It's not just about the carbon, try living next to a coal fired power station. The toxic pollution they spew out is a dangerous health hazard.
In China alone 1 million people die every year directly as a result of toxic air pollution mostly from coal fired power stations. Anything that forces the global community to move away from heavily polluting coal and into cleaner less polluting alternatives such as natural gas or renewables is a good thing for every body.
"In 2010, West and colleagues published an estimate of the global health effects of air pollution based on a single atmospheric model. More recently, West and colleagues thought they could improve their calculations by using results from a range of atmospheric different models—six in all—rather than relying on just one. In 2013, they published their results in Environmental Research Letters, concluding that 2.1 million deaths occur worldwide each year as a direct result of a toxic type of outdoor air pollution known as fine particulate matter"
"More than 1 million people are dying prematurely every year from air pollution in China, according to a new analysis.
"This is the highest toll in the world and it really reflects the very high levels of air pollution that exist in China today," says Robert O'Keefe of the Health Effects Institute in Boston, who presented the findings in Beijing this week.
Alarm has been growing in recent years about the air in China. On many days in many cities, it's thick with smog.
"When you get off the airplane, if you were to travel to Beijing, you would immediately feel your eyes stinging and your throat rasping," says Barbara Finamore, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's China program based in Beijing.
It's so bad that people commonly walk the streets wearing masks. Parents won't let their kids play outside.
"There are many days where we cannot see the building across the street," she says. "It's a pea soup of pollution.""
