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posted by martyb on Wednesday January 08 2020, @08:05PM   Printer-friendly

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)


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Thursday January 09 2020, @03:46AM

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 09 2020, @03:46AM (#941311) Journal

    Here's the estimated total cost per kilowatt hour study that germany did in 2013 [fraunhofer.de], while we were ramping up our fracking.

    At the time, wind was 107 euros per megawatt hour at the high end, while natgas was 98 at the high end. With wind variability being what it was, low cost wind was much cheaper(45) than low end natgas(75), which is pretty non-variant.

    Since then [fraunhofer.de] renewable prices have dropped and high-price wind and low-price natgas are comparable, mostly due to efficiencies of long-term value in renewables(you always need more gas for your gas plants, but the windmills keep running for decades), I wouldn't expect similar pricing in the US if we just ramped up now.

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