The Health Benefits of Wind and Solar Exceed the Cost of All Subsidies (arstechnica.com) 432
New submitter TheCoroner writes: A paper in Nature Energy suggests that the benefits we receive from moving to renewables like wind and solar that reduce air pollution exceed the cost of the subsidies required to make them competitive with traditional fossil fuels. Ars Technica reports: "Berkeley environmental engineer Dev Millstein and his colleagues estimate that between 3,000 and 12,700 premature deaths have been averted because of air quality benefits over the last decade or so, creating a total economic benefit between $30 billion and $113 billion. The benefits from wind work out to be more than 7 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is more than unsubsidized wind energy generally costs.
This study ambitiously tries to estimate the benefits from emissions that were avoided because of the increase in wind and solar energy from 2007 through 2015, and to do so for the whole of the U.S. Millstein and colleagues looked at carbon emissions, as well as sulphur dioxides, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter, all of which contribute to poor air quality. There are other factors that also need to be considered. A rise in renewables isn't the only thing that has been changing in the energy sector: fuel costs and regulation have also played a role. How much of the benefit can be attributed to wind and solar power, and how much to other changes? The researchers used models that track the benefits attributable to renewable power as a proportion of the total reduction in emissions.
This study ambitiously tries to estimate the benefits from emissions that were avoided because of the increase in wind and solar energy from 2007 through 2015, and to do so for the whole of the U.S. Millstein and colleagues looked at carbon emissions, as well as sulphur dioxides, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter, all of which contribute to poor air quality. There are other factors that also need to be considered. A rise in renewables isn't the only thing that has been changing in the energy sector: fuel costs and regulation have also played a role. How much of the benefit can be attributed to wind and solar power, and how much to other changes? The researchers used models that track the benefits attributable to renewable power as a proportion of the total reduction in emissions.
tsrjwsrtjhrb rsdth rth rdth r rsh rh rttrs (Score:5, Funny)
But what if we make the world better for no reason?
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But what if we make the world better for no reason?
7 million dollars per death ? come on really?
Re:tsrjwsrtjhrb rsdth rth rdth r rsh rh rttrs (Score:5, Informative)
That's the EPA's standard figure based on the average total contribution a person makes to the economy over the course of an entire lifetime. It's not just how much you pay him to drive the bus - it's all the money every business loses if he doesn't show up to drive the bus because their workers can't get to the factory.
And if there's a problem with that figure, it's that it's way out of date and hasn't been inflation adjusted since the study that produced it was done in the 1990s - the real figure from the same study would be a LOT higher now. But it remains the best studied, and most comprehensively an accurately calculated average financial value of a human life that exists in all of science.
There's another problem with it though - it doesn't calculate the emotional loss to family members when you die, the lost productivity to the economy for your funeral and the reduced productivity as they deal with the many difficulties of grieving, the bad impacts when a primary breadwinner dies and a formerly self-sufficient family is forced to use welfare to make ends meet or any of those things.
If you were to put a number on those losses, then even without inflation adjustment the number is probably low-balling it by at least 30%.
Mopar (Score:5, Funny)
But what about the health benefits of me driving a '69 Charger Hemi R/T? It's great for my stress level and has cured my erectile dysfunction.
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Watch Vanishing Point. It has much the same effect.
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But what about the health benefits of me driving a '69 Charger Hemi R/T? It's great for my stress level and has cured my erectile dysfunction.
Wow. PopeRatzo, this is so unlike you. (Spoken as a friend.)
All I can say is, finding a 21st-century ride might let you escape from winning the Darwin Award. ;-P
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Darwin, isn't he that monkey guy?
Let me tell you, I get so excited when I drive my Detroit iron that I don't even have to use my hands to steer. Which is handy when I need to pour myself a drink.
Re: Mopar (Score:2)
You might fool them, but I'm on to you. My guess is you drive a Prius. Which is not a horrible choice, compared to other cars. It's better than a Tata or Dacia, after all.
Re:Mopar (Score:4, Funny)
You're channelling either Hunter S Thompson or P J O'Rourke, can't quite decide which.
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Re: Mopar (Score:2)
Actually it is also good for the planet...I mean you keep a car from 69 that still runs....that beats anything. I'm greener than grass but this craziness 'buy new electric vehicle instead of running your old ICE for another decade' must stop....I bet they'll force us to buy new electric every 5 years cause you know the battery is better now and you save the world...wink wink...forced obsolescence....nudge nudge recover the RD costs of Elon the messiah...
Anyone here wants to prove me bad for the environment
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Your tears of jealousy are delicious.
Obsolete. (Score:2)
Your kind is obsolete.
sometimes the article just smells bad (Score:2, Insightful)
is it just me or when you read an article like this one does your "This is a crock of sh*t" alarm go off?
Seems like about 1 million assumptions and taking estimates into facts and global averages into local and assuming 100 utilization of generation and zero pollution cost of manufacture and disposal of generation equipment. Plus probably more. I mean I love renewable energy but this article just smells bad despite all the clean renewable air.
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Science reporting often smells worse than the actual science it reports.
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Couldn't read the paper, due to paywall, but from the abstract, is there actually a scientific method involved at all?
I have the feeling that a lot of complaints on /. about the non technical posts mirror what's going on in the scientific community; in the quest of scientists maintaining their jobs they have to get funding, and resort to very similar tactics of popularism, rather than actual scientific endeavour.
Re: sometimes the article just smells bad (Score:5, Informative)
Fuck 'em. I got a few bucks. I'll fight the case.
http://sci-hub.io/saveme/16a8/... [sci-hub.io]
If the direct link doesn't work, search the DOI.
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You're my new hero! :P
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You probably can edit the HTML/CSS to remove the blur effect.
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is it just me or when you read an article like this one does your "This is a crock of sh*t" alarm go off?
Seems like about 1 million assumptions and taking estimates into facts and global averages into local and assuming 100 utilization of generation and zero pollution cost of manufacture and disposal of generation equipment. Plus probably more. I mean I love renewable energy but this article just smells bad despite all the clean renewable air.
Estimation can be a useful tool even in areas where estimation is highly susceptible to bias.
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Estimation can be a useful tool even in areas where estimation is highly susceptible to bias.
Good point! For one thing, we now know a human life is worth 1 million dollars. So useful to know!!! And age and other factors don't matter! Also great to know. So enlightening.
Similar 'Wind and Solar Beat Nuclear' Study (Score:2, Insightful)
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
http://news.stanford.edu/news/... [stanford.edu]
Here's TFA:
"Once you have a nuclear energy facility, it's straightforward to start refining uranium in that facility, which is what Iran is doing and Venezuela is planning to do," Jacobson said. "The potential for terrorists to obtain a nuclear weapon or for states to develop nuclear weapons that could be used in limited regional wars will certainly increase with an increase in the number of nuclear energy facilities worldwide." Jacobson calculated that if one small nuclear bomb exploded, the carbon emissions from the burning of a large city would be modest, but the death rate for one such event would be twice as large as the current vehicle air pollution death rate summed over 30 years.
So basically, to make Nuclear just fall off his chart, he assumes that building more powerplants will lead to nuclear war, and calculates how much stuff that will burn. Is that not completely absurd?
Basically, the gist of what he's saying about Nuclear is this: "We have to pretend like it's a bad idea, because if we don't, other countries will want to do it, and then they might build bombs. So, say it with me: Nuclear is a baad idea."
Does somebody want to break it to the guy that Iran and other states will pursue weapons programs no matter what sort of powerplants we build in the US? And besides, what's more likely to cause war: Clean and cost-effective nuclear powerplants that the rest of the world will want to copy, or an energy shortage which sends us looking to secure fossil fuels? I think the latter.
Anyway, this calculating methodology is so incredibly bizarre that I suspect it's bought.
So I'm always hearing about how the climate science community is rigorous and weeds out bad work, but that doesn't seem to have happened here. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place, but it's been eight years and AFAICT this study was never retracted nor the lead scientist (Mark Z. Jacobson) confronted over it.
Re:sometimes the article just smells bad (Score:5, Informative)
I hear the point you are trying to make and there some validity to it if the study is suspect.
But consider this.
Any pollution associated with wind or solar or electricity generation is going to be highly localized. And it's going to be in one place - easier to scrub, filter, and contain.
The only pollution from an electric vehicle going down the road is rubber from the tires (same as other vehicles) and brakes (which is about 1/10th as much due to regenerative braking.
By comparison, internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles emits their own weight in pollutants into the atmosphere each year.
Source: OHIO EPA.
The following pollutants are in car exhaust:
(If you skip to the bottom, you'll see PM10's are a huge threat from ICE vehicles.
Pollutants from Car Exhaust
CO2 â" carbon dioxide. This gas is naturally present in the atmosphere at low concentration (approximately 0.035%). It absorbs infrared energy and is thus a greenhouse gas (a contributor to global warming). Concentrations of CO2 in the earth's atmosphere appear to be increasing. This could have a substantial effect on the climate. The internal combustion engine contributes to the increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. The effect of carbon dioxide, however, is felt worldwide. It does not have a great impact on the immediate urban environment2. Nor are car engines the greatest producers of this pollutant.
CO â" carbon monoxide. The main source of CO in cities is the internal combustion engine, where it is produced by incomplete combustion. Anthropogenic sources account for approximately 6% of the 0.1 ppm concentration of CO in the earth's atmosphere globally. In an urban area, the concentration (and the percentage anthropogenic contribution) can be much higher. During a city rush hour, for example, concentrations of CO can reach 50 or even 100 ppm, which greatly exceeds the safe level. CO is highly toxic: it binds to haemoglobin more strongly than oxygen does, thus reducing the capacity of the haemoglobin to carry oxygen to the cells of the body. CO also has the nasty habit of sticking to haemoglobin and not coming off. This means that a fairly small amount of it can do a lot of damage.
CO can be oxidised to the far less harmful CO2 if there is enough O2 available. At higher air-fuel ratios the level of CO emission goes down. The fuel has undergone complete, or more nearly complete, combustion. CO can also be oxidised to CO2 in a catalytic convertor.
NOx â" oxides of nitrogen. While some nitrogen may be present in the fuel (as mentioned earlier), most oxides of nitrogen are produced when elemental nitrogen (N2) in the air3 is broken down and oxidised at high temperatures (approximately 1000 K or greater) and pressures within the internal combustion engine. Nitrogen monoxide (NO) is produced in higher concentration than nitrogen dioxide (NO2) but the two species are in any case interconvertible by means of photochemical interactions. Other oxides of nitrogen, such as N2O4, may occur; but are more rare. Because hydrocarbons compete with nitrogen for oxygen, NO is formed to a greater extent in cars with a 'lean mixture', that is, a low fuel-air ratio.
NO and NO2 are toxic species. Oxides of nitrogen also play a major role in the formation of photochemical smog, which is discussed below.
HC â" hydrocarbons. 'Much of the hydrocarbon fuel passes through the process unconsumed and is expelled into the atmosphere along with other exhaust fumes'. This remark was made earlier in passing. Fuel close to the wall of the combustion chamber may be quenched by the relative coolness of that area and not be burned. If the engine is poorly designed or is not in proper working order the proportion of unburned fuel rises. Hydrocarbons are also released to the atmosphere by evaporation from fuel tanks. Hydrocarbons can be dangerous to human health and are also part of the makeup and cause of photochemical smog, which is discussed below.
C6H6 â" Benzene and its
Re:sometimes the article just smells bad (Score:4, Insightful)
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And the other 25% is... And how much is emitted... We can wait while you figure out your obvious mistake.
Re: sometimes the article just smells bad (Score:2)
Ya, but it sounds "truthy "
Re:Statism on the march (Score:5, Insightful)
If you believe in any form of government then you believe in re-distributive taxation. The question from there is not the morality of such a thing, anyone who has agreed that government is necessary has already agreed to that. The real question is what money should be spent on.
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Again and again I see the argument made that if you do not agree that unlimited government is necessary then you must be in favor of no government.
So, to state the real question again, how much say in how you live your life should the government have?
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Somewhere I recall a government designed around minimizing such things rather than maximizing them... But perhaps it was just a fantasy.
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If you believe in any form of government then you believe in re-distributive taxation. The question from there is not the morality of such a thing, anyone who has agreed that government is necessary has already agreed to that. The real question is what money should be spent on.
But it doesn't have to all or nothing. For me the real question is how much money must be taken from those who work.
Even if a totalitarian State could theoretically direct my life better than I can (and all adults know it can't), I still don't want one.
I had a mommy and daddy when I was a child. I don't want that now. Many people want a totalitarian State to direct their lives, I don't.
That's not the same thing as some Mad Max Sudan. I just happen to think that the best government is the the one that pro
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If you don't like the subsidies for renewables, please also fight the subsidies for fossil fuels, such as free waste disposal. We're losing hundreds of billions a year just to health problems caused by fossil fuel pollution. Problems caused by climate change will just add to that hidden fee. I don't know about you, but I'm tired of my wealth being transferred to clean up someone else's problem, especially since they got -- and still are -- rich from making the problem in the first place.
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The cost saving is not because people who die from tobacco re
Negative Externalities (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, it has long been known that if the negative externalities of coal generation were factored in it would be way more expensive than other generation forms. Did they also count the concerns about coal ash storage, which has caused drinking water problems and even a flood of radioactive, toxic sludge in the case of the Tennessee Valley?
But ... (Score:2)
But if all those people don't die early, the rest of us will have to share the cost of their social security payments.
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In that case lets put the lead back in gasoline. I miss the 97 octane stuff anyway, I had to reduce the timing on my 383 Duster.
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Lead gasoline causes expensive violence. Let's just make this efficient as possible and herd people into gas chambers on their retirement day. It'll have the added benefit of making lazy old folks work for longer productive years.
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It's mostly infants.
The stuff that comes out of tailpipe is bad (Score:5, Insightful)
It should come as a no surprise that the stuff that comes out of tailpipes is not good for you to breathe. It can and does kill people. People who want to kill themselves quickly, breathe a lot of it in a short amount of time. The rest of us are doing it over a longer period of time.
The sooner we switch away from a gas burning engine, the better.
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All we're waiting on is the damn batteries. Once we have the battery storage at an economical price the gas engine will be obsolete.
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Your renewable energy requires storage. The cheapest energy storage is lead-acid. So the environment impact of lead mining, battery production and battery recycling, with occasional loss of the batteries into the environment, should be taken into account.
Or, if you prefer, there should be a big subsidy to replace lead-acid with anything less toxic which also is to be taken into account.
And while you Americans do it we Russians just improve our nuclear cycle.
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A. Energy storage that is installed is either pumped hydro or lithium. I may be wrong, but I don't think there are any grid-scale lead-acid storage installations.
B. Storage isn't required anywhere as much as people commonly suppose. What is needed is a good grid. There is always wind somewhere. Tides are predictable. Sunlight in the right location is predictable.
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Major advances in zinc-air rechargable batteries, and iron based batteries, suggest that high density storage with a low environmental toxicity are reasonably possible. Lead-acid is CURRENTLY the most inexpensive, but it is ALSO the most heavy, and among the least energy dense. Those two things make them very unattractive for the storage medium that replaces fossil fuel, the toxicity of the lead is just icing on that shit cake.
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It should come as a no surprise that the stuff that comes out of tailpipes is not good for you to breathe. It can and does kill people. People who want to kill themselves quickly, breathe a lot of it in a short amount of time. The rest of us are doing it over a longer period of time.
You can kill yourself by drinking lots of water in a short time, so drinking less over longer periods of time is clearly unhealthy. Your conclusion might be right, but your argumentation is sadly lacking.
Sure but what if it's all a big hoax (Score:3, Insightful)
Jokes aside, at least in the US nothing's going to change unless our electoral system does. Right now about 55,000 coal miners in swing states are holding our national elections hostage trying to hold onto jobs made increasingly irrelevant by fracking and cheap natural gas... With our electoral system it doesn't matter how you vote because we don't weigh each person's vote equally. Which was after all the entire point. It keeps change to a minimum and protects landowner's interests.
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Right now about 55,000 coal miners in swing states are holding our national elections hostage trying to hold onto jobs made increasingly irrelevant by fracking and cheap natural gas...
Your statement is provably false.
According to the Wikipedia article on coal mining in the US [wikipedia.org], here are the top 10 coal producing states as of 2014, with their annual production numbers (millions of short tons) and their electoral vote allocations according the articles on the 2012 [wikipedia.org] and 2008 [wikipedia.org] US presidential elections:
I'm pretty sure nuclear beats them all (Score:4, Insightful)
Even including the deaths from Chernobyl nuclear power has an impressive safety record. More people died from windmill and solar accidents per energy produced than nuclear.
Sure, there were a lot of accidental deaths in the early days of nuclear power but it's making a lot of safe energy now. Wind and solar combined make very little energy, and you compare that to worker deaths from electrocutions and falls and nuclear has them beat by an order of magnitude on safety. Nuclear is better for the environment too, less carbon produced per energy than wind or solar. Pretty sure nuclear kills fewer birds and bats too.
I just heard on the radio today of the health effects of the sound made by windmills. I think they called it "infrasound", it's the low frequency hum made by windmills that cause headaches, hearing loss, and all kinds of crazy stuff. Maybe that's a bunch of pseudoscience, I don't know.
I see a lot of comparisons of wind and solar to coal and natural gas. Why not compare it to nuclear? I know why. By comparison wind and solar is expensive, dirty, deadly, and did I mention expensive?
If these articles want to convince me that I need wind and solar power then they need to compare it to nuclear too. But they don't. Again, I know why.
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Nuclear plants are incredibly expensive. But I'd say it's my preferred method of generation--if we reprocess (reuse) the fuel.
Nuclear was beat before this all started (Score:2)
Gas turbines, wind, solar etc fill the gaps instead of directly competing with nukes.
The nuke advocates that see solar and wind as a threat are just idiots charging at windmills who have forgotten that almost nothing has been spent on new nukes since long before wind and solar became viable on the grid.
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*cough, cough *. Fukushima.
Just like many nuke plants, they went cheap on the safety.
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You've been horribly misled. Consider how that lie you've been told is disproved in China where they really don't care much about the regulations yet their reactors are not getting built at 1/10, 1/5, or 1/2 the cost. I used to work with a Russian turbine engineer and he told me the Russian stuff that gave ever
Re:I'm pretty sure nuclear beats them all (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a link to paper by Kharecha and Hanson showing the health benefits of nuclear power to 2012. 1.8 million premature deaths avoided due to reduced air pollution.
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10... [acs.org]
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I see a lot of comparisons of wind and solar to coal and natural gas. Why not compare it to nuclear?
The base investment for nuclear power is 10 billion dollars. It's a regulatory nightmare and there is resistance against it by some people. There is also the cost of cleaning up a reactor if it melts down and all the evacuations required because of it. You have to factor in things going wrong.
By comparison wind and solar is expensive, dirty, deadly, and did I mention expensive?
Solar can be decentralized and allow people to never have to pay an electric company again. Being connected to "the grid" should be considered a vulnerability. Also, solar never threatens to an area uninhabitable
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I just heard on the radio today of the health effects of the sound made by windmills. I think they called it "infrasound", it's the low frequency hum made by windmills that cause headaches, hearing loss, and all kinds of crazy stuff. Maybe that's a bunch of pseudoscience, I don't know.
Infowars has a radio station now?
What we really should do is put WiFi routers up there so the people who make up weird illnesses don't need to stretch their imagination too high.
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It's good on health but bad on cost. Way, way too expensive.
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Send it to us. We shall reprocess it and power our Dear Soviet Motherland with your waste for the millenia to come.
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Only in the sense people don't know how radiation works and think it's dangerous for a hundred thousand years and are afraid that subduction zone disposal mines would magically spew concentrated plutonium onto future babies.
Thankfully we have nice safe coal and just dump all the waste right into the air and ocean.
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If you oppose nuclear you are a wannabe environmentalist who doesn't understand how radiation works.
Coal lovers hate nuclear to the extent it's a cliche? I've never even heard of this. You can freely substitute any fossil fuel coal in my example if it makes you happy.
Use the "think of the children" stupid (Score:2)
In any case as the old saying goes one in the hand is worth 2 in the bu
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In "macroeconomic terms," retired people continue to provide economic value to a society. For example, providing "free" child care services for their grandchildren (since typically now both parents must work to stay afloat) -- child care being one of the biggest expenses a working family can face. And that's just one example... retired folk frequently volunteer their time toward many different sorts of "economically invisible" endeavors. And, of course, they continue to be consumers, which gives us poor wor
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Electric Cars won't pollute where they are (Score:5, Informative)
Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) Vehicles emit pollution that weighs roughly as much as the vehicle- every single year.
Electric cars emit tire rubber dust (same as ICE) and brake dust (but only 1/10th as much).
That's it. No micro particulates, no unburnt hydrocarbons, no leaing fluids, no CO2, CO, or Sulphur.
Any pollution created by the cars manufacture is going to be highly localized, containable, and filterable.
Any pollution created by electrical generation is going to be highly localized, containable, and filterable (even coal).
If your town has 1 million ICE vehicles in it on a given day, replacing them would remove 4 billion pounds of pollution per year from your town.
That's going to help many over 65, and anyone with breathing problems, probably cut cancer noticeably due to the reduction of PM10 combustion emissions.
Re:Electric Cars won't pollute where they are (Score:4, Interesting)
There's a conference concerning air quality held every couple of years called "Upwind-Downwind". A few years ago, somebody presented a paper at one of them that indicated a majority of people who wound up in an emergency ward with some kind of heart problem had been breathing air on or very close to a road within the previous few hours. It was really pretty amazing. And yes, they'd taken into account all the obvious stuff like "everybody lives near a road".
There's also been evidence from mobile air testing labs that levels of NOx and SOx skyrocket at heavily-used intersections during red lights. It's extremely localized...as in feet, not yards. I'll be really interested to see what happens to general public health when the internal combustion engine has been mostly replaced.
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$10M per death? (Score:2)
"between 3,000 and 12,700 premature deaths have been averted because of air quality benefits over the last decade or so, creating a total economic benefit between $30 billion and $113 billion."
So, averting one premature death costs the economy $10M? Not sure why the benefit goes down per person if more deaths are averted, but where on earth are they getting anywhere near $10M per person?
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I would bet it's based on loss to the economy of a healthy worker plus the cost of health care for somebody with heart/lung problems, and probably some other stuff that hasn't occurred to us.
Re: $10M per death? (Score:2)
If that cost is really true, government would have a case to pay people to have kids. If each day kid is $10M return, paying parents $100K per kid per year from birth to 18 should be a no brainer - great return on investment.
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Odd you should say that. When I was growing up in Canada, there used to be a "Baby Bonus"...a cheque the government sent every month, with the amount based on how many kids you had. It was a big country with a small work force. At some point, corporations persuaded them it would be better to simply import trained adults than to go to all the trouble of birthing, growing and schooling them, and the Baby Bonus is no more.
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First, I doubt the baby bonus was anywhere near $100K per year per child. Second, if each child really represented $10M in economic opportunity, it would make sense to do both, invest in baby bonus and bring in already educated adults. My point is, I sincerely doubt the $10M figure is anywhere near that. Most people will not even make $10M in their lifetime, forget time value and other such things.
What subsidies? (Score:2)
The last German auction for needed subsidies for coastal Wind-generators the winner asked for exactly 0€ subsidies.
They don't need that anymore.
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$30B / 3k people = $10 million per person. That's a heck of a lot of economic benefit per person.
Indeed. It seems silly to say that preventing the premature death of some random person would bring $10M in economic benefit. That is far more than most people earn in a lifetime. It seems more reasonable to assume that most of the people dying from air pollution are sick or elderly, and would otherwise be an economic burden on society. So keeping them alive would be a cost not a savings.
Re:ambitious math... (Score:5, Informative)
Economist here, people are generally considered to have an intrinsic value. It's how we decide if we should put up a barrier on the edge of a road or not.
Re:ambitious math... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, not really. You see, elderly people who're most at risk of dying due to the increased pollution are those with pre-existing respitory conditions that by themselves are already expensive to treat.. What do yu think is one of the driving factors of causing those people to have said conditions? Pollution. So by cutting down pollution, you reduce the amount of elderly people in need of care, thereby decreasing costs. And it's not as if only young people fall to these illnesses. They're at a heightened risk obviously, but inhaling pollutants does increase mortality risk in all age-groups.
Take London during the industrialization for example with its massive amounts of coal-smoke. There too, the vast majority of people outside factory and mine-workers that suffered and died of smog-induced illnesses were older people. By your logic it should have been fine to leave London covered in smog, because 'nah, it really just kills older folks they're going to die anyway'.
Or look at modern day Chinese megacities with pollution so bad, that in certain areas just going outside to breathe the air is equivalent to smoking 1-2 packs of cigarettes a day. [berkeleyearth.org]. You think the chinese are interested in cutting down pollution en masse just because they wanna appear green, or because they've done that math and figured out that having an explosion of respitory illnesses will cost them a metric fuckton in lost years of employment as well as treatment costs?
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Woops, meant to say 'old' there.
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$30B / 3k people = $10 million per person. That's a heck of a lot of economic benefit per person.
What's the GDP of the US? What does it work out to per person?
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In other news, people live more than one year and have intrinsic value.
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Nor is it entirely about costs, we spend lots of money trying to make people live longer... If this is a cheaper way to do so, it's definitely worth pursuing.
Also note: if you're only counting deaths you're not counting all the money spent on astma medicin..
Re: ambitious math... (Score:2)
I'm guessing they included the economic benefit from people who wouldn't have died, but would have taken sick days or been hospitalized or the like. That's probably a lot more than the number of lives saved.
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I'm guessing they included the economic benefit from people who wouldn't have died, but would have taken sick days or been hospitalized or the like.
Nope. From TFA: "that’s just the estimated economic benefits of the averted 3,000 to 12,000 premature deaths—it doesn't count things like sub-lethal medical issues and lost productivity"
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I don't know if you have seen one, but windmills take up about as much land as a cell tower. It's just the footprint.
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You can't have people living near a windmill, so that may cut down the value of the land. Also, huge gobs of concrete are used to stabilize them. Well, everything has some negative consequences, it's all a matter of what you prefer.
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According to NextEra [ontario-wi...stance.org], 800 tons of concrete per windmill. A quick look shows ranges from 200 tons to 1000 tons per windmill. I'd call that gobs. Their are a lot of abandoned wind farms that no one wants to clean up, too. A clean-up deposit should be required to build them.
I don't know what cows care about, but if you can't build near it the value of the land will decrease. Maybe a little, maybe a lot.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Tell that to the Monju reactor operators.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Since nuclear has such a wildly greater EROEI than wind and solar,
No, you're wrong. Here is the science. [stormsmith.nl] Short answer negative EROEI on nuclear.
why isn't this story about the trillions of lives and quintillions of dollars saved by nuclear over the last 50 years?
Because there isn't any story to tell.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Followed your link, searched for EROEI (from your post), found this:
The energy return on energy investment (EROEI) is here defined as the ratio of the energy delivered to grid over the energy investments, both measured over the full cradle-to-grave (c2g) period. The energy return on energy investments of the world averaged nuclear energy systems are EROEI = 2-3 under the current conditions, but will decline over time when leaner uranium ores are to be exploited
https://www.stormsmith.nl/i12.html
Now, 2-3x isn't great, but it is more than 1.
Also, a chart from that source indicates that EROEIs of greater than 1 will last until after 2070.
https://www.stormsmith.nl/Resources/eroeitime070v2.jpeg
Perhaps I read the wrong part of your article, but it is also possible you were just hoping no one would follow your link.
Re: (Score:3)
This calculation is absolutely wrong. It vastly over-estimates the costs of Uranium mining and the energy cost of nuclear enrichment. You have to dig into a whole pile of stupid formulas to find it. This is forms a part of the anti-nuclear echo chamber.
Re: (Score:3)
why isn't this story about the trillions of lives
Assuming you mean humans, there are only billions on the planet, not trillions.
The live cost of Chernobyl is estimated to be up to a million.
and quintillions of dollars saved by nuclear over the last 50 years?
Because nuclear power is the most expensive power we have? And always was?
Re:Nuclear (Score:5, Informative)
The worst nuclear accident in history may have killed "up to" a million. Coal kills a million every year (air pollution in general kills 5.5M a year) in normal operation without an accident (and also has numerous accidents that kill thousands every year).
Coal only kills about 13,000 Americans a year these days, but is much worse in most of the world. For example, "researchers found that coal use shaves off 5.5 years of the average lifespan of a person living in northern China compared to the someone in the south." (source [oilprice.com]) In China alone Coal kills 670,000 a year.
Re:Nuclear (Score:5, Interesting)
The so called Liquidators alone are more or less all dead:
At the peak of the cleanup, an estimated 600,000 workers were involved in tasks such as building waste repositories, water filtration systems, and the "sarcophagus" that entombs the rubble of Chernobyl
One advocacy group, the Chernobyl Union, says 90,000 of the 200,000 surviving liquidators have major long-term health problems.
http://news.nationalgeographic... [nationalgeographic.com]
Sorry, no idea where you have your numbers from, but I saw several thousand dead bodies myself.
Keep in mind: the Liquidators where 17 - 19 year old recruits of the soviet army, they should be about 50 now, more than 2/3rds are dead.
And that does not even include the civil persons that died in the area around the plant.
Re:Nuclear (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's step away from Chernobyl for a second and get back to the implicit question: is nuclear power "safe"?
I think that is "begging the question". Before we ask whether nuclear technology is safe, we need to know whether its the technology we have to be worrying about or the organizations that are using it that are the problem.
I think it's the organizations that are using the technology that are the danger. That's a bit like the way everyone thinks they're a better than average driver; they are, on their best days. And that's how we judge ourselves, by how we are when we're at our best. But when you're talking about safety, you have to judge yourself by how you are on a bad day.
Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were old reactor designs that would be considered unacceptable by modern standards. And yet, in both cases the catastrophic failure can ultimately be traced to failures in organizational decision-making. Chernobyl failed because of a safety test that was compromise by pressure to minimize power delivery disruptions that eventually put a reactor that was outside its normal operating envelope in the hands of an operations shift that didn't have the expertise to handle it. Fukushima's failure can be traced to TEPCO's failure to respond to the information that the tsunami statistics under which the plant was designed grossly underestimated a hundred year tsunami; all they had to do was to stage portable power generation equipment on the high ground surrounding the plant, but instead they raised the on-site backup generators by a few inches -- in effect they made a token response, which showed they got the message but didn't take it seriously.
Look around at the crappy, semi-competent or corrupt companies you have to deal with. In a world with only a few reactors, you have some chance of making sure none of the companies running them would be like those. In a world where nuclear reactors are ubiquitous, you have to design them so you'd be comfortable with companies like Comcast or Wells-Fargo running them.
Re: (Score:2)
It's more likely that people in a thousand years will die tripping and falling on their way into a nuclear waste dump, than die from the radioactive materials there. The stuff that can kill you quickly has short half-lives. They'd probably have to purposely set up house there to be in danger, and to be that stupid you'd have to be talking about a post-apocalyptic world where a few people dying doesn't matter.
Re: (Score:2)
He fought against wind but wanted to force it on the rest of us.
Luckily, none of us were stuck in an elevator with him.
Re: (Score:2)
I dunno, you could probably make some sort of counter-force generator out of the Fascists and Antifas right about now with all of those Olympic gold mental gymnastics they're pulling right now, and probably make this whole planet explode from the sheer release of energy. Similar to a cat with buttered bread strapped butter side up to its back and tossed off a building, except much, MUCH more volatile.
Re: (Score:2)
"Additional concerns about health impacts from sound, infrasound and flickering light from wind turbines have been extensively studied around the world and found to have no significant human health impact
http://www.torontoenvironment.org/windmills/myths#infrasound