Joshua Anderson for The New York Times Miners in a break car that will take them down into a coal mine in Hazard, Ky.
Coal may be among the dirtiest fuels, but it is also cheap and plentiful in the United States, where it still accounts for nearly half of electricity generation.
Yet coal power’s rock-bottom price for utilities and consumers omits a host of attendant costs associated with its production, from public health impacts to local and global environmental effects. Measuring these impacts with any kind of precision is not easy, but in a new report, a team of researchers at the Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment tries to put a price tag on coal’s hidden costs.
The numbers are startling: simply tallying public health impacts, the study found that coal costs the United States economy $140 billion to $242 billion a year. Much of this burden is borne by mining communities in Appalachia, where premature deaths associated with coal mining cost local economies an estimated $74.6 billion a year.
“We really don’t appreciate the public health dimension of what this is costing us,” said Dr. Paul Epstein, lead author of the study and a public health expert at Harvard Medical School. “I think we’ve been sticking our heads into the sand.”
Even the study’s most conservative estimate of the uncounted cost of coal — $175 billion a year — would more than double the average cost of coal-fired electricity, the authors found. At this lower range, roughly 80 percent of the costs were from well-documented public health impacts like lung and heart disease, with the rest of the costs attributed to climate change and other environmental impacts as well as local economic effects like lost tourism in coal-mining areas.
In a statement to Reuters, Lisa Camooso Miller, a spokeswoman for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, an industry group, criticized the Harvard study, saying it failed to account for the positive societal impacts of cheap coal energy. “Lower energy prices are linked to a higher standard of living and better health,” Ms. Miller said.
Yet Dr. Epstein maintains that the true costs of coal are probably even higher than the study’s worst-case estimate of more than $500 billion a year. Much remains unknown about the public health dimensions of coal mining, processing and combustion, particularly the effect on groundwater, and with a lack of firm data, the study ignored a host of probable pollution-related health impacts.
“Part of the epidemic of cancer can be attributable to some of these carcinogens that we’re pouring into the groundwater from extracting fossil fuels,” he said.
The infiltration of carcinogens into the residential water supply of Appalachian communities may be particularly acute, he said, and public health studies are under way to determine the severity of the contamination.
“We see the accidents and the deaths of some of the miners. We see some of the impacts of mountaintop removal,” he said. “We don’t see the benzene and lead and mercury and arsenic — the whole slew of carcinogenic materials affecting household waters.”