As shown in the video below, submitted by Gary Tulie, Harvard University reports that coal dust and the exhaust from coal-fired power plants killed at least 460,000 people over the last 20 years.
Where we tend to think of coal-powered electricity as a principal cause of climate change and other forms of long-term environmental damage, we often overlook the devastation in causes to human life–and the families of those lost to lung disease. What about the impact on the children who now grow up fatherless and/or motherless?
The title of this post implies that it’s possible to ascribe a dollar-figure to this enormous catastrophe, and I suppose it is. If there were a series of class-action lawsuits, there would be gaggles of actuaries in insurance companies with huge spreadsheets running what-if calculations.
But in this case, no one’s paying. The atmosphere is simply a sewer that the operators of coal plants dump their effluent–for free, regardless of the damage.
What we have here in the United States, in terms of money in politics, is a full-on disease. Tax cuts for billionaires, corruption and the uber-rich’s ownership of our lawmaking processes, the destruction of our educational system, institutionalized racism, the rejection of science, limited access to healthcare, and devastation of the natural environment are all heading this nation to a horrible end.
Is there hope? Many young and energetic people believe there is.
Is It Healthy for Our Country to Allow Billionaires to Own Congress?
About 40 years ago, I used to lie in bed on Sunday mornings with my coffee and Los Angeles Times opened to the real estate section: “Homes in Other States.” I recall voicing some level of buyer’s remorse, having just paid more for a who-cares house in Southern California, where I could have bought half a county in Oklahoma or Mississippi.
My girlfriend at the time, now my wife, would ask me, “But do you think you’d be happy living in West Virginia, with some of the most poorly-educated people in the country? Do you think that would forward your career and your overall life satisfaction?” She had a point, to be sure.
Today’s MAGA conspiracy theorists will tell you that people are leaving California in droves, because of things like environmental regulations. Yet that doesn’t explain why the Golden State, if it were a country, would have the fourth largest economy on the planet, and a house here identical to one in Alabama whose value there may be $200K would fetch about $1.2 million here.
People don’t come here for the wide-open freeways. We’re here for the beauty, the sophistication of so many people, highly educated people, and unparalleled business opportunities.
There’s a reason that Google, Oracle, Apple, Nvidia, Adobe, Salesforce, Facebook, Visa, Wells Fargo, Disney, etc. aren’t located in Arkansas or Louisiana.
At left we have John Fetterman talking to people so stupid they’ll believe that it would have been wrong for the British colonists to oppose King George III in the late 18th Century, or for the people of Germany and Italy in the 1930s to stand up against Hitler and Mussolini. What about the people in today’s dictatorships, i.e., the people in Russia, China, North Korea, or any of the other 50+ authoritarian regimes around the world?
Morons tend to agree with the loudest, most aggressive voice of nationalism, regardless of how little sense it makes.
It’s a great moment of opportunity for Fetterman.
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