4 ms·

> Burning stuff [2,3] causes all sorts of effects on our environment, directly impacting health. It can; apparently in the US long it did; but a lot of the dir

> Burning stuff [2,3] causes all sorts of effects on our environment, directly impacting health. It can; apparently in the US long it did; but a lot of the dirt got cleaned up. E.g., can have clean air even in LA and NYC with lots of gasoline and Diesel power cars and trucks. And outside the top 50 or so US cities, car and truck exhaust is a problem not worth even talking about. E.g., coal needs to be cleaned up since it can put out sulfur, mercury, some radioactivity, etc. Some uses of coal in China and India might be causing significant to serious problems there. For some ugly problems, see the movie I referenced here: The movie shows some of what happens in Africa where they try to cook indoors by burning dried animal dung -- really bad, ugly medical problems. They would be much better off burning coal or using electricity from burning coal in a power plant.

pintxo 7y ago
You might be underestimating the negative health effects of "burning stuff", have a look at page 3 of [1]. Replacing coal with gas should give a 10x improvement on air pollution related deaths and serious illness. If we could go full renewable (or fusion, if it wasn't always 25 years away), we could get rid of even more averse health effects. Note: your argument of coal based electric energy is better than burning stuff at home is strongly supported by [1]. But this is not what we are arguing about. No one was proposing to abandon electric energy from the grid and go back to burn wood at home. The question was, if there maybe is a health argument to switch from coal (or generally burning stuff) to renewable energy. [1] (This has been published in The Lancet, sorry for the potentially biased looking link, but due to the paywall at the original publisher I had to resort to google for an alternate provider) http://www.scotianwindfields.ca/sites/default/files/publications/electricity_generation_and_health_the_lancet_2007.pdf http://www.scotianwindfields.ca/sites/default/files/publicat...
UnFleshedOne 7y ago
Well, I can imagine burning dung is worse for your health than burning coal. Between apartment size dung stoves and a centralized coal plant I would totally chose the coal plant. That is a bar so low you'll have to dig it up though.

pintxo 7y ago

You might be underestimating the negative health effects of "burning stuff", have a look at page 3 of [1]. Replacing coal with gas should give a 10x improvement on air pollution related deaths and serious illness. If we could go full renewable (or fusion, if it wasn't always 25 years away), we could get rid of even more averse health effects. Note: your argument of coal based electric energy is better than burning stuff at home is strongly supported by [1]. But this is not what we are arguing about. No one was proposing to abandon electric energy from the grid and go back to burn wood at home. The question was, if there maybe is a health argument to switch from coal (or generally burning stuff) to renewable energy. [1] (This has been published in The Lancet, sorry for the potentially biased looking link, but due to the paywall at the original publisher I had to resort to google for an alternate provider) http://www.scotianwindfields.ca/sites/default/files/publications/electricity_generation_and_health_the_lancet_2007.pdf http://www.scotianwindfields.ca/sites/default/files/publicat...

UnFleshedOne 7y ago

Well, I can imagine burning dung is worse for your health than burning coal. Between apartment size dung stoves and a centralized coal plant I would totally chose the coal plant. That is a bar so low you'll have to dig it up though.