New Study: Coal Deaths Exceed Coal Jobs

UPDATE Below

Not that it will come as a surprise to anyone with half a grain of sense and half an hour spent in the coal fields, but coal mining costs coalfield communities more in early deaths than it benefits in jobs.

Appalachia has some of the most impoverished communites in the United States. The entire region is economically depressed as compared to the national average. But coal communities in Appalachia are even worse off than the rest of the region, a fact that runs counter to the idea that coal jobs support local communities. A new study out of the Institute for Health Policy Research at West Virginia University and published in Public Health Reports looked at this discrepency and found that, even using conservative assumptions, the economic costs of coal mining in Appalachian communities far outweighed the benefits from having a coal mine in the community.

The study reached this conclusion by gathering publicly available data from various government databases and then calculating how much economic benefit coal mines produced in Appalachian communities vs. how much the coal mines cost in early deaths. As a result, the study had to prove that there were unusual deaths in coal communities, and they did so using statistical analyses designed to account for the effects of “smokin, race, poveryt, physician supply, education, and other variables.” And even after adjusting for all these variables and removing their effects on early mortality, the study found that there was nearly 3000 excess deaths in coal-heavy Appalachian counties as compared to the rest of the US.

Multiply the number of excess deaths caused by “chronic forms of heart, respiratory, and kidney disease, as well as lung cancer” by the official value of statistical life (VSL, the amount of money that each life is worth for cost-benefit analyses performed by the federal government) and you have a conservative estimate of the costs of coal mining. Similarly, use an old 1997 estimate of the economic benefits to Appalachian communites, adjust for yearly inflation, unemployment since the start of the study period, add tax income and subtract government subsidies, and you get a reasonable estimate for the value of coal in Appalachia.

The result: just over $8 billion in estimated benefits to Appalachian communities, but at cost of $51 billion in lost economic power due just to the early deaths of people living in coal communities.

Put another way, since 1997, Appalachian coal communities have lost $43 billion dollars that they would have kept in their communities had they thrown the coal companies out.

Read that again: $47 billion lost in just the last decade. How much lost since coal mining began in earnest 100 years ago?

And that's $47 billion in the last decade just in the cost of early deaths. That doesn't count the economic cost of roads destroyed by overweight coal trucks, house foundations shattered by blasting, forests of valuable hardwood bulldozed and burned, wells poisoned by mine leaching, irreplaceable sources of fresh water buried under mine waste.

No, no surprise and not rocket science. But yet more proof that anyone - especially a bought-off Lieutenant Governor seeking a Senate seat - who dares to mention coal as anything but an abomination to be eliminated at any cost is a liar who thinks you're stupid.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE, 6:30 a.m A study by a Berea nonprofit finds that the coal industry "the coal industry takes $115 million more from Kentucky’s state government annually in services and programs than it contributes in taxes."