Hacker News Reader

Comment by strictnein | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

That's a moot point if there's another viable way to generate the same amount of power without trading lives in the process.

Slave labor also improved your life quite a bit, provided you were a slave owner. Thankfully we found an alternative.

Slavery, really? That's your analogy?

What's your viable way to replace coal today? Include explanations of how your replacement can be as reliable as coal, and how the developing world can afford these sources without sacrificing other government services.

Don't know where you have been, but coal use has decreased the past few years. Natural gas and renewables have already started to replace coal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_in_the_United_States...

That's just the US, where natural gas is plentiful and very cheap.

well, the article is exclusively about the US. If you are up for talking about other countries, let's discuss France's coal power

Literally millions of people are being killed by coal, without any choice in the matter[1]. What analogy would you prefer to use for something as devastating as that?

Coal only seems affordable if the significant health and environmental costs are (incorrectly) assumed to be zero.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/12/china-coa... >Emissions from coal plants in China were responsible for a quarter of a million premature deaths in 2011 and are damaging the health of hundreds of thousands of Chinese children, according to a new study.

A study commissioned by Greenpeace. Yes, a very unbiased and honest source on these topics. Might as well list an NRA study on gun violence.

And read closer, please. The study claims to have found indicators pointing to shortened lives, not people being killed by coal, which is significantly different.

And, again: warmth and electricity and live to 65, or cold and darkness and live a little longer. And really, that wouldn't be the trade off, because electricity and warmth also lead to longer lives. So this study is meaningless and shows nothing at all.

I have no doubt that 19th century London was better off with coal despite the horrific air pollution it caused. But the question before us is whether to continue using coal now that we are much richer and have many more options in terms of what technologies we have.

Well, temper that with a view of a world where coal was scarcer, more expensive. It would not have been used for so many purposes, we'd have been more efficient in our spoiling of the planet. Being as cheap as it was, led to a car for every garage, consumerism, inefficient insulation in houses for the first century etc.

You would prefer a world where only the rich can afford electricity and warmth? Because that's the world you describe.

Oh don't be a pedant. If coal were more expensive, it would be used for important things - not pissed away. That says little about rich vs poor.

I'm not being a pedant. Where does the inexpensive electricity come from? It is very much about rich and poor. And making electricity is a very important thing.

Coal is currently important, but not that important. As a finite resource it's also going to be gone in ~2 thousand years (big error bars on that though) which is a fairly short time period all things considered. For perspective let's ignore all non-renewables + wind and solar and just look at Hydropower.

Hydropower use reached a record 3,427 terawatt-hours, or about 16.1 percent of global electricity consumption. That on its own is enough to provide useful power to everyone sure we would not be using it for home heating but lighting, computers, and refrigeration would easily make the cut even if AC would be far too expensive for most people. aka, most people get a setback but not to the dark ages. Toss in just wind power and you could meet the world’s electricity needs at perhaps a 10-30% increase in electricity costs.

In the end there is a huge inertia in the current system; dropping coal in say 10 years would be possible, but ridiculously expensive. Dropping it over the next 100 might just happen without anyone noticing.

PS: Solar is really interesting as it's cheaper than coal in some areas, but inertia and changes in the supply curve are keeping their prices linked. We are heading to a supply shift so peak costs might actually start taking place at night.

The same could have once been said about Whale Oil.

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 right now we allow people to burn coal and vent the combustion products into the atmosphere while not paying for the massive costs this imposes on the general population.

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?

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?

Personally, I think we should ban the burning of coal (unless the peak oil doomsday guys turn out to be right and we need it to keep society from collapsing). But it needs to be done over a relatively long time period so people have time to adjust.

I'm a libertarian-leaning guy, but charging for externalities has proven to be a mostly unworkable concept. How much is a human life worth? How much is a few years of a human life worth? How much should someone be compensated for a sickness with which they would not have otherwise been afflicted? Let's say we know coal burning doubles the risk of non-smoking-related lung cancer by 10%. When someone gets lung cancer, especially a smoker, how could you possibly determine the sum he's owed by a coal company? There's no way to prove they were even at fault. Should people be compensated for the risk of developing a problem they never actually develop?

And once you start down that road it doesn't end. Coal companies will (rightly) point out nearly every business generates uncompensated negative externalities. This morning I was awoken early by a trash collector. Shouldn't he be compensating me for the noise he's producing? Lack of sleep has a quantifiable negative impact on health. Shouldn't UPS be compensating me for the time I've spent waiting in traffic because one of their vans was double-parked?

You can charge for externalities without distributing them to the victims on a personal level.

You're right that precisely compensating a lung cancer victim is pretty much unworkable. But the statistics in aggregate are pretty clear, so you can collect that money as a tax without paying out precise compensation to each individual victim. This still produces the appropriate incentive to burn coal only when it's worth the full cost.

Your examples illustrate this principle. Your garbage collector probably has to pay a license fee, and has to obey noise regulations. UPS pays vast amounts of money for parking tickets. These could probably be calibrated better, but we don't just let these companies generate negative externalities at will.

^^^ FTW

Reply on news.ycombinator.com