Great Lecture: The Hidden Costs of Energy, presented by Dr. Jared Cohon

I went to a really interesting lecture last night where Jared Cohon, president of Carnegie Mellon University, presented the findings of a study convened by the National Academy of Sciences on the externalized costs associated with energy extraction, production, and use. The event was put on by the Group Against Smog and Pollution (GASP), a local grassroots organization which from what I could tell was made up of primarily elderly white people. The content was pretty technical and had a pretty hard-nosed economist approach that required assigning actual dollar values to air pollution, human sickness, and human mortality. The study was intended to look exclusively and energy produced and consumed in the United States, and looked at the life cycle of several major uses: Electricity Generation, Transportation, and Heat for Buildings. The costs or damages were broken down between climate and non-climate damages, the former of which referring to health effects from point sources like power plant and tailpipe emissions, and the latter in the form of impact to the GDP. It appears based on the NAS press release that the study has been done for some time, but perhaps the report was not fully organized and completed until just this week. I found a couple very interesting takeaways from the lecture:

· One of the charts Dr. Cohon showed looked at full life cycle climate impacts of various types of vehicles and fuel types. As it turns out, the production of the vehicle accounts for a substantial amount of the life cycle carbon emissions, somewhere in the range of 25-30%. That’s huge, and depending on the fuel economy of fuel type, is much greater than the actual emissions from the fuel being consumed.

· Similarly, electric vehicles powered by coal-fired power plants are worse climate polluters than nearly any other type of vehicle and fuel mix. In this case, the emissions from the generation of the electricity make up the majority of the life cycle carbon emissions. It’s no wonder, given the atrocious efficiency of current coal plants (25-30%). I hope that this will dampen some of the enthusiasm around “zero-emission vehicles”, as we’re really just concentrating the pollution, and making it worse as this report states.

· In that same vein, corn-based ethanol is a big loser as well, given the intense amount of energy needed to plant, harvest and manufacture the fuel. Let’s hope this is the last nail for ethanol, but probably not.

· In terms of carbon emissions, natural gas-fired power plants had about half the carbon emissions of coal-fired power plants. That is much higher than I had realized. However, the non-climate impact of natural gas versus coal is fractional.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t provide any of the really informative charts as I did not download the report, it costs about $40. You can look at a low-res version here, though the charts don’t show up at all.Newsflash! Got the charts via email from GASP. Here they are!!!

I was really pleased to be in attendance at this lecture, but I thought the convening group GASP may not have been the right organization to put this on. It seemed to me that the technical content was a little over the heads of most of this group, but I could be wrong. I think that were it hosted by another organization like Sustainable Pittsburgh or PennFuture, it would have had a much more substantial turnout. It may have also limited the opportunity for members of the audience to pontificate or stand on their soapboxes under the guise of asking a question. I really hate that.