by Alex Epstein
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. Which is our next task.
7
REDUCING RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
THE POLLUTION CHALLENGE
Let’s recap where we are. We use cheap, plentiful, reliable energy from fossil fuels to transform our environment to meet our needs. This leads to a far longer, more opportunity-filled life—and, it turns out, far greater safety from, even mastery of, climate. And the same holds true for environmental quality in general. We don’t take a safe environment and make it dangerous; we take a dangerous environment and make it far safer.
But at the same time, we do create risks and side effects that can be deadly, and we need to understand them in order to set policies that will maximize benefits while minimizing risks. Like all technologies, fossil fuels have risks and side effects. When we transform those ancient dead plants into energy, bad things can happen.
Every time we use energy from fossil fuels (and from any other form of energy) we are engaging in a process that is filled with risk and that, if not managed properly, can become deadly. The process of producing energy can involve all manner of hazardous materials. For example, hydrofluoric acid, a vital material in certain kinds of oil drilling (and many kinds of mining) can literally travel through your skin and melt your bones.1 The process of producing energy, because it involves something that can generate enormous amounts of power, always carries the risk of the power going out of control: explosions, electrocutions, fires. And then the process of producing fossil fuels involves by-products that can be hazardous to our health.
Take coal, the fossil fuel with the most potentially harmful by-products. Energy journalist Robert Bryce describes our “intense love-hate relationship” with “the black fuel.”
Coal heated people’s homes and fueled the Industrial Revolution in England, but it also made parts of the country, particularly the smog-ruined cities, nearly uninhabitable. In 1812, in London, a combination of coal smoke and fog became so dense that according to one report, “for the greater part of the day it was impossible to read or write at a window without artificial light. Persons in the streets could scarcely be seen in the forenoon at two yards distance.” Today, two hundred years later, some of the very same problems are plaguing China. In Datong, known as the “City of Coal,” the air pollution on some winter days is so bad that “even during the daytime, people drive with their lights on.”2
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.
Figure 7.1: Decline in U.S. Air Pollution
Source: U.S. EPA National Emissions Inventory Air Pollutant Emissions Trends Data
How was this achieved? Above all, by using antipollution technology to get as many of the positive effects of fossil fuels and as few of the negative effects as possible.
I like to think about risks and side effects this way. When we are using a technology, we are transforming our environment to meet our needs, to achieve a positive effect. But that transformation can accidentally or inevitably lead to an undesired effect—a power plant exploding or some type of molecule that, in high enough concentration, fouls up the air. The way to deal with it is to use technology to transform risks and by-products into smaller risks and smaller by-products.
To see how this works, let’s take the fossil fuel that has historically and today been associated with the most environmental hazards: coal.
MANAGING BY-PRODUCTS AND RISKS—A UNIVERSAL CHALLENGE
Much of present-day energy discussion proceeds as if certain types of energy (fossil fuel, nuclear) are inherently dirty and dangerous and others (wind, solar) are clean and safe. But there is no limit to how much cleaner and safer fossil fuel use can be. For example, someday it might be possible to completely purify coal so that it generates no air pollutants and the materials that would have become air pollutants—nitrogen, sulfur, heavy metals—become valuable commodities. To a great extent, this is what we do with oil. What was once oil pollution dumped into a lake is now the basis for the plastic keyboard I am typing on.
At the same time, there is also no getting around the fact that every form of energy has risks—and every industry is responsible for managing them.
Consider the following story about the health and safety hazards of producing wind power. We think of wind as “clean” because there is no smoke coming out of the windmill. But in looking at any energy technology, we must remember that it’s a process, starting with mining the materials necessary for the machines all the way to disposing of them. And wind turbines require far more toxic materials than fossil fuels do—materials called rare-earth elements. These elements are “rare,” not in the sense that there are few of them, but in the sense that they exist in low concentrations in the Earth: it takes a lot of mining and a lot of separating of the desired metals from other elements using hazardous substances like hydrofluoric acid in order to get usable rare earth elements.
Here’s what this process looks like in a major facility in China—where most rare earths for wind power are mined. This dispatch is from reporter Simon Parry, who visited to experience a rare earth mine firsthand. As you read his account, ask yourself: Does this mean that wind power is dirty and immoral?
On the outskirts of one of China’s most polluted cities, an old farmer stares despairingly out across an immense lake of bubbling toxic waste covered in black dust. He remembers it as fields of wheat and corn.
Hidden out of sight behind smoke-shrouded factory complexes in the city of Baotou, and patrolled by platoons of security guards, lies a five-mile-wide “tailing” lake. It has killed farmland for miles around, made thousands of people ill and put one of China’s key waterways in jeopardy.
This vast, hissing cauldron of chemicals is the dumping ground for seven million tons a year of mined rare earth after it has been doused in acid and chemicals and processed through red-hot furnaces to extract its components.
. . . When we finally break through the cordon and climb sand dunes to reach its brim, an apocalyptic sight greets us: a giant, secret toxic dump . . .
The lake instantly assaults your senses. Stand on the black crust for just seconds and your eyes water and a powerful, acrid stench fills your lungs.
For hours after our visit, my stomach lurched and my head throbbed. We were there for only one hour, but those who live in Mr. Yan’s village of Dalahai, and other villages around, breathe in the same poison every day.
People too began to suffer. Dalahai villagers say their teeth began to fall out, their hair turned white at unusually young ages, and they suffered from severe skin and respiratory diseases. Children were born with soft bones and cancer rates rocketed.3
Does this mean the energy source this process makes possible is dirty and immoral? When I speak at colleges and students tell me that fossil fuels are “dirty,” I sometimes ask them that question without first telling them what kind of energy the story is talking about. Inevitably they say it should be banned. When I reveal it’s wind power, they protest, “No, just because something has problems doesn’t mean we ban it. Otherwise we would ban everything. We should look at the big picture and try to solve the problem.”
Exactly, I say. And we need to take the same
approach with fossil fuels.
USING TECHNOLOGY TO MINIMIZE, NEUTRALIZE, AND REVERSE POLLUTION
Coal as a fuel has many advantages: Modern coal technology can harness coal energy extremely cheaply, and it is available in enormous quantities in many regions of the world. One of its disadvantages lies in its natural properties. As a solid fuel of condensed biological origin, it includes a lot of materials that were part of the natural environment long ago and that are potentially harmful to human health, such as sulfur, nitrogen, and heavy metals.
Fortunately, thanks to technology, coal has been getting healthier and cleaner since the 1800s, and today places that are home to coal plants, such as North Dakota, also have some of the world’s cleanest air.
In the 1800s, coal was a major provider of energy for private households in Western countries, heating the stoves that were at the center of every home to cook and to keep the deadly cold outside. But it had a major direct health impact: the constant coal smoke indoors, which is almost always worse than any outdoor air pollution (although the coal stoves also led to plenty of outdoor air pollution). Urban areas were particularly affected, as they were the centers of industrial activity and at the same time densely populated. Pollution was visible as the smoke dampened the sunlight in the cities, darkened the laundry hanging to dry, and even blackened the trees with soot. Still, the energy from coal was so valuable that these side effects were more than tolerated. In many cases they were embraced.
Take Manchester, England, a major industrial city full of coal waste. There was no movement against air pollution in Manchester—even though its pollution makes China’s air today seem pristine.
Why not? Because, as one commentator put it, the smoke was an “inevitable and innocuous accompaniment of the meritorious act of manufacturing.”4 No coal meant poverty and starvation—something to consider when we tell poor countries to adopt impractical technologies instead of coal.
In Manchester, the smoking chimneys were considered “the barometer of economic success and social progress.”5 That is not to say that living in smoke is the goal. Manchester did not want and would not need to live in coal smoke forever, and neither will the poor countries now striving for energy, thanks to enormous advances in coal plant technology.
In 1882 Thomas Edison revolutionized the use of coal, both from the production side and from the pollution side, when he built the first commercial, centralized coal-fired electric power plant for New York residents, starting what is the primary use for coal today: the production of electricity.
The power plant, being centralized, away from most people’s homes, provided in-home power without burning the coal in the house. People went from burning coal in their home to getting power, almost by magic, from electricity that didn’t pollute at all. (One negative side effect of centralized power is that we are not taught to think about what’s “behind the plug”; many don’t realize that it’s “dirty” fossil fuels that make it possible for them to have clean electricity.)
Power plants also became progressively better at getting more energy from less coal, meaning less pollution (and lower energy costs).
One of the biggest problems coal can cause, particularly when paired with unfavorable weather conditions, is smog. As late as 1952, London experienced a massive air-pollution problem from a temperature inversion—a phenomenon that prevents particles from dissipating throughout the atmosphere and keeps them in dangerous, concentrated form. The particularly tragic 1952 inversion increased sulfur dioxide and soot concentrations all over the city, with a death toll estimated between four thousand and twelve thousand in a matter of weeks.6
Thankfully, technology has evolved greatly since then. Modern coal technology has many different means of reducing pollutants. There are filters like ceramics or fabric filtration systems to prevent undesirable substances from getting into the air; there are ingenious processes that use certain chemical agents, such as limestone, to bind pollutants and prevent them from escaping; there are mechanical devices like wet or dry scrubbers to separate out unwanted constituents; and there are many others.
Over time, these technological advances, as they became economical, became mandated by law. There is a whole controversial literature about which laws (federal or state) get credit, how much was industry’s profit-motivated pursuit of efficiency, and to what extent the laws overregulated pollution at the expense of access to energy. For our purposes the important thing is this: It’s clearly possible to increase fossil fuel use while decreasing pollution. And what applies to the most challenging fossil fuel, coal, also applies to oil and natural gas. This is a lesson that China can learn—and as it adopts more sophisticated modern coal plants, is starting to learn.
MINIMIZING DANGER
So far, we have discussed the challenge we face from the negative by-products that come from producing and using fossil fuels. But there is another category of risk: the danger of the energy itself going out of control.
On Deepwater Horizon—the oil rig that exploded in 2010, killing eleven workers and causing the BP oil spill—the energy went out of control.7 In creating massive amounts of power, there’s always the risk that we’ll lose control of the power. This can mean a nuclear meltdown, a massive fire at an LNG terminal, an explosion in a coal mine, a downed live power line, or even a flying windmill.
When energy goes out of control, you can both lose the energy (sometimes permanently) and often lose lives. Obviously we want to avoid this as much as possible. Fortunately, modern technology has made energy production much, much safer. For comparison, in the 1870s, according to Daniel Yergin’s The Prize, some five thousand people died annually in kerosene explosions from the lamps in their homes.8 Gasoline is more volatile than kerosene, yet we drive our cars without any fear of explosion.
One consequence of the improvements in safety is far lower fatality rates for workers. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, someone in oil and gas extraction is one third as likely to get into a fatal accident as someone in logging and one fourth as likely as someone in fishing and hunting. And this might surprise you: The fatality rate in coal mining is, thanks to a concerted effort to radically improve safety over time, even lower than that of oil and gas extraction. If trends continue, both industries will become safer still over time.9
In 2013, having read some of my writing, the vice president of a coal company in Kentucky invited me to go underground in one of the mines. I eagerly accepted. When I got there, I was struck by how proud the workers were of their safety practices and how worried they were that I would be afraid to be underground. I reassured them that I was well aware of the statistics and that “the most dangerous part of a trip to a coal mine is the drive there.” Statistically, that’s absolutely right.
Every mining accident is a tragedy, but it should not be exploited to misrepresent the truth that coal is becoming safer and safer.
THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT
The history of pollution laws consists of competing approaches to a challenging problem: how to protect the individual’s right to be protected against pollution while simultaneously recognizing his right to pursue a modern, industrial life along with the energy that life requires.
My view of the right approach is: Respect individual rights, including property rights. You have a right to your person and property, including the air and water around you. Past a certain point, it is illegal for anyone to affect you or your property. But—and here’s where things get tricky—it’s not obvious what that point is. Let’s look at two extremes.
One policy would be: People can pollute or endanger other individuals at will so long as they are viewed as benefiting “the common good.” This policy, encouraged by some businesses in the nineteenth century, is immoral. It says that some individuals should be sacrificed for the business and its customers.
Here’s another bad policy: Any amount of impact on air, water, and land should be illegal. This
is simply impossible by the nature of reality—for example, consider that perhaps our most dangerous emission, contagious disease, can often be transmitted through the air or other life forms in ways we cannot detect or prevent.
At any given stage of development, some amount of potentially harmful waste cannot be prevented. For example, the man who invented fire could not protect himself or his neighbors from smoke. Should he be prohibited from using fire? Obviously not, because the right to be protected from pollution exists in a context, which is the right to the pursuit of life more broadly. Fire was far more helpful to human health than it was harmful, and so it was the right, healthy choice to use it.
Energy is so valuable that throughout history people have been willing to tolerate what we would consider intolerable pollution because the energy impact was so positive. Fortunately, over time, technology makes it possible to create less and less harmful waste and to better deal with the waste still created. As we have more wealth, energy, and knowledge, we can have stricter pollution standards and even more minimization of harmful waste.
The role of government is to pass laws based on individual rights and standards set according to science and the current state of technological evolution. The job of industry is to continue that evolution.
If the government does its job, it achieves two great results: the liberation and growth of energy production and the progressive reduction of pollution and danger. Historically, that is the trend—and with better laws and technologies here and abroad, we can do much better.
Unfortunately, we are taught the opposite.
It is a common practice to attack fossil fuels by misrepresenting them as fundamentally or uniquely dangerous. This is what’s behind the current attack on fracking—hydraulic fracturing, part of the shale energy revolution I discussed in chapter 3.