All of our lungs should breathe a collective sigh of relief for not having to deal with so many particulates from coal burning after these rules go into force. Not to mention saving our water from pollution of coal ash.
It will be pleasant to have less of these types of plants in operation:
And this country will be just a little bit greener knowing, we don't need to have trains crossing the country 24/7 from Wyoming just to keep the boilers running.
Is there any data that our lungs are seriously hurt by these particulates right now?
>>> And this country will be just a little bit greener knowing, we don't need to have trains crossing the country 24/7 from Wyoming just to keep the boilers running.
We will have to get the energy from somewhere. The only viable alternative on that scale that I can see is nuclear energy, but given current panic mood about it, does not seem very likely. If not, are we ready to seriously cut energy consumption and accept the accompanying life standards drop? I don't think so.
A cursory reading of the literature would suggest that American Lung Association, Natural Resource Defense Counsel, and Physicians for Social Responsibility all concurred that coal burning does impact our respiratory system.
Your second argument is a bit like saying, well we have to get nicotine from somewhere. If not smoking, what else will people do to get their fix. Are we really ready to give up our nicotine habit?
A lot of people did give up smoking once they figured out it was killing them. If people realize the same thing about coal, I suspect there will be a much faster and stricter set of regulations coming into force.
As for the problem of where to get energy, natural gas is a more efficient and cleaner burning alternative that you didn't mention. Of course if that gas is delivered via fracking there are a whole lot of other problems with ground water pollution. So the energy mix needs to change and it needs to be found in a less impactful fashion.
>>> Your second argument is a bit like saying, well we have to get nicotine from somewhere
No it does not. Human organism has ways of producing substances that work with the same receptors that respond to nicotine. Thus, there is no biological need to introduce nicotine to the organism. More correct analogy would be vitamines, proteins, minerals and other substances that we commonly call "food". If you want to give up food, it would be reasonable to ask, how you replace energetic and nutritional needs of the organism? Modern economy has energetic needs which need to be satisfied if you want to have modern economy. Either you go back to pre-industrial economy and subsistence on the constant brink of starvation, or you produce a lot of energy. There's no other way. The question is how you are going to produce it.
>>> natural gas is a more efficient and cleaner burning alternative that you didn't mention.
As carbon emissions are the problem being discussed, and burning gas produces carbon emissions, naturally I did not consider it as a true alternative with respect to producing energy while reducing carbon emissions.
> We will have to get the energy from somewhere. The only viable alternative on that scale that I can see is nuclear energy, but given current panic mood about it, does not seem very likely. If not, are we ready to seriously cut energy consumption and accept the accompanying life standards drop? I don't think so.
Easy answer: natural gas. It's already a bigger source of electricity than nuclear, and it'll inevitably play a large role in the grid in the future as it neatly solves the dispatch problem (renewables can't really be controlled, but NG plants can be dispatched at a moments notice to make up for lost capacity).
I agree that gas is more clean then the coal, but speaking in context of carbon emissions, does it really change that much? It's still burning hydrocarbons.
- thus, you can calculate approximately how much energy is stored in each of the above fossils per mole of carbon dioxide:
- methane = 4CH = 1640 kJ / mol CO2
- petrol = 2CH + CC = 1170 kJ / mol CO2
- coal = CH + CC = 760 kJ / mol CO2
This is obviously a gross simplification, but hopefully you'll see the outline of why gas is much cleaner than coal. Methane, since it's a gas, also burns much cleaner than liquids or solids since you can better mix the fuel with oxygen, so methane tends to produce much less particulate matter, soot, and other products of incomplete combustion.
EDIT: spenrose below has a great point about uncombusted methane in the atmosphere. Methane is a NASTY greenhouse gas, so it's absolutely worth taking into account how natural gas production affects methane levels in the atmosphere. Namely, there was a worrying metastudy a few months ago about how natural gas production is quite leaky, which has nontrivial greenhouse gas considerations: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/february/methane-leaky-ga...
The burning creates about half the CO2 as coal does. Unfortunately unburned methane is a worse GHG in the short term (when it matters). That said, old coal plants are much worse than the best new coal plants, so the regulations are important.
The bracket they give is, as Retuters reports, is "as low as $175 billion or as high as $523 billion" but there is much more costs than specifically lung impact. Unfortunately, direct link from Greenpeace site to the actual study does not work, but I'll try to find it and see what they say about specific health impact.
See edits/corrections. The breakdown starts on page 91. The effects of air pollution on lungs is discussed on page 85. The breakdown pegs the 'best' estimate for health costs from air pollution at $187 billion per year.
Interestingly, the impact on Appalachia, $75 billion per year, is substantially more than the GDP of West Virginia ($57 billion per year). The economic return of coal mining in Appalachia is very probably net negative.
Ever been somewhere where coal is a real issue? I lived in SLC for years and, particularly thanks to the mountains creating a nasty inversion in the winter, there were times when the air was downright toxic. I recall doing a project about it in high school and finding a lot of data related to increased health issues when it got particularly bad.
Of course SLC is an extreme example, most cities never see inversions like that, but it is certainly the case there that probably the largest contributor, and far and away the main source of power, is coal emissions.
I don't doubt there are bad places and bad factories that pollute. But the parent post made it sound as if literally everybody is affected by it, including people not living in SLC or near any coal plants. Which exactly what got me interested to see the data about how I could be affected (curiously, though not unexpectedly, it was received by some as if I was somehow defending coal burning by just asking to see the data that explain how harmful it is).
Are you familiar with the recommendation that children and pregnant women limit their intake of seafood to one serving per week, because of mercury exposure?
Almost half of that mercury comes from coal emissions.
That's an entire type of food being significantly contaminated across the planet. And that's just one of the many nasty things emitted by coal burning.
It is not at all an exaggeration to say that the entire planet is affected by burning coal.
And that is the reason why all coal burning plants are being required to retrofit with equipment to capture mercury and other toxic metals (along with retrofits for SOx and NOx). But that is not good enough.
It will be pleasant to have less of these types of plants in operation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_Scherer
And this country will be just a little bit greener knowing, we don't need to have trains crossing the country 24/7 from Wyoming just to keep the boilers running.