[rayiner]

> Also note that these are not costs of production, these are what people wind up paying for it

Cost of production and what people pay are two different things. A true accounting would include cost of production and externalized costs. Doing that doubles the price of coal: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/tallying-coals-hid...

> Even the study’s most conservative estimate of the uncounted cost of coal — $175 billion a year — would more than double the average cost of coal-fired electricity, the authors found.

And most of that is from well-understood and well-measured health impacts of coal pollution:

> At this lower range, roughly 80 percent of the costs were from well-documented public health impacts like lung and heart disease

So you pay $75 per megawatt hour for coal. And then the poor sap who lives downwind of the coal plant pays another $75 per megawatt hour for your electricity use in the form of dying early from lung cancer.