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

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...