Do you drive to work?
How about the younger members of your family? Does anyone close to you suffer from asthma?
Until we discovered how to use fossil fuels, almost everybody lived in poverty and on the edge of starvation. By contemporary standards, barely anyone knew what well being was.
The pre-industrial world was not the of Garden of Eden. It was far from that.
Most people lived on a handful of peas and about 5kg a year of bacon fat. If they had a couple of yards of coarse cloth a year to clothe themselves, they were lucky. The average life expectancy was around forty. FOSSIL FUELS changed all of that and don't forget it.
Try moving some earth with your own muscle power. Just try digging a hole a yard deep and a yard each side and and move the earth five yards into a pile. A diesel bull dozer will do that in six seconds and be ready to start again immediately. It would take you best part of a day's sweat and toil. If you were twenty-five you might do it in three hours.
Fossil fuels have transformed the fortunes of all of us. We criticise China's record on c02..... I have done too, but look at how the lives of a billion and a half people have been transformed even in our own life time. When I was a kid, the Chinese were starving, moving heavy goods in wheel barrows and riding a Flying Pigeon bike if they were the village success story. All of that was done on the back of using fossil fuels.
Fossil fuel produced fertiliser has banished starvation from everywhere that has a functional society not at war. In 1950 with a world population of 2.5 billion, we had millions living in undernourishment and starvation. The abundant use of artificial fertiliser and fossil fuel machinery has transformed that situation. The production of fertiliser used on one acre of agricultural land uses 5.5 gallons of oil or gas equivalent.
Today, far fewer people die in natural disaster than fifty years ago. Far fewer people are hungry, far fewer people are in abject poverty, far fewer die of disease.
DO NOT expect the rest of us to abandon the thing that lifted us from the gutter because a few people have asthma. The rest of us - the vast majority, don't have asthma.
The most dangerous man in Britain today is not some Raoul Moat maniac. It is Ed Milband.