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Wednesday, May 6th, 2015

Clean Power Plan Would Save Thousands of Lives Each Year

Author:     Scott Detrow
Source:     Scientific American
Publication Date:     May 5, 201
 Link: Clean Power Plan Would Save Thousands of Lives Each Year
Stephan:   We are so used to the environment of carbon energy that the health depredations it causes hardly register on us as a society. But, in fact, as this report describes these are massive and unnecessary, and part of the payoff for transiting out of the carbon era will be their elimination.
None of the health benefits the study focused on would come from reduced carbon dioxide emissions, however, but rather, they would come from reduced output of sulfur dioxide and other emissions. Credit: John Fowler/Flickr

None of the health benefits the study focused on would come from reduced carbon dioxide emissions, however, but rather, they would come from reduced output of sulfur dioxide and other emissions.
Credit: John Fowler/Flickr

The Obama administration has taken great pains to frame its Clean Power Plan as an immediate solution for an immediate, quantifiable problem. President Obama and other high-level administration surrogates have routinely focused on easy-to-picture issues like asthma, rather than the more existential threat of an increasingly warming planet, as they try to sell an ambitious plan to lower the power sector’s carbon emissions 30 percent below 2005 levels over the next 15 years.

So the key takeaway of the first independent, peer-reviewed study on the U.S. EPA regulation’s public health benefits was likely music to the administration’s ears.

“The general narrative is addressing climate change will be costly, and the benefits will now accrue for generations,” said Dallas Burtraw, […]

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