Hannah Ritchie of Your World in Data began telling us how to save the world starting at the top, with the atmosphere. And in that effort, she began with the “airpocalypse” of the Beijing Olympics in 2008, shown above, in contrast with the view on a clear day. The drastic cleanup campaign began in 2013.
In 2022 Beijing hosted the Winter Olympics, which was worlds apart from the Summer Games 14 years earlier. The city's air quality had improved rapidly in the last decade. Once 'almost uninhabitable', news headlines now referred to its blue skies and smog-free air. It had dropped off the list of the world's 200 most polluted cities. This time, the improvement was different: it wasn't a temporary flex for its international visitors. It was a permanent change demanded and achieved by the city's population itself. But how?
Nothing surprising, is how. That is the message of her entire book, Not the End of the World.
- Public anger, no longer suppressed, but recognized as legitimate
- Media attention, no longer suppressed, but recognized as legitimate
- Binding legal commitments in an official ‘war on pollution’, in place of denial and obstruction.
Yes, even authoritarian one-party governments cane sometimes be moved to do the right thing, when it is made blindingly obvious what that is, and it doesn’t threaten to impose actual democracy.
More particularly,
- Get older, more polluting cars off the road
- Shut down polluting factories, or at least relocate them far from major cities
- Switch power generation from coal, particularly from the dirtier forms of coal, to much cleaner gas, which is still a problem for global warming, but not so dire for health.
Between 2013 and 2020, Beijing's pollution levels fell by 55%. Across China as a whole, they fell by 40%. The health benefits of these changes are huge: it's estimated that the life expectancy of the average person in Beijing has increased by 4.6 years.
OK, well, that was then. What about now? Same story. Nothing surprising to anyone following this Diary series.
- Ever-cheaper and more effective technology
- Wind
- Sun
- Storage
- Geothermal
- Heat pumps
- EVs
- HVDC power lines
- Planting trees and rolling back deforestation
- Carbon-neutral steel, cement, ammonia
- Agrivoltaics
- The circular economy
- REAL carbon capture in reactive rock, not decrepit oil wells
- Political will among populations and then governments
- The magic of the exponential function and the logistic function
- Blinding obviousness, especially about my old shibboleth, $$Real Money$$TM
Renewable energy is cheaper than polluting energy, to begin with. Then, Ritchie points out, we have to account for the trillions of dollars of damage to health done by pollution. If governments had to account for that, the solutions would all be no-brainers.
And thus the passing of innumerable tipping points, such as the death of coal by a billion cuts, country by country, to be followed by the deaths of oil and gas and other polluting industries, and eventually Peak Carbon, Net Zero, and going sufficiently Carbon Negative to cool the planet down to where we started. But they are only innumerable because we refuse to count them. There will actually be thousands of tipping points to celebrate. I am particularly looking forward to the end of childhood asthma from diesel school buses, but I will not turn down any of the others.
I am going to pass over the dismal history of air pollution, going back beyond the Greeks and Romans to the capturing of wildfires, and continuing in recent times with acid rain and the ozone hole. Actually, the good stuff begins there, because we got rid of acid rain and ozone-depleting chemicals, against insane denial and obstruction. So we can do it again. And again, and again, etc. etc.
Actually, in much of the world the air is cleaner that it has ever been since the taming of fire. Death rates from pollution are falling globally, even in most developing countries.
The solution to air pollution…follows just one basic principle. Stop burning stuff.
- Coal
- Oil
- Gas
- Wood
- Crop residues
- Garbage
Ritchie is wrong about one thing.
#NoNewNukes
They are vastly, hugely, unconscionably expensive, and can only be built in countries where the government and the nuclear industry make corrupt deals for unwarranted subsidies. There is a lot of talk about molten salt reactors, and about small modular reactors (SMRs). The problem is that for all of the industry and government hype, there really aren’t any of them. A few engineering prototypes, yes, but nothing scalable that has any hope of being commercialized. Again, they are magnets for unwarranted, corrupt subsidies.
Similarly nuclear fusion is a pipe dream. It has been thirty years off for the last 80 years, and shows every sign of continuing to be.