Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Most of us have had the experience of sitting around a campfire when the wind changes direction and
blows the smoke into our faces right as we take a breath. The resulting experience is unpleasant: a few
sharp coughs, along with some stinging of the eyes and throat. For us, it's a temporary annoyance. For
billions of people around the world, it is an everyday experience.
Imagine if the only way you could avoid the danger of cold—historically, cold is a far bigger killer than
warmth—was to light a fire in your house every day of the year. You could do things to reduce the amount
of smoke you breathed in by using a chimney and opening windows (though at the expense of letting cold
in), but the fact remains that you would be breathing in an enormous amount of smoke every day. For
many people today, that's the choice: breathing in smoky air or cold.
Today the idea of using a fire to routinely heat our dwellings is foreign to most of us. Modern homes
are heated with advanced furnaces that heat air within a machine and then send the warm air to various
locations in the house. The heating is usually done either via clean-burning natural gas, in which case the
furnace has an exhaust system to remove any waste from the combustion, or with electrical heating ele-
ments powered by mostly faraway smokestacks (which themselves minimize air pollution by diluting and
dispersing particulates higher in the air).
The combination of sophisticated machines and cheap, reliable energy has made the heating of homes
such a trivial issue that most of us have never considered its connection to cleaning up the air we breathe
every day. And yet natural-gas furnaces enable us to enjoy all the benefits of having a warm place to live
with none of the downsides of smoky, toxic air that our ancestors would have endured for the same priv-
ilege.
Allofthese benefits apply,notjustinheating ourhomes,butincookingourfood.Indoorpollution from
primitive cooking methods is a major global problem, and using fossil fuels can help solve it.
We need to consider all these air-cleaning benefits when we consider the air pollution
risks
of fossil
fuels. Which is our next task.
