Posts Tagged by National Academy of Sciences
Civilization Faces Many Crises, So Let’s Abandon Science
| September 16, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Politics |
Wednesday, I was lucky enough to attend a conference presented by the Institute for Integrated Economic Research, a non-profit research organization focused on developing an unbiased view of global economic processes. I’ll be interviewing one of its key people and a presenter at the conference, Nate Hagens, for my next book, and Nate wanted me to come up to speed on his thinking before we spoke, so that I could ask better questions when the time came. Read More
The True Cost of Fossil Fuels
| November 29, 2009 | Posted by Craig Shields under 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.
