Putting a Price on Death

As shown in the video below, submitted by Gary Tulie, Harvard University reports that coal dust and the exhaust from coal-fired power plants killed at least 460,000 people over the last 20 years.

Where we tend to think of coal-powered electricity as a principal cause of climate change and other forms of long-term environmental damage, we often overlook the devastation it causes to human life–and the families of those lost to lung disease. What about the impact on the children who now grow up fatherless and/or motherless?

The title of this post implies that it’s possible to ascribe a dollar-figure to this enormous catastrophe, and I suppose it is.  If there were a series of class-action lawsuits, there would be gaggles of actuaries in insurance companies with huge spreadsheets running what-if calculations.

But in this case, no one’s paying.  The atmosphere is simply a sewer into which the operators of coal plants discharge their waste–for free, regardless of the damage.