Fossil Fuel Combustion Kills More Than 1 Million People Every Year, Study Says (arstechnica.com) 151
An anonymous reader writes: Burning fossil fuels kills more than 1 million people ever year, according to a new study that examined the worldwide health effects of fine particulate pollution, also known as PM2.5. Coal, which produces sooty, particulate-laden pollution, is responsible for half of those deaths, while natural gas and oil are responsible for the other half. Some 80 percent of premature deaths due to fossil fuel combustion takes place in South Asia or East Asia, the report said. Because fine particulate pollution can be so easily inhaled and swept into the bloodstream, it is responsible for a range of diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, COPD, lung cancer, and stroke. More recently, researchers have found links between PM2.5 and other, less obvious diseases like kidney failure and Parkinson's. People who have experienced long-term exposure to PM2.5 are also at greater risk of hospitalization if they fall ill with COVID.
The researchers gathered monthly pollution and source data from 1970 to 2017 and ran it through a global air-quality model in conjunction with satellite data. The result was a global map of outdoor PM2.5 with a resolution of about 1 km^2. From there, they estimated the average outdoor exposure for people living in various parts of the world. The study was coordinated by the nonprofit Health Effects Institute, and its coauthors were Randall Martin, a professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering at Washington University, and Michael Brauer, a professor of population and public health at the University of British Columbia. In regions like South Asia and East Asia and some Eastern and Central European countries, coal causes a majority of the premature deaths that result from fossil fuel combustion. That's due in part to those regions' reliance on coal and because their regulations are typically not as stringent as elsewhere. In regions like North America and Western Europe, which are less reliant on coal, oil and natural gas cause the majority of deaths from fossil fuel-related particulate pollution. Even in the US, a country with relatively stringent clean air laws, fine particulate pollution from fossil fuels is responsible for about 20,000 deaths annually, according to the study.
The researchers gathered monthly pollution and source data from 1970 to 2017 and ran it through a global air-quality model in conjunction with satellite data. The result was a global map of outdoor PM2.5 with a resolution of about 1 km^2. From there, they estimated the average outdoor exposure for people living in various parts of the world. The study was coordinated by the nonprofit Health Effects Institute, and its coauthors were Randall Martin, a professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering at Washington University, and Michael Brauer, a professor of population and public health at the University of British Columbia. In regions like South Asia and East Asia and some Eastern and Central European countries, coal causes a majority of the premature deaths that result from fossil fuel combustion. That's due in part to those regions' reliance on coal and because their regulations are typically not as stringent as elsewhere. In regions like North America and Western Europe, which are less reliant on coal, oil and natural gas cause the majority of deaths from fossil fuel-related particulate pollution. Even in the US, a country with relatively stringent clean air laws, fine particulate pollution from fossil fuels is responsible for about 20,000 deaths annually, according to the study.
Viva Freddy Mercury! (Score:3)
Backfire, gasoline
Hydrocarbon with benzene
Guaranteed to kill a mill
Anytime
Don't know if that's good news or not (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Don't know if that's good news or not (Score:4, Funny)
Which is technically also from fossil fuel combustion :)
Re:Don't know if that's good news or not (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Don't know if that's good news or not (Score:4, Insightful)
Assuming, of course, the only alternative is giving up all energy and transportation.
Coal being replaced by nuclear and renewables or even natural gas (which while not great, does not pollute as badly as coal) makes a lot of sense. Renewable even has a much better possibility to enable independent living (a rural or suburban living scenario today could get enough panels and battery back up to go off grid in most geographies).
Obviously, we have a ways to go before combustion cars can be superseded, but we are making solid progress on that front.
No one is advocating 'back to the pre-industrial era, where we would have no hope to preserve the lives of so much of the population we have today'.
Re: Don't know if that's good news or not (Score:4, Interesting)
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Which is technically also from fossil fuel combustion :)
There will be more pedestrian deaths when silent electric vehicles become the norm.
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Re: Don't know if that's good news or not (Score:2)
Internal Combustion Engines likely save more than 1 million lives through ambulance trips to hospitals worldwide.
Besides, it's a made up number - in case anyone cares. There aren't 1 million death certificates that say cause of death "pollution"
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You were a fetus, too. Are you not a person? Hm.
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I am now, but I wasn't then.
That's not news. (Score:2, Informative)
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Your link isn't to a peer reviewed study, fwiw. Not really clear it would save that much money.
I wish CA would stop making so many wildfires (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't think I ever get any of California's fossil fuel exhaust, but wow, their wildfire smoke sometimes even reaches me all the way over in another state away. If California would get a handle on their overforestation problem, that would probably do a lot to help clean up their dirty air.
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My understanding is that fire smoke is less of a problem than fossil fuel smoke, because your body is better at filtering out the large particles. IDK though.
Also coal puts mercury into the air, which is a different element altogether.
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If California would get a handle on their overforestation problem
When you combine the general attitude that wildfires are bad and have to be extinguished as fast as possible with decades of environmental fanaticism that tries to block anything that someone wants to do to the 'wilderness' because it might affect the habitat of some species no one knew about until five years before, you wind up taking wilderness that evolved to require periodic fires to clear out excessive growth and, in some cases, enable replacement of burned vegetation and turning them into miles and mi
Re: That's not news. (Score:3)
Re: That's not news. (Score:2)
Saves live too (Score:2, Insightful)
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This article is about how many people it kills and why we should move from it ASAP.
As if people don't already know we need to stop burning fossil fuels.
There's one problem with this warning, we can't stop burning hydrocarbons. We can stop burning hydrocarbons from petroleum, but we need hydrocarbon fuels for transportation. Catalytic converters remove soot so thoroughly from engine exhaust that the air is cleaner coming out than it went in, it's devoid of oxygen but also devoid of dust, pollen, VOCs, NOx, and so many other things that are bad for us. Lots of CO2, not a lot of oxygen, p
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Re: Saves live too (Score:2)
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we need hydrocarbon fuels for transportation.
We need fewer and fewer over time. Electric vehicles are on track to be as cheap or cheaper to make than gasoline cars, and already require less maintenance and the cost to charge on residential power is cheaper than gasoline. True it sounds like the best bang for the buck is retiring coal power plants if you have to prioritize and/or the EV power demands would otherwise keep coal plants operating, but so long as you can reasonably do both, it seems a wise thing to do.
Tylenol overdose kills at least thousands of people every year
True, and actually a lot of the medic
Re: Saves live too (Score:2)
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Batteries are likely going to fall short of hydrocarbons in energy density for a long time -- not least because much of the "fuel" mass in hydrocarbon combustion is oxygen from the air. A stack of lithium batteries doesn't look so good compared to a gas tank and an air intake.
But electric motors are far more powerful than internal combustion engines per unit mass, so in a lot of applications (cars) you get that weight back. An ICE car has a light gas tank and a heavy engine; an electric car has a heavy batt
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While true, for the subset of applications where we don't get there with battery, I suspect hydrogen fuel will be easier and more practical before we are doing synthetic hydrocarbons. However in either case, we can probably accomodate those in more spsecial circumstances, getting the bulk of power generation and personal transportation off of fossil fuels would go very far even if use cases must use fossil fuels for now while we decide whether it's synthetic hydrocarbon, hydrogen, or electric for the use ca
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100% agree. It was time to get everything we can off of hydrocarbons 25 years ago. We can figure out the hard stuff on a case-by-case basis but there is zero reason to burn coal any more.
Re: Saves live too (Score:2)
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I don't think anyone has ever seriously claimed that oil is from dinosaurs, at least anyone with any understanding. Algae is considered more likely.
People also just comprehend the timelines involved, 100's of millions of years, long enough for the solar system to travel around the galaxy.
Not peer reviewed (Score:4, Informative)
This "study" is not peer reviewed, and has a lot of uncertainty (according to the study itself).
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Possibly, hard to say. The whole thing looks more like marketing material than science (entirely my opinion).
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I prefer an unpolluted atmosphere, it's way better. But if we're going to present data, it should be accurate. I oppose propaganda, even when I agree with the goal of those who push the propaganda.
anti-nuclear protestors (Score:5, Insightful)
Anti-nuclear activists have a lot of blood on their hands, and it will only get worse with climate change.
But they are too wrapped up in their self-righteousness and anti-tech paranoia to ever admit a mistake.
They are still protesting against GMO and pesticides, no matter how many millions would have starved.
Re:anti-nuclear protestors (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's a question of scale. Like every airplane crash is in the news, but the thousands of deadly car crashes per day aren't.
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There is at least one death from radiation from Fukushima. There is a large amount of limiting deaths from nuclear incidents to only those who die from acute radiation exposure by proponents of nuclear fission power. Consequently they are utterly disingenuous and in doing so hinder their case.
If you only are going to count those dying from acute radiation exposure then those dying from exposure to fine particulates don't count as deaths from fossil fuels either.
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If you only are going to count those dying from acute radiation exposure then those dying from exposure to fine particulates don't count as deaths from fossil fuels either.
Nobody is neglecting to count deaths from radiation exposure from accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima.
There were early estimates of potentially thousands dead from Chernobyl that in time never appeared, so the estimates had to be reduced. This kind of happened with Fukushima, they thought there would be a rise in thyroid conditions from the radioactive iodine but they didn't appear. Many children were examined, which resulted in a spike of early detection of conditions but that just meant early detecti
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So that's one person, not "people", which means it fails that test. It "made the news" in an Illinois newspaper I never heard of so, not quite some global event that would stick into one's memory. That's another failure. Then it's a maintenance diver that would appear to have drowned, not quite what one thinks of as a "nuclear power accident". I don't know, maybe he died of acute radiation poisoning. For that to happen he'd have to dive deep into the pool and bear hug a fresh from the reactor core fuel
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For that to happen he'd have to dive deep into the pool and bear hug a fresh from the reactor core fuel rod. That's not an "accident", that's "suicide".
It's unfortunately common for nuclear divers to die, it's a dangerous job.
Perhaps when you said "nuclear accident" you didn't actually mean accident, you meant something else. Maybe you should use a different word to describe what you mean.
Re: anti-nuclear protestors (Score:2)
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If coal/natural gas do in a million people per year, then coal/natural gas kill more people in any given HOUR than have been killed by nuclear power in all of history.
Now, admittedly, if we count the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs as "deaths caused by nuclear power", then your month figure would be in the timezone of correct...
Re: anti-nuclear protestors (Score:5, Insightful)
How can you deliver it on time and at a price that competes with renewables?
False question. It is not competing with renewables, but with coal and gas for baseload. And the answer is a carbon tax - make them pay for the pollution and health externalities.
This will help growth in renewables too. But right now, nuclear is far cheaper than storing the output of solar/wind for when it is needed. (in most cases)
You cannot beat hydro, if it is available, but very few countries have enough hydro capacity for everything.
However waste is managed, it will be better than dumping it into the atmosphere as we do for coal. Even dumping nuclear waste in the deep ocean would be far safer than fossil-fuel smoke stacks.
Anyway, you are shifting the goal-posts. Even if renewables meet all your dreams tomorrow, the anti-nukes did terrible damage over recent decades.
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Re: anti-nuclear protestors (Score:2)
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Re: anti-nuclear protestors (Score:2)
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Coal and gas can't compete with renewables, so they are going away. In Europe coal is going extinct for electricity production in some countries, like the UK and Germany. Germany has set an end date for coal based generation.
Even gas can't really compete. It will probably stick around to cover emergencies and rare occasions when other sources are not available and power cannot be imported, but that's about it.
Right now a new nuclear plant in Europe has a planned construction time of about 10 years, but typi
Re: anti-nuclear protestors (Score:2)
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How can you deliver it on time and at a price that competes with renewables?
How can we know renewables can be delivered on time and at a price that competes with fossil fuels? I can look up how it was done. We kept trying again and again until we got it right. We call this "development". We didn't get solar power right on the first try. Some could argue we still didn't get it right, and we may never quite get solar power right either. We just keep building different variations on the theme until we find some balance of costs to benefits. Because different uses call for diffe
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Have you offered your town as a nuclear waste storage dump as yet in response to Biden's request? They are crying out for sites.
Yes. In fact there is already a nuclear waste site not far from me. I believe that there are already plans to truck in more waste there.
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Anti-nuclear activists have a lot of blood on their hands, and it will only get worse with climate change.
People also protest natural gas pipelines, even if that gas is used to replace coal. And they protest hydroelectric dams. And transmission lines.
A lot of the people who call themselves environmentalists deserve climate change.
Once again you need to solve a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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You've touched on a number of interesting questions there. Too many for here :)
I don't know much about safety regulation of private companies in the US, so the short answer is, Why do you need private companies?
Worldwide, nuclear power plants are largely publicly owned.
Rather than getting bogged down, my point relies on the simple observation (with the benefit of hindsight, yes) that nuclear has a far, far better safety record than fossil fuels. Even with Fukushima and Chernobyl. And if you are counting Che
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And exactly how is the Banqiao Dam disaster an ongoing problem today? Was it even a problem 10 years after the disaster? Now compare that to Chernobyl and Fukushima which continue to be problems years after the event and will continue to be problems for decades and centuries to come. That's the difference when an event at a nuclear plant occurs you are dealing with the after effects for hundreds of years to come.
The problem is failure state (Score:2)
As for why we would let private companies run nuclear power plants Americans have a strong distrust for go
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Only this month former residents of the area around Fukushima were allowed to return for an overnight stay. Older residents only, it's still not safe for children.
I've lost count of how many attempts have been made to decontaminate the area now, last count was 5 but each time it fails and has to be repeated. Of course at this point many of the communities are no longer viable, too many people have left and there are no amenities like shops and clinics, certainly no jobs.
Meanwhile the shiny new reactor that
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The Fukushima disaster was not caused by 'running nuclear power plants far past their safe lifetime'. It was caused by building the plant in a tsunami-prone area without adequate protection against tsunamis. Specifically, they had all of their emergency generators in a single location, and the flood took them all out.
I don't know how this happened: what the factors were that led to such an oversight. I do know the nuclear power industry is already regulated to within an inch of paralysis in an effort to rul
The plant was vulnerable to a once in a 100 years (Score:2)
Re: Once again you need to solve a problem (Score:2)
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Specifically how do you keep private companies from running nuclear power plants far past their safe lifetime?
The same way you stop government from shutting them down before their safe lifetime. Stop electing morons.
Yeah, I know there are only morons to choose from. That is a bigger problem than climate change.
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Do you think a government-run nuclear power plant would be better? Like Chernobyl? Like Hanford?
You do know it's 'the government' that regulates all the private ones don't you?
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Hanford wasn't a power station, it was a plutonium production and fuel reprocessing facility. PUREX uses some very nasty chemicals.
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And in which country, where people starved before, do they have GMOs? Or more precisely, which GMO food is grown where and is cutting down on starvation?
Re: anti-nuclear protestors (Score:2)
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There are not many countries where farming GMO food is legal.
So that distributed grain must be from the USA.
No idea how much GMO grain the USA is "distributing" to Africa. Is that another life bio experiment :P ?
Re: anti-nuclear protestors (Score:2)
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The trouble is, who is going to be an advocate for nuclear? The green movement is largely against it for ideological reasons. Big energy isn't interested in developing a technology that could deliver cheap and plentiful energy and make their current stores of fossil fuel worthless. Renewable proponents don't want it, because cheap base load generation would significantly reduce demand for their products.
The only people who can advocate for nuclear is the nuclear industry, and they have been so tarnished by
Re: anti-nuclear protestors (Score:2)
The whole picture (Score:4, Interesting)
Diarrhea causes 1.6m deaths (Score:4, Interesting)
As of 2016, diarrhea causes 1.6m deaths. And there's no upside to diarrhea, unlike fossil fuel combustion.
https://www.infectiousdiseasea... [infectious...dvisor.com]
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The wrong people are killed (Score:2)
Generally the poor are killed, they do not have much influence and so little is done about it. Belching power plants are not built near where the rich live.
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Generally the poor are killed, they do not have much influence and so little is done about it. Belching power plants are not built near where the rich live.
I believe you have that backwards. The houses that cost least are built in the lowest cost land. That's going to be near the power plants, the railroad tracks, airports, and so on.
I'm reminded of some guy with more money than brains that wanted to get the US Navy to stop shooting off their cannon at the first and last formations of the day, a ritual that has been going on at that base for something like 300 years. He made complaints on how it interrupted his day, and suggested firing off the cannon one d
Re: The wrong people are killed (Score:2)
How many would die if we stopped? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How many would die if we stopped? (Score:4, Informative)
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Obviously the answer is that it depends on if you give them an alternative.
Realistically we will never completely stop burning stuff. We just need to get to a point where the emissions are offset by capture, and where the burning we did is controlled do it doesn't harm human health.
The other side of the equation (Score:5, Insightful)
Fossil fuels have allowed us to emerge from a primitive societies where most people lived in constant fear of starvation and all kinds of medical conditions. They have really improved and probably extended our lives. In the time we've started using fossil fuels human life expectancy has risen not fallen. This is not entirely coincidental.
I'm all for non-burning alternatives, but let's not forget what fossil fuels have enabled, cause if we do we risk losing the benefits together with the risks,
Re:The other side of the equation (Score:5, Insightful)
Natural gas and ... (Score:2)
It's sort of like compiling statistics for deaths due to marajuana and Fentanyl use.
How can they tell the difference? (Score:2)
Most PM 2.5 pollution from motor vehicles is actually not out the tailpipe it comes from brakes and tires. If they are just looking at a map of where things are and doing extrapolations how can they tell the 2.5 contributions?
Also natural gas produces very little PM 2.5 if your not completely incompetent so why that is thrown in makes little sense.
If you're going to evaluate secondary mortality (Score:2)
If you're going to evaluate "secondary" mortality, as opposed to "primary" mortality such as people killed on an oil rig, then you need to do it in both directions. You need to look at all the life-saving technology made possible by fossil fuel combustion. Rescued by helicopter? Fossil combustion. Ambulance got there in 5 minutes? Combustion. High energy society in general, powered by fossil combustion, brings us so many life saving and prolonging technologies that it's difficult to evaluate. Living
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Hmm... Your sig. Is it intentional that you said "for all intensive purposes" rather than the actual expression "for all intents and purposes"? A wry comment, or a mistake?
So? (Score:2)
That indicates poor design of whatever is burning the fuel.
Meanwhile, poverty leads to vastly more deaths, and that's what we will have when they eliminate fossil fuels.
Meh... something gonna kill you regardless (Score:2)
The big problem with all of these studies is, they never take into account how many of these predicted deaths were with folks who already had major health problems. If fossil fuel pollution is killing a lot of people with drastically reduced lung capacity (say, from decades of cigarette smoking?), or people with other respiratory issues to start with? It seems rather ingenuous to pretend all those lives would really be "saved" if we eliminated the fossil fuels.
I mean sure, you'd be able to statistically cla
Modern farming ... (Score:2)
Only fossil fuels currently have the energy density necessary to power agriculture and its processing and transportation to market. People died in Texas last year because the heating system used to prevent the icing of the natural gas lines was powered by solar and wind power.
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People aren't saying the 'right' answer is to forgo our technologies, people are simply highlighting the importance of alternative safer ways to get there. Of your use cases, we are well on track for being able to do all of them without fossil fuels except flight.
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You can keep people alive in the cold with electric heat pumps.
You can cook food with an electric stovetop.
You can drive to a hospital in an electric vehicle.
You can generate electricity with solar panels, wind turbines, nuclear reactors, or geothermal sources, none of which pollute the air to any appreciable degree.
Aviation is harder. We're likely going to need to keep using chemical fuel for that for a while.
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Re: And it also saves 100's of millions of lives (Score:2)
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Obviously they aren't saying to forgo energy, but to pursue alternatives.
On the shutting down nuclear plants, I have a different thought, we should be spinning down the 50 year old designs but phasing in more of the modern designs. Nuclear energy can be far safer and produce far less problematic waste than our typical nuclear power plant does, but we can't deny that the 50 year old designs have flaws that make it reasonable to be looking elsewhere.
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Since over 30 years most certainly not half of Europe
Re: Old age kills (Score:2)