The Oil Drum

In the context of current discussions of global warming, this chart completely baffles me. This thread will be stale long before a detailed analysis could be done, but the problem readily manifests itself on the back of an envelope.

For coal, the externalities shown add up to 3.5 € cents per kwh of electricity from coal. For a power plant efficiency of, say, 40%, that's 1.4 € cents per kwh of heat energy from coal. Since there is no column for oil products, let's just apply that directly to gasoline. A U.S. gallon of gasoline produces around 40kwh of heat energy, or, using the coal number as possibly an overestimate since coal is usually considered "dirtier", externalities of 56 € cents per gallon. That is about 70 U.S. cents per gallon depending on the exchange rate. And less than half of that owes to global warming.

Now, a gasoline or carbon tax that raised 70 U.S. cents per gallon of gasoline (or diesel) would not change behavior much - that much is already proven beyond doubt. The 33 cents or so for global warming would change it even less.

So here's my problem:

Many here, and perhaps you, yourself, have advocated hugely expensive increases in mass transit. But, at a guess, I'd say it costs an extra hour or two per work-day to use mass transit (unless one both lives and works in Manhattan, downtown Chicago or San Francisco, or some other well-served ultra-dense city core), and with an average car it might save a gallon or even a gallon-and-a-half of gasoline or diesel, much less with a Prius. (I'm not concerning myself with Hummer or Escalade drivers here, if they can't afford the fuel they couldn't afford the vehicle in the first place. Also note, in most places in the U.S., mass transit is creepy-crawly buses averaging maybe 7mph/11kph with stops - the odds that one of the few rail lines can take you where you need to go are risibly slim.)

These figures suggest that taking the advocacy at face value, people "ought" to value a gallon or so of gasoline or diesel as equivalent to an hour or two of their time. (I'm not concerning myself with ultra-long exurban commutes either - they are hyped but are still atypical.) That works out to US$15 to US$30 per gallon, using an average wage of about $15 in this country. Most of this huge number must be externalities, since the underlying price (ex taxes) right now is somewhere around US$1.70, and was under $3 even at the 2005 peak.

This discrepancy between the chart and the strident recommendation to expand mass transit is just astounding, a factor on the order of 30. Based on the chart, for example, it is apparently not worth doing very much to prevent global warming, which only accounts for 35 US cents per gallon. After all, carbon tax of that magnitude would impact hardly anything substantially, except perhaps for aluminum smelting, except that much of that, IIRC, is still done with non-grid hydro power.

So we have all this chatter about radical, time-consuming or expensive behavior modifications - buses, bicycles, working far below one's economic potential, etc. So what is going on? How do I reconcile this sort of panic with the numbers in the chart, which would be no obstacle at all to unlimited coal-to-liquids?

WTF?
Why does wind have a noise cost? They can only be heard within a few hundred meters anyway. Are they trying to say that all the other plants are silent within a few hundred yards? Turbine noise? Noise from coal trains?

Why are renewable power options held to impossibly high standards? Also, does anyone else feel that the health costs might be a bit off? How exactly does wind have the same health cost as coal? WTF. The EPA recommends that children and pregnant women severely restrict the amount of fish that they eat because of the methylmercury possibly contained within them. This mercury pollution can be traced back to coal emissions. How is this not an enormous cost?

Perhaps these problems magically do not exist in Germany.