Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
dif
finding the gasoline needed for our
cars, know the impact. The United States spends a great
deal of money to see that oil and gas from the Middle East
can
culty back then in
flow freely to the markets of the rest of the world.
Western Europe is nervous about its dependence on
Russian natural gas, the
flow of which has already been
turned off twice for political reasons.
The energy we use affects our environment in many
ways, not merely by climate change. As the Director of a
large US science laboratory that had joint research pro-
jects with China, I used to travel there frequently. The air
pollution was bad at the time of my
first trip in
and
terrible at
the time of my last
in
. For
the
summer Olympics, China shut down every coal-
miles of Beijing because of
air pollution. They now require the most ef
fired power plant within
cient coal-
ciency
than we require in the United States), and are building
nuclear power plants, large wind farms, and large solar
installations, not because of climate change, but to reduce
the air pollution that affects the health of their population.
The US National Academy of Sciences in
fired power plants for all new builds (higher ef
pub-
lished a book called Hidden Costs of Energy [
]. In it the
costs of pollution from coal in the United States were
estimated to be
people in the coal industry from miners to secretaries to
executives according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
You could shut down the coal industry, give each of them
a pension of
$
billion per year. There are
,
per year tax free, save the economy
money, and improve the health of many people. The
environmental consequences of our energy choices go
far beyond climate change.
$
,
