But is a cheap coal plant a worse polluter than N household cooking fires, where N is the number of households that the cheap coal plant enables to switch to electric cooking? (Don't forget that those households also probably heat the house with wood fires or something equally nasty.)
You might be underestimating the negative health effects of "burning stuff", have a look at page 3 of [1]. Replacing coal with gas should give a 10x improvement on air pollution related deaths and serious illness. If we could go full renewable (or fusion, if it wasn't always 25 years away), we could get rid of even more averse health effects.
Note: your argument of coal based electric energy is better than burning stuff at home is strongly supported by [1]. But this is not what we are arguing about. No one was proposing to abandon electric energy from the grid and go back to burn wood at home. The question was, if there maybe is a health argument to switch from coal (or generally burning stuff) to renewable energy.
[1] (This has been published in The Lancet, sorry for the potentially biased looking link, but due to the paywall at the original publisher I had to resort to google for an alternate provider) http://www.scotianwindfields.ca/sites/default/files/publicat...
Sure, but there's still a lot of people who don't want to, simply because coal is cheaper than both eco-pellets and gas. My grandparents only changed theirs from coal to gas last year, and only because grandpa was getting too old to go and add coal to the boiler every few hours - but they've been complaining about the fortune that the gas is costing them ever since.
Look, we use wood at home now, and given the chimneys in this house everyone else here has always done that too (or the house wouldn't have made it).
My point is that this sort of transition isn't immediate and universal. Some people had the motivation and opportunity to use coal, there were lots of advantages and it spread... slowly... at the same time the infrastructure to extract and distribute it developed.
> Individual coal burning is a huge problem because homes don't have the same environmental regulations or efficiency of a coal power plant.
Maybe a huge problem for those with coal burning stoves, but overall this is 0.1% of houses, and 50% of those are in Pennsylvania.
Compared to the huge amount of coal burned for electricity, that's a drop in the bucket, and most likely used because or the homeowner loves coal for some reason, or doesn't want to, or cant upgrade to a fuel like natural gas, propane, or wood pellets.
It's kind of a counterpoint still. We tried and managed to replace coal for home heating and transport with something else, because coal kind of sucks for those things. The fact that coal continued to be used in new ways is a consequence of coal dropping in price and there being no real external pressure to eliminate coal usage. It's not clear what happens once there's strong pressure to eliminate these fuels from our economy, because we've never really tried it before.
Coal was shifted from the home to the energy plant.
Is this better because the negative effects of coal burning were removed locally and moved to a central location? Or maybe because the local locations can no longer control their own consumption?
I agree that it doesn't make sense at all for the US to trade breathing air for one time energy use, but in the abstract, trading breathing air for cheap energy in order to lift people out of poverty is far from absurd, it's an actual, difficult trade off that should be thought about carefully. A lot of people still live in homes constantly filled with wood smoke, for whom an electric coal-powered cooking stove would drastically improve their air quality.
Naturally coal is still terrible for the environment, but ours is a position of great privilege, to have clean air feel so much more important than the source of our energy.
Don't forget that's ~10% thermal efficiency so your really talking about 30% increase in power from the same coal. On top of that they they go for a more complete burn which reduces things like CO and NOx which would otherwise produce smog.
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