We hear from the fossil fuel industry that coal is our cheapest source of energy.
Which is kind of true, in a Bill O’Reilly/Fox sort of way, as long as you don’t count the cruel costs in lives and health of those most vulnerable.
A groundbreaking new study has found that long-term improvements in air quality are associated with better respiratory function in children during critical growth years.
The study, published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, looked at lung development in children ages 11 to 15 in Southern California over the course of the last two decades as air pollution controls significantly improved air quality. It is the first time that researchers have shown that better air quality leads to the direct improvement of lung development in children.
The University of Southern California Children’s Health Study measured lung development in thousands of adolescent children in communities across the Los Angeles area since 1993. The project found large gains for the children studied from 2007 to 2011, compared to children of the same age in the same communities from 1994-98 and 1997-2001.
By adjusting for age, gender, ethnicity, height, respiratory illness, and other variations, the study provides strong evidence that improved air quality by itself brings health benefits.
“We saw pretty substantial improvements in lung function development in our most recent cohort of children,” said lead author W. James Gauderman, professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. “It’s strange to be reporting positive numbers instead of negative numbers after 20 years.”
Gauderman is used to reporting negative numbers. Previously reported results from his data had provided evidence for the harmful impacts associated with lung development for children in areas with heavy air pollution, as well as showing that children living near busy roads have a higher risk of developing asthma.
Now, the long-term data is showing positive impacts as air quality improved.
The United States’ reliance on coal to generate almost half of its electricity, costs the economy about $345 billion a year in hidden expenses not borne by miners or utilities, including health problems in mining communities and pollution around power plants, a study found.
Those costs would effectively triple the price of electricity produced by coal-fired plants, which are prevalent in part due to the their low cost of operation, the study led by a Harvard University researcher found.
“This is not borne by the coal industry, this is borne by us, in our taxes,” said Paul Epstein, a Harvard Medical School instructor and the associate director of its Center for Health and the Global Environment, the study’s lead author.
“The public cost is far greater than the cost of the coal itself. The impacts of this industry go way beyond just lighting our lights.”
Coal-fired plants currently supply about 45 percent of the nation’s electricity, according to U.S. Energy Department data. Accounting for all the ancillary costs associated with burning coal would add about 18 cents per kilowatt hour to the cost of electricity from coal-fired plants, shifting it from one of the cheapest sources of electricity to one of the most expensive.
Burning fossil fuels costs the United States about $120 billion a year in health costs, mostly because of thousands of premature deaths from air pollution, the National Academy of Sciences reported in a study issued Monday.
The damages are caused almost equally by coal and oil, according to the study, which was ordered by Congress. The study set out to measure the costs not incorporated into the price of a kilowatt-hour or a gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel.
The estimates by the academy do not include damages from global warming, which has been linked to the gases produced by burning fossil fuels. The authors said the extent of such damage, and the timing, were too uncertain to estimate.
Nor did the study measure damage from burning oil for trains, ships and planes. And it did not include the environmental damage from coal mining or the pollution of rivers with chemicals that were filtered from coal plant smokestacks to keep the air clean.
“The largest portion of this is excess mortality — increased human deaths as a result of criteria air pollutants emitted by power plants and vehicles,” said Jared L. Cohon, president of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who led the study committee.
Nearly 20,000 people die prematurely each year from such causes, according to the study’s authors, who valued each life at $6 million based on the dollar in 2000. Those pollutants include small soot particles, which cause lung damage; nitrogen oxides, which contribute to smog; and sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain.
The study lends support to arguments that society should pay extra for energy from sources like the wind and the sun, because their indirect costs are extremely small. But it also found that renewable motor fuel, in the form of ethanol from corn, was slightly worse than gasoline in its environmental impact.
Seventy-eight percent of African Americans live within 30 miles of a coal-fired power plant. Black children have an 80 percent higher rate of asthma than their White peers, and are more than three times more likely to die of the disease. These same communities are the ones hit first and worst by the superstorms, floods, drought, and disasters that climate change threatens to bring. When disaster strikes, Americans with the fewest resources have a harder time escaping, surviving, and recovering. Hurricane Katrina taught us that.
Jules Verne had a grasp of this when he wrote his novel ‘Black Diamonds’. I was fortunate to have tickets for a UK library that carried the whole set of the Fitzroy Edition and I visited regularly looking for newly republished titles – over fifty IIRC when I moved on into adult life and moved away in a rather peripatetic career.
Later I studied the use of women and children in mines including a decent into ‘Big Pit’ in the South Wales coalfield. Later I went down there again whilst on a family holiday as a daughter wished to visit, wife declined.
Reblogged this on jpratt27.
All you say about Big Coal in this article is pretty much true. There’s nothing here that I would dispute.
But I’d also like to attach an addendum about “Big Green’s War on Your Children.” I’m not just saying that to be cynical. It’s mainly the Green Movement’s (if we want to call it that) war on nuclear power that amounts to a “war on your children.”
It’s a “war” because the endless anti-nuclear propaganda is indeed having an effect. A number of countries which have/had successful nuclear programs and are/were on the verge of upgrading to very much safer 4th generation reactors have cancelled those plans and started building windmills instead. Unfortunately, the intermittant low-power windmills need backup from those dirty coal and natural gas power plants. Or else “green” biofuels.
Yeah, I know that the green movement denies that their endless protests have any effect at all (which makes me wonder why they have them), and in fact nuclear is collapsing because it’s uneconomic. That is blatent nonsense, and I hate to see history being rewritten for political reasons. Nuclear power plant construction came to an end in the USA in 1983 with the Shoreham lawsuit which I remember well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoreham_Nuclear_Power_Plant
I was part of the anti-nuke movement at the time (well actually, I had just left the movement a year before) and we/they were ecstatic and loudly proclaimed “we defeated nuclear power.” Now a generation later and that is forgotten, but at the time we knew very well that shutting down a brand-new power plant that hadn’t even started for a bogus reason would fatally undermine the industry. The next big blow came in 1994 when (thanks mostly to the odious John Kerry) the greenies got the 4th generation experimental IFR shut down:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
That put the nail in the coffin of the nuclear power industry in the USA. Meanwhile in France, the political shutdown of the 4th generation Superphenix reactor killed any further nuke development:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix
Japan has long had to contend with an anti-nuke movement, but I would be dishonest to say that there wasn’t some justification for it, given Fukushima. That accident really set the industry back. But it was self-inflicted – it would have been dead easy to have located the plant on higher ground, or at least put the crucial backup diesel generators on the roof instead of in the basement where they were destroyed by flooding during the tsunami. I won’t say that Japan’s nuclear industry wasn’t guilty of negligence – they were. All the more reasons to learn the right lessons from Fukushima, instead of the wrong ones.
So OK, if you’re an antinuke activist, congratulate yourself and your allies. Outside of China and a couple of other Asian countries, you “won.” Your kids will pay the price for your feel-good activism. Wind, solar, biomass, coal, oil, tar sands and (fracked) natural gas will be the future. Damn the consequences, full speed ahead.
As the wise old saying goes, watch what you wish for.
What I wish for is a much quicker end, once and for all, to the twin nuclear industries–weapons and reactors, neither of which could exist without the other and both of which together are an insane foray into one of the chief manifestations of existential rage and desire for ultimate destruction. Since humans manifest that rage in thousands of ways, it’s saying a lot that this is one of the most likely to end us.
Led and backed by efficiency, conservation and changed priorities and lives, the clean renewable energies of wind, solar, tidal, wave, micro-hydro, geothermal and ACES and others can and will supply everything humans need with an infinitesimal harmful impact compared to fossil and nuclear fuels’ and weapons’.
If we act immediately, massively and wisely.
For humanity to survive the ongoing and intensifying climate cataclysm we’re also going to have to democratize and equalize, and both fossil and nuclear fuels destroy democracy and concentrate wealth and power in the hands where we least want them–the hands of psychotic psychopaths. (That is, those not in touch with reality and not able or willing to feel connection to life, including their own.) For 10,000 years, we’ve mostly been wishing for the wrong things. Now we have a chance to build an energy system and a society based on it, that is probably the best wish we’ve had in that entire time–a Solarwind economy.
I do congratulate myself and tens of millions of others for a job well and nearly done in turning off this path to destruction. I for one have been working on it since spending the last days of March of 1979 in the shadow of just one of thousands of mistakes made by those Mad Fools. (Actually I started before that, but with the full commitment I made to this outcome that week, this month feels like a rebirthday.)
Thank you, Cy. Let’s hoist an organic home-brewed ginger brew in commemoration on the 28th
Ah, the proverbial Demented Rooster struts in the barnyard, this time smugly congratulating himself on piling up a whole pile of philosophical BS about nuclear “weapons and power” overlaid with pie-in-the-sky bright-sidedness.
Jeffy4Z spouts more of the “insane” propaganda that was used to inhibit nuclear power in the past—-the conflation of weapons and electricity generation that scared everyone and has blinded us to the real and necessary part nuclear power MUST play in the near future if we want to have any hope of dealing with AGW.
“If we act immediately, massively and wisely”, he says. Yep, and therein lies the rub, since there is little sign that those three conditions are being met.
A nice rant, even though it’s full of narcissistic and excessive hyperbole and rhetoric rather than reality. For example:
“…..insane foray into one of the chief manifestations of existential rage and desire for ultimate destruction”.
“….those not in touch with reality and not able or willing to feel connection to life, including their own”.
“….in the shadow of just one of thousands of mistakes made by those Mad Fools”.
Lord love a duck! Do you feel better now, Jeffy? May I suggest that you take yourself off to some site for “angry poets and philosophers” where this kind of crap will be better appreciated?
I was just in Florida and what did I see on the beach? Some clown with a teeshirt with “legalize coal”. On the back was the “Don’t Tread on Me” tea party rattlesnake symbol. If you want to know who votes for the stupids in Congress, here’s your right wing ignoramus voter in action.