The True Cost of Fossil Fuels
Here is a new post on a subject that I think lies at the very crux of the discussion on renewable energy: identifying the true costs of fossil fuels. Yes, the migration to renewable energy is expensive, but it’s the bargain of the century when one honestly and carefully adds up all the costs — obvious and hidden — associated with coal and oil — not to mention nuclear. As long as we as a civilization live under the delusion that “gas prices are low,” we’re destined to follow irrelevant discussions on the subject of its alternatives.
The most obvious candidates for inclusion in this list of costs are healthcare, global climate change, and ocean acidification. While no one suggests that quantifying the cost of the damage in any of these categories is easy, I call readers’ attention to this recent article in the New York Times that opens a discussion on the subject, quoting a report from the National Academy of Sciences. The article concentrates on the healthcare issues, and points to a cost of about $120 billion a year in US alone (less than 5% of the world’s population), due largely to the thousands of premature deaths caused by air pollution.
Of course, these figures don’t put a price on the enormity of the human misery associated with these premature deaths — most of which are cancer. It’s ironic that we’re talking about the cost of treating people who are slowly succumbing to agonizing deaths, while not even mentioning the suffering of the patients — and that of their loved ones.
To be fair, these costs are even harder to quantify. In a way, one could argue that these are all cases of “wrongful death,” insofar as we actually have the technology at hand to make the move to renewables, but we find it politically infeasible to stop mining coal and pumping oil. It certain makes one wonder if the energy industry will be facing the same type of class-action lawsuits (not to mention public loathing) that has greeted the tobacco industry over the last half century.
In any case, articles like this New York Times piece indicate that we’re starting to ask ourselves the right questions. And as always, that’s a prerequisite to finding the right answers.
As I’ve noted previously, the eminent venture capitalist 
With the Copenhagen summit occupying so much attention on the international stage, I may as well weigh in with my own viewpoint. In brief:
Guest blogger Geoff Nicholson writes:
As I wrote to a friend recently:
On the things I find so fascinating about the migration to renewables is that it represents the confluence of so many different scientific and technological disciplines – especially in the quest to drive down costs. To take an obvious example, wind turbines are rooted in straightforward fluid dynamics as well as electricity/magnetism. But some real cleverness is required to get wind (and the others) to a point at which, as a source of renewable energy, it is cost-competitiveness with fossil fuels. As we’ve noted here numerous times, there’s plenty of renewable energy out there if you’re willing to pay enough for it. The problem is that we’re on a tight budget here, and that’s where this becomes interesting.
I’m always amazed at a phenomenon that I presume to be coincidence – that similar things all seem to happen at the same time. No sooner do I publish a few posts of the 
Peter Buzzard comments on my post “Molten Salt Energy Storage” as follows:
Yesterday’s guest blogger wrote:
