Unearthing the True Cost of Fossil Fuels

Coal trains in Wyoming. Photo: KimonBerlin via Flickr/CC BY 2.0

For decades now, fossil fuel company executives and D.C. politicians have worked together to ensure that coal and oil prices stay low enough to keep the American people hooked. In his new book Greedy Bastards, Dylan Ratigan explains how “vampire industries” like oil and coal have forged “an unholy alliance with government based not just on the money that they contribute to political campaigns and spend on lobbying but on their ability to hypnotize us with false prices.”

Industry gets tax breaks, subsidies, military support in volatile regions, the right to use our air and water like a sewer, and assurance that the government will clean up its environmental messes. Politicians get campaign contributions, a steady flow of dirty energy, and a talking point to brandish about how they kept energy affordable.

But the American public just gets screwed.

We get stuck with a dirty, polluting energy regime; one that enriches a few one percenters while making the public sick and hobbling innovation. As Ratigan puts it in his book, a handful of greedy bastards are fleecing Americans with a “Very Bad Deal”. Fossil fuels seem cheap and convenient now, but when we get hit with the true costs—of a spoiled environment, of missing out on vital future industries like clean energy, of a mounting public health burden, of possible war—we’ll see we were had.

Just how rigged is the fossil fuels market? In a word, overwhelmingly.  Clearly, government assistance distorts the price of fossil fuels, making them artificially cheaper. But those direct subsidies are nothing compared to the enormous costs the public indirectly pays for fossil fuels.

In fact, coal is so economically disastrous that the mainstream journal American Economics Review found that the electricity generated from coal actually does more damage to the economy than the electricity is worth. Grist’s David Roberts notes that “Coal-fired power is a net value-subtracting industry. A parasite, you might say. A gigantic, blood-sucking parasite that’s enriching a few executives and shareholders at the public’s expense.”  In other words, if prices accurately reflected all of the actual costs of burning coal, coal-fired power plants would be dead in the water.

We’ve got to restore price integrity to commodities like coal.  We’ve got to prevent fossil fuel companies from dumping their costs on us, level the playing field for clean energy technologies, and reveal the true costs of fossil fuels once and for all.

http://www.treehugger.com/energy-policy/true-cost-fossil-fuels.html#mkcpgn=fbth1