Eli5 Why did fossil fuels bring about such a huge increase in standard of living if they are bad for the environment?
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“Abundant energy” produced better standards of living.
“Oops, all that abundant energy is destroying everything” was a problem discovered later on.
Because people didn’t know or care that they were bad for the environment when they started using them for everything from making heat in your house to fueling your car to making power for entire cities. Now we do know better, but so much infrastructure is based on fossil fuel energy that it is not cost effective or realistic to try to switch everything instantly. And of course big coal and oil companies don’t want to have to lose out on a big source of revenue.
Fossil fuels are very energy dense. Burning coal to heat steam, and thus turn a turbine has turned once a job for donkeys and rivers into something that can be done anywhere automatically.
You can now produce electricity consistently using dynamos, and this was revolutionary. Nevermind the vechles, ships and everything else that could be powered through this method.
You can use other things to generate steam for a turbine, like decaying unstable isotopes. However burning hydrocarbons is by far the easiest way.
Being bad for the environment isn’t being immediately bad for humans. Humans aren’t directly affected by a change in CO2 levels, the amounts involved are small. However the small changes cause the environment to heat, and this is slowly bringing worse weather.
As for pollution, the burning of fossil fuels produces smog and acid rain. These kill people much sooner than the CO2 and are direct causes of deaths. However these deaths were generally overlooked in the push for better technology and greater luxuries
It’s almost something you can’t even compare, the amt of energy used, and available, to mankind before and after the industrial revolution. For the longest time, investing in energy and fossil fuels was the single greatest bang for your buck. Even with the downsides and costs associated with it, and as those became more widely known and discussed, it remained the biggest bang for your buck investment you could make for any given population.
Fossil fuels and energy investments, as well as subsidies, also generally affected/affect many parts of the economy at once. Cheaper gas means people can afford to travel, it means goods are cheaper to move, more energy means more machines, which means more goods and services available, etc. This is a very large part of why it is so incredibly difficult to quit fossil fuels, and why governments around the world subsidize fuel. Generally, it makes everything cheaper.
Also fossil fuels specifically were used because of the relative abundance and the fact that they are usually pretty dense in energy. Then, over time, we became dependant upon them, because there wasn’t anything that could easily and cheaply replace them. It made sense to use this available resource, rather than investing in or researching alternative. Especially early on, there weren’t as many alternatives to generate power at scale for society.
Mostly economics, plus ignorance.
Generating energy is hard, and generating enough of it for an entire city is even harder. For the longest time, there just wasn’t a feasible way to do it on a wide enough scale.
The fossil fuels industry came along and introduced the world to a miracle: cheap, reliable energy for everyone. Suddenly, entire cities and even entire countries could have abundant energy — energy that opened the door for ordinary people to have lights, automobiles, telephones, radios, televisions, refrigerators, air conditioning, and so on. We didn’t understand the ecological cost of this energy — all we knew was that it was improving lives the world over.
Of course, we now know that fossil fuels are terrible for the environment, but that wasn’t known right away. Additionally, fossil fuel companies have been investing *loads* of money into defaming climate science for a long time even after it *was* known. Despite there being scientific consensus on climate change for decades now, we’ve only just *barely* entered an era where many people recognize that it’s a real threat, and it’s this widespread recognition that’s required to do anything about it.
What’s bad for the environment isn’t the fossil fuels themselves, it’s the waste product produced by burning them.
Imagine that someone keeps giving you boxes of cookies. You enjoy the cookies, but you foolishly leave the empty boxes piled on your bed rather than throwing them out, until eventually there’s no space to sleep. You wouldn’t ask “Why was eating the cookies so enjoyable, if they were bad for my bedroom?” The deliciousness of the cookies is simply unrelated to your failure to correctly dispose of the boxes they came in.
Fossil fuels were a source of energy, and energy is super useful in all sorts of ways. However, burning them resulted in carbon dioxide, which had to be disposed of somehow. Carbon dioxide is a gas, so we thought we could just dump it into the atmosphere and nobody would notice because the atmosphere is so large. This worked for a while, but now there’s so much in the atmosphere that it’s starting to cause problems.
Youre asking two different questions here and youre pretending the two are mutually exclusive…
The answer is straightforward. Fossil fuels are a source of abundant energy that can be harvested, refined, and used with relatively low technology.
140 years ago we didn’t have the technology to make renewable energy sources come anywhere close to supplying a large population. Therefore we minded coal and oil.
The easiest solution to a problem usually results in the most instances of unforseen consequences. A capitalist society will always have a bias towards the easiest result to a problem
Because having electricity and heating is good, but putting too much carbon into the air by burning fossil fuels is making the planet hotter.
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