traveled to your home through a complex network of plastic (oil) or copper pipes originating from a massive storage tank made of metal and plastic. Before it ever even got to the distribution tank, your water went through a massive, high-energy treatment plant where it was treated with complex synthetic chemicals to remove toxic substances like arsenic or lead or mercury. Before that, the water would have been disinfected using chlorine, ozone, or ultraviolet light to kill off any potentially harmful biological organisms. And to make all these steps work efficiently, the pH level of the water has to be adjusted, using chemicals like lime or sodium hydroxide.
Natural water is rarely so usable. Most of the undeveloped world has to make do with natural water, and the results are horrifying. Billions of people have to get by using water that might contain high concentrations of heavy metals, dissolved hydrogen sulfide gas (which produces a rotten-egg smell), and countless numbers of waterborne pathogens that still claim millions of lives each year. It’s a major victory for any person who gains access to the kind of water we take for granted every day—a victory that fossil fuels deserve a major part of the credit for."Sanitation
Historically, the inability to effectively deal with our own bodily waste has been one of the largest threats to human health. To this day it takes an enormous toll on human life throughout the world. For example, cholera is a bacterial disease that is transmitted through the ingestion of food or water contaminated by human fecal matter. The toxin that these bacteria produce inhibits the body’s ability to absorb food and water, which can very quickly cause death through dehydration. Worldwide, over a hundred thousand people get sick from cholera annually. (Think about that when you hear environmentalists talk about “harmony with nature”—i.e., harmony with all our predators, their waste, and our waste.) But cholera has been all but eradicated in the industrialized world.
Here’s the big picture of sanitation—the percent of our world population with access to improved sanitation facilities, according to the World Bank.
"Note that as recently as 1990, under half the world had “improved sanitation facilities.” The increase to two thirds in only a few decades is a wonderful accomplishment, but a lot more development is necessary to make sure everyone has a decent, sanitary environment.
Part of the way we have solved sanitation problems is through the industrialized world’s ability to thoroughly sanitize any water human beings might consume using high-energy machines. Just as important, we have created entirely separate water systems to deal with sewage. Historically, a person’s sewer tended to be connected, at least in part, to his drinking water. This was rarely intentional, and early civilizations did construct sewer systems to isolate human waste, but natural, unrestricted water flows usually lead to a certain amount of mixing between the human waste and the nearest freshwater source—particularly as more and more people group together.
Today, sewage is not only kept separate from clean water sources, but it is also extensively treated to render its most dangerous elements harmless so that it can be disposed of safely, in some cases used as a fertilizer or even, thanks to the latest technology, turned into drinking water. The technology of sewage treatment is another advance made possible by industrialization, and it is yet another energy-intensive process for transforming our environment.
Want a more sanitary environment for people around the globe? We need more cheap, reliable energy from fossil fuels.
Air
Most of us have had the experience of sitting around a campfire when the wind changes direction and blows the smoke into our faces right as we take a breath. The resulting experience is unpleasant: a few sharp coughs, along with some stinging of the eyes and throat. For us, it’s a temporary annoyance. For billions of people around the world, it is an everyday experience.
Imagine if the only way you could avoid the danger of cold—historically, cold is a far bigger killer than warmth—was to light a fire in your house every day of the year. You could do things to reduce the amount of smoke you breathed in by using a chimney and opening windows (though at the expense of letting cold in), but the fact remains that you would be breathing in an enormous amount of smoke every day. For many people today, that’s the choice: breathing in smoky air, or going cold.
Today the idea of using a fire to routinely heat our dwellings is foreign to most of us. Modern homes are heated with advanced furnaces that heat air within a machine and then send the warm air to various locations in the house. The heating is usually done either via clean-burning natural gas, in which case the furnace has an exhaust system to remove any waste from the combustion, or with electrical heating elements powered by mostly faraway smokestacks (which themselves minimize air pollution by diluting and dispersing particulates higher in the air).
The combination of sophisticated machines and cheap, reliable energy has made the heating of homes such a trivial issue that most of us have never considered its connection to cleaning up the air we breathe every day. And yet natural-gas furnaces enable us to enjoy all the benefits of having a warm place to live with none of the downsides of smoky, toxic air that our ancestors would have endured for the same privilege.
All of these benefits apply, not just in heating our homes, but in cooking our food. Indoor pollution from primitive cooking methods is a major global problem, and using fossil fuels can help solve it.
We need to consider all these air-cleaning benefits when we consider the air pollution risks of fossil fuels.
And technology is making these risks ever smaller. Stories of rampant smog in Chinese cities bring fears that the situation will inevitably get worse there and in any other country that industrializes. Fortunately, our experience in the United States illustrates that things can progressively get better.
Here again is a graph of the air pollution trends in the United States over the last half century. In the image are total emissions of what the EPA classifies as six major pollutants that can come from fossil fuels. Notice the dramatic downward trend in emissions— even though we were using more fossil fuel than ever.
Source: U.S. EPA National Emissions Inventory Air Pollutant Emissions Trends Data. Graph originally appeared in The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.
How was this achieved? Above all, by using anti-pollution technology to get as many of the positive effects of fossil fuels and as few of the negative effects as possible."
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