I first came to Kenya in 2005, 27 years old, as a part of my master project for Chalmers University of Technology. They had allowed me to start my master project early because of how very motivated I was. Once here, it immediately started changing my perspectives. Since then, it’s like a whole new universe has opened up in my mind… I really recommend it to anyone! For the first time, I could look at my own Western culture from the outside, and that’s the only way you can really see it. “I can imagine fish have no word for ‘water’”, as Terry Pratchett had a character say, in his book Small Gods. One major thing that I thus came to realize about my culture is this:
We have forgotten that money means lives!
In Sweden, we look down on money as something filthy and corrupting, I came to see. To us, it’s a matter of how many cars you can have, and how often you can buy a new mobile phone. Things to brag about to your neighbors, making them jealous. But “money can’t buy you happiness”, we say. I once told a Swede that in Kenya, they truly believe that it can, and the Swede annoyed me a bit by expressing ridicule for the silly Kenyans… But who is silly, really? Because for the great majority of people in the world, money is not about cars and mobile phones!... It’s about how long you live, and how many children you lose.
On Our World in Data, you can see an amazing animated map of how life expectancy has changed in the world over time, all the way back from 1543 (although it was only the UK that apparently collected such data at that time). The color codes start from 20 – 30 years, and amazingly, as late as the 1950s, several countries in especially Africa were still in this category! Many more were in the 30 – 40 years category, as were both Sweden and the US back in the 1800s:
Here is a chart with some of the countries, as well as the world:
We can see that the US was a good half century before the world in surpassing a life expectancy of 50 years. Then, Japan caught up with them and surpassed them, despite their disastrous dip of the atomic bombs in WW2. India and Kenya are slightly behind the average but coming strongly. Kenya has a tragic recession from what I assume is HIV/AIDS starting in 1991, and when I first came here in 2005, life expectancy was still below 55 years, which I remember shocked me and grieved me. Little did I imagine what a remarkable recovery she was to make in the one and a half decades that followed!
The interesting thing about this chart is that, apart from the blows from such things as the atomic bombs and HIV/AIDS, it could almost have been a chart over CO₂ emissions, couldn’t it? The two look almost the same! Rising at almost the same time, in almost the same rate…
Our World in Data also has a report called:
The world’s energy problem
Without cheap, safe, low-carbon energy sources at scale we are stuck between the alternatives of high greenhouse gas emissions and energy poverty
Here is a quote from the summary:
Here is one of the graphs from the report, showing the correlation between CO₂ emissions and GDP:
And here is a part of another image, showing the link between GDP and Life Expectancy, as well as with Child Mortality:
The correlation is quite undeniable, isn’t it?
But when talking with especially the Green Party members in Sweden, where I have many friends since I was a member there myself for 18 years, they often categorically deny that the burning of fossil fuels has had anything to do with this extraordinary and unprecedented boom in life-length seen in the past few hundred years. They say that it’s the discovery of penicillin and other modern medicine that is behind most of it. But tell me, how would that explain the above differences between the countries then? Isn’t penicillin equally discovered in Kenya as it is in the US, yet Kenyans still live 15 years shorter? Why do 21 countries still have a life expectancy below 60 years, and why are almost all of them in Africa? The bottom record is held by Central African Republic, with a life expectancy of only 51 years.
To put it in yet another way, here is a screenshot from an excellent presentation called “200 Years of Global Change” by Hans Rosling, the famous Swedish “statistician entertainer”, at the IPCC’s release of their 2013 report AR5, in Stockholm:
He shows the population from the poorest billion on the left to the richest billion on the right. Then, underneath, he has put how much energy each billion utilize in a year, and of what kind. The black blocks are fossil carbon fuels, coal, oil etc. Purple is nuclear energy, green is biofuels and orange is solar and wind power. “The halo of the rich”, as Rosling commented when placing this tiny little block on top of the richest billion’s stack. Over the energy blocks, Rosling then places seven white blocks symbolizing the seven million children under the age of 5 dying each year. (I can console you that this number has gone down significantly since then. It’s now “only” around 5.5 million per year (although even this number puts the <3 million COVID-19 deaths in a new perspective, doesn’t it?).) As you can see, the child deaths make a curve exactly mirroring the energy consumption curve. Rosling’s comment, at timestamp 16:24 in the video is:
“If you burn coal, you save children. Did you hear?... You burn coal – you save children.”
His words, not mine. Worth noting is that the late Hans Rosling was a firm believer that climate change was a major threat to humanity, and his presentation starts with him praising the new IPCC report. He thus draws this conclusion about the use of fossil fuels and child deaths very much in spite of his personal conviction on climate change, not in line with it. These are the best conclusions, since if at all he is biased, his bias would be directed the other way and thus couldn’t be the cause of this conclusion, as is otherwise so very common in the world.
Just the other week, one of my Green Party friends posted on Facebook a link to some article claiming that the combustion of oil was behind some 20% of all deaths in the world. I commented that this was a greatly unfair way of putting it, as the same oil had also saved so many especially children’s lives, and expanded our life expectancy so much. In fact, how many of those people that the oil allegedly killed would have even been alive at that time, if it hadn’t been for that same oil? How many would have died decades earlier, or not even been born, as their parents would have died before the age of 5? The poster found this too dumb to even respond to (he later revealed), but another Green Party friend of ours picked up the ball and said you can’t reason that way. It wasn’t the oil in itself that saved all those people, it was just the energy. If the energy had come from some other source, the positive effects would have still happened, but without the negative effects that the oil brings.
And of course, I had no objections to this! If the energy had come from some other source, the positive effects would have still happened. But first of all, this does not take away the fact that it still was the oil (and the coal and the gas) that did bring about these positive effects, in the real scenario that actually happened. The “other energy source” scenario is interesting but hypothetical. It didn’t happen that way. So to fairly gauge the effects of fossil fuels on human health, we must evaluate the different aspects by themselves: How much energy do they bring? How easily accessible is the energy? How much does it cost? How practical is it to handle? How clean is it? And how many lives does a certain amount of accessible, cheap and easy-to-handle energy save? How many lives does the pollution take? I haven’t made careful calculations on this, but just looking at the charts above, as well as Rosling’s presentation, it is clear without a shadow of a doubt to me that fossil fuels have saved a great many more lives than they have taken, and that they still do. If you burn coal, you save children.
(It’s funny to remember what a novel thought this was to me, when some probably right-wing sympathizer first pointed it out to me some two decades ago… He said that most things had actually become better and better in the world in the 1900s. Poverty had reduced and health and life-length improved, etc. So how bad could the oil be?... I almost doubted this, at first! In my world-view, people were living shorter and shorter because of environmental destruction and pollution, and they were becoming poorer and poorer because of oppression and inequality in the world… This was the impression I had gotten from my leftist and environmentalist parents and friends. But I looked into the data, and slowly, little by little, I came to accept it. I still want to limit pollution mind you! Especially since much of it accumulates. Thus with time, the bad effects increase more than the good effects. But I had to change my perspective that industrialism was an almost pure evil, to that it was actually an immense and almost pure blessing.)
My second objection to the “other energy source” scenario must be that even if we could go back in time, say, and with our current knowledge about the dirtiness of oil and other carbon fuels try some alternative energy source, it is far from certain that this would even work. The Green Party friend promoted wind power as a great alternative “more reliable than nuclear energy” etc (which he justified in a very funny way). Well, Elsa* has already, in other parts of this book, talked about wind power and its environmental and health problems. In the context of poverty and life-length however, the most important aspect of it is probably that it fluctuates all the time. Every hour and every day, the output from wind power is different from another hour and another day, not just for the single plant but also for all of Sweden, for example. This is, of course, an impossible situation for any kind of industry. Thus, industrialization could definitely not have happened the way it did, with just swapping fossil fuels for wind power! For industrialization to be able to work on wind power alone, we would need techniques for energy storage and power transmission over large distances for smoothing of the fluctuations, that even today are not invented.
But let us leave the past: Could we transition to a renewable-energy based industrialism from this day forward? And could those countries that are still hustling on a life expectancy of some 50, 60 years do the rest of their much desired life-length expansion and child death reduction based on these new energy sources? Well, we would hope so, wouldn’t we. But fact remains that these techniques are not there yet. Don’t get me wrong, I’m doing my best to spread the biogas technology here in Kenya! This already has the potential of saving many lives here in a short time. Just the smoke from cooking fires with firewood and charcoal is estimated to kill some 22,000 Kenyans every year, many of whom are children. (COVID-19 has now killed around 2,000 Kenyans as of 28 March 2021, just as a comparison. The population is 50 million.) Biogas burns without smoke or soot and is thus harmless for the lungs. It also gives an excellent organic fertilizer which preserves the soil, and since it takes much less time to maintain the digester than the collection of firewood takes, it can give especially women the chance to find some form of income, thus reducing poverty. Solar panels are also big here, especially in such remote areas where no power grid is expected in yet another 10 or so years. This helps children study in the evenings – another very important factor for reducing poverty. And money means lives, as we recall.
But all of this is still on a low level of development. What really boosts GDP and thus life length is large-scale industrialism, and as stated, this cannot yet be achieved on solar and wind power, and certainly not on biogas, since there just isn’t enough feed material around to produce enough biogas for this. Biogas is great for household solutions and small businesses, but not a solution for industry. Millions of brilliant engineers are out there right now working on solutions for a future industry based on renewable energy, but let’s face it:
With every year that industrialism and economic growth delays, children die. Young and middle-aged people die.
I’m a stout environmentalist. I love nature and I care for the world. I changed my entire life once to save it, when moving from Sweden to Kenya. But our ambitions to save the world should not be based on lies. Don’t tell me that the combustion of oil takes more lives than it saves, when this is not true. Don’t tell me it’s a piece of cake; we can just do it all on renewable energy instead, when the necessary techniques for this, despite our best efforts, are not yet invented.
And we may never invent them. It is possible that the golden age for humanity has already passed. When we finally do run out of fossil fuels (and rare metals and other finite materials that we use), it is possible that our industries will be less economical and efficient all over, and that life will be harder and shorter again as a result. We may never reach the era of Star Trek, and whatever we might want to believe in this regard is irrelevant. In the meantime, let us boldly look with open eyes at what we do know. Which is that fossil fuels save more lives than they take, certainly before we factor in climate change. So many of my friends and former political colleagues – as well as celebrity Greta Thunberg – talk as if it is just sheer stupidity that stops people from simply ending the use of fossil fuels, right now! Greta pronounces the words “money” and “economic growth” in her speech to the UN as if they were the dirtiest words she knows. (But at least she refuses to believe that her audience is evil, which is sweet of her!) Well, here’s the news for Greta and all of her Western World followers:
People are neither evil, nor stupid. They just want to live, that’s all. And fossil fuels save lives. Look no further: This is the reason why it is so hard to give up fossil fuels, even though most leaders now say they want to. Even if we believe that climate change might lead to disasters some time in a distant future – which I personally don’t – it would still be extremely hard for the people alive today to want to sacrifice their own lives, and the lives of their own children right now, for the sake of some other children some time in the future.
It would help us all if my fellow environmentalists would follow in Hans Rosling’s admirable footsteps and just accept this, the tremendous upside of the fossil fuels. Without necessarily giving up their criticism of them in other respects! From there, we could start discussing the best way forwards. A discussion based on reality, not on some hypothetical alternative scenario that may sound ever so pleasant, but which isn’t real.
 |
We can see that the US was a good half century before the world in surpassing a life expectancy of 50 years. Then, Japan caught up with them and surpassed them, despite their disastrous dip of the atomic bombs in WW2. India and Kenya are slightly behind the average but coming strongly. Kenya has a tragic recession from what I assume is HIV/AIDS starting in 1991, and when I first came here in 2005, life expectancy was still below 55 years, which I remember shocked me and grieved me. Little did I imagine what a remarkable recovery she was to make in the one and a half decades that followed!
The interesting thing about this chart is that, apart from the blows from such things as the atomic bombs and HIV/AIDS, it could almost have been a chart over CO₂ emissions, couldn’t it? The two look almost the same! Rising at almost the same time, in almost the same rate…
Our World in Data also has a report called:
The world’s energy problem
Without cheap, safe, low-carbon energy sources at scale we are stuck between the alternatives of high greenhouse gas emissions and energy poverty
Here is a quote from the summary:
“The energy problem that receives most attention is the link between energy access and greenhouse gas emissions. But the world has another global energy problem that is just as big: hundreds of millions of people lack access to sufficient energy entirely, with terrible consequences to themselves and the environment.”
Here is one of the graphs from the report, showing the correlation between CO₂ emissions and GDP:
 |
And here is a part of another image, showing the link between GDP and Life Expectancy, as well as with Child Mortality:
 |
| GDP on the x axis, Life expectancy and Child mortality on the respective y axis. From: https://ourworldindata.org/worlds-energy-problem?country= part of the 4th graphic from the top. |
But when talking with especially the Green Party members in Sweden, where I have many friends since I was a member there myself for 18 years, they often categorically deny that the burning of fossil fuels has had anything to do with this extraordinary and unprecedented boom in life-length seen in the past few hundred years. They say that it’s the discovery of penicillin and other modern medicine that is behind most of it. But tell me, how would that explain the above differences between the countries then? Isn’t penicillin equally discovered in Kenya as it is in the US, yet Kenyans still live 15 years shorter? Why do 21 countries still have a life expectancy below 60 years, and why are almost all of them in Africa? The bottom record is held by Central African Republic, with a life expectancy of only 51 years.
To put it in yet another way, here is a screenshot from an excellent presentation called “200 Years of Global Change” by Hans Rosling, the famous Swedish “statistician entertainer”, at the IPCC’s release of their 2013 report AR5, in Stockholm:
 |
| Video: “Hans Rosling – 200 years of global change”, Stockholm, Sept 28, 2013, https://youtu.be/grZSxoLPqXI |
“If you burn coal, you save children. Did you hear?... You burn coal – you save children.”
His words, not mine. Worth noting is that the late Hans Rosling was a firm believer that climate change was a major threat to humanity, and his presentation starts with him praising the new IPCC report. He thus draws this conclusion about the use of fossil fuels and child deaths very much in spite of his personal conviction on climate change, not in line with it. These are the best conclusions, since if at all he is biased, his bias would be directed the other way and thus couldn’t be the cause of this conclusion, as is otherwise so very common in the world.
Just the other week, one of my Green Party friends posted on Facebook a link to some article claiming that the combustion of oil was behind some 20% of all deaths in the world. I commented that this was a greatly unfair way of putting it, as the same oil had also saved so many especially children’s lives, and expanded our life expectancy so much. In fact, how many of those people that the oil allegedly killed would have even been alive at that time, if it hadn’t been for that same oil? How many would have died decades earlier, or not even been born, as their parents would have died before the age of 5? The poster found this too dumb to even respond to (he later revealed), but another Green Party friend of ours picked up the ball and said you can’t reason that way. It wasn’t the oil in itself that saved all those people, it was just the energy. If the energy had come from some other source, the positive effects would have still happened, but without the negative effects that the oil brings.
And of course, I had no objections to this! If the energy had come from some other source, the positive effects would have still happened. But first of all, this does not take away the fact that it still was the oil (and the coal and the gas) that did bring about these positive effects, in the real scenario that actually happened. The “other energy source” scenario is interesting but hypothetical. It didn’t happen that way. So to fairly gauge the effects of fossil fuels on human health, we must evaluate the different aspects by themselves: How much energy do they bring? How easily accessible is the energy? How much does it cost? How practical is it to handle? How clean is it? And how many lives does a certain amount of accessible, cheap and easy-to-handle energy save? How many lives does the pollution take? I haven’t made careful calculations on this, but just looking at the charts above, as well as Rosling’s presentation, it is clear without a shadow of a doubt to me that fossil fuels have saved a great many more lives than they have taken, and that they still do. If you burn coal, you save children.
(It’s funny to remember what a novel thought this was to me, when some probably right-wing sympathizer first pointed it out to me some two decades ago… He said that most things had actually become better and better in the world in the 1900s. Poverty had reduced and health and life-length improved, etc. So how bad could the oil be?... I almost doubted this, at first! In my world-view, people were living shorter and shorter because of environmental destruction and pollution, and they were becoming poorer and poorer because of oppression and inequality in the world… This was the impression I had gotten from my leftist and environmentalist parents and friends. But I looked into the data, and slowly, little by little, I came to accept it. I still want to limit pollution mind you! Especially since much of it accumulates. Thus with time, the bad effects increase more than the good effects. But I had to change my perspective that industrialism was an almost pure evil, to that it was actually an immense and almost pure blessing.)
My second objection to the “other energy source” scenario must be that even if we could go back in time, say, and with our current knowledge about the dirtiness of oil and other carbon fuels try some alternative energy source, it is far from certain that this would even work. The Green Party friend promoted wind power as a great alternative “more reliable than nuclear energy” etc (which he justified in a very funny way). Well, Elsa* has already, in other parts of this book, talked about wind power and its environmental and health problems. In the context of poverty and life-length however, the most important aspect of it is probably that it fluctuates all the time. Every hour and every day, the output from wind power is different from another hour and another day, not just for the single plant but also for all of Sweden, for example. This is, of course, an impossible situation for any kind of industry. Thus, industrialization could definitely not have happened the way it did, with just swapping fossil fuels for wind power! For industrialization to be able to work on wind power alone, we would need techniques for energy storage and power transmission over large distances for smoothing of the fluctuations, that even today are not invented.
 |
| I will translate this pic... but anyway, it's a graph by the Swedish Power Grid showing the production of wind power in Sweden for two recent winters. |
But let us leave the past: Could we transition to a renewable-energy based industrialism from this day forward? And could those countries that are still hustling on a life expectancy of some 50, 60 years do the rest of their much desired life-length expansion and child death reduction based on these new energy sources? Well, we would hope so, wouldn’t we. But fact remains that these techniques are not there yet. Don’t get me wrong, I’m doing my best to spread the biogas technology here in Kenya! This already has the potential of saving many lives here in a short time. Just the smoke from cooking fires with firewood and charcoal is estimated to kill some 22,000 Kenyans every year, many of whom are children. (COVID-19 has now killed around 2,000 Kenyans as of 28 March 2021, just as a comparison. The population is 50 million.) Biogas burns without smoke or soot and is thus harmless for the lungs. It also gives an excellent organic fertilizer which preserves the soil, and since it takes much less time to maintain the digester than the collection of firewood takes, it can give especially women the chance to find some form of income, thus reducing poverty. Solar panels are also big here, especially in such remote areas where no power grid is expected in yet another 10 or so years. This helps children study in the evenings – another very important factor for reducing poverty. And money means lives, as we recall.
But all of this is still on a low level of development. What really boosts GDP and thus life length is large-scale industrialism, and as stated, this cannot yet be achieved on solar and wind power, and certainly not on biogas, since there just isn’t enough feed material around to produce enough biogas for this. Biogas is great for household solutions and small businesses, but not a solution for industry. Millions of brilliant engineers are out there right now working on solutions for a future industry based on renewable energy, but let’s face it:
With every year that industrialism and economic growth delays, children die. Young and middle-aged people die.
I’m a stout environmentalist. I love nature and I care for the world. I changed my entire life once to save it, when moving from Sweden to Kenya. But our ambitions to save the world should not be based on lies. Don’t tell me that the combustion of oil takes more lives than it saves, when this is not true. Don’t tell me it’s a piece of cake; we can just do it all on renewable energy instead, when the necessary techniques for this, despite our best efforts, are not yet invented.
And we may never invent them. It is possible that the golden age for humanity has already passed. When we finally do run out of fossil fuels (and rare metals and other finite materials that we use), it is possible that our industries will be less economical and efficient all over, and that life will be harder and shorter again as a result. We may never reach the era of Star Trek, and whatever we might want to believe in this regard is irrelevant. In the meantime, let us boldly look with open eyes at what we do know. Which is that fossil fuels save more lives than they take, certainly before we factor in climate change. So many of my friends and former political colleagues – as well as celebrity Greta Thunberg – talk as if it is just sheer stupidity that stops people from simply ending the use of fossil fuels, right now! Greta pronounces the words “money” and “economic growth” in her speech to the UN as if they were the dirtiest words she knows. (But at least she refuses to believe that her audience is evil, which is sweet of her!) Well, here’s the news for Greta and all of her Western World followers:
People are neither evil, nor stupid. They just want to live, that’s all. And fossil fuels save lives. Look no further: This is the reason why it is so hard to give up fossil fuels, even though most leaders now say they want to. Even if we believe that climate change might lead to disasters some time in a distant future – which I personally don’t – it would still be extremely hard for the people alive today to want to sacrifice their own lives, and the lives of their own children right now, for the sake of some other children some time in the future.
It would help us all if my fellow environmentalists would follow in Hans Rosling’s admirable footsteps and just accept this, the tremendous upside of the fossil fuels. Without necessarily giving up their criticism of them in other respects! From there, we could start discussing the best way forwards. A discussion based on reality, not on some hypothetical alternative scenario that may sound ever so pleasant, but which isn’t real.
------------
* Elsa Widding. This text is going to be a chapter in her book, The Climate Circus, which I'm currently translating.
