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How Coal Kills

scientificamerican.com

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Re: How Coal Kills

#41

Post by tjradcliffe »

Jolijn wrote: post #5

I'm interested in the study of complex issues like these (more from a math point of view than a political one) - how to optimize for the right choice, given that each choice has a bunch of non-overlapping side effects. But I don't really know where to get started. What could I google for?

"Economics" :-)

Seriously, this is precisely the problem that economics tries to solve, and it is evolving into a mature discipline with a reasonable level of empirical validity, but the way psychology has evolved in the past few decades.

There are several main policy-oriented disciplines:

1) sociology, which studies society as if economics didn't matter

2) economics, which studies society as if morality didn't matter

3) political science, which studies society as if neither economics nor morality matters

I'm caricaturing, of course, but the differences between the fields are due more to historical accident than anything else, and if you're interested in focusing on the math then economics is the place to be.

There is a lot of very interesting work being done in "heterodox" economics right now, particularly by people like Steve Keen, who is focused on relaxing the assumption that the economy is at all times in quasi-equilibrium, which is foundational to the neo-classical paradigm: http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/

Keen is interested in dynamical economic models, which necessarily require you include things like banks and money in the model (these drop out of equilibrium models, mostly.)

Re: How Coal Kills

#42

Post by danielharan »

msisk6 wrote: post #28
danielharan wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only would that be very difficult to do, nuclear and coal have had decades of subsidies, giving them quite an unfair head-start. In any case, by 2017 solar will be at grid parity in most of the US. By 2020 this won't even be a topic.

It doesn't seem possible for solar to make that much progress in that short a time. It takes forever to get transmission capacity approved and built to areas where solar is really cost-effective and we still don't have grid-scale energy storage.

By grid parity, I meant people would be able to save money by installing it on their rooftops.

As for utility-scale, it's also smashing records, but that's a different discussion. $6c/kWh in UAE was a figure that surprised a lot of observers.

Regarding storage... solar coincides very well with peak A/C load, so the main use case doesn't require it.

Re: How Coal Kills

#43

Post by danbruc »

tjradcliffe wrote: post #39
Symmetry wrote: post #24

That was completely devoid of any useful numbers. Here's a nice, well researched chart that actually puts coal in a useful context compared to other ways of generating electricity. http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml The rest of that is well worth reading, too.

Unfortunately it doesn't give any links to sources. In particular, the number for oil is surprisingly high. I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm just curious about where and how the deaths are occurring. Coal kills in three distinct ways: 1) Miners: This depends enormously on the country and the mining technology. The trend in North America is toward fewer and fewer miners underground. I've worked in a support industry for…

Here [1] is the ExternE project homepage. The entire publication seems to have somewhere between 2000 and 5000 pages.

[1] http://www.externe.info/

Re: How Coal Kills

#44

Post by Symmetry »

tjradcliffe wrote: post #39
Symmetry wrote: post #24

That was completely devoid of any useful numbers. Here's a nice, well researched chart that actually puts coal in a useful context compared to other ways of generating electricity. http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml The rest of that is well worth reading, too.

Unfortunately it doesn't give any links to sources. In particular, the number for oil is surprisingly high. I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm just curious about where and how the deaths are occurring. Coal kills in three distinct ways: 1) Miners: This depends enormously on the country and the mining technology. The trend in North America is toward fewer and fewer miners underground. I've worked in a support industry for…

I actually did the numbers a while ago and even the Fukushima plant which ended up exploding produced less deaths than the Next Big Futures numbers for world coal and landed in the middle of Sustainable Energy's numbers for European coal.

http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2013/12/fukushima-vs...

Re: How Coal Kills

#45

Post by tsotha »

mikeash wrote: post #26
strictnein wrote: post #8

I'll flip the question: Considering that coal has provided a very significant amount of the electrical power and heat for humans over the past 100 years, how many lives has coal saved? How much has it improved the human experience? Put simply, a world without coal is a horrible world.

The proper solution is to capture the externalities imposed by coal and force those who burn coal to pay the entire cost of burning it, including the cost of the emitted pollution. Then the solution will work itself out. If coal is indeed the best solution even with all the damage it causes, it will still be viable when these costs are captured. If other methods are better, then they will win out. The problem is that…

That's nice in theory, but the problem is nobody has any idea how to quantify those externalities.

Re: How Coal Kills

#46

Post by mikeash »

tsotha wrote: post #45
mikeash wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The proper solution is to capture the externalities imposed by coal and force those who burn coal to pay the entire cost of burning it, including the cost of the emitted pollution. Then the solution will work itself out. If coal is indeed the best solution even with all the damage it causes, it will still be viable when these costs are captured. If other methods are better, then they will win out. The problem is that…

That's nice in theory, but the problem is nobody has any idea how to quantify those externalities.

Sure they do. You won't be accurate to the penny, but quantifying this stuff can be done. Even getting to within an order of magnitude would be useful.

Re: How Coal Kills

#47

Post by tsotha »

mikeash wrote: post #46
tsotha wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nice in theory, but the problem is nobody has any idea how to quantify those externalities.

Sure they do. You won't be accurate to the penny, but quantifying this stuff can be done. Even getting to within an order of magnitude would be useful.

Not if you're basing taxes/charges on it. An order of magnitude?

Re: How Coal Kills

#48

Post by mikeash »

tsotha wrote: post #47
mikeash wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure they do. You won't be accurate to the penny, but quantifying this stuff can be done. Even getting to within an order of magnitude would be useful.

Not if you're basing taxes/charges on it. An order of magnitude?

What alternative are you proposing? All I see so far is basically, it's too hard so let's not even try.

Re: How Coal Kills

#49

Post by tsotha »

mikeash wrote: post #48
tsotha wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you're basing taxes/charges on it. An order of magnitude?

What alternative are you proposing? All I see so far is basically, it's too hard so let's not even try.

Yeah, pretty much. If you're gonna do something like that you should first make sure you're not going to make life worse for people than the current system.

Re: How Coal Kills

#50

Post by mikeash »

tsotha wrote: post #49
mikeash wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What alternative are you proposing? All I see so far is basically, it's too hard so let's not even try.

Yeah, pretty much. If you're gonna do something like that you should first make sure you're not going to make life worse for people than the current system.

Why is that the default rather than, say, banning all coal burning until the danger can be quantified? If your position is that it's impossible to know the size of the impact, how do you choose one versus the other?
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