Fossil fuels cost us plenty: Billed as 'cheap,' their hidden costs are high indeed. Think BP
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Next to Milton Friedman, Pee Wee the landscaper is the most persuasive teacher of energy economics I have ever encountered.
Pee Wee had the cheapest lawn service in the neighborhood but we never knew why. Then the city inspector showed up and told us: Pee Wee was dumping his trash in an empty lot a few blocks away, which the city had to clean up. Pee Wee's service was not so cheap after all: It just seemed that way because other people were paying for it.
I was thinking about Pee Wee as I slogged through 373 pages of a new report called the "Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use."
This is the most thorough cost accounting of energy sources I have ever seen. It shows how coal and other fossil fuels create enormous costs that the rest of us pay for. Whether we know it or not. Whether we like it or not.
The National Research Council reports that the damage caused by coal costs us $62 billion a year, primarily in health care costs for those sickened or killed by respiratory problems linked to pollution.
If that sounds like a subsidy, it should. Because that is exactly what it is. And the council did not even count damage from climate change, water pollution from mining or dozens of other costly problems.
But still we hear that fossil fuels are cheaper.
Republican functionary Christopher Horner's new book proclaims that renewable energy will "bankrupt" this country and is a "declaration of war against America's most reliable sources of energy -- coal, oil and natural gas."
Wall Street Journal editorial writer Stephen Hayes agreed, calling it a plot between Big Government and Big Labor.
Before I became the CEO of a solar power company in California and a card-carrying member of this conspiracy, before I ever heard about Pee Wee, I studied for my MBA at the University of Chicago. There I met and spoke with on many occasions the inspiration for Messrs. Horner and Hayes. The great man himself: Milton Friedman.
First Published June 10, 2010 12:00 am
