Health benefits of wind and solar offset all subsidies

[Jimbo101]

ARS Technica

Estimated economic benefits of renewables in the US is $87 billion.

Wind and solar energy are obviously essential in reducing carbon emissions, but they also have a remarkable side effect: saving lives. As they edge out fossil fuels, renewables are reducing not just carbon emissions, but also other air pollutants. And the result is an improvement in air quality, with a corresponding drop in premature deaths.

A paper in Nature Energy this week dives into the weeds by trying to estimate the economic benefits of wind and solar power across the whole of the US. 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¢ per kilowatt-hour, which is more than unsubsidized wind energy generally costs.

Death is in the air

Poor air quality is a tricky beast in public health, since it’s not obvious when someone dies as a result of air pollution. The World Health Organization estimates that air pollution leads to around 7 million premature deaths globally each year—people dying earlier than they otherwise would have from heightened incidence of cancer, heart disease, and respiratory disease.

In the US, air pollution is responsible for an estimated 200,000 premature deaths a year. Road transport (53,000 deaths) and electricity generation (52,000 deaths) are the two sectors contributing the lion's share of the problem. For perspective, the CDC reports that heart disease and cancer, the two biggest killers in the US, each claim around 600,000 lives each in a typical year. The third biggest killer, respiratory disease, is at 155,000.


(sigh)

Would be great if we had a functioning administration, congress,... - that actually believed and/or understood science

[WhiteTara]

1. It would have been great if we

had crossed that Bridge to the Future and the rightful President had led the world in environmental stability in 2000. But here we are instead.