Fossil fuel companies only exist because consumers need and buy their products, and that includes Trevor Hancock and every environmentalist in the world. Cities depend on fossil fuels and use them every day, yet some B.C. city councils want to sue fossil fuel companies for producing a product that they cannot function without.
At the dawn of the 20th century, the population of 100,000 horses deposited 2.5 million pounds of manure and 60 thousand gallons of urine per day on the streets of New York. Imagine the stench, the flies, the windblown manure dust on hot summer days, the muck from rain running into the waterways. Imagine the health effect. It was a crisis for which there seemed to be no solution.
The solution was fossil fueled cars and trucks.
2023 the warmest year on record? Possibly. There is disagreement. But we do know without a doubt that prior to records being kept, proxy evidence tells us that temperatures were at times much higher. 1,000 years ago, the Medieval Climate Optimum was warmer, 6,000-7,000 years ago the Holocene Optimum was much warmer.
We’ve always had extreme weather events. But now hurricanes are slightly decreased, tornado damage and tornado incidence have decreased dramatically, a new satellite study of rainfall suggests that in the last 20 years the intensity of rainfall has declined a little in most places, new global data analyses suggest no trends in drought and declining flood magnitude in the last 120 years.
What has increased is doomsday media reporting every time there is an extreme natural event.
Humans emitted almost a trillion tons of CO2 in the last 32 years, yet global losses due to weather related damage are shrinking as a proportion of our economy. Deaths from weather related events have declined by 95 percent over the past 100 years while the population quadrupled.
Ocean acidification – not happening, at most there might be a very slight decrease in alkalinity.
Plastic pollution – Plastic is everywhere and there is no alternative to most of it. Most of the pollution comes from poor countries with low fossil fuel usage.
Air and water pollution have massively decreased due to fossil fuels (see horses).
Oil spills are relatively rare and the environment recovers.
Habitat destruction related to fossil-fuel extraction? How long would the world’s forests exist if we stopped extracting fossil fuels? A year?
Coral reefs are thriving, setting records.
We depend on fossil fuels. Without them, billions would die.
Art Betke
Prince George
