By Derrick Haynes
For decades, tobacco industries and lax standards of societal health kept the true cost of smoking hidden from the public. Today, the consequences of burning coal for energy are emerging—and the lessons could have a much faster impact, according to researchers speaking Feb. 19 at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Vancouver.
In a session titled "The True Cost of Coal," social scientists and energy researchers presented their findings on the impact of coal use on human health and the struggle to transition to cleaner energy sources.
The discussion featured a tribute to the late Paul Epstein, a physician at Harvard University, who was going to moderate before his passing in November 2011. Epstein's final study, published in February 2011, made what he called the “invisible costs of coal visible” by accounting for the external health costs of air and water pollution from mining and coal-fired plants.
His team's best estimate for the annual cost of coal to American society was $345 billion—with a range from $175 billion to $523 billion. The numbers were based on assessing results from a detailed survey of prior research.
Yet the first speaker provided sobering numbers of his own demonstrating that global coal consumption and demand will not decline any time soon.
Annual coal purchases in the U.S. are about $50 billion, said Daniel Kammen, a physicist and director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. But in the oil and gas sector, total purchases are about $500 billion each year, he said. For that reason, Kammen stated, environmentalists and renewable energy proponents have chosen the “wrong enemy.”
Suitable, low-cost replacements for oil and gas exist—such as biofuel, Kammen noted. However, a substitute for coal has not yet been found.
Panelist Samir Doshi, an ecologist at the University of Vermont who contributed to Epstein's life-cycle study of coal, described the impact of mining on Appalachian communities.
Mountaintop removal is the “most efficient” form of surface mining, Doshi said. It entails lower labor costs, but it does not currently factor in the external health costs on nearby residents. It's also one of the most energy-intensive methods of extracting, he stated.
“The drilling in of nitrate explosives over two weeks is equivalent to the blasting of an atomic bomb,” Doshi said. “It has to be. You're blowing up a mountain.”
Unlike the pollution caused by the dumping of mountain remnants—called “valley fill” or “spoil”—into streams, the release of methane from mining is under-reported, Doshi said. Once methane gets into the atmosphere, it has 25 times the heat-trapping capability of carbon dioxide, he noted.
Years of studying communities throughout the Appalachian states—Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia—have unveiled the negative relationship between mining and community health, said panelist Melissa Ahern, an economist at Washington State University, who has worked in the region since 2007. Ahern and her frequent collaborator Michael Hendryx of West Virginia University contributed to Epstein's life-cycle study as well.
Ahern has found that coal-mining towns have higher poverty rates, higher levels of birth defects, and a higher percentage of unemployed workers (due to mechanization among mining companies) compared with non-mining towns.
With more recent data, Ahern specifically compared mountaintop removal mining counties with their non-mining counterparts. People in areas with mountaintop removal had a 31 percent higher risk of reduced quality of life because of health issues, she found.
In particular, a study co-authored by Hendryx concluded that 703 excess deaths from cardiovascular disease occurred in mountaintop removal areas, in comparison with 369 excess deaths in towns near conventional mining sites.
Ahern asked the audience to ponder the situation as an age-old question of who should reap the benefits from mining—and who should pay the costs to public health.
“We can all remember what happened with tobacco,” she said. “We have to sort out and understand what is the true cost of what we are doing and see if there is an alternative. Can we do something now that we know what all the costs are?”
Derrick Haynes is a senior majoring in print/online journalism at Howard University. Derrick was an intern most recently at the Washington Post on the metro desk, and an online copy-editing intern at WSJ.com. He has covered politics and plays and everything in between. Reach him at dhaynesflga@gmail.com.
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