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Every year on Earth Day, we’re supposed to reflect on all the ways we’ve made the planet worse — and pledge to be less bad next year, whether by buying a hybrid or biking to work.
Do the opposite this Earth Day: Reflect on all the ways we’ve made the planet better. Because despite all our eco-guilt, the planet has never been a better place for human beings to live.
Try this thought experiment:
Imagine that we transported someone from 300 years ago, at the very start of the Industrial Revolution, to today’s world. What would he think about our environment? Without question, his reaction would be one of disbelief; not that we had destroyed his pristine, natural world, but that such a clean, healthy environment was possible.
“The air is so clean,” our time traveler might say. “Where I come from, we’re breathing in smoke all day from the fire we need to burn in our furnaces and stoves.
“And the water. Everywhere I go, the water tastes so fresh, and it’s all safe to drink. On my farm, we get our water from a brook we share with animals, and my kids are always getting sick.
“And then the weather. I mean, the weather isn’t that much different, but you’re so much safer in it. You can move a knob and make it cool when it’s hot, and warm when it’s cold.
“And what happened to all the disease? In my time, we had insects everywhere giving us disease — my neighbor’s son died of malaria — and you don’t seem to have any of that here. What’s your secret?”
Read: America’s water crisis is way bigger than Flint
I’d tell him that one of the major secrets was energy, specifically energy derived from fossil fuels — oil, coal and natural gas. Though these fuels are derided as “old,” they are the fastest-growing energy source in the world (coal above all) because the fossil-fuel industry is uniquely good at producing cheap, plentiful, reliable energy on a scale of billions of people.
Fossil fuels power machines that allow us to transform our naturally hazardous environment into a far healthier environment. Most of the natural world is too hot or too cold, has too much rainfall or not enough. Then there’s bacteria-filled water, disease carrying insects, tornadoes, earthquakes and tsunamis, to name just few of nature’s other unpleasant features.
The climate impact of CO2 is real — but mild and manageable.
To master nature, we’ve drained swamps, reclaimed land, cleared forests, built roads, constructed glass and steel skyscrapers. We’ve irrigated deserts, developed fertilizers and pesticides, linked oceans — all of it in humanity’s incredibly successful effort to create a safer, cleaner, more habitable world. And we did most of this using machines running on cheap, plentiful, reliable energy from fossil fuels.
Read: It’s time to break free from fossil fuels
To be sure, using that energy has carried risks and created negative byproducts. All forms of energy do, such as the perilous mining practices used to generate the “rare earth metals” for windmills. But thanks to technology, we get better and better at minimizing and neutralizing risks, leading to record levels of clean air and clean water in the developed world.
But what about CO2? If we look at what has been scientifically demonstrated vs. what has been speculated, the climate impact of CO2 is real — but mild and manageable. In the last 80 years, we have increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from 0.03% to 0.04%, and the warming has been barely more than the natural warming that occurred in the 80 years before that, when there were virtually no CO2 emissions. The total warming during the last 160 years, natural and manmade, is about a degree Celsius.
Many prominent scientists and organizations predict catastrophe — for example, many claim that another half degree or degree warming will ruin us — but this is wild speculation and nothing new. Thirty years ago, John Holdren, who is now President Obama’s top science adviser, predicted that by now we’d be approaching a billion CO2-related deaths from famine. Instead, famine has plummeted as have climate-related deaths across the board. According to data from the International Disaster Database, deaths from climate-related causes such as extreme heat, extreme cold, storms, drought and floods have decreased at a rate of 50% since the 1980s and 98% since major CO2 emissions began 80 years ago.
Why?
Because while fossil-fuel use has only a mild warming impact, it has an enormous protecting impact. Nature doesn’t give us a stable, safe climate that we make dangerous. It gives us an ever-changing, dangerous climate that we need to make safe. And the driver behind sturdy buildings, affordable heating and air-conditioning, drought relief and everything else that keeps us safe from climate is cheap, plentiful, reliable energy, overwhelmingly from fossil fuels.
Read: How good intentions in Paris could lock in global warming
In sum, human beings have made the Earth a far, far better place to live for ourselves. We took a planet that didn’t give us a good standard of living and changed it into the safest, cleanest, most bountiful environment ever. And we keep getting better at it. That’s something to be proud of.
Alex Epstein is founder and president of the Center for Industrial Progress, a for-profit think tank, and author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels” (Portfolio/Penguin).
