A Cheap Way To Kill 460,000 People

“Coal, historically a relatively inexpensive fuel, is burned to provide electricity worldwide”— from Science.

According to a new study published in Science, the air population created by “coal electricity-generating units” (EGU) killed 460,000 people in the US between 1999 and 2020. This report was based on emissions from 480 EGUs. The records used came from Medicare data.

The only piece of good news was that EGU emissions have been falling. The bad news is that coal remains among the cheapest sources of electricity worldwide.

The New York Times reported that many of these deaths did not need to happen: “Yet the study also found that during that period the shuttering of coal plants in the United States, coupled with the installation of scrubbers in the smokestacks to “clean” coal exhaust, has had salubrious effects. Deaths attributable to coal plant emissions among Medicare recipients dropped from about 50,000 a year in 1999 to 1,600 in 2020, a decrease of more than 95 percent, the researchers found.”

The lead author of the study, Lucas Henneman, an assistant professor in the Sid and Reva Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering at George Mason University, told The Guardian, “Air pollution from coal is much more harmful than we thought, and we’ve been treating it like it’s just another air pollutant.”.

The most shocking finding of the research is not just the revelation of the number of deaths. It is also that the tradeoff of lives lost versus cheap electricity remains on the table. There is still no clear consensus about the burning of coal in the future as a source of electricity. Notably, the use of coal is much higher in many other countries, especially in China and India.

The authors of the report in Science wrote: “Coal, historically a relatively inexpensive fuel, is burned to provide electricity worldwide even as the US and other nations continue to debate whether it should remain a part of the energy portfolio amid public health and climate concerns.”

The argument is that coal is too expensive to replace, even if the cost is a loss of a large number of human lives. Much of the climate crisis debate is based on what we are willing to pay for.