Turning to renewable energy could be one of the biggest efforts we could make to halt global warming.
But aside from the benefits to our planet, apparently it can also benefit regular people. This is because switching away from fossil fuels can reduce medical expenses.
Images courtesy: Reuters
The findings come from a new study carried out by the MIT Centre for Energy and Environmental Policy. The team looked at ten US states across the Midwest and Great Lakes region, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, West Virginia, New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware. That's because these states currently have a much greater reliance on coal than other regions of the US.
MIT says that, if these states switch to renewable energy and keep up to current international standards, it would cost about $3.5 billion to set up the infrastructure. However, they could then see total savings of $4.7 billion in health benefits by 2030, which is a 34 percent return on the initial investment.
"This research shows that renewables pay for themselves through health benefits alone," lead author Emil Dimanchev told The Verge.
How does that work out? Well plenty of previous studies have looked at how much climate change can cost us, in the form of rising heating and air conditioning bills, water desalination, and the cost to companies. This one instead however looked at how renewable energy could affect air quality and therefore medical bills.
The idea is that switching over to solar and wind energy and ditching coal automatically raises the general air quality in the region and lowers the amount of particulate matter in the atmosphere. Because of that, people are less susceptible to respiratory diseases, lung cancer, and strokes.?
As such, they're then spending less on medical bills and losing less pay over excessive sick days. And both those things are very important in countries without universal healthcare, like the US. And this saving is just if these states stick to current policies of generating 13 percent of their power needs through renewable sources. If they instead up it to 19.5 percent, they could instead see $13.5 billion in health benefits in 2030 compared to $5.8 billion in costs.
Unfortunately, the Trump administration has been pushing to roll back policies supporting renewable energy generation. According to MIT, throwing out this 13 percent split entirely could instead result in 50 premature deaths annually in each state by 2030.
So it's in the best interest of our health and our budgets if we just switch over to clean energy as soon as possible.