Peak Air Pollution: The Increasing Sustainability of Fossil Fuels

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- March 11, 2025

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.

Source: Community Emissions Data System (CEDS).

Hannah Ritchie notes that some countries are lagging, getting worse. Those are the impoverished countries that rely on wood and dung burning, but there is also good news.

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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.

Conclusion

Improving emissions with greater usage underscores the increasing sustainability of fossil fuels. As I wrote for the Cato Institute more than a quarter-century ago:

Environmentalists support a major phase‐​down of fossil fuels (with the near‐​term exception of natural gas) and substitution of favored “nonpolluting” energies to conserve depletable resources and protect the environment. Yet energy megatrends contradict those concerns. Fossil‐​fuel resources are becoming more abundant, not scarcer, and promise to continue expanding as technology improves, world markets liberalize, and investment capital expands.

Add natural gas to the list. But there was one major threat to energy sustainability, I wrote in 1999:

The greatest threat to sustainable energy for the 21st century is the global warming scare. Climate‐​related pressure to artificially constrain use of fossil fuels … based on incorrect assumptions.

What was true then has been confirmed by myriad events, from the Great Texas Blackout of 2021 to the energy price inflation in the UK/EU.