Aspirin & fossil fuels (Calvin Beisner, Cornwall Alliance)

Link: http://us8.campaignarchive1.com/?u=8fe89cf100dfd0bf13664d610&id=b90eee0579 The follow contains excerpts. For the whole article with embedded hotlinks, please click on link above.

Ban Aspirin? Really?!?

by Calvin Beisner, Cornwall Alliance Suppose you made a product that had delivered hundreds of millions of people from pain and disability and prevented serious illness in millions more, was continuing to do both, and was the least expensive of all products for those purposes. If someone sought to ban its use because it posed comparatively minor risk of comparatively minor harm in far fewer people, would you 1.

2.

3.

4.

Ignore the charge, hoping it would go away?

Surrender and close up shop?

Lie and say the risks were nonexistent?

Offer evidence that your product’s benefits far outweighed its risks, and that its risks could be minimized or eliminated with proper use?

I trust you’d choose D (4). And if you did, do you think you’d deserve to be demonized because you made your living by that product?

Let’s make this more concrete. Aspirin—salicylic acid—is a natural substance derived from the bark of some trees. It’s been in use for literally thousands of years to relieve fever, headache, inflammation, rheumatoid arthritis, and many other ailments and pains. More recently it’s been shown to reduce risk of heart attack, stroke, and several kinds of cancer.

But we also know that, in high enough doses for long enough periods, it can cause stomach bleeding and ulcers.

If someone now demanded we ban aspirin because of its comparatively minor and preventable risks, despite its enormous benefits, what should be the response?

Opponents of fossil fuel-fired electricity generation play the role of those who would demand banning aspirin. They’re focusing on its comparatively minor risks and ignoring both its tremendous benefits and the ready ways to minimize its risks.

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For instance, coal has been in use as an energy source for centuries. Early on, burned without filtering emissions, it caused dangerous air pollution in the form of fly ash, oxides of sulfur and nitrogen, and carbon monoxide. But the industrial production it energized made food, clothing, shelter, and other goods and services so much more abundant and affordable that human health and life expectancy improved despite the pollution.

Since then, we’ve learned to capture essentially all the dangerous substances when we burn coal—and developing countries get to apply the technologies we developed at much earlier stages, and much lower costs, making their rise out of poverty, disease, and high mortality rates, and their elimination of coal’s truly dangerous emissions, faster than ours.

We’ve also learned that the carbon dioxide emitted when we burn coal makes almost all plants, all over the world, grow better, making more food available to all living things, especially people, especially the poor.

Similar truths apply, even better, to the other fossil fuels—oil and natural gas.

In a nutshell, this is why the Cornwall Alliance has been arguing for over a decade that the demand to reduce and eventually ban fossil fuel use to prevent global warming is wrongheaded. For the energy indispensable to lifting and keeping whole societies out of poverty, they are better sources than any alternative because they are more abundant, affordable, and reliable—with the possible exception of nuclear power. (*) Poverty, in turn, is a far greater risk to human health and life than anything related to weather or climate.

The demand to substitute less abundant, affordable, reliable sources—like wind and solar—is therefore a demand to prolong the poverty of billions and risk forcing millions back into it.

Those of us in the wealthy West who are accustomed to instant-on-demand, alwaysthere-when-you-want-it, uninterrupted, inexpensive electricity tend to underestimate the incredible benefits we get from fossil fuels. That’s why it’s important that we learn about them, and learn to communicate them clearly to others. The alternative is to wave those benefits goodbye and risk returning to the poverty of our ancestors—to a life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” to quote Thomas Hobbes—and trapping our poorer neighbors in the developing world in it.

Robert Bryce’s discussions of coal, oil, and natural gas in his extraordinary book Smaller page 2

Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper will equip you with what you need to know, and what you need to share with others, to prevent such a sad eventuality. .. .. .. .. .. ..

To see the Cornwall Alliance promotion for the book by Robert Bryce, Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper go to link at the top of this article.

(*) Statement by John Shanahan, President of Go Nuclear, Inc. and Environmentalists for Nuclear - USA. Nuclear power has either about 10,000 or 1,000,000 times higher energy density than fossil fuels depending on which nuclear technology is being used: Gen III or Gen IV. Nuclear energy offers significant improvements over fossil fuels for the environment, waste management and many other parameters. Nuclear energy should only be used in countries with stable governments, where human rights are respected, with sound economies, good higher education, outstanding technical and crafts people and respect for other people and other countries. Dr. Beisner at the Cornwall Alliance provides an excellent example of the benefits of aspirin and fossil fuels that can and should be used the world over for as long as possible. Dr. Patrick Moore, Co-Founder of Greenpeace says: "I am a huge supporter of nuclear energy because of its merits as a reliable, safe, clean, and cost-effective source of electricity. But I do not agree with those who would market it against fossil fuels, the most important and versatile energy sources, providing 85% of world energy. .. .. The biggest problem nuclear faces is the irrational fixation on wind and solar, which would not exist on the grid if not for long-term subsidies and mandates to purchase their output even when more cost-effective and reliable energy is available.

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