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Ditching coal in the US is saving lives, helping crops:
A lot of the discussions about switching sources of electricity focus on costs, specifically whether going renewable will cost more than fossil fuels. But the costs of fossil fuels go well beyond simply the costs of supplying the fuel. Fossil fuels create costs by harming human health and the environment—these costs aren't priced into electricity produced. Instead, they wind up being paid by society at large—and that's before pricing in the inevitable costs of climate change.
In fact, in the United States, the rationale for Obama-era climate rules included the idea that the regulations would save money by avoiding these costs. That claim was controversial, however, and the Trump administration's rollback of these rules also claimed to provide economic benefits.
What's been lacking is a clear measure of the impact of pollution from fossil fuels. In an attempt to rectify that, Jennifer Burney of the University of California, San Diego, took advantage of a natural experiment that the US has been undertaking: shuttering older coal plants and replacing them with natural gas, which produce far less pollution. Using data from a decade of vanishing coal plants, Burney found that tens of thousands of deaths had been avoided by replacing coal plants. As an added bonus, the productivity of nearby farms increased as well.
[...] The decommissioning of coal plants was associated with drops in ozone and aerosols formed by sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide. For the latter two chemicals, the decrease faded as a simple matter of distance from the closed plant. (Ozone dynamics were a bit more complicated.)
Burney found that "these lower aerosol and ozone concentrations conferred near-immediate benefits to health and crop productivity." All cause mortality in the counties closest to the closed plant dropped by a percent, with the elderly being the largest beneficiaries. All told, the data suggests that about 27,000 premature deaths were avoided between 2005 and 2016. The confidence intervals are wide, ranging from 2,700 to 50,000, but the numbers go up if a wider radius around the plant is used. The effects on crops were even more dramatic. Nearby corn and soybean yields went up by over five percent; wheat yields rose by four percent.
Translating those numbers to apply to the remaining coal plants, Burney found that even for the conservative 25km estimate, they caused about 330,000 premature deaths and a loss of 10 billion bushels of crops over the decade she studied. For reference, she notes that the crop loss is roughly equivalent to a half-year's production; it's also equivalent to five percent of the total US harvests over that decade.
Journal Reference:
Jennifer A. Burney, The downstream air pollution impacts of the transition from coal to natural gas in the United States, Nature Sustainability (DOI: doi:10.1038/s41893-019-0453-5)
(Score: 5, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 08 2020, @10:25PM (6 children)
These days most people focus on the CO2 that fossil fuels add to the atmosphere. There are other reasons, too:
Coal mining is brutal; whether shaft mining, which is hell on Earth for the coal miners, or mountain top removal, which is as awful as it sounds, or strip mining, which is also as awful as it sounds, the process to win it from the Earth destroys human beings and watersheds wholesale before a nugget of it is even burnt.
Oil we thought about a whole lot more 5 years ago when British Petroleum spilled billions of gallons of it in the Gulf of Mexico, but it apparently didn't bother us all enough to take public transportation or refrain from buying ridiculous numbers of Ford F150's. It's also responsible for funding global terror networks thanks to Iran and Saudi Arabia. We've fought far too many wars over it, too.
Natural gas has boomed thanks to fracking, but fracking pollutes aquifers and causes earthquakes in places that are generally tectonically stable. Despite what the PR firms employed by natural gas producers want us to believe, it is not green energy.
It's all dirty stuff before any of it is actually used, and the negative social and political externalities of its extraction are legion and mostly blithely ignored in the final tally of its cost.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08 2020, @10:40PM
Mountain top removal sounds great. It is basically simulating the glacial cycle and possibly delaying the next ice age by releasing minerals into the soils we have depleted.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday January 08 2020, @11:32PM (3 children)
Ummm... not that this is an argument to continue using coal energy but BHP to roll out autonomous trucks at QLD coal mine [australianmining.com.au]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 08 2020, @11:59PM (2 children)
It's not the truck part that sucks. It's the working the coal seam a mile underground bent over double because it's only four feet tall part that sucks.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Thursday January 09 2020, @12:35AM (1 child)
Not yet in coal mining (and let's hope it'll never be in coal), but remote-controlled [australianmining.com.au]/automated mining [im-mining.com] - even underground - seems to be the future. After all, old gamers and military drone controllers will need a job too.
The silver lining of "producing pollution in an out-of-sight-out-of-mind way"? 'T's a good prototyping ground for space mining - if (when?) they get to solve the power/energy sources capable of working in space conditions and robust enough to last decades. May not happen in our life time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday January 09 2020, @01:22PM
I think it's less of an engineering & science challenge to advance renewable energy and storage than to perfect space mining. Although, I have wanted space mining since I read a dusty tome, Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet [wikipedia.org], as a kid.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Friday January 10 2020, @11:16PM
I think the real problem is that "big energy" realizes that getting away from fossil fuels and into renewable energy sources will also mean that there will eventually be far less of a reason to have "big energy" in the first place. Transmitting power long distances from big plants is a very inefficient means of supplying power, with a great deal of waste. We could do far better if each property in any particular area contributed to a small local power grid, whether by solar, wind, geothermal, or whatever best suits the location (even small nuclear plants although a lot has to happen before that will be allowed) in whatever combinations work best for the local environment. It is currently not about getting energy to people, but dollars into the pockets of those behind "big energy".