Deaths Per Terawatt Hour

I started looking at the fossil fuel versus renewables debate slightly differently recently. Not cost. Not aesthetics. Not whether a wind turbine spoils somebody's view from a converted barn in the Cotswolds.

Deaths per unit of power generated.

And once you look at it that way, the whole cultural argument around energy starts to look faintly absurd.

People have a very strange way of assessing danger. If a wind turbine catches fire somewhere in Denmark, there will be videos all over Facebook within the hour accompanied by comments about "green madness" and civilisation collapsing under the tyranny of woke electricity.

Meanwhile, millions of people quietly inhaling combustion by-products from coal, oil and gas barely registers because it happens slowly, indoors and without visible flames shooting into the sky.

The numbers are not even remotely close. Coal causes roughly 25 deaths per terawatt-hour of electricity generated. Oil about 18. Gas around 3. Wind and solar sit down near 0.04 and 0.02 respectively. Not slightly safer. Vastly safer. Orders of magnitude safer.

And those fossil fuel deaths are not mainly dramatic mining disasters or exploding rigs any more. Most come from the dull, grinding business of air pollution. Tiny particulates. Nitrogen oxides. Sulphur compounds. The invisible stuff that quietly shortens lives while everyone carries on making tea and watching Escape to the Country.

In fact, almost on cue, a gas explosion at a coal mine in China has just killed around 90 miners in the deadliest mining disaster there for more than 16 years.

Which is revealing in itself. Because when people think about fossil fuel deaths, they often imagine something confined to history books. Victorian pits. Soot-covered children. Brass lamps and exhausted men emerging from shafts in black-and-white photographs.

But this is not ancient history. It is now. And even disasters like this are still only the visible tip of the fossil fuel death toll. The overwhelming majority of deaths linked to coal are not dramatic explosions that make Reuters headlines. They are the slow-motion deaths from air pollution that never become headlines at all.

Nobody films a man slowly developing cardiovascular disease from years of combustion pollution and uploads it with dramatic music and a caption saying: "Net Zero fanatics won't tell you THIS."

Which is perhaps why that old line attributed to Stalin keeps resurfacing in human affairs: "A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths are a statistic." A turbine fire is dramatic. A mining collapse is dramatic. An oil rig explosion is dramatic. Millions of people quietly shaving years off their lives through combustion pollution is just background atmosphere. Literally.

People fear spectacular danger far more than statistical danger. A battery fire becomes proof that electric vehicles are rolling bombs. An offshore wind farm is treated as an environmental outrage. Yet entire cities breathing fossil fuel exhaust every day has become so normal that people mentally edit it out altogether.

There is also still a strange romance attached to fossil fuels for some people. Hard hats, sparks, pipelines, oil rigs in storms, blokes welding things at dawn while somebody waves a union flag in the background.

Renewables, by comparison, look faintly middle class. Silent panels. White turbines. People explaining tariffs over coffee at the Hay Festival. But lungs do not care whether their particulates arrived patriotically. A boiler does not become healthier because somebody describes gas as "common sense energy". The cardiovascular system remains tediously unmoved by Facebook memes featuring Winston Churchill.

Which is why the whole debate has started to resemble people defending smoking by pointing at the rare occasions somebody chokes on a nicotine patch.

At some point, familiarity stopped being mistaken for safety in most areas of life. We no longer assume asbestos is harmless because grandfather lagged pipes with it in 1958 while cheerfully eating a cheese sandwich.

Yet with fossil fuels, millions still instinctively treat the old dangerous system as the reassuringly normal one, while viewing the newer, vastly safer technologies with suspicion simply because they look culturally unfamiliar.

It is not really an engineering argument any more.

It is aesthetics wearing a hard hat.