To fend off claims that fracking poses a risk to health from air emissions, an MIT economist/EPA advisor claims that the risks are offset by lives saved from using less coal.
The WaPo reports:
“There’s a strong case that people in the U.S. are already leading longer lives as a consequence of the fracking revolution,” said Michael Greenstone, a professor of environmental economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That’s because many power plants have stopped burning coal and switched to natural gas, which emits far less fine soot, nitrous oxide and sulfur dioxide.
However, there is no evidence that coal plant emissions kill anyone.
Wow just wow. This is why us Canadians have given up on you all down there and are looking for other places to send our energy. The United States has become to stupid to recognize that their fart app on their I phone is there because of multiple forms of Hydrocarbon.
Certain parts of the world – those in areas that have lots of food on their tables – are the first people to hate fire since some ancient person figured out how to control it.
“This is because when you get the right answer for the wrong reasons, you are still wrong.” Apparently not under Common Core…but the bridge breaks anyway.
When I was a math student my teachers always required me to show my work. This is because when you get the right answer for the wrong reasons, you are still wrong.
The conventional-fuel folks had better hang together or they will surely hang separately. It ought to be obvious that the unicorn-hair crowd intend to eliminate anything that produces CO2, CO, soot, or radiation in any form. They’re pretty miffed about dams, too, which leaves almost everything that works as anathema to them.
If methane is less costly than coal, it will displace some coal power production. Coal burning does produce real pollution, although it can be managed quite readily with technology we have. Let economics and engineering drive the grid, not scare stories and certainly not the grid’s producers throwing one another to the crocodiles, hoping to be the last one eaten.