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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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.
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