NO ONE HAS IT HARDER THAN THEIR FATHER DID:

"Between 1970 and 2020," according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), "the combined emissions of the six common pollutants (PM2.5 and PM10, SO2, NOx, VOCs, CO, and Pb) dropped by 78 percent." Similar trends have been observed in other developed nations as well. Between 1970 and 2016, the UK reduced its emissions of all air pollutants except ammonia by 60%. The trend is unmistakable to anyone looking carefully at the evidence. Drs. Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser helpfully summed up the situation for Our World in Data in 2019:

"What becomes clear is that far from being the most polluted in recent history, the air in many rich countries today is cleaner than it has been for decades." [...]

One of the best ways to bring a nation out of grinding poverty is to boost its agricultural productivity. The introduction of high-yielding crop varieties during the Green Revolution, led by plant pathologist Norman Borlaug, nicely illustrated how this phenomenon works. According to a July 2021 study, enhanced crops developed between 1965 and 2010 increased food production by more than 40%, saving the world a whopping $83 trillion. [...]

Of course, climate change is the elephant in the room. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have increased in recent decades, which has led the WHO and others to warn about the looming public health impacts of heat waves, wildfires, and other natural disasters caused by global warming. Even here, though, the disaster projections that so often make headlines are out of step with the evidence.

For one thing, improved infrastructure (such as widespread air conditioning) has helped prevent a lot of weather-related mortality. Deaths due to natural disasters more broadly have also plummeted: A century ago, natural disasters commonly killed more than a million people annually. Today, that figure hovers somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 deaths per year.

Recent research has shown that fossil fuels have generated far fewer GHG emissions than projected by commonly used climate models, a divergence that "is going to only get larger in coming decades," climate researcher Roger Pielke, Jr. explained in November 2020. [...]

What does all this mean? The economist Julian Simon was right: Human ingenuity is the ultimate resource.

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