"about half" of the air pollution deaths from air pollution are linked to biomass.
A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (Lancet 2012, 380, 2224–60: For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240.)
These figures are not as precise as stated in the tables to which I make reference, but they are a good approximation.
Generally the division of the two main sources of air pollution, biomass and fossil fuels is represented by indoor vs outdoor air pollution, since in much of the world - albeit the part of the world that our bourgeois "Tesla cars will save the world" rhetoric heavers couldn't care less about it - biomass is burned indoors for cooking and for other purposes.
A great deal of effort has been made by international poverty agencies to improve the quality of, for example, wood stoves, responsible for many of these deaths, but apparently - and this is true in first world nations as well as in second and third world nations - having the biomass smoke carried outdoors has a profound effect on outdoor air pollution.
Biomass, including "traditional" biomass (biomass used by poor people about whom we couldn't care less ) accounts for about 43 of the 576 exajoules humanity was consuming as of 2016 according to the IEA's World Energy Outlook.
(As I discussed in this space here, The Growth of "Renewable" Energy Has Exceeded 2007 World Energy Outlook Projections by 55%! I have converted the unfortunate unit used by the IEA, the MTOE, into exajoules, the SI unit.)
Dangerous fossil fuels, by contrast, provide 466 exajoules.
This means, even if we strictly define the outdoor/fossil fuels and indoor/biomass distinction, albeit with some fudging, biomass is proportionately worse in terms of deaths per exajoule, which is not to excuse millions of deaths from coal, oil and gas, but merely to state that biomass is worse than fossil fuels.
I recently saw somewhere - although I confess that I don't have the reference handy - a claim that 30% of the outdoor deaths from air pollution are related to biomass; I think it may have been in one of the Nature journals. If I have this right, this would further elevate the health consequences of biomass when compared to fossil fuels as a whole, if not coal.
Arguably, biomass is partially a carbon cycling scheme, so its climate impact, if not its health impact, is somewhat less than fossil fuels.
Biomass is nonetheless, one of the few so called "renewable energy" schemes whose extreme environmental impact can be ameliorated I think.
Now, as it happens, since we have been very lazy and so willing to lie to ourselves that all of our efforts to address climate change have largely consisted of wishful thinking and utilizing our lack of scruples about lying to ourselves, future generations will not be required to merely stop using dangerous fossil fuels, but will be required - so much as they can with the limited resources we have left for them - to remove the dangerous carbon dioxide waste we've left for them from the atmosphere.
This is an extremely challenging task, one that one can imagine to be barely feasible, but about which one should think if one gives a shit about future generations. From an energetic standpoint, this requires not only to overcome the entropy of mixing as part of the free energy of removal, but also the energy of reducing carbon.
The entropy of mixing is routinely overcome by the biome via photosynthesis. It is possible because plants and photosynthetic algae are self replicating and thus can cover a large surface area. This suggests that the clean collection of biomass is one option, and by clean, I refer to the utilization of carbon free systems which can only involve nuclear primary energy, but not necessarily secondary energy.
The second part, reducing carbon, can be performed by hydrogenation, thermal reduction (carbon dioxide splitting thermochemical cycles such as the cerium or tin based cycles to name a few) or perhaps electrochemical means. Thermochemical hydrogen is well understood, and many cycles are known. The combustion of biomass in a closed system - using the oxygen component as a side product of water splitting - can yield syn gas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon oxides, generally monoxide, but dioxide as well.
Modern chemistry has advanced to the point that pretty much any industrial scale commodity can be made from syn gas with appropriate processing.
I note that another huge surface area extractant for carbon dioxide is surface water, notably the ocean. If we are going to remove carbon dioxide from the environment, particularly by nuclear means, the ocean is an excellent device for doing so. The mass to volume ratio of carbon dioxide in seawater is much, much higher than it is in air.
Heating homes - a luxury that many in the first world take for granted - can be accomplished by using waste heat from nuclear power plants in a district heating system. This has historically been done in the UK (with its very first reactor at Calder Hall), Romania's Cernovada reactors, and many Soviet reactors.
In recent years I have been studying systems of heat transport in the form of supercritical fluids, in particular the wonder fuel DME, dimethyl ether, which has a critical temperature on the order of 150C. Such transport and storage would rely on the utilization of thermal barrier coatings.
But DME itself - which is accessible via thermochemical reactions driven by high temperature nuclear reactors of the types actively under investigation in China - is a very remarkable fuel, able to replace diesel fuel in tractors and trucks, all systems utilizing LPG, and all systems using dangerous natural gas. (DME is an approved fuel for use in Japanese and Chinese natural gas plants, but regrettably, in China, it's made from coal and not syn gas.)
I have convinced myself that all these things are feasible, which is not to say that they will be done. Most probably they will not be done. What will be done is that misleading statements will continue to be made like the obviously fraudulent remark that "renewable energy is the fastest growing capacity on the planet!!!!!!!" blah, blah, blah, although 50 years of mindless cheering for solar and wind has not made them produce even ten of the 576 exajoules we are now utilizing on this planet. They can't even keep up with the increases in the use of coal and natural gas.
There is very little that nuclear energy can't do, given the last fifty years of discoveries in materials science, including thermophysical materials science, chemistry, chemical engineering, and engineering physics. These practical and theoretical sciences have all been greatly enhanced by the availability of vast computational power.
These things are not as popular in popular bookstores as say, books on Astrology or Self Help or books on how to invest in the stock market or have sex, but nonetheless, great advances have been made in science and engineering, however much the general public and the government it allowed to rule this country despise scientists and engineers.
The deeper I go, the more impressed and awed I am at the fine minds of modern scientists and engineers.
They have made things possible, but the possible is neither the probable or the popular. In our culture we confuse popularity with wisdom, although wisdom has never actually been a general feature of human culture.
In an ideal world we would care about future generations, and the huge fraction of the current generation that lives in dire poverty. This is the foundation of my liberalism, the belief that section one of the 25th article of the UN's 1948 Declaration of Human Rights should be enforced.
It reads as follows:
1. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
However it appears that
my liberalism has gone out of style. I'm an old fart, and will die soon enough, so who gives a shit about old people's liberalism anyway?
Modern liberalism as I've come to understand it involves cheering for that
government subsidized billionaire asshole Elon Musk, and his subsidized products for other billionaires and millionaires, and working to turn every mountain top in the country into an industrial park for the wind industry, as well as all coastal shelves and shorelines as well.
It appears that the synergy of offshore oil platform industrial parks and offshore wind industry industrial parks works quite well - well it doesn't actually work well, but in the pop mentality it's just grrrreaaat! - as we see in that disgusting country in the North Sea that everyone raves about, Denmark.
I discussed my thoughts on these topics elsewhere:
Current Energy Demand; Ethical Energy Demand; Depleted Uranium and the Centuries to Come
I hope this touches on the answers to your questions. Thanks for your interest.
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