Many of us are old enough to remember when pollution was a serious problem. We remember air-quality alerts in many of our major cities; we remember trash-strewn roadsides, rivers that one daren't try swimming in or eating fish out of, and dirty skies. In the late '60s and '70s, when I was a kid, all that changed; by the early '80s, much of the heavy lifting was done. The air and waters were cleaner; the roadsides were mostly free of litter. And things have just gotten better since. It's not perfect, nor will it ever be, but all in all, the pollution problem has been largely dealt with.
As I'm fond of writing, we solve today's problems with tomorrow's technology. In this case, we have solved yesterday's problem with today's technology, and that technology is still evolving, still making fossil fuel plants cleaner. We are, as Master Resource's Robert Bradley Jr. points out, past peak pollution.
Earlier this year, Our World in Data published a Daily Data on global air pollution. Hannah Ritchie, deputy director and science outreach lead, wrote:
Global emissions of local air pollutants have probably passed their peak. The chart [below] shows estimates of global emissions of pollutants such as sulphur dioxide (which causes acid rain), nitrogen oxides, and black and organic carbon. These pollutants are harmful to human health and can also damage ecosystems.
It looks like emissions have peaked for almost all of these pollutants. Global air pollution is now falling, and we can save many lives by accelerating this decline. The exception is ammonia, which is mainly produced by agriculture. Its emissions are still rising.
Here's the chart from the linked article:
— Ward Clark (@TheGreatLander) March 11, 2025
Ammonia, as noted, is the outlier, but ammonia is mostly a by-product of agriculture. The climate scolds like to talk about methane from bovine flatulence, but they aren't saying as much about ammonia. There's nothing bad about this, but it's sure to have the climate scolds up in arms. Of course, they have a lot on their plate at the moment, with the Trump administration undoing all of the Biden administration's kowtowing to this nitwittery. That's a good thing; the busier we keep them being outraged, the less time they have to glue themselves to roadways.
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What this points to — very clearly — is that fossil fuels are, thanks to advances in how we use them, becoming more, not less, sustainable. This is happening, mind you, as fossil fuel use increases, especially in places like China and India — and even there, where coal-fired plants are in wide use, things are improving. They have some catching up to do, but they've turned the corner. So, the scolds are reacting by trying to claim CO2 — essential to life on this planet — is a pollutant.
The overall improvement has been documented for the U.S. and metro areas therein, as well as in China, India, and the EU. Child air pollution fatalities are declining. And all this while the usage of fossil fuels has increased around the world in recent years and decades.
These dramatic gains were hardly predicted by the anti-industrial environmentalists. They now define carbon dioxide emissions as a “pollutant” (it is not) to make their case. But CO2 enrichment is a positive externality, not a negative one.
This is, of course, Social Activism 101. Claim a problem exists, identify it loosely enough to shoehorn almost any human activity into its contributing factors, and if/when those things are resolved, add new contributing factors. It's impossible for activists to claim victory, fold their tents, and go home; they have to keep pushing to the point of absurdity. The climate scolds have reached this point.
The environmental movement started with some serious concerns. Our major cities were dirty and smoggy. Many of the nation's rivers were polluted. It was socially acceptable to toss bags of trash out the car windows. All that has changed, and the United States is cleaner than it's been since before the Industrial Revolution, with one notable exception being the trash-strewn homeless Bidenvilles that litter many of our major cities — and are, ironically, allowed and even protected by some of the same leftists who shout at us about climate change and fossil fuels.
While they shout, though, things keep improving. We're winning, and if we can break through the bottlenecks that are holding back more progress with nuclear power for electricity generation, things will get even better, even faster.
We solve today's problems with tomorrow's technology. With a tomorrow that will (hopefully) include nuclear power, maybe even the long-shot that is fusion power, things will just keep getting better — and cleaner.
