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The Health Benefits of Wind and Solar Exceed the Cost of All Subsidies (arstechnica.com)
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.
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.
But those wind farms are so god damn ugly. I'd rather die earlier. Thanks anyway.
Since nuclear has such a wildly greater EROEI than wind and solar, why isn't this story about the trillions of lives and quintillions of dollars saved by nuclear over the last 50 years?
Oh, right. mdsolar still gets paid per click for stories that push up the stock price of companies that take taxpayer subsidies in exchange for importing Chinese solar panels.
Carry on.
$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.
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.
and we create a better world for nothing?
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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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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When you die it will be a great day for the local surrounding area.
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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.
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.. 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?
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
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But what if we make the world better for no reason?
7 million dollars per death ? come on really?
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.