The environmental costs of coal extraction, emissions, and combustion waste stream are monumental. However, international development agencies such as the World Bank often fund massive coal projects with the assumption that the benefits of electricity outweigh the costs of coal. From a public health perspective, modern sanitation, water treatment, and health care delivery require access to electricity. Without evidence to the contrary, it is reasonable to assume that the public health benefits of coal might be greater than its costs in terms of air and water pollution.
A new study published by Julia Gohlke of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and colleagues provides empirical evidence that the public health costs of coal are greater than its benefits. Infant mortality and life expectancy were examined as benchmarks of health status. Using data from 41 countries from 1965 to 2005, the researchers found that per capita coal consumption was associated with increased infant mortality and reduced life expectancy over time.
As expected, electricity consumption per capita was strongly associated with lower infant mortality, but the impact on life expectancy was smaller. Gains over time were primarily accounted for by markers of water and air quality. Electricity reduces water-borne diseases by water and sewage treatment and replacing open-fire indoor heating and cooking methods.
Coal consumption per capita was associated with increased infant mortality and reduced life expectancy, particularly over time. Thus, nations that relied on coal to generate electricity had worse health outcomes than those that relied on other generation sources. There was considerable variability in years of life lost attributable to coal use. The key appeared to be air pollution, with high levels of particulate matter (soot) associated with adverse health outcomes.
The results suggest that access to electricity is good for you as long as you do not use coal to generate it most of it and set stringent standards for air quality. High levels of soot indicate lax pollution controls. If you are letting big particles go up in smoke, you are also letting many toxins go into the lungs of your fellow citizens. Among developing nations, China has the highest years of life lost to coal-related air pollution (average of 6.3 years) during the study period.
Coal use is never really inexpensive. If you do not have stringent air quality standards, you merely pass on the costs to the population in the form of health problems. If you clean up after coal, the costs to generate power rise exponentially.
External costs: Coal's dirty little secret
This is just one of several recent studies to focus on what economists like to call the external costs of coal. External costs represent all the costs associated with a product that are passed on to society instead of being reflected in the price paid by the consumer. Of all the fossil fuels, coal is certainly the worst of the bunch when it comes to external costs. Two other studies delved into the external costs associated with coal in the United States.
A 2009 report by the National Academy of Sciences attempted to tabulate the external costs for coal emissions for the year 2005. Here is some of what they found:
Coal accounts for about half the electricity produced in the U.S. In 2005 the total annual external damages from sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter created by burning coal at 406 coal-fired power plants, which produce 95 percent of the nation's coal-generated electricity, were about $62 billion; these nonclimate damages average about 3.2 cents for every kilowatt-hour (kwh) of energy produced. A relatively small number of plants -- 10 percent of the total number -- accounted for 43 percent of the damages. By 2030, nonclimate damages are estimated to fall to 1.7 cents per kwh.
Coal-fired power plants are the single largest source of greenhouse gases in the U.S., emitting on average about a ton of CO2 per megawatt-hour of electricity produced, the report says. Climate-related monetary damages range from 0.1 cents to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, based on previous modeling studies.
The National Academy of Sciences estimate focused exclusively on stack emissions. The hidden costs associated with coal are even higher when the environmental and public health costs of extraction and the millions of tons of toxic combustion waste generated from coal-fired plants are factored in. A just published Harvard University study by Paul Epstein attempted to estimate all of these external costs of coal.
"What we pay for coal makes it seem like it's cheap," Dr. Paul Epstein, Associate Director of the Center for Health and Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, told PRI's Living on Earth, "but the cost to taxpayers -- to the general public in terms of health and environmental impacts -- are enormous."
The costs of coal not directly factored into the price, the so-called externalities, add up to somewhere between a third and a half a trillion dollars per year, according to Epstein. If the external costs were taken into consideration, Epstein estimates that it would "would double or even quadruple the cost of coal that we would pay in cents per kilowatt-hour."
Epstein's calculations try to take the whole life cycle of the coal into consideration. That includes mining -- both mountaintop and underground -- transport to the processing plants, and transport in railways to the coal combustion plants. Epstein says that "seventy percent of our railway traffic is coal in this nation."
The calculations also take public health costs into consideration. In Appalachia alone, the public health burden adds up to about 75 billion dollars per year, according to Epstein's calculations. This is the impact of air and water pollution, primarily, on people's health.
The Epstein study can be found here.
The bottom line is simple. The external costs of coal are high, including its negative impact on public health. These external costs are trivial relative to the potential costs associated with climate change. Unfortunately, while we pride ourselves in being a reality-based community, Congress does not.
