Climate Corner: Not the end of the world

Jul 27, 2024

Rebecca Phillips

editorial@newsandsentinel.com

There is a lot of bad news out there; we’ve all heard it. So it was a surprise to read “Not the End of the World,” a recent book by Hannah Ritchie, lead researcher at Our World in Data. Without ignoring all the very real work needing to be done, she details ways in which we humans are getting it right.

At the most basic level, people are living longer than even a hundred years ago. Fewer children are dying. Fewer women die in childbirth. Regular bouts of famine are no longer the norm, as they were for much of human history. United Nations data show that extreme poverty is being reduced around the world. Alleviation of so much human suffering is good.

In earlier times, such poverty reduction came at an environmental cost. Agriculture brought deforestation. Industry brought pollution of air and water, problems that are with us still. Yet the air in most human-inhabited places is cleaner today than it has been for centuries.

How can this be? The answer is simple: cleaner fuels. Our species’ first fuel was wood, which releases more CO2 and particulates than any other substance used for heating and cooking. The adoption of coal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reduced deforestation, but descriptions of cities in those days generally include details about poor air quality. London, for instance, was called “the big smoke,” and the five-day Great Smog of 1952 is believed to have killed more than 10,000 people outright, with many more sickened. Difficult as it may be for some to believe, even the most polluted cities today have cleaner air than Louis XIV’s Paris or Victoria’s London.

It is not just smog that has decreased: Per-capita CO2 emissions have declined as well. Humanity’s total emissions have been rising (except for the pandemic reduction when fewer of us were driving), but per-capita carbon emissions peaked in 2012. As Ritchie notes, she, a city dweller with a climate-controlled home and all the electronic devices common today, whose work requires her to spend lots of time online with the data held in energy-guzzling data centers around the world, emits half the carbon her grandparents did at her age. Half. And she is not an anomaly. The same is true of a majority of the world’s people.

Why have the per capita emissions declined? Again, the adoption of clean fuels. In developing countries, the Clean Cooking Alliance has helped millions of households transition from cooking with wood or charcoal–dirty fuels responsible not only for massive carbon emissions but for respiratory illness and early death–to the use of cleaner, modern stoves. In the developed world, electricity generation is transitioning from coal to cleaner alternatives, among them solar, wind, hydro, and (arguably) nuclear energy, all of which have lower emissions of CO2, particulates, and a variety of noxious substances than coal does. In this century, the percentage of electricity derived from coal burning has declined from 55% to 20% in the U.S., in Denmark from 90 to 10%, and in the U.K. from 66% to 2%.

Not only are these alternative fuels cleaner-burning, they are now less expensive than either coal or natural gas when the total cost is considered. By 2019, electricity generation from onshore wind or solar photovoltaic was less than half the cost of coal plant generation or two-thirds the cost of natural gas. Clean technologies are now economic winners.

The good news, then: we are not doomed. Scaling up the adoption of our cleanest technologies will not drive societies into poverty. It will reduce our emission of CO2 and particulates, help to stabilize our climate, and improve human health at the same time. As the subtitle of Ritchie’s book states, we can be the first generation to build a sustainable planet.

***

Rebecca Phillips is a retired English professor, pollinator gardener, and member of Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action.