Why we need to tap our reservoirs of clean cheap energy.

It was never about being environmentally sound, it was about concentrating power. Tragic that there should be such an unintended consequence to their actions. From the World Health Organization:

7 million premature deaths annually linked to air pollution
In new estimates released today, WHO reports that in 2012 around 7 million people died - one in eight of total global deaths � as a result of air pollution exposure. This finding more than doubles previous estimates and confirms that air pollution is now the world�s largest single environmental health risk. Reducing air pollution could save millions of lives.

China's air pollution is legendary but it is not the only problem:

After analysing the risk factors and taking into account revisions in methodology, WHO estimates indoor air pollution was linked to 4.3 million deaths in 2012 in households cooking over coal, wood and biomass stoves.

Cooking and heating because clean-burning petroleum fuels are too expensive. We need to generate our electricity with Thorium reactors, convert our vast quantities of coal to liquid fuel (Fischer�Tropsch) using the waste heat from the reactors. This simple change in policy would make the price of gasoline, diesel and heating oils plummet allowing them to be used for cooking and heating in third-world nations. The cheap price of energy would also allow these areas to electrify and would do more to advance public health and local economics than anything the nattering do-gooders are proposing these days. How do the environmentalists deal with the cognitive dissonance of their being directly responsible for seven million deaths each and every year...