Making Economic Sense

One hears this all the time these days from various companies and corporations regarding their willingness to change their dirty, polluting habits. "We will make changes when it makes economic sense to do so, and not sooner," or, "It is not economically beneficial for us to put in these cleaner technologies at this time," or something to that effect. One hears similar statements from our government leaders such as this from the previous administration, "We must abide by the requirement that any such changes be in accordance with what make economic sense before we push any new regulations on the practices of producing corporations." This is a paraphrase of a sentence in a letter that the White House personally addressed and sent to me a few years back when I had written a scathing, personal letter to the Bush White House expressing my outrage over the mountaintop removal practices of the coal companies in the Appalachian regions.
There are many of us who remember the debate during the Bush years (and earlier, I believe) over how to structure the emphasis on how to decide environmental policy. The debate centered on the principle of costs vs. benefits. The conservative side wanted to emphasize a direct economic connection between costs and benefits, which meant that if benefits could not be shown to outshine the economic costs, even if those benefits were meaningful in other ways, such as less pollution, more beauty, etc., then the regulatory approach should not be taken. The liberal side always tried to show that the benefits of effective enviromental requirements, such as requiring big industry to implement the best available technology (BAT) in regard to their waste output, do outweigh the costs. Well, now there are some newly-available facts to buttress that argument.
The Chicago-based Environmental Law and Policy Center just released a report based on data obtained from the National Research Council showing in concrete numbers just what is the economic costs to human health as a result of the emissions from our nation's coal-burning power plants. The National Research Council provided health cost estimates for the nation's energy output as a whole, including emissions from power plants and from vehicles, and their overall cost estimate is $120 billion per year. This estimate is for hidden costs tied, for the most part, to soot emissions from power plants and from vehicles, and does not include what we pay for the comsumption of coal, gasoline, and diesel fuel (Chicago Tribune, Michael Hawthorne, Thursday, October 21, 2010,"Health costs of coal plants are tallied," Section 1, page 11).
The National Research Council, one of our nation's leading scientific organizations, included data for emissions from power plants and their health impacts from across the country, including for the antiquated, still-running, coal-burning  Fisk and Crawford power plants right here in our city of big shoulders and big smokestacks, Chicago. The estimated costs for the neighboring communities of these plants, those being the Pilsen and the Little Village neighborhoods, are $127 million annually.
If you think about it for a moment, you realize that hey, it's not just the direct costs to a producing company that need to be considered for that plant to either change or keep its emission practices, it's also the costs to the surrounding entities, whether they be people, animals, trees, plants, fields, streams, and so forth. Sticking with people here, the costs are clearly significant. Think about it. Thanks!