You probably know that coal power plants are bad for the climate, and for your health. But how do we know how much of an impact one coal power plant can have? Where does its pollution go?
Megan Hall: Welcome to Possibly, where we take on huge problems like the future of our planet and break them down into small questions with unexpected answers. I’m Megan Hall.
You probably know that coal power plants are bad for the climate, and for our health. But how do we know how much of an impact one coal power plant can have? Where does all that pollution go? To answer this question, we’re bringing you a special crossover episode with the show Humans in Public Health, a monthly podcast about the people behind public health research.
This episode focuses on the work of Brown University professor Cory Zigler. Cory worked with a team of researchers to figure out exactly where dangerous coal particles go. Their approach was so specific, the team could point to a single power plant and say how many people it killed. How do coal power plants affect our health? Here’s Cory’s explanation-
Cory Zigler: When coal is burned, lots of things go out into the air. Where my research sits is mostly focused on the emissions of sulfur dioxide and when sulfur dioxide goes into the atmosphere, it starts to react with other chemicals in the air, and it turns into particulate pollution, or fine particulate matter. These are tiny particles, small enough to penetrate our lungs and make us sick.
Megan Hall: And those particles can affect our health in all sorts of ways.
Cory Zigler: Respiratory health, cardiovascular health, neurological health, things like Alzheimer’s disease.
Megan Hall: So the biggest impact of these particles is about life expectancy.
Megan Hall: So breathing this stuff in can kill you?
Cory Zigler: Over a long period of time, people die sooner than they would have otherwise died.
Megan Hall: And so Cory and the other researchers wanted to figure out where the particles from coal power plants in particular were going.
Cory Zigler: We really tried to isolate which coal plants were sending their particles to which parts of the country. That way if you live in Rhode Island, you could say it’s actually this power plant, that power plant and that power plant in Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, that are sending most of their pollution to Providence.
Megan Hall: And so Cory, and some other researchers, set out to answer this question.
Cory Zigler: What we had at our disposal was every power plant in the United States, there’s very good data, on essentially real time emissions. We know very well what exactly is coming out of the smokestacks for power plants in the US. At the other end of the equation, so to speak, is we had data on Medicare beneficiaries in the US. So this is almost everybody over age 65 we know what zip code they live in, and we know when they died.
Megan Hall: And by combining that information with models that show where the wind is blowing, the researchers could figure out how many people had been killed because of a coal plant’s pollution.
Cory Zigler: So these are just among Medicare beneficiaries, but it’s about 460,000 excess deaths in the United States. That’s over about 20 years.
Megan Hall: And they could also attribute those deaths to specific coal plants.
Cory Zigler: The power plants that tended to be associated with the most deaths were large coal power plants. They tended to be in that kind of mid Atlantic or Ohio River region, that are blowing their pollution to large population centers, so the Northeast or there are some in Georgia where the wind goes to Atlanta.
Megan Hall: But there’s good news in all of this. Their research showed that as the US has burned less coal, deaths have gone down.
Cory Zigler: Even these power plants that historically are associated with a lot of mortality, even they have gone way down over time. Some of them closed. Some of them install these scrubbers. Scrubbers being something that you can think of it as, like literally scrubbing the sulfur dioxide out of the smoke before it comes into the atmosphere. Across the board, the deaths attributable to coal have been going down over time.
Megan Hall: Cory and the researchers made their findings public on an interactive map. To explore the map and see the impact of a powerplant near you, you can go to askpossibly.org.
And that’s it for today! To hear the full episode of Humans in Public Health with Cory Zigler, just search Humans in Public Health wherever you get your podcasts.
Possibly is a co-production of Brown University’s Institute for Environment and Society, Brown’s Climate Solutions Initiative, and the Public’s Radio.
The post Can we count the number of people who die because of coal powerplants? appeared first on TPR: The Public’s Radio.