The Real Cost of Energy
View on Nature website"That’s not to say coal is now clean, even in power plants that abide by the clean-air regulations, because not all emissions are eliminated. 'In the United States, air pollution from burning fossil fuels is still estimated to account for tens of thousands of premature deaths per year,' says Daniel Shawhan, who models the economic and environmental effects of electricity policies at Resources for the Future, a think tank in Washington DC that applies economics to environmental policy questions. 'In China, which is less regulated, it’s more like 1 million deaths per year, primarily from coal.'"
"The working group took the models’ estimates of a global SCC and added its own assumptions about economic and population growth, the mean global temperature if CO2 in the atmosphere doubled, and how to convert future damage costs into today’s dollars, says Joseph Aldy, a public-policy researcher at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a member of the group. The most recent figure from August 2016 — $40 per tonne — was used in policies across the Obama administration."
