6 ms·

How Coal Kills

48 points by wlmsng 12y ago

higherpurpose 12y ago
It seems unlikely we'll ever put a price on coal's impact on people's health (and therefore the cost of healthcare) and on the environment. But the very least we could do is cut the subsidies, and let it compete fairly against solar and other renewables. Eventually we'll chase it out of the market, because solar ill keep getting more cost-effective.
- jes 12y ago
  Would you be willing to have a truly level playing field, where no energy technology was awarded subsidies?
  - danielharan 12y ago
    Not only would that be very difficult to do, nuclear and coal have had decades of subsidies, giving them quite an unfair head-start. In any case, by 2017 solar will be at grid parity in most of the US. By 2020 this won't even be a topic.
    - msisk6 12y ago
      It doesn't seem possible for solar to make that much progress in that short a time. It takes forever to get transmission capacity approved and built to areas where solar is really cost-effective and we still don't have grid-scale energy storage.
      - danielharan 12y ago
        By grid parity, I meant people would be able to save money by installing it on their rooftops. As for utility-scale, it's also smashing records, but that's a different discussion. $6c/kWh in UAE was a figure that surprised a lot of observers. Regarding storage... solar coincides very well with peak A/C load, so the main use case doesn't require it.
  - lkbm 12y ago
    A truly level playing field would mean internalizing all externalities. If that were possible, yes, that would be ideal, but as he just noted, it's really unlikely, partly because it's enormously complex.
    - fleitz 12y ago
      That's actually just your definition of a level playing field, there is no 'true' level playing field. (Well, other than literal playing fields that are level)
- strictnein 12y ago
  Compete fairly against solar by eliminating coal's subsidies but not solar's?
- ProAm 12y ago
  > cut the subsidies, and let it compete fairly against solar and other renewables Almost all those other industries have massive subsidies. Solar would have gone no where without the government the last 10 years.
- ghouse 12y ago
  World-wide, in 2010, the IEA calculated that fossil fuel subsidies were $409 _billion_! http://www.iea.org/publications/worldenergyoutlook/resources/energysubsidies/ http://www.iea.org/publications/worldenergyoutlook/resources...
Jolijn 12y ago
I'm interested in the study of complex issues like these (more from a math point of view than a political one) - how to optimize for the right choice, given that each choice has a bunch of non-overlapping side effects. But I don't really know where to get started. What could I google for?
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  "Economics" :-) Seriously, this is precisely the problem that economics tries to solve, and it is evolving into a mature discipline with a reasonable level of empirical validity, but the way psychology has evolved in the past few decades. There are several main policy-oriented disciplines: 1) sociology, which studies society as if economics didn't matter 2) economics, which studies society as if morality didn't matter 3) political science, which studies society as if neither economics nor morality matters I'm caricaturing, of course, but the differences between the fields are due more to historical accident than anything else, and if you're interested in focusing on the math then economics is the place to be. There is a lot of very interesting work being done in "heterodox" economics right now, particularly by people like Steve Keen, who is focused on relaxing the assumption that the economy is at all times in quasi-equilibrium, which is foundational to the neo-classical paradigm: http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/ http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/ Keen is interested in dynamical economic models, which necessarily require you include things like banks and money in the model (these drop out of equilibrium models, mostly.)
strictnein 12y ago
I'll flip the question: Considering that coal has provided a very significant amount of the electrical power and heat for humans over the past 100 years, how many lives has coal saved? How much has it improved the human experience? Put simply, a world without coal is a horrible world.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Well, temper that with a view of a world where coal was scarcer, more expensive. It would not have been used for so many purposes, we'd have been more efficient in our spoiling of the planet. Being as cheap as it was, led to a car for every garage, consumerism, inefficient insulation in houses for the first century etc.
  - strictnein 12y ago
    You would prefer a world where only the rich can afford electricity and warmth? Because that's the world you describe.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      Oh don't be a pedant. If coal were more expensive, it would be used for important things - not pissed away. That says little about rich vs poor.
      - strictnein 12y ago
        I'm not being a pedant. Where does the inexpensive electricity come from? It is very much about rich and poor. And making electricity is a very important thing.
        Retric 12y ago
        Coal is currently important, but not that important. As a finite resource it's also going to be gone in ~2 thousand years (big error bars on that though) which is a fairly short time period all things considered. For perspective let's ignore all non-renewables + wind and solar and just look at Hydropower. Hydropower use reached a record 3,427 terawatt-hours, or about 16.1 percent of global electricity consumption. That on its own is enough to provide useful power to everyone sure we would not be using it for home heating but lighting, computers, and refrigeration would easily make the cut even if AC would be far too expensive for most people. aka, most people get a setback but not to the dark ages. Toss in just wind power and you could meet the world’s electricity needs at perhaps a 10-30% increase in electricity costs. In the end there is a huge inertia in the current system; dropping coal in say 10 years would be possible, but ridiculously expensive. Dropping it over the next 100 might just happen without anyone noticing. PS: Solar is really interesting as it's cheaper than coal in some areas, but inertia and changes in the supply curve are keeping their prices linked. We are heading to a supply shift so peak costs might actually start taking place at night.
mavhc 12y ago
Coal contributes to most of the mercury pumped into our atmosphere, which is what's contaminating the fish, and more radiation than nuclear power.
- Synaesthesia 12y ago
  Coal power also contributes more radiation to the atmosphere than nuclear power, or weapons ever did! It does this because of trace amounts of uranium and other radioactive elements which are in coal, released when burnt.
belorn 12y ago
For an article titled "how coal kills", I must say I am not much more wiser from reading it. Is it only from specific impurities which are themselves toxic elements, or does the carbon play a role? Is it the size of the particles in coal smoke/ash, or is it the molecules? Do they interact to form something deadlier than the sum of the parts? I know coal kill. What would be interesting to know is how.
- nitid_name 12y ago
  I've heard east coast (US) coal is dirtier than west coast (US) coal, particularly in sulfides. The acid rain fix known as the Clean Air Act of 1990 was heavily lobbied by the east coast coal producers and bears some marks to show for it. Burning so called "Clean Coal" has to do with how much gross weight of sulfur you pull out of the coal, which makes sense for coal heavy in sulfides, but less so for west coast fuel. As it stands, to burn west coast coal in the US requires the addition of sulfides to the coal so it can then be pulled back out. As for other impurities... there are a lot of radioactive crap in coal that is aerosolized during the combustion process. The most notable of these is uranium, which is carried away with the rest of the fly ash. There's a "shadow" around coal smoke stacks where such fly ash ends up accumulating. If it makes it into the water table or onto arable land that is used to grow crops, BAM, you've irradiated a small chunk of your population. Depending on the source of the coal, there are various other heavy metals that can end up in your fly ash.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- fleitz 12y ago
  In any random set of data there will be 'clusters'. There's actually a pretty good chance a cluster will appear. It's like a lottery, it's very likely someone will win it each week. Humans have an incredibly poor intuition about statistics.
- mikeash 12y ago
  Rather than talk about how it "seems like" a slim chance, you could actually calculate the odds and see just what the chances are. And remember that if an event is one-in-a-million, it'll happen thousands of times in the world at large.
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  Most people die from heart disease or cancer. Why do you assume the chance is slim?
fleitz 12y ago
Why are press releases on hacker news? The 'article' is practically devoid of content.
Symmetry 12y ago
That was completely devoid of any useful numbers. Here's a nice, well researched chart that actually puts coal in a useful context compared to other ways of generating electricity. http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml The rest of that is well worth reading, too.
- malkia 12y ago
  I'm going nuclear over this page!
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  Unfortunately it doesn't give any links to sources. In particular, the number for oil is surprisingly high. I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm just curious about where and how the deaths are occurring. Coal kills in three distinct ways: 1) Miners: This depends enormously on the country and the mining technology. The trend in North America is toward fewer and fewer miners underground. I've worked in a support industry for hard rock mining, and coal is fundamentally different in a lot of ways, but in hard rock the push is toward "zero entry" mining, where everything underground is teleoperated or simply autonomous. 2) Transport: Coal has to be moved via train and truck, and the average thermal coal plant requires a boxcar load every fifteen minutes. This is one of the things that makes nuclear so much safer: uranium has such high energy density that transportation deaths are very nearly zero. Mining deaths are lower too. 3) Pollution: This is where coal really falls down. It's full of heavy metals--lead, mercury, arsenic--and governed by standards that let coal plants release more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear plants. Particulates cause premature death due to respiratory disease. On the good side, they may be cutting global climate change by more than half (1 W/m2 cooling due to particulates vs 1.6 W/m2 warming due to CO2). Oil in contrast seems like it ought to be relatively safe. Drilling, refining and pipeline transport rarely kill people. Rail transport--brought to you by people who hate pipelines but love cars and electricity but oppose nuclear, solar and windmills--is far more dangerous but it would be surprising if it was that much worse than coal. Here are some alternative data with some discussion of different sources and studies: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so... (coal and oil are both still pretty bad compared to nuclear, but we knew that anyway: nuclear is overwhelmingly the safest way to generate electricity, despite its likely preventable issues with economically catastrophic failure.)

48 points by wlmsng 12y ago

It seems unlikely we'll ever put a price on coal's impact on people's health (and therefore the cost of healthcare) and on the environment. But the very least we could do is cut the subsidies, and let it compete fairly against solar and other renewables. Eventually we'll chase it out of the market, because solar ill keep getting more cost-effective.

jes 12y ago
Would you be willing to have a truly level playing field, where no energy technology was awarded subsidies?
- danielharan 12y ago
  Not only would that be very difficult to do, nuclear and coal have had decades of subsidies, giving them quite an unfair head-start. In any case, by 2017 solar will be at grid parity in most of the US. By 2020 this won't even be a topic.
  - msisk6 12y ago
    It doesn't seem possible for solar to make that much progress in that short a time. It takes forever to get transmission capacity approved and built to areas where solar is really cost-effective and we still don't have grid-scale energy storage.
    - danielharan 12y ago
      By grid parity, I meant people would be able to save money by installing it on their rooftops. As for utility-scale, it's also smashing records, but that's a different discussion. $6c/kWh in UAE was a figure that surprised a lot of observers. Regarding storage... solar coincides very well with peak A/C load, so the main use case doesn't require it.
- lkbm 12y ago
  A truly level playing field would mean internalizing all externalities. If that were possible, yes, that would be ideal, but as he just noted, it's really unlikely, partly because it's enormously complex.
  - fleitz 12y ago
    That's actually just your definition of a level playing field, there is no 'true' level playing field. (Well, other than literal playing fields that are level)
strictnein 12y ago
Compete fairly against solar by eliminating coal's subsidies but not solar's?
ProAm 12y ago
> cut the subsidies, and let it compete fairly against solar and other renewables Almost all those other industries have massive subsidies. Solar would have gone no where without the government the last 10 years.
ghouse 12y ago
World-wide, in 2010, the IEA calculated that fossil fuel subsidies were $409 _billion_! http://www.iea.org/publications/worldenergyoutlook/resources/energysubsidies/ http://www.iea.org/publications/worldenergyoutlook/resources...

Jolijn 12y ago

I'm interested in the study of complex issues like these (more from a math point of view than a political one) - how to optimize for the right choice, given that each choice has a bunch of non-overlapping side effects. But I don't really know where to get started. What could I google for?

tjradcliffe 12y ago
"Economics" :-) Seriously, this is precisely the problem that economics tries to solve, and it is evolving into a mature discipline with a reasonable level of empirical validity, but the way psychology has evolved in the past few decades. There are several main policy-oriented disciplines: 1) sociology, which studies society as if economics didn't matter 2) economics, which studies society as if morality didn't matter 3) political science, which studies society as if neither economics nor morality matters I'm caricaturing, of course, but the differences between the fields are due more to historical accident than anything else, and if you're interested in focusing on the math then economics is the place to be. There is a lot of very interesting work being done in "heterodox" economics right now, particularly by people like Steve Keen, who is focused on relaxing the assumption that the economy is at all times in quasi-equilibrium, which is foundational to the neo-classical paradigm: http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/ http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/ Keen is interested in dynamical economic models, which necessarily require you include things like banks and money in the model (these drop out of equilibrium models, mostly.)

strictnein 12y ago

I'll flip the question: Considering that coal has provided a very significant amount of the electrical power and heat for humans over the past 100 years, how many lives has coal saved? How much has it improved the human experience? Put simply, a world without coal is a horrible world.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Well, temper that with a view of a world where coal was scarcer, more expensive. It would not have been used for so many purposes, we'd have been more efficient in our spoiling of the planet. Being as cheap as it was, led to a car for every garage, consumerism, inefficient insulation in houses for the first century etc.
- strictnein 12y ago
  You would prefer a world where only the rich can afford electricity and warmth? Because that's the world you describe.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Oh don't be a pedant. If coal were more expensive, it would be used for important things - not pissed away. That says little about rich vs poor.
    - strictnein 12y ago
      I'm not being a pedant. Where does the inexpensive electricity come from? It is very much about rich and poor. And making electricity is a very important thing.
      - Retric 12y ago
        Coal is currently important, but not that important. As a finite resource it's also going to be gone in ~2 thousand years (big error bars on that though) which is a fairly short time period all things considered. For perspective let's ignore all non-renewables + wind and solar and just look at Hydropower. Hydropower use reached a record 3,427 terawatt-hours, or about 16.1 percent of global electricity consumption. That on its own is enough to provide useful power to everyone sure we would not be using it for home heating but lighting, computers, and refrigeration would easily make the cut even if AC would be far too expensive for most people. aka, most people get a setback but not to the dark ages. Toss in just wind power and you could meet the world’s electricity needs at perhaps a 10-30% increase in electricity costs. In the end there is a huge inertia in the current system; dropping coal in say 10 years would be possible, but ridiculously expensive. Dropping it over the next 100 might just happen without anyone noticing. PS: Solar is really interesting as it's cheaper than coal in some areas, but inertia and changes in the supply curve are keeping their prices linked. We are heading to a supply shift so peak costs might actually start taking place at night.

mavhc 12y ago

Coal contributes to most of the mercury pumped into our atmosphere, which is what's contaminating the fish, and more radiation than nuclear power.

Synaesthesia 12y ago
Coal power also contributes more radiation to the atmosphere than nuclear power, or weapons ever did! It does this because of trace amounts of uranium and other radioactive elements which are in coal, released when burnt.

belorn 12y ago

For an article titled "how coal kills", I must say I am not much more wiser from reading it. Is it only from specific impurities which are themselves toxic elements, or does the carbon play a role? Is it the size of the particles in coal smoke/ash, or is it the molecules? Do they interact to form something deadlier than the sum of the parts? I know coal kill. What would be interesting to know is how.

nitid_name 12y ago
I've heard east coast (US) coal is dirtier than west coast (US) coal, particularly in sulfides. The acid rain fix known as the Clean Air Act of 1990 was heavily lobbied by the east coast coal producers and bears some marks to show for it. Burning so called "Clean Coal" has to do with how much gross weight of sulfur you pull out of the coal, which makes sense for coal heavy in sulfides, but less so for west coast fuel. As it stands, to burn west coast coal in the US requires the addition of sulfides to the coal so it can then be pulled back out. As for other impurities... there are a lot of radioactive crap in coal that is aerosolized during the combustion process. The most notable of these is uranium, which is carried away with the rest of the fly ash. There's a "shadow" around coal smoke stacks where such fly ash ends up accumulating. If it makes it into the water table or onto arable land that is used to grow crops, BAM, you've irradiated a small chunk of your population. Depending on the source of the coal, there are various other heavy metals that can end up in your fly ash.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

fleitz 12y ago
In any random set of data there will be 'clusters'. There's actually a pretty good chance a cluster will appear. It's like a lottery, it's very likely someone will win it each week. Humans have an incredibly poor intuition about statistics.
mikeash 12y ago
Rather than talk about how it "seems like" a slim chance, you could actually calculate the odds and see just what the chances are. And remember that if an event is one-in-a-million, it'll happen thousands of times in the world at large.
Dylan16807 12y ago
Most people die from heart disease or cancer. Why do you assume the chance is slim?

fleitz 12y ago

Why are press releases on hacker news? The 'article' is practically devoid of content.

Symmetry 12y ago

That was completely devoid of any useful numbers. Here's a nice, well researched chart that actually puts coal in a useful context compared to other ways of generating electricity. http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml The rest of that is well worth reading, too.

malkia 12y ago
I'm going nuclear over this page!
tjradcliffe 12y ago
Unfortunately it doesn't give any links to sources. In particular, the number for oil is surprisingly high. I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm just curious about where and how the deaths are occurring. Coal kills in three distinct ways: 1) Miners: This depends enormously on the country and the mining technology. The trend in North America is toward fewer and fewer miners underground. I've worked in a support industry for hard rock mining, and coal is fundamentally different in a lot of ways, but in hard rock the push is toward "zero entry" mining, where everything underground is teleoperated or simply autonomous. 2) Transport: Coal has to be moved via train and truck, and the average thermal coal plant requires a boxcar load every fifteen minutes. This is one of the things that makes nuclear so much safer: uranium has such high energy density that transportation deaths are very nearly zero. Mining deaths are lower too. 3) Pollution: This is where coal really falls down. It's full of heavy metals--lead, mercury, arsenic--and governed by standards that let coal plants release more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear plants. Particulates cause premature death due to respiratory disease. On the good side, they may be cutting global climate change by more than half (1 W/m2 cooling due to particulates vs 1.6 W/m2 warming due to CO2). Oil in contrast seems like it ought to be relatively safe. Drilling, refining and pipeline transport rarely kill people. Rail transport--brought to you by people who hate pipelines but love cars and electricity but oppose nuclear, solar and windmills--is far more dangerous but it would be surprising if it was that much worse than coal. Here are some alternative data with some discussion of different sources and studies: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so... (coal and oil are both still pretty bad compared to nuclear, but we knew that anyway: nuclear is overwhelmingly the safest way to generate electricity, despite its likely preventable issues with economically catastrophic failure.)