The venerable Matt Wald at the “NY Times” had a revealing story yesterday: Fossil Fuels’ Hidden Cost Is in Billions, Study Says. He cites a study, commissioned by Congress, just out from the National Research Council. Monetizing the value of human life cut short by air pollution – “small soot particles, which cause lung damage; nitrogen oxides, which contribute to smog; and sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain” – the NRC estimated $120 billion a year in health costs, based on 20,000 premature deaths valued at $6 million each.
The study did not measure the impacts from trains, shipping, or aviation, nor from the impacts of climate change. The NRC study neglects then, among other things, what James J. Corbett, a professor in the College of Earth, Ocean and Engineering at the University of Delaware, asserted in a study published two years ago that attributed 60,000 cardiopulmonary and lung cancer deaths each year globally to shipping emissions – and forecast an increase to nearly 85,000 deaths by 2012 under current trends.
The NRC study “…also found that renewable motor fuel, in the form of ethanol from corn, was slightly worse than gasoline in its environmental impact.” (See Are Biofuels A Bummer? for more on the problems of ethanol production.) The NRC study did not, however, delve into environmental or health damage from coal mining, oil extraction and refining, nor nuclear power operations and radioactive waste disposal. (For more at the blog on coal, see Coal – Besides Carbon Dioxide, There’s …)
I’ve highlighted many other problems with fossil fuel and nuclear power here, including the massive capital and operating costs and the extraordinary inefficiency of conversion loss in conventional central power generation. I’ve touched on the “resource curse” too. What I and others have been saying is let’s all of us, in the developed and the developing world, be free of these many and diverse drags on our societies. What the National Research Council is affirming in their study is that health impacts count!
(There’s a P.S. here: the study found that the health impacts from natural gas are quite small relative to those from coal and oil. Not surprisingly, there’s a nearly full-page ad from America’s Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA) tucked in right next to Wald’s article.)