Unearthing the True Cost of Fossil Fuels : TreeHugger
Mining, transporting, and burning oil, gas, and coal also inflicts major damage to the environment and public health—and we pick up the tab. A 2009 report from the National Research Council showed that
fossil fuels impose $120 billion of annual costs on the public every year. Air pollution takes a massive toll on public health—it causes respiratory problems, widespread illness and death, and leads to a huge number of missed work days. The prognosis from a Harvard study, the first to analyze the full life-cycle impact of coal, is even bleaker.
That report’s lead author, the late Dr. Paul Epstein, told me in an interview that “Between the land disturbance, the mountaintop removal, the processing ... and the combustion, we estimate that
this is costing the American public somewhere between a third to half a trillion dollars in health costs and deaths.”
Yes, that’s ‘trillion’ with a ‘T’. Every year.
In fact, coal is so economically disastrous that the mainstream journal American Economics Review found that
the electricity generated from coal actually does more damage to the economy than the electricity is worth. Grist’s David Roberts notes that “Coal-fired power is a net value-subtracting industry. A parasite, you might say. A gigantic, blood-sucking parasite that’s enriching a few executives and shareholders at the public’s expense.”
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According to Ratigan’s calculations,
the price of gasoline is around $10 too cheap per gallon when all unaccounted-for costs are included. Other projections put the figure even larger.
And there are a wide range of estimates of the “true” cost of coal:
Depending on how you factor in the costs of climate change, it could be between a few additional cents per kWh to a whopping ˘26.89 extra per kilowatt hour—the high-end estimate from the Harvard study. By way of comparison, the average American paid ˘11.54 per kWh on their residential electric bills last year. In other words, if prices accurately reflected all of the actual costs of burning coal, coal-fired power plants would be dead in the water.
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Using the example of oil, Ratigan writes that such distortion results in a situation where
“the free market can’t help [us] decide if it’s worth switching from gas to another fuel, because the market isn’t free, it’s rigged.” Similarly, investors, homeowners, and utilities can’t decide whether it will pay off to invest in clean energy and efficiency when the price of burning coal, which still supplies nearly half the nation with electricity, is
so cheap.