[rayiner]

A Harvard study a few years ago found the externalized cost of coal to be about $350 billion per year in the U.S. alone: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/16/usa-coal-study-idU....

You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want to bring government subsidies for renewable into the discussion, you also have to consider the externalized cost of legalized pollution. The only defensible calculation is to look at cost per kilowatt hour excluding government subsidies and including externalized costs. That's the true economic cost of the energy source.

And coal is miserable on that front. I wouldn't be surprised if coal use is a net loss to the economy (i.e. the value of the energy generated by coal is less than the environmental cost of coal use).

[refurb]

I wouldn't be surprised if coal use is a net loss to the economy (i.e. the value of the energy generated by coal is less than the environmental cost of coal use)

That doesn't make any sense. Net loss to the economy? If you were to say a net loss overall, including environmental costs, I might agree.

[rayiner]

Environmental costs are part of the economy. The cost of solar includes paying highly-skilled workers to build the panels. The cost of coal includes paying doctors to treat the resulting increase in lung disease, etc.

The problem is that we don't measure economic activity accurately, because we ignore draw-down of capital (human, natural, or otherwise). Fukushima actually increased Japan's GDP for a quarter, because the damage-response activity gets counted in GDP while the loss of physical capital does not. Fossil fuel use suffers from this problem in two ways: 1) the value of the capital removed from the ground isn't counted (i.e. nobody counts selling off their family furniture as net positive income, but resource-rich countries count selling off oil or minerals as such); 2) the loss of human and environmental capital is ignored (strip mining mountains causes rain to wash away river banks, and that's money directly out of someone's pocket).

[brc]

Even then, it's not a net loss to the environment.

Coal is an energy dense naturally occurring product. The environmental damage from coal relates to mining, shipping and burning it. The environmental benefits of coal are that extraction, transport and burning doesn't happen to other things - ie, biomass, otherwise known as timber.

England has more forest now than it has for centuries, because a more energy dense substitute for energy was extracted (coal). In many developing countries, access to coal would be a net benefit, because it would reduce clearing and burning of vegetation, and because the ensuing affordable energy allows for more intensive food production, and the keeping of food inventories, further lessening the pressure on the environment.

Of course, everything that applies to coal also applies to natural gas even more so, and obviously to fusion even more than that. But this meme of 'coal is evil and must be stopped' ignores the reality of the situation and completely ignores the benefits of efficient energy production, especially in the case where real, persistent and preventable environmental damage is taking place because there is a lack of efficient energy productin.

[JanezStupar]

So are you implying that we would be better off long term if we just shut down coal plants immediately?