The Enormous Social Cost of Cheap Coal

On Wednesday, a global research team reported in the top-tier scientific journal Nature that air pollution prematurely kills about 3.3 million people a year around the world. In the U.S., the annual toll approaches 55,000 deaths—with power plant emissions the leading contributor. And by 2050, in the absence of any major changes, those mortality figures are expected to double.

When it comes to energy-related emissions capable of killing human beings, the main culprit is coal. For decades, oil wore that crown of carbon, but in the early 2000s coal became the greatest fossil fuel emitter, and hasn’t looked back. As a recent chart from the journal PNAS shows, the trajectories of oil and coal as shares of total global emissions are moving in opposite directions: