Indur Goklany is one of my favorite scholars on the interplay of people, resources, and our natural environment. Few are more thorough and careful to root their ideas in solid empirical research. And what his research reveals, again and again, is that people’s creativity is making the world a better and better place to live, not just for people but also for plants and animals.

In a day when Greens everywhere demonize people’s use of fossil fuels as imperiling the planet, Goklany demonstrates, in a recent article at WattsUpwithThat.com, that quite the opposite is the case. Here, condensed a bit, is a bulleted list of improvements particularly to the human condition that Goklany attributes at least in large part to our use of fossil fuels:

• Between 1990–92 and 2014–16, despite a global population increase of 35% (or 1.9 billion), the population suffering from chronic hunger declined by 216 million. Consequently malnutrition also declined. Since reductions in hunger and malnutrition are the first steps to better public health, age-adjusted mortality rates have declined and life expectancy has increased.
• Even in low-income countries, life expectancy, probably the single best indicator of human wellbeing, increased from 25–30 years in 1900 to 42 years in 1960 and 62 years today.
• People are not just living longer, they also are healthier. …
• Between 1950 and 2013, the average person’s standard of living measured by GDP per capita, increased from $2100 to $8200 (in 1990 international PPP-adjusted dollars)….
• More importantly, the global population in absolute poverty declined from 53% to 17% between 1981 and 2011. … Not accidentally, the most rapid reductions in poverty occurred in east and south Asia, the areas with the fastest economic growth, all fuelled by fossil fuels.
• Education and literacy, once the domain of the clergy and the wealthy, have advanced. Between 1980 and 2012, enrollment in secondary schools in low-income countries increased from 18% to 44%.
• The average person has never had greater and faster access to information, knowledge and technology to help them learn, adapt and solve whatever problems they face. Mobile (cell) phone subscriptions have risen from 0% of population in 1997 to 55% in 2013 in low-income countries, while Internet users rose from virtually nil to 7% of the population over the same period.
• These indicators reflect the very factors that enhance resilience and adaptive capacity, no matter what the threat. And as humanity’s vulnerability to adversity has declined, the negative consequences of climate and weather, in particular, have been reduced. Thus the more narrowly focused climate-sensitive indicators have, predictably, also improved. Specifically:
  • Global death rates from all extreme weather events have declined by over 98% since the 1920s.
  • Crop yields have improved steadily across the world. From 1961 to 2013, cereal yields increased by 85% in the least-developed countries and 185% worldwide, and show no sustained sign of decelerating, let alone reversing.
  • Despite population increases, which theoretically should have made clean water less accessible, the number of people with access to a safe supply has actually increased worldwide. Between 1990 and 2012, the population with such access increased from 75.9% to 89.3% (that is, by 2.3 billion additional people).3 Concurrently, an additional 2.0 billion people got access to improved sanitation.
• The global mortality rate for malaria, which accounts for about 80% of the global burden of vector-borne diseases that may pose increased risk under global warming, declined from 194 per 100,000 in 1900 to 9 per 100,000 in 2012, an overall decline of 95.4%.

And then he brings home the point:

The improvement in human well-being have been enabled directly or indirectly through the use of fossil fuels or fossil-fuel powered technologies and economic growth. This is because every human activity—whether it is growing crops, cooking food, building a home, making and transporting goods, delivering services, using electrical equipment for any purpose, studying under a light or going on holiday—depends directly or indirectly on the availability of energy (see below) and, in today’s world, energy is virtually synonymous with fossil fuels; they supply 82% of global energy used.

There’s much more in that article, and much, much more in his outstanding book The Improving State of the World: Why We’re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet.

 

Featured image by Clinton Steeds, Creative Commons, used by permission.