"Accounting for the damages [of unpriced externalities] conservatively doubles to triples the price of electricity from coal per kWh generated"
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010....
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010....
It will be pleasant to have less of these types of plants in operation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_Scherer
And this country will be just a little bit greener knowing, we don't need to have trains crossing the country 24/7 from Wyoming just to keep the boilers running.
>>> And this country will be just a little bit greener knowing, we don't need to have trains crossing the country 24/7 from Wyoming just to keep the boilers running.
We will have to get the energy from somewhere. The only viable alternative on that scale that I can see is nuclear energy, but given current panic mood about it, does not seem very likely. If not, are we ready to seriously cut energy consumption and accept the accompanying life standards drop? I don't think so.
A cursory reading of the literature would suggest that American Lung Association, Natural Resource Defense Counsel, and Physicians for Social Responsibility all concurred that coal burning does impact our respiratory system.
See: http://www.lung.org/assets/documents/healthy-air/toxic-air-r...
And:
http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/coals-assault-chapter-3.pdf
Your second argument is a bit like saying, well we have to get nicotine from somewhere. If not smoking, what else will people do to get their fix. Are we really ready to give up our nicotine habit?
A lot of people did give up smoking once they figured out it was killing them. If people realize the same thing about coal, I suspect there will be a much faster and stricter set of regulations coming into force.
As for the problem of where to get energy, natural gas is a more efficient and cleaner burning alternative that you didn't mention. Of course if that gas is delivered via fracking there are a whole lot of other problems with ground water pollution. So the energy mix needs to change and it needs to be found in a less impactful fashion.
No it does not. Human organism has ways of producing substances that work with the same receptors that respond to nicotine. Thus, there is no biological need to introduce nicotine to the organism. More correct analogy would be vitamines, proteins, minerals and other substances that we commonly call "food". If you want to give up food, it would be reasonable to ask, how you replace energetic and nutritional needs of the organism? Modern economy has energetic needs which need to be satisfied if you want to have modern economy. Either you go back to pre-industrial economy and subsistence on the constant brink of starvation, or you produce a lot of energy. There's no other way. The question is how you are going to produce it.
>>> natural gas is a more efficient and cleaner burning alternative that you didn't mention.
As carbon emissions are the problem being discussed, and burning gas produces carbon emissions, naturally I did not consider it as a true alternative with respect to producing energy while reducing carbon emissions.
Of course SLC is an extreme example, most cities never see inversions like that, but it is certainly the case there that probably the largest contributor, and far and away the main source of power, is coal emissions.
Almost half of that mercury comes from coal emissions.
That's an entire type of food being significantly contaminated across the planet. And that's just one of the many nasty things emitted by coal burning.
It is not at all an exaggeration to say that the entire planet is affected by burning coal.
There's a lot. From a health perspective, PM is way worse for human health than carbon dioxide. Here's two EPA fact sheets and a well-cited article:
http://www.epa.gov/airquality/particulatematter/health.html
http://www.epa.gov/region7/air/quality/pmhealth.htm
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969799...
> We will have to get the energy from somewhere. The only viable alternative on that scale that I can see is nuclear energy, but given current panic mood about it, does not seem very likely. If not, are we ready to seriously cut energy consumption and accept the accompanying life standards drop? I don't think so.
Easy answer: natural gas. It's already a bigger source of electricity than nuclear, and it'll inevitably play a large role in the grid in the future as it neatly solves the dispatch problem (renewables can't really be controlled, but NG plants can be dispatched at a moments notice to make up for lost capacity).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unite...
- gas is CH4 (four hydrogens for every carbon). Oil is approximately CH2 (in reality, it's slightly higher than two). Coal is approximately CH.
- a CH bond has about 410 kJ / mol; a CC bond has about 350 kJ / mol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond-dissociation_energy)
- thus, you can calculate approximately how much energy is stored in each of the above fossils per mole of carbon dioxide:
- methane = 4CH = 1640 kJ / mol CO2
- petrol = 2CH + CC = 1170 kJ / mol CO2
- coal = CH + CC = 760 kJ / mol CO2
This is obviously a gross simplification, but hopefully you'll see the outline of why gas is much cleaner than coal. Methane, since it's a gas, also burns much cleaner than liquids or solids since you can better mix the fuel with oxygen, so methane tends to produce much less particulate matter, soot, and other products of incomplete combustion.
EDIT: spenrose below has a great point about uncombusted methane in the atmosphere. Methane is a NASTY greenhouse gas, so it's absolutely worth taking into account how natural gas production affects methane levels in the atmosphere. Namely, there was a worrying metastudy a few months ago about how natural gas production is quite leaky, which has nontrivial greenhouse gas considerations: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/february/methane-leaky-ga...
EDIT: Direct link http://chge.med.harvard.edu/resource/full-cost-accounting-li...
Interestingly, the impact on Appalachia, $75 billion per year, is substantially more than the GDP of West Virginia ($57 billion per year). The economic return of coal mining in Appalachia is very probably net negative.
If coal power costs $0.1/kWh, and solar/wind/whatever costs $0.15/kWh, then you would only need a $0.05/kWh equivalent carbon tax to shift investment in research and infrastructure. Or really even just the promise of such a tax in five years. And it is fine for the tax to gradually approach $0.2/kWh equivalent, because by that point the only applications using coal would be specialized and could afford it without wrecking the economy.
http://www.nexteraenergyresources.com/pdf_redesign/Full%20Co...
Interestingly, most of the external costs they estimate aren't CO2 emissions. Table 4 on page 92. In the "median" case, it's 9.3 c/kWh air pollutants, 4.4 c/kWh public health burden from Appalachian mining, and then 3.1 c/kWh from climate effects. In the "high" case climate goes up to 10.2 c/kWh, still less than half of the 26.9 c/kWh total.