THE ENERGY EFFECT AND CLIMATE MASTERY - The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels - page 73

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THE ENERGY EFFECT AND
CLIMATE MASTERY
FOSSIL FUELS' MOST IMPORTANT CLIMATE-RELATED EFFECT
So far we have surveyed the evidence about the impact of the greenhouse effect and the fertilizer effect on
climate. Now we turn to a different question: How does the energy we get from fossil fuels affect the livab-
ility of our climate?
A theme of this topic is that energy is ability —because energy can help us do anything better. So if
we have more energy, all things being equal, we should be better at dealing with climate—at protecting
ourselves from or counteracting storms, heat, cold, floods, and so on.
How much better? And how is that offset by risks? Well, we need a way of measuring climate livability.
One way to approach this is to look at overall life expectancy and income—the leading indicators of
human flourishing. If our climate is a significant danger and has been getting more dangerous since cata-
strophic predictions began over thirty years ago, then its effect might show up; it certainly would if it had
reached catastrophe status. But as we saw in chapter 1, the more fossil fuel we use, the more life expectancy
and income we have.
But if climate danger was a growing threat that was at the earlier stages of a terrifying ascent, it wouldn't
show up in life-expectancy statistics yet. Where it would surely show up is in statistics that measure climate
danger specifically.
The best source I have found for this is called EM-DAT: The OFDA/CRED (U.S. Office of Foreign
Disaster Assistance and Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters) International Disaster Data-
base, based in Brussels. 1 It gathers data about disasters since 1900.
Here again is the graph from chapter 1that relates CO 2 emissions, the alleged climate danger,to the num-
ber of climate-related deaths, which reflects the actual climate danger. It's striking: as CO 2 emissions rise,
climate-related deaths plunge.
And to make matters better, in reality the trend is even more dramatically downward, because before the
1970s, many disasters went unreported. One big reason for this was lack of satellite data. Now we can see
the whole world, so we can track icecaps and disaster areas with relative ease. In 1950, if there was a dis-