3 ms·
How can we know that coal kills 13k people a year in the US? Sure, burning coal releases carcinogens but most of the population lives far away from coal plants.
by bgorman 6y ago
How can we know that coal kills 13k people a year in the US? Sure, burning coal releases carcinogens but most of the population lives far away from coal plants.
- Lazare 6y agoThis study says 13k: https://www.catf.us/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/CATF_Pub_TheTollFromCoal.pdf https://www.catf.us/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/CATF_Pub_TheT... Estimates vary; some reckon it's more like 50k: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1352231013004548?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...
- corty 6y agoSimilar to how we "know" how many people a low-level nuclear release killed: You know how much of a high dose of some carcinogen it takes for a certain cancer or death risk. You scale this down linearly to low doses. Then you estimate population doses from the release and a few multiplications later you arrive at a "death toll". You will note the amount of estimates necessary, and the pessimistic assumptions like linear-no-threshold for carcinogen exposure. Most probably, death-tolls estimated this way are upper bounds. Only for smog events, there is a possible calibration of such estimates through excess mortality, and even that is in some doubt, because smog hits the old-infirm-dying-anyways harder.