A new research has found that Coal-fired power plants killed at least 460,000 Americans during the past two decades, causing twice as many premature deaths as previously thought.
Cars, factories, fire smoke and electricity plants emit tiny toxic air pollutants known as fine particulate matter or PM2.5, which elevate the risk of an array of life-shortening medical conditions including asthma, heart disease, low birth weight and some cancers.
The researchers analyzed Medicare and emissions data from 1999 and 2020, and for the first time found that coal PM2.5 is twice as deadly as fine particle pollutants from other sources. Previous studies quantifying the death toll from air pollution assumed all PM2.5 sources posed the same risk, and therefore probably underestimated the dangers of coal plants.
According to the research, which was published in Science, most deaths happened when environmental standards were weakest and PM2.5 levels from coal-fired power stations highest.
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“Air pollution from coal is much more harmful than we thought, and we’ve been treating it like it’s just another air pollutant,” said the lead author, Lucas Henneman, an assistant professor in the Sid and Reva Dewberry department of civil, environmental and infrastructure engineering at George Mason University. “This type of evidence is important to policymakers like EPA [the US Environmental Protection Agency] as they identify cost-effective solutions for cleaning up the country’s air, like requiring emissions controls or encouraging renewables.”
Henneman was reported to have led a group of researchers who used publicly available data to track air pollution – and its health effects – from the 480 US coal power plants that operated at some point between 1999 and 2020.
A model was used to track the wind direction and reach of the toxins from each power station. Annual exposure levels were then connected with more than 650m Medicare health records that covered most people over age 65 in the US.
The coal plants associated with most deaths were located east of the Mississippi River in industrialized states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, where power stations were historically constructed close to population hubs. But every region had at least one plant linked to 600 deaths, while 10 were associated with more than 5,000 deaths across the study period.
The research found that about 85% of the total 460,000 coal plant-related deaths occurred between 1999 and 2007, an average of more than 43,000 deaths per year. The death toll declined drastically as plants closed or scrubbers – a type of sulphur filter – were installed to comply with new environmental rules. By 2020, the coal PM2.5 death toll had dropped 95%, to 1,600 people.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
