Coal production in the U.S. comes with “hidden costs” to the economy — including damage to public health and the environment — that might exceed $500 billion annually, according to a report by Harvard University researchers.
With coal still the most widely used electricity-generating fuel, the researchers followed the entire life cycle of the mineral — from exploration, through transportation, processing and burning— to estimate its hidden burden on the economy. They concluded that coal, in its impact on public health alone, costs $140 billion to $242 billion per 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 Harvard public health expert, told The New York Times. “I think we’ve been sticking our heads into the sand.”
The report, to be published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, partly focuses on Appalachia, where premature deaths associated with coal mining cost local economies an estimated $74.6 billion per year. For the U.S. as a whole, the study also assessed the costs of coal-related mercury and greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental damage.
The study’s most conservative overall estimate of the hidden cost of coal came in at $175 billion a year, which still was more than double the price paid for coal-fired electricity. The highest cost estimate was $523 billion.
Lisa Camooso Miller, a spokeswoman for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, an industry group, told Reuters that the study failed to account for the positive effects of cheap coal energy. “Lower energy prices are linked to a higher standard of living and better health,” she said. Coal still accounts for nearly half of electricity generation in the U.S.
But Epstein told The New York Times that the hidden toll identified in the study “is not borne by the coal industry, this is borne by us, in our taxes.”
He said he believes that the true costs of coal probably are even higher than the study’s worst-case scenario. Much is still unknown, he says, about coal-related groundwater contamination, and researchers did not analyze other probable pollution effects because of a lack of firm data.
