Quote:
Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard
So, innovations for renewable energy will help the economy; and not hurt it.
There are plenty of ways to quantify the health effects of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels use / pollute a lot of water, as well.
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As I said, it's not clear that renewable energy will be a long term cost saving. If it were so now, then we'd just have renewables powering everything.
The health effects of fossil fuel use is not easy to quantify at all. In fact, most every economic and health metric is positively correlated with fossil fuel consumption. In other words, life expectancy has skyrocketed since the age of fossil fuels, and poverty has plummeted.
It's cut and dry that someone falling to their death from a wind turbine has been killed in service of renewable energy, or it's clear cut that a coal mine collapsing and killing a person is directly related to fossil fuels, but someone simply dying of cancer cannot be directly attributed to pollution. It may be easy to quantify fossil fuel related health problems if every other variable remained as it was, but instead every variable has changed.
Fossil fuels have without question resulted in a great good for human well-being. That isn't to deny the negative externalities, but there isn't even a debate about whether measurable things such as poverty and health have improved due to their use.