Business-As-Usual Not As Cheap As It Looks, Concludes NRC Report

A study from the National Research Council says the nation’s current energy mix entails “hidden costs” associated with health and transportation, to the tune of $120 billion annually.

The NRC report does not include costs associated with climate change, for which estimates vary widely. Nor does it attempt to estimate the expense associated with using the nation’s military to help secure global oil production and transport infrastructure.

Instead, it estimates that the nation spends $56 billion each year on transportation, and another $62 billion on expenses associated with coal-fired electricity—the latter primarily to address health problems associated with particulate pollution.

For coal alone, that represents an additional 3.2 cents per kilowatt hour in hidden expense.

The report was commissioned by Congress when it was putting together the 2005 Energy Act. It was designed to help understand what energy actually costs, versus what its price tag looks like on paper. The NRC was charged with investigating the “health, environmental, security and infrastructural” costs (and benefits) of U.S. energy production and consumption.

The Congressional Budget Office has warned that Waxman-Markey could reduce the GDP by between 0.2 and 0.7 percent in 2020, but in light of this study, those numbers do not take into account the “hidden costs” that could disappear as country shifts to a cleaner energy mix.

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