Human, Social, and Environmental Damages Avoided through the Retirement of the U.S. Coal Fleet

Civil Society Institute
Project completed January 2011.

A companion to Synapse’s 2010 report Beyond Business as Usual: Investigating a Future without Coal and Nuclear Power in the U.S. (BBAU 2010), this study examines the substantial “external” costs of burning coal to produce electricity—such as premature deaths, social costs, and environmental damages—and estimates the degree to which these costs could be avoided by 2050 by moving to the Transition Scenario modeled in the BBAU 2010 report.