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Bill McKibben writes for The New Yorker in a March 18, 2022 article titled "In a World on Fire, Stop Burning Things" (emphasis added):

Our species depends on combustion; it made us human, and then it made us modern. But, having spent millennia learning to harness fire, and three centuries using it to fashion the world we know, we must spend the next years systematically eradicating it. Because, taken together, those blazes—the fires beneath the hoods of 1.4 billion vehicles and in the homes of billions more people, in giant power plants, and in the boilers of factories and the engines of airplanes [and] ships—are more destructive than the most powerful volcanoes, dwarfing Krakatoa and Tambora. The smoke and smog from those engines and appliances directly kill nine million people a year, more deaths than those caused by war and terrorism, not to mention malaria and tuberculosis, together. (In 2020, fossil-fuel pollution killed three times as many people as COVID-19 did.)

In 2020, did three times as many people die from fossil-fuel pollution as from COVID-19?

LShaver
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The smoke and smog from those engines and appliances directly kill nine million people a year

I’ll address the “nine million people a year” estimate. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 7 million people a year “die prematurely” from air pollution. They break this down into household pollution, which according to their estimates causes 3.8 million premature deaths, and ambient (outdoor) air pollution, which causes 4.2 million premature deaths.* You can find detailed explanations of the nature of these sources of pollution and references to further resources on the above-linked web pages.

* Since 3.8+4.2=8 and yet the WHO cites 7 million as the estimate for the total air pollution deaths, presumably that means that 1 million of the premature deaths are classified as being brought about by both indoor and outdoor air pollution.

Now, 7 million is not that far from 9 million, so in that sense McKibben’s estimate appears plausible. However, I see a couple of issues with his way of presenting things:

  • “directly kills” seems stronger than “causes premature deaths”, which is a vague and not precisely quantified statement. (E.g., if someone died six months sooner than they would have otherwise because pollution exacerbated some medical condition they had, it’s probably misleading to say they were “directly killed”, but “died prematurely” sounds more correct.)

  • McKibben’s article focuses on humanity’s need to stop burning fossil fuels (e.g., the article’s subheadline reads “The truth is new and counterintuitive: we have the technology necessary to rapidly ditch fossil fuels”). However, the 3.8 million premature deaths from household pollution are, according to WHO’s explanation, “attributable to inefficient cooking practices using polluting stoves paired with solid fuels and kerosene.” The WHO also writes: “Around 2.6 billion people cook using polluting open fires or simple stoves fuelled by kerosene, biomass (wood, animal dung and crop waste) and coal.”

    Now, biomass is not a fossil fuel, so if you’re only interested in deaths related to fossil fuels, the 3.8 million figure is surely an overcount. But McKibben’s writing seems to conflate multiple sources of pollution in a single paragraph by talking less precisely about “fires”, (and its synonyms “combustion” and “blazes” — well, this is a New Yorker article after all…), while making the overall target of the article appear to be fossil fuels specifically.

    In any case, from the WHO’s explanation it’s clear that these household pollution premature deaths are caused largely due to the terrible methods of burning fuel (whether fossil-based or not), which result in huge amounts of harmful particulate matter being released, rather than to the mere fact of the burning itself. So if you count these deaths in the seven million statistic, the marshaling of these deaths in support of McKibben’s “stop burning things” argument seems a bit dishonest to me. And if you don’t count them, then we are down to only 4.2 million deaths from outdoor pollution, which is quite far from McKibben’s 9 million.

Summary: the WHO is not necessarily the only or most authoritative source of data on this topic, so McKibben might be relying on another source that’s equally credible. However, at least when cross checking his claims against the WHO’s data, they seem a tad hyperbolic to me.

Dan Romik
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    I'm guessing the 9 million figure is from [this article](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2021.110754) from April 2021, which was widely reported in the news. If you Google "fossil fuel deaths by year" it's referenced in all five of the first results. – LShaver Mar 22 '22 at 13:51
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    Your distinction between "directly kills" and "causes premature deaths" is identical for covid. – Tech Inquisitor Mar 22 '22 at 19:22
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    @TechInquisitor no, it is not. The claim is that the modern industrialized world has air pollution which can cause someone to die a few months sooner on average. However, that can be misleading, as the average lifespan is a lot longer than it was in pre-industrial times due to better food distribution and medicine. So if someone would have died at 50 in the middle ages, would have died at 92 in modern society without air pollution but dies at 90 due to air pollution, would it be better in the middle ages? On the other hand, with covid you can die at 30 while otherwise you could have reached 90 – vsz Mar 23 '22 at 05:14
  • @TechInquisitor perhaps. I take no position on the matter of covid-19-caused deaths. It seems to me more productive to focus on the nine million air pollution deaths per year claim rather than on the claimed three to one air pollution/covid deaths ratio. – Dan Romik Mar 23 '22 at 05:19
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    @vsz you are cherry picking to support your pre-conceived notions on this topic. Covid deaths also include a very large amount of co-morbidities just like pollution related deaths. Many Covid deaths are people who would have lived to 92, but died at 90 with Covid. Very very few are 30 year-olds who would have reached 90. – BlackThorn Mar 23 '22 at 15:51
  • @BlackThorn : it's false to say that there are "very very very few" 30 year olds. Yes, the death rate was highest among the elderly, but many younger people also died. And not just terminally ill ones, there were even professional athletes who died or got critically ill. – vsz Mar 23 '22 at 15:59
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    @vsz According to the cdc, in the US, all deaths involving covid for individuals 30-40 years old account for less than 2% of deaths for all ages involving covid, which is a similar total number of deaths due to other diseases in that age group. Considering that comorbidities are a serious confounding factor, it is fairly safe to say that very very (I only put 2, not 3 smh) few 30 year olds died to covid who would have lived to 90. – BlackThorn Mar 23 '22 at 16:36
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    @BlackThorn I suppose it depends on how you define "very very few." 2% of the nearly 1 million Covid deaths is still 20,000. Overall, over 40,000 people age 0-45 have died from Covid in the U.S., making it the #2 cause of death behind only unintentional injury in that age cohort. (And that's with unintentional injury being an extremely broad category including vehicle accidents and accidental drug overdose.) – reirab Mar 23 '22 at 16:51
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    Folks, no offense but I find it a bit strange that you are debating covid-19 deaths in the comments thread of my answer, which doesn’t mention covid-19 at all. Can you please limit the debate here to issues that actually relate in some way to my answer? For covid-19 discussions you can use the comments thread of the question itself and/or chat, or the comments threads of other answers that do discuss the covid issue. – Dan Romik Mar 23 '22 at 16:53
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    @DanRomik agreed, we shouldn't be debating about covid deaths in the comments, but this is still relevant to your answer. The question is about relating covid deaths to pollution deaths, so the semantics between the two are very much on topic. Your answer only addressed the semantics of pollution deaths while ignoring the fact that many of the same issues are present in covid death accounting. – BlackThorn Mar 23 '22 at 17:05
  • @BlackThorn “_while ignoring the fact that many of the same issues are present_”: hmm. If McKibben says something misleading about pollution deaths, and something about covid-19 deaths that’s misleading _in exactly the same way_, and those two errors somehow balance each other out to make McKibben’s three-to-one claim more correct than if he had made only one misleading statement, well, that’s hardly a point in his favor (or a good defense of his claim), is it? And the fact that I criticized only one misleading statement rather than both does not make my criticism any less valid, does it? – Dan Romik Mar 23 '22 at 18:59
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    @DanRomik I'm not really interested in continuing this thread, but I'll just say that the dots here are pretty easy to connect if you stop assuming what people mean and just look at what they say. Part of the main argument was that pollution is worse than covid, but if you realize that both pollution and covid numbers are inflated, McKibben's statement is sort of stronger than if you were only critiquing the pollution numbers. Your criticism is less valid if you cherry-pick issues to nit-pick while ignoring those that might weaken your argument. – BlackThorn Mar 23 '22 at 19:37
  • @BlackThorn fair enough, you’ve made your point and so have I. Let’s find common ground in agreeing that we’re not really interested in continuing this thread. :-) Thanks for an interesting discussion. – Dan Romik Mar 23 '22 at 19:43
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    "the fact that I criticized only one misleading statement rather than both does not make my criticism any less valid, does it?" - it most certainly does, when the question is explicitly about the comparison between the two. – Tech Inquisitor Mar 23 '22 at 22:18
  • I asked about the overlap between deaths attributable to indoor + outdoor air pollution [over on earthscience.SE](https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/q/23636/7741), where there's now a helpful answer. – LShaver Mar 24 '22 at 15:01
  • @TechInquisitor I stand by what I said. To be clear, it’s fair to criticize my answer for not addressing covid-19 when that’s part of what the question is asking about. But I’ll say again, aside from this specific criticism, it cannot reasonably be argued that my not mentioning covid-19 invalidates or weakens ny criticism of what McKibben wrote about air pollution deaths. – Dan Romik Mar 24 '22 at 23:10
  • @BlackThorn and TechInquisitor, I guess the confusion here is that Dan Romik isn't trying to criticize McKibben's full argument, but only on the claim that "pollution kills 9 million people" (see his first sentence after the quote). In this light, I think it's clear that any other fallacies of McKibben's on COVID-19 is not relevant in the view of Dan Romik's goal of this answer. In this context, McKibben has only ever said "pollution kills 9 million people". You may criticize this answer for not answering the whole question, but not that this criticism is invalid or weak :) – justhalf Mar 25 '22 at 08:05
  • @justhalf You're missing the point. These are valid criticisms of McKibben's argument. But the exact same criticisms apply in exactly the same way to the officially claimed number of covid deaths. By conspicuously failing to mention that, this answer implies a misleading apples-and-oranges comparison. – Tech Inquisitor Mar 25 '22 at 16:24
  • That's my point too, this answer is really only one side of the argument, and is portraying it as so with "I’ll address the “nine million people a year” estimate." It doesn't attempt at all to compare the pollution part of the claim with the covid part of the argument. So this answer is a partial answer, and a reasonable one at that. It indeed is not a reasonable full answer, for the reasons you described. – justhalf Mar 25 '22 at 17:07
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The claim's specificity is probably not rock-solid, but the idea that fossil fuels kill huge numbers of people annually is sound.

I'm assuming McKibben was relying on this study from Harvard University published in Environmental Research, which provides a point-estimate of deaths from sub-2.5 micron particulate matter emissions of 8.7M deaths per year. Rounding that off produces a 9M/year estimate.

It's important to note that the study itself identifies some pretty dramatically wide 95% confidence intervals (including negative values - which would represent air pollution actually prolonging people's lives by preventing their death... lol). The real number could be 0 or as high as 14M deaths per year.

That study does a good job at improving on the existing methodology for modeling - and typing - air pollution. In particular, it focused on filling in gaps left by studies that generally use satellite data because satellites can't tell if a given bit of PM2.5 came from fossil fuels, agriculture, or folks cooking over campfires. Those corrections produced a big jump in the numbers of deaths attributable to fossil fuels, in no small part because it's able to examine the intersection between burning of large amounts of fossil fuels and high population densities associated with urban centers - particularly in China. (There's a whole section in the study devoted to the work China has been doing to get it's air pollution under control, and incorporating that tightens the 95% CI considerably).

There's also some amount of rhetorical license due to McKibben since fossil fuels are a century+ old energy paradigm, and COVID-19 is both recent, and being swiftly studied and adapted to. In a given year, have fossil fuels killed exactly thrice as many people as COVID-19? Estimates of that specificity aren't really possible.

But in the long run, fossil fuels' body count makes a mockery of COVID-19, for sure.

It's also important to note that this is ONLY considering deaths from PM2.5 exposures. Fossil fuels kill in a dizzying variety of ways from mining accidents (coal mining has gotten a lot better since its inception, but it's still a dangerous business, as is oil drilling), climate impacts, political factors (it's not entirely unreasonable to lay casualties of wars fought over oil fields at the feet of fossil fuels, etc).

Most of these numbers are unknown, many unknowable, and apportionment and attribution is rife with philosophical issues.

But we know enough to know that fossil fuels are bad.

William Walker III
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    So to say "fossil fuels killed more than COVID-19 in 2020" would be too specific -- but what about "fossil fuels kill more in an average year than COVID-19 killed in 2020"? – LShaver Mar 22 '22 at 14:12
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    @LShaver The problem is in making a claim that we know how many people COVID-19 killed, and how many people Fossil Fuels killed. We don't have good enough data to make precise point estimates of either. We just know both numbers are big - way bigger than we want them to be. There's strong evidence that we grossly underestimate both figures. If I was being graded on accuracy of language, rather than rhetorical impact I would say they are, at the least, reasonably comparable to one another in that they are both very deadly.... but one is a thing we choose to do to ourselves continuously. – William Walker III Mar 22 '22 at 14:25
  • @WilliamWalkerIII, didn't covid decrease such deaths because of restricted traveling and thus reduced fuel burning? – akostadinov Mar 23 '22 at 14:44
  • @akostadinov Probably a small amount. Transportation fuel combustion is the lesser source here, though. The bulk of PM2.5 comes from electric power plants and industrial processes that need heat (concrete production is the big one there). Again, we don't have precision point estimates, so trying to noodle with adjustments thereto is a waste of effort, and quibbling over whether or not a given point estimate is correct also misses the point. – William Walker III Mar 23 '22 at 15:32
  • @WilliamWalkerIII Not sure about worldwide, but [transportation is the #1 source of CO2 emissions in the USA](https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions). Not sure how that correlates to particulate matter, though. Granted, USA numbers probably aren't very relevant to particulate matter deaths anyway. – reirab Mar 23 '22 at 17:03
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    @reirab Gasoline/Petrol in particular are fairly clean-burning fuels insofar as PM2.5 is concerned. PM2.5 mostly comes from coal. So yes, Transportation is more GHG, but nowhere near as much PM. – William Walker III Mar 23 '22 at 20:13
  • @WilliamWalkerIII Gotcha, that makes sense. In that case, though, the claim/quote is rather misleading since it's talking about all fossil fuels (as opposed to coal specifically) and it specifically mentions engines. (And, if particulate matter is the problem, then the claim is largely irrelevant to the U.S. where it was published anyway.) – reirab Mar 23 '22 at 21:07
  • We know enough to know that too much of _anything_ is bad. If there were "only" a million humans in 100 communities of ten thousand spread around the planet there would be enough to maintain a tech base but they couldn't cause a problem if they tried. I have seen conspiracy theories about COVID (and vaccines and of course 5G, did you pack your tinfoil hat?) being part of a depopulation scheme and I couldn't help but be amused that the people who make the most noise about the problem also loudly object to the only possible solution. – Peter Wone Mar 23 '22 at 23:58
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    @reirab the author is using "engine" in the broad sense of a ["machine designed to convert one or more forms of energy into mechanical energy"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine), which also applies to power plants which first use an engine to create mechanical (rotational) energy, which is then used to generate electricity. – LShaver Mar 24 '22 at 00:41
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    I'm accepting this answer because it directly addresses the source of the 9 million figure, and explains why the comparison itself (irrespective of the numbers) is questionable. – LShaver Mar 24 '22 at 15:05
  • <<< Fossil fuels kill in a dizzying variety of ways from mining accidents (coal mining has gotten a lot better since its inception, but it's still a dangerous business, as is oil drilling) [...] >>> The dangers to miners from mining activity in the modern world do not and could not possibly produce a death toll remotely near the orders of magnitude of the numbers we're discussing. The total number of coal miners killed worldwide in recent years numbers in the hundreds per year, and is steadily declining. – AlabamaScholiast Mar 24 '22 at 21:46
  • Any workplace death is an unimaginable and terrible bereavement, but the figures we're talking about are completely insignificant in magnitude compared to the figures in the millions. [There were a total of **12** workplace deaths for coal miners in the United States in 2018.](https://arlweb.msha.gov/stats/centurystats/coalstats.asp) US mining has exceptionally high safety standards compared to many other places; but [the number for China in the same year was 333.](http://web.archive.org/web/20211209001532/https://clb.org.hk/content/deaths-coal-mine-accidents-china-fall-new-low-333-2018) – AlabamaScholiast Mar 24 '22 at 21:47
  • @AlabamaScholiast Indeed. And, moreover, many of those personnel would likely be other high-risk jobs. My point wasn't that mining accidents are numerous. My point is the study in question only looked at one (obviously very big) slice of the whole picture as part of further context about "we don't actually know what this number is." – William Walker III Mar 25 '22 at 02:07
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The smoke and smog from those engines and appliances directly kill nine million people a year

In 2020, fossil-fuel pollution killed three times as many people as COVID-19 did.

The Dan Romik's answer does a good job of critiquing the 9 million people per year, but the other side of the equation is also uncertain, as in did only 3 million people die of COVID-19 in 2020? Studies have tried to estimate the true death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic and they come up with an answer that is many times higher than the official one. Nature discusses two models that attempt to use excess mortality to estimate the true death toll, and the answers are about three times greater than the reported deaths:

COVID'S true toll

Another challenge to the official numbers has recently been published, though at time of writing this is currently only available as a non-peer reviewed pre-print, is an analysis of nasopharyngeal swab taken from 1,118 deceased individuals at a single hospital in Lusaka, Zambia. The detected COVID-19 was detected among 32.0% of those samples. During times of peak transmission COVID-19 was detected in ∼90% of all deaths. This indicates that only about 10% of COVID-19+ deaths were identified in life, indicating an under-counting of approximately an order of magnitude. This is consistent with a surprisingly low incidence of reported COVID across much of Africa and may indicate the true death toll is many times that reported.

While there is plenty of uncertainty in both these analyses. In the former there are semantic questions about how deaths indirectly related to covid are counted in this context. In the latter is very hard to generalise to wider situations than this hospital and would be expected to be very different in areas with more testing capacity, which probably means most of the world outside of Africa. However considering both these areas of uncertainty assuming that only 3 million people died from COVID-19 in 2020 is not well supported by the evidence.

User65535
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    What is the "official" count for 2020, if there is one? If we're applying a less conservative model to covid deaths, it only makes sense to apply a less conservative model to fossil fuel deaths as well. So we should at least start by comparing the "official" numbers. – LShaver Mar 22 '22 at 13:53
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    @LShaver [Our world in data](https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths) has total_deaths = 1,881,743 for the end of 2020. As they have 17 for 22nd Jan I think that is an answer. – User65535 Mar 22 '22 at 14:27
  • [Direct link to 2020 COVID-19 deaths per Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=earliest..2020-12-31&facet=none&pickerSort=desc&pickerMetric=new_deaths_per_million&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=false&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=~OWID_WRL) – LShaver Mar 22 '22 at 14:38
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    Excess death would also include deaths caused by the restrictions imposed by governments (via depression, less exercise etc), even including deaths resulting from vaccine side effects. I don't necessarily claim these are the most important factors, but people have been very much on the lookout for covid-related deaths, and since there are so much excess death that's unaccounted for you need some real evidence to attribute all of it to the virus itself. This especially since the world has changed quite extensively by the _reactions_ to covid, and we can't know 100% they were all necessary. – EdvinW Mar 23 '22 at 13:40
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    @EdvinW, I agree. Deaths caused by stupid restrictions, fear and lifestyle changes are unfair to be counted as caused by the virus. – akostadinov Mar 23 '22 at 14:41
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    I do try and mention that, "there are semantic questions about how deaths indirectly related to covid are counted in this context". Any quantification of this effect you are aware would help the answer if you pointed me at it. – User65535 Mar 23 '22 at 14:44
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    By the way those excess deaths are the excess deaths associated with pandemic not directly with Covid. They include effect that lockdowns had on postponing medical procedures. – 1muflon1 Mar 23 '22 at 23:25
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    There is a big difference between "COVID killed someone" and "someone tested positive for COVID before they died". Most people who die from COVID were not healthy to begin with. Are you familiar with the Alberta boy who tested positive for COVID before he died of brain cancer? He became the poster child for getting children vaccinated, until the family spoke out. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/covid-comorbidities-alberta-spitzer-1.6212510 – cimmanon Mar 24 '22 at 12:57
  • @cimmanon That could have an effect, but when we are talking about 90% of deaths reprasenting an order of magnitude underestimation it would have to be a lot of such cases to make a significant effect on the overall answer. If you are aware of any quantitative studies that could shed light on the issue I could work them into this answer. – User65535 Mar 24 '22 at 14:04
  • Reported covid deaths of 900k in roughly 2 years moves WWll to be a minor historical event where 400K US deaths were incurred in roughly 4 years. By deaths I mean abrupt deaths. Not shortening one's lifetime by a few per cent as per air pollution. I consider the former more significant than the latter.. – tckosvic Apr 02 '22 at 18:24