Dr. Conca opines that most comprehensive report to date on the health effects of environmental pollution shows that filthy air, contaminated water and other polluted parts of our environment kill more people worldwide each year than almost everything else combined – smoking, hunger, natural disasters, war, murder, AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
China knows this better than any other country. Over 300,000 people die each year from toxic emissions coming out of coal-fired power plants alone. And silica manufacturing and waste from computer chip and solar array manufacturing is a growing health problem.
This dependence of a good life on energy is not a secret. The 2015 COP21 climate meeting in Paris was mainly about how to give these people that much energy without giving them coal. Not only to save more lives, but to save the planet.
And it will take all non-fossil sources, not just renewables. Along with millions of wind turbines and thousands of square miles of solar arrays, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the International Energy Agency, the United Nations Sustainable Solutions Network and the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate all argue for a tripling of nuclear energy, requiring over a thousand new reactors, or many times that of small modulars, to stabilize carbon emissions.
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