Fossil fuels may be responsible for twice as many deaths as first thought | Hacker News Reader

Fossil fuels may be responsible for twice as many deaths as first thought

economist.com

44 pointsdynm10 comments

And people are still afraid of nuclear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Safety.

Rightly so. But, the science and technology is still progressing and I hope we can achieve a safe green energy.

Fukishima is still a disaster and it will take more time to shake that off and yet more time to understand the ramifications of it. (as with Chernobyl)

Did you read my link? Let me quote it for you:

With a death rate of 0.07 per TWh, nuclear power is the safest energy source per unit of energy generated.[164]

(This estimation takes Chernobyl and Fukusima into account!)

Wasn't Fukushima mostly a matter of short-term profit being prioritised higher than rule conformance by management and those managed? And then, when something random happened, the consequences were nuclear.

I think this is a wrong measure for something that is happening constantly. We can calculate excess deaths from Covid because we have base (a year before the pandemic), but we can't calculate excess deaths from fossil fuels because we don't have anything to relate to, anything changing.

Every person needs to die and so in a steady state world it does not matter whether we are using fossil fuels or not -- the number of deaths every year will be the same (ie. the same as births). So you can't really say there are any excess deaths because there is no excess we can measure.

What would be more useful is a measure of how much it impacts average lifespan and healthy years (ie. how many years you can expect to live in relatively good health).

It seems to me that responsible way to think about this sort of calculation would be to include something like QALYs lost due to premature death caused by fossil fuels on one side of the ledger, and QALYs gained due to cheap energy (supporting the development of advanced medical technology and food abundance) on the other.

It has always been a problem that the mental trick of weighing costs and benefits doesn't come naturally to human beings, but I've definitely been noticing it more and more during this era of COVID, wherein the idea of tradeoffs and cost/benefit, which should be central to any pandemic response, is rarely invoked.

As an estimate you can look at life expectancy before we used fossil fuels and compare them with after.

Since fossil fuels are the foundation of all modern technology that changed that life expectancy, from plastics to fertiliser to most medicines.

But Im sure, since fossil fuels like oil are now pretty much completely owned by China and Russia we may just get to find out what a world without them looks like, since neither are big on sharing right now.

Such a non-sensical argument. Every technology humans wield has consequences. We should also count all the lives saved and the billions of people lifted out of abject poverty, largely due to a web of modernity built on fossil fuels.

Of course, we should be pushing for cleaner energy sources that pollute less than fossil fuels, but the headline makes it sound like an unmitigated disaster, which is not fair.

> We should also count all the lives saved and the billions of people lifted out of abject poverty, largely due to a web of modernity built on fossil fuels

Nuclear could save all those lifes, too, without as disastrous consequences.

What about the billions that have been lifted out of poverty due to fossil fuels?

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