Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Sources: EM-DAT International Disaster Database; World Bank, World
Development Indicators (WDI) Online Data, April 2014
If we look at year-to-year data, there is a dramatic difference between the heavy fossil fuel users and
the light fossil fuel users in climate-related deaths—you are much, much safer in an industrialized country.
This has a fairly obvious application: If you care about safety from climate, shouldn't you be encouraging
rapid industrialization? Which today means encouraging fossil fuel use.
We can see that spikes from events like a major storm in one country increase the short-term volatility
in the data. This reflects the nature of weather. The blue G7 nations are nevertheless much safer places,
despite including disaster-prone nations with high population numbers, like the United States and Japan.
Shouldn't fossil fuel energy get some credit here?
To give you one particularly astonishing data point, the database reports that the United States has had
zero deaths from drought in the last eight years. This doesn't mean there are actually zero, as the database
only covers incidents involving ten or more deaths, but it means pretty near zero. Historically, drought is
the
number-one climate-related cause of death
. Worldwide it has gone down by 99.98 percent in the last
eighty years for many energy-related reasons: oil-powered drought-relief convoys, more food in general
because of more prolific, fossil fuel-based agriculture, and irrigation systems.
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,
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And yet we constantly
hear reports that fossil fuels are making droughts
worse
. These reports give credibility to climate-predic-
tion models that can't predict climate, but no credibility to the plain facts about how important more en-
ergy is to countering drought.
There is one more point to be made about the 29,404 deaths in 2013. Climate is no longer a major cause
of death, thanks in large part to fossil fuels.
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By contrast, there are 1.3 billion people with no electricity,
