Science

When we think about the climate crisis our minds often, quite rightly, go to how greenhouse gas emissions are causing the global temperature to rise, causing catastrophic storms, floods, fires, and hunger. We sometimes forget that burning fossil fuels is also the primary cause of global air pollution and its horrendous effects on health and mortality.

In 2021 more than 8 million deaths worldwide were attributed to air pollution. That’s roughly one out of every 8 deaths caused by air pollution. New studies show that about 61% of these are attributable to pollution caused by fossil fuels. That means that air pollution from fossil fuels kills close to 5 million people a year globally. Of course, the number of people suffering from asthma and other respiratory diseases caused by air pollution is much greater than that.

There are more than 250 million cars and light trucks that run on gasoline on the roads in the U.S. Every time a driver of one of those cars stops for fuel, what they pump into their tank is, by law, about 90% gasoline and 10% ethanol.

Ethanol is made primarily by grinding corn and then fermenting it. Corn is the largest crop in the U.S. Each year farmers plant roughly 90 million acres in corn–growing almost 14 billion bushels. Thirty percent of the U.S. corn crop goes into making ethanol for fueling vehicles.

In a sense, this is a form of solar power. Through photosynthesis the corn plant captures the sun’s energy and turns it into corn. However, it’s a ridiculously inefficient way to capture the sun’s energy for our use in transportation.

After lying to us for decades and continuing to expand the extraction, use, and export of fossil fuels when we need to be eliminating them altogether, the oil and gas industry has come up with yet another way to confuse the public and persist in their climate destroying practices–“carbon capture.” It would be great, of course, if we could pull large amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere, but current proposals to rely on the feeble, inefficient, expensive, existing technology for carbon removal as a key climate strategy, are disastrous and intentionally deceptive.

Forests do an excellent job of removing carbon from the atmosphere and we should preserve and expand them everywhere. On the other hand, current industrial carbon capture methods are “wildly expensive,” use a great deal of energy, and remove only “pathetically small” amounts of carbon. They are no where near to being a meaningful strategy for addressing the climate crisis.

The most rapid way to deal with climate change, and we do need to act rapidly, is to cut emissions by abandoning fossil fuels, increasing renewable energy generation, increasing energy efficiency, and reducing overall energy use. The problem is that the fossil fuel industry is using the idea of industrial carbon capture as an excuse to keep burning fossil fuels indefinitely, in increasing amounts.

António Guterres was born in Portugal in 1949. He studied physics and electrical engineering and then worked as an assistant professor. He left education to enter politics and in time became the Prime Minister of Portugal for 7 years. National public opinion polls later ranked him as the best prime minister of the previous 30 years. From 2002 – 2015 he was the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and in 2017 was elected the Secretary-General of the UN.

I’ve been fascinated by the power of his succinct statements on climate change. I am unaccustomed to hearing the truth and a positive vision stated so boldly by someone in a high-ranking official position. With the release of the latest IPCC report (March 20, 2023) he said,
“Humanity is on thin ice and that ice is melting fast.” He described the IPCC report as “a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every timeframe. In short, our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once.”