The Great Satan of Energy

Some of you, I’m sure, will assume that by the Great Satan of Energy I must mean nuclear power, but I don’t. The Great Satan of energy is coal. Whether nuclear power is a lesser demon or a good angel is beyond the scope of this article. It’s just not the Great Satan. I want to convince you that even if nuclear power is every bit as bad as its severest critics maintain, coal is far, far worse.

My argument is based solely on the contribution of coal to global warming. Of course, coal has other environmental impacts, none of them good. Soot. Sulfur. Smog. Toxic waste. And did I mention that coal ash is radioactive? It emits radon gas that had been trapped in the coal seams before the coal was mined. But set that all aside. Let’s just look at the impact of coal on the global climate.

To estimate how bad coal is, one needs a little context. The world’s population is about 7 billion, or 7,000 million. Each year, 130 million babies are born and 60 million people die. The main causes of death are heart disease and stroke (18 million), infectious diseases and parasites (15 million), and cancer (8 million).

Among specific causes of death, according to the World Health Organization, H.I.V./AIDS kills 1.5 million people each year, while smoking kills 6 million annually.

Where will climate change fall in relation to this spectrum of deaths? Right now, respectable estimates of the yearly death toll from climate change are in the hundreds of thousands. However, the impacts of climate change are just beginning to be felt. If the world goes on burning fossil fuels at an ever-increasing rate, the average toll in the coming century will certainly be much higher than this.

An optimistic estimate would be that deaths from climate change will be about as numerous as those from H.I.V./AIDS. If the impact of climate change remains at this level, they will be “lost in the noise” of the total death rate of 60 million, which in any case will climb in coming decades as the current bulge of younger people age up. To claim that the death toll from climate change will be much less than this is to claim that it is not important enough to worry about. A certain breed of climate denier makes this claim, namely that world resources should be directed toward other goals, such as fighting poverty and finding cures for the “big three” killers.

Consider, however, the multitude of ways that climate change will kill us: agricultural failures (think of the monsoon not coming to India); depletion of critical water supplies (think of those vanishing glaciers in the Himalayas and the drought in the American West); rising sea levels (think of catastrophic floods in Bangladesh); spread of tropical diseases into the temperate zones (think of a malaria epidemic in New York), and wars fought over diminishing resources (think nuclear war as India and China claim that they need the relatively vacant and enticingly warming lands in Siberia to house and feed their starving millions, and Russia takes exception).

I am going to use 1.5 million deaths per year as a base case even though, for the above reasons, I believe this is very optimistic. Perhaps climate change will have an impact comparable to that of smoking (6 million deaths per year) or infectious diseases (15 million annually). Even the apocalyptic scenario envisioned in the film “Interstellar” cannot be ruled out. That would mean perhaps 60 million or more excess deaths annually.

How long will these impacts last? Experts say centuries. Because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for about 100 years, however, I’m going to charge the coal plant for only 100 years’ worth of deaths, even though one could argue that as the instigator of longer-term effects, our fossil fuel combustion now should be charged with all of them. In other words, I’m giving coal the benefit of the doubt every step of the way, but as we will see, it still looks very bad.

How much of the climate-change impact is one coal-fired power plant responsible for? The logical answer would be to estimate its greenhouse gas emissions over its lifetime and compare that to the world’s expected emissions for a century. As an approximation, I used its input energy over a 45-year plant life and compared that with an estimate of the world’s fossil energy use over 100 years.

This yielded the conclusion that a typical million-kilowatt coal plant would be responsible for one part in 20,000 (1/20,000 or .005 percent) of the total damage. That may seem like a tiny sliver, but it’s a tiny sliver of a very big number.

If you take the base case, the coal plant kills 1/20,000 times 1,500,000 deaths per year times 100 years, which works out to 7,500 excess deaths. For the more likely case in which climate change will be comparable to smoking as a cause of death, the coal plant kills 30,000 people. The two worst cases yield estimates of 75,000 and 300,000 excess deaths, respectively.

The thing to note is that these estimates do not apply to a coal-fired power plant that has a major accident, but to one that operates exactly as designed and with all available environmental controls in place. These controls do nothing about carbon dioxide. The comparison with nuclear power demands one’s attention. In contrast to what might happen in case of a terrible accident, with coal we have something comparable (or worse) happening even when there is no malfunction.

To put it another way, every coal plant is a Chernobyl. Every coal plant is a Fukushima.

John Andrews, who has a Ph.D. in physics, did research on solar energy and energy-efficient buildings for 25 years at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He lives in Sag Harbor.