Environment, International, Politics

Study: Switching From Coal Would Save 52,000 Lives Annually In The United States

220px-AlfedPalmersmokestacksWe have previously discussed studies that show the number of people killed by pollution each year — a concrete cost rarely discussed in debates like the current outcry over the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Accord.  In a new study published in Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews (DOI: 10.1016/j.rser.2017.05.119), researchers from Michigan Technological University found that switching over to photovotaics from coal would prevent 51,999 premature deaths a year and potentially making as much as $2.5 million for each life saved.  What is interesting is that those people opposing environmental controls clearly do not view themselves in one of these groups of fatalities even though pollution tends to impact everyone fairly evenly.

Each year coal causes tens of thousands of Americans premature deaths in the United States.  The Paris Accord is often discussed in terms of temperature control.  Indeed, President Trump referred to the small decrease that would be attained from carbon reductions. What was missed is that the Accord is designed to stop the worsening of the atmosphere as the first priority. This study shows that there are also concrete benefits in terms of lives.

I was critical of the Paris Accord as not going far enough (even though the Accord has a provision for interim adjustments to attain greater reductions).  However, I still believe that the Trump Administration has placed this country on a path that will cost both health and economic benefits.  As noted earlier, the alternative fuel industry employs more people than coal, oil, and gas operations combined in this country.  Green technology and alternative fuels are the expanding economy and market around the world.  We are now moving aggressively away from the new economy and it will cost not just jobs but lives in the long run in my view.

 

Here is the study: Carbon Pollution study

133 thoughts on “Study: Switching From Coal Would Save 52,000 Lives Annually In The United States”

    1. I’ve personally never met anyone who didn’t believe the climate is changing. It quite obviously always has and always will. So what’s your point?

  2. The reason that everyone can open a can of food and not die is that Napoleon, realizing that an army does “travel on its stomach” offered a large cash prize to anyone who could figure out how to preserve food.

    He didn’t provide government funding for the effort. He awarded the cash prize for results.

    Obama said if he got everything he wanted regarding fossil fuels utility bills would “skyrocket>” His word — not mine.

    If coal is eliminated without a viable, affordable replacement, Granny won’t be getting pushed off a cliff — she’ll freeze to death in the dark.

  3. Is that the gross or the net? Did they make any attempt at all at assessing the public health implications of reallocating factors of production? Is it even possible to model that with requisite specificity?

    While we’re at it, you don’t ‘save 52,000’ lives annually. All of those 52,000 will die eventually. What you do is make additions to life expectancy.

    1. Oh, so now you want to put all those solar workers out of work???? You are so cruel.

  5. Study: Cut CO2 emissions 100%.

    Change your life style. The Amazon way. Yine Indians meets the Mashco Piro Indians. It was an ambush. 200 Mashco warriors invaded Yine Village of Monte Salvado, Peru. This rare video shows it.

  6. The stupidity of people who are missing out on the alternative energy industrial revolution: the reduced pollution, the increase of higher paying jobs, the opportunities for entrepreneurial windfalls, the increase of exports from the US instead of to the US, etc, is graphic when on reads this blog. This seems to be becoming a uniquely American phenomenon. Turley’s blog is now at par or perhaps worse than those of Fox News and the Washington Times.

    However, first one has to identify the sickness before it can be cured. If one archived these postings from the extreme right wing nuts and compared them to the thoughts of the flat earth people, those against the polio vaccine, ????

    1. And these Trumpers here probably believe that Galileo was a heretic.

      1. You keep reminding us that progtrash politics begins and ends with vanity. It has almost no serious content anymore.

    2. Are you aware that the flat earth theory was once the “consensus”?

  7. Hundreds-of-billions-of-tons of carbon pumped out every year worldwide and it just goes away apparently. No effects, no long-term damage.

    It’s like listening to people deny the existence of electrons while they use electricity to do so.

    We’re altering the climate at our peril, as if we don’t have enough already.

      1. Not as carbon dioxide in the air.

        Do learn some basic chemistry…

  9. And, with the additional heat and disruption of the formerly stable climate, less food.

    Does not look good going into the future.

  10. It’s depressing how many crazies Professor Turley seems to attract.

    2. Patriot, Prairie Rose, and Bettykath haven’t posted on this thread.

    3. Indeed. I became a bit of a fan of Turley back in the Bush years, then I lost track of him. I recently found his blog and am surprised at how much of a sewer the comments are. Oh well.

  11. David B. was that reply to me? Not much evidence in it if it was.

    Here is just one example of cooking data in favor of the lie that man is changing weather by burning coal, gasoline, natural gas or whatever.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/05/30/global-warming-alarmists-caught-doctoring-97-percent-consensus-claims/#12ef33d8485d

    The ‘hockey stick’ jive has also been debunked. Other global fear monger talking points have also been shot down.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2015/02/09/top-10-global-warming-lies-that-may-shock-you/#644fd5253a5a

    SamFox

    1. Unfortunately, SamFox, those articles are Faux Neuz. If you care to comment about climate, first learn some climatology. I previously, above, suggested the thorough study by Weart.

      1. So then Mr. Benson, refute them. Prove to us that these are fake articles.

        SamFox

    2. Mr Fox, you should not use the word “whatever” – it is code for vagina.

  12. Do these people cared, truly gave a dern, about human life? If so, how about they do a study on how many lives could be saved by switching from abortion to adoption.

    One good volcanic eruption spews more junk into the air than the USA does in what, 10 years? Our emissions are way down from the 1800 & 1900 hundreds. I for one am not falling for the man caused global warming scam.

    Anyone for getting India & China to cut THEIR emissions? Al Gore & L Decaprio, however it’s spelled, have yet to back their jive with a lifestyle change.

    Mr. Trump did US a HUGE favor by withdrawing from the Paris crap. It’s just a setup to further take US down Cloward & Pivon style. Any one read their book ‘Strategy’? Throw Rules For Radicals in there while we’re at it.

    SamFox

    1. This is too scatter-brained to respond to. See my previous.

      1. No, it’s not too scatter-brained. The authors in question may have produced a study as meticulously as they could. It doesn’t mean it’s all that useful for collective decision-making. It can be useful for people who want to feel important. Paul Ehrlich spent decades promoting his ideas for saving humanity. His colleagues in whatever faculty at Stanford in which he was ensconced just published papers in the life sciences in obscure academic journals. (I bet they published better work, though).

  13. I am calling BS on this. 52K, that is an insane number to claim. That is a huge number. Traffic deaths in the US are 33K a year (and I am rounding up).

    And switching to photoelectric? You mean those photoelectrics made in toxic village waste sites in China?

    1. Unfortunately, the figure is in agreement with prior epidemiological studies. You could start by considering the articles cited in the paper that Turley has linked.

      1. Which ‘prior studies’?

        And how is the ‘study’ conducted? The problem you have here is attempting to define and measure all the implications of such a technological modification.

  14. What’s not mentioned is the 200,000 deaths in the US caused by medical mistakes.
    So where’s climate issue? Is it embedded in the other issues? What about genetics?
    This is the worse argument for Global warming activists.

    Heart disease: 614,348
    Cancer: 591,699
    Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 147,101
    Accidents (unintentional injuries): 136,053
    Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 133,103
    Alzheimer’s disease: 93,541
    Diabetes: 76,488
    Influenza and pneumonia: 55,227
    Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 48,146
    Intentional self-harm (suicide): 42,773

    With all due respect, Professor Turley, you’re wrong.

    Nevermind that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Nevermind that the oceans would RECEDE if the polar ice caps would melt…think about that…that’s not even physics. Nevermind that they leave the sun out of the equation when Mann and Phil Jones makes their models.

    Professor Turley, I so admire you.I don’t mean to be presumptuous. Educate yourself on the other side, There are 1000s of legitimate scientists like John Christy that will show you that this is all political. Even the founder of Greenpeace. Patrick Moore finds the movement highly political.

    If climate change or global warming or global freezing isn’t real then the deaths associated with it can’t be either.

    When I was a kid, global cooling was the panic. “The New Ice Age” was the fear. I remember it well because I was already a freeze baby. More cold panicked me.

    Is this the hill you wish to die on?

    1. You have it all quite, quite wrong. First study “The Discovery of Global Warming” by Spencer Weart. Only then comment.

      1. David Benson – what is Stephen’s study going to tell me that the Climategate emails didn’t? And why is he the be all and end all that we should read?

        1. You have the name wrong. This history is a place to start, not stop.

    2. Pollution is somewhat separate from ‘climate change’. Poor health and deaths can be, in some cases, attributable to pollution.

      I agree that ‘climate change’ is highly politicized. However, the issue can be examined dispassionately. Cholesterol and fat cause heart disease was the consensus until recently. It, too, was not discussed dispassionately, and the proponents of that hypothesis who were so sure of themselves did not actually have the whole picture. Genetics is a poor argument, too, considering the effects of epigenetics. Environment (diet, lifestyle, stress, toxins and pollution, etc) plays a huge role, and can affect genes.

      Agriculture and pollution does play a role through the effects on the soil microbiome, and, consequently carbon sequestration.

      I agree, it is not a pollutant, per se. But, like excess CO2 in our blood can cause illness, excess CO2 in the atmosphere could upset the balance and cause problems, too. The rising CO2 is a symptom of other dysfunction, and that source(s) has not been determined adequately.

      Also,the complexity of the soil microbiome and agriculture and chemicals does not fit into the models. And, the Paris Agreement states at the beginning that food production should not be affected by attempts to reduce emissions. That seems to indicate that any issues regarding agricultural practices will not even be part of the discussion. Why the focus on industry? They are not the sole source of problems, just as smoking is not a sole cause of chronic disease in people.

  15. This is not the first study on excess mortality and ill health from breathing air polluted by burning stuff, especially coal.

    The three prior commenters obviously haven’t bothered to try to understand that literature.

  16. This is a very nice puff piece for a low level technical university trying to get subsidies for solar power. This school’s specialty is metallurgy mining, not coal. And the article was primarily written by the social sciences department, lead author.

    1. MTU doesn’t do mining anymore. The article has nothing to do with any attempt by MTU to acquire solar panels.

      1. David Benson – if you read the article, they are pushing the subsidy of solar panels and the sales of solar panels.

        1. I wouldn’t say “pushing” but rather the replacement of coal burners by solar panels everywhere in the USA so as to save lives, and by their metrics, $$.

          I didn’t notice anything about subsidies in the abstract which is as much as I read.

          1. David Benson – I read the whole thing, not just the abstract. Where did you do to school for goodness sakes? BTW, I did learn that engineers have not learned to write any better. They really needed an editor from the lit dept.

    2. Epidemiology is a social research discipline, so you’d expect that. The question is whether their model could ever adequately account for the downstream effects of reallocating factors of production.

  17. Now we know for sure that MR Turley is a shill for the globalists, as anyone with an IQ over room temperature, has figured out this blatantly obvious con job.

        1. frank – only Obama and Soros have paid shills working for them these days.

      3. Is it ‘peer-reviewed’? The title of the publication suggests it specializes in rapid publication and / or letters. There are commercial publishers who have an ant heap of small circulation lower-rung journals that are seldom cited.

      4. David – it is a publish or perish world in academia. This article is published in a journal probably no one reads, I do not know if it was peer reviewed or not, but if you read the Climategate emails, peer review is a joke in the climate field.

        1. Not necessarily a joke, but the e-mails did reveal that people in gatekeeper positions (at the American Geophysical Union, IIRC) were scamming around to keep dissenters out of print.

      1. You’re a conduit for a conduit. Why not do something that would induce a sentient being to take you seriously?

        1. DSS, are you assuming that anon is a sentient being? Appears to be more of a bot to me.

  20. Disproportionate losses directly downwind from the coal burners. Here in southeastern Washington state I am downwind of precisely 2 coal burners, both at considerable distance. The PM 2.5 hazards around here are not from coal haze.

    Not true in the Midwest and further east.

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