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Fossil fuels advance mankind? (Part III)


From MasterResource

By Julian Salazar Velásquez

Editor. Note: Julián Salazar Velásquez, geologist and petroleum engineer in the oil industries of Mexico and Venezuela, is a leading educator and advocate of free-market energy. He is the author of many articles and Gerencia Integrada de Campos de Hidrocarburos” (2020), an overview of the oil industry value chain. His four-part worldview begins with Part I and Part II and ends tomorrow with Part IV.

If organizations and governments see hydrocarbons and coal as a curse, what follows is a massive setback, unlike the historical precedent of fallen civilizations. Incredibly, this has happened in a number of countries.

Most have seen gains from fossil fuels, first coal and then oil and gas. Yes, CO atmosphere2 emissions have increased, but so has the standard of living for a record number of people, what has come to be known as the Great Breakthrough. Check the data for yourself: economic, demographic, education, health, quality of life, politics, science and technology, food productivity and consumption, and others are overwhelming to list.

On the economic side, the impact in recent years can be observed according to the following indicators: Gross domestic product per capita (GDP), world exports and poverty rate. Based on world population growth and life expectancy.

From the perspective of education, health, quality of life, politics, science and technology and food production, note the improvement in basic education, literacy, vaccination, mortality rate infant mortality and democracy.

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As shown in Figure 5 Below, it has been since the Industrial Revolution—the trigger for the use of coal as a fuel to power steam engines, steam trains, railroads, spinning machines, and other other innovative technology—CO2 Exhaust gases begin to be generated into the atmosphere. At the same time, a period of world prosperity began, and then accelerated in the early 20th century with the use of energy sources derived from oil and gas, making the 20th century the century of exponential growth. Such developments continue to this day.

The most used macroeconomic indicator to measure the wealth of countries and their inhabitants, Gross Domestic Product per capita (GDP per capita), has begun to grow steadily from using coal as an energy source to sustain the Industrial Revolution (Figure 6). The index has skyrocketed since the beginning of the 20th century with a combination of petroleum-based fuels such as gasoline, fuel oil, kerosene and gas and oil giving rise to the global production machine.

That prosperity is reflected in the exponential growth in global exports like most indicators of the 20th and 21st centuries (Figure 7).

The most important indicator of global prosperity is poverty reduction. As shown in Figure 8, the extreme poverty index (that is, residents living on less than 1.9 international dollars per day) tends to decrease as fossil fuels dominate the energy market. In 1820, 88.2% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty; by 2015, less than 10%, which correlates with the replacement of fossil fuels with dilute, intermittent renewables (primitive biomass, falling water, etc.).

Figure 9 showing the distribution of extreme poverty by region. Poverty is less than 10% in the most economically developed countries, such as the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Western Branch), Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean- calves and East Asia. However, the rate of extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa is 56% of the population, characterized by very low energy consumption.

The rate for Latin America is 5%, excluding Venezuela’s dire state. According to a study by the Catholic University of Andres Bello (UCAB) in 2021, the country has already slipped back to pre-industrial levels with poverty rates exceeding 56% of Africa’s. Somewhat surprisingly, Venezuela is marked by an almost complete lack of freedom with the implementation of unfeasible communist projects and policies.

The behavior of the demographic indicators corresponds to those previously analyzed, in the sense that changes in world population and life expectancy are also influenced by the onset of the Industrial Revolution and the use of use fossil fuels. According to the graph in Figure 10world population started to increase significantly from the Industrial Revolution, was 1.26 billion in 1850 until it increased and reached 7.5 in 2020, an estimated 8.91 in 2050.

Similarly, the average life expectancy is around 35 years in the Americas, Europe and Oceania continents, a number that has increased steadily from that point until reaching 80 years of age in 2019; while the rest of the world ranged from under 30 years old to slightly over 60 years old during the same period. This important improvement is due to the decrease in infant and adult mortality, the advancement of medical technology and public health, and the improvement of the aforementioned indicators such as: poverty rates and GDP per capita, plus other indicators related to basic education, literacy, immunization and infant mortality.

in synthesis Figure 11, human progress is evident in the quality of life, greatly improved by the widespread use of coal as a driving factor for the Industrial Revolution and the addition of fuels derived from oil from the 20th century, represented by 17% with basic education in 1820 increasing to 86% in 2015; as well as improving the literacy rate from 12% to 85% by 2014.

On the other hand, only 1% of the population in 1820 lived in countries governed by liberal democracy, while in 2015 this number rose to 56%. By 1820, the benefits of vaccination campaigns against diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus were unknown; In 2015, the vaccination rate reached 86%. This was a major factor in reducing infant mortality from 43% in 1820 to just 4% in 2015.

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