After Gutenberg

Brooklyn Treehugger Brian Merchant relays word from the National Academy of Sciences that coal fired electric power plants do an estimated $62 billion dollars in environmental damage a year. The estimate accounts for “damage done to crop and timber yields, to buildings and materials, and the toll coal takes on human health–including the cost of illness and premature deaths it causes.”

Photo via Climatico
“Aggregate damages associated with sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter emitted by the facilities amounted to $156 million on average per plant.”

The study, The Hidden Cost of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use, commissioned by the Academy, examined 406 coal plants. The coal plants in the study group account for approximately 95% of the electricity generated in the United States by coal-fired power plants.

The study concluded that the hidden cost of coal amounts to $156 million a year. Of course, this is a cost borne by the public rather than coal companies. The report notes that it is the US government, “which must clean up coal plants’ contamination,” i.e., when such clean-up does occur.

A portion of the hidden costs can be found in medical bills that people who have coverage incur from illnesses related to air and water pollution generated by the utilities operating the coal-fired electric power plants. According to the report, these health costs amount to damages that “include premature mortality and morbidity (chronic bronchitis, asthma, emergency hospital admissions for respiratory and cardiovascular disease).”

[Editor's note: No Surgeon General Warning as yet, although we see plenty of the Tobacco strategy.]

Legislation under consideration “repeats the mistakes of the 1977 Clean Air Act — mistakes that we have been paying for in the form deadly air pollution ever since. Three decades ago,” writes Bruce Niles, “Congress exempted older plants from soot and smog limits that applied to new units, on the assumption and promise by the industry that they would soon be retired. Instead, the industry took full advantage of this loophole to refurbish old plants and, in some cases, to expand their capacity and emit even more of the air pollution that causes tens of thousands of asthma attacks, hospitalizations, heart attacks, and premature deaths every year.”

Also factored into the final costs was damage done to recreational activities and outdoor visibility. All told, the reduced or damaged crop and timer yields, the damage done to building materials, the strain on placed on outdoor recreation, the hampered visibility in certain environments, and the toll taken on human health brings the cost of coal to $62 billion a year in the US.

The study did not consider any potential damages done by greenhouse gas emissions, either–this is the cost of burning coal right now, the price that all American citizens must pay. And needless to say, it’s a steep one.

Nor did the report consider subsidization of the coal industry.

More Treehugging posts about the Environmental Damage of Coal

• US Coal Plants Dump Thousands of Gallons of Waste Into Drinking Water a Year
• 600 Coal Ash Dump Sites Found in 35 States: Is There One Near You …