New report highlights that the importance of replacing planet warming fossil fuels is not just about mitigating climate change, it's also about our health.
The new study focuses on the growth of renewable energy in the US from 2019 to 2022. Over that period, by reducing the use of fossil fuel power plants, the authors say that America's use of wind and solar power cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 900m metric tons. That’s the equivalent of taking 71m cars off the road every year.
“From 2019 through 2022, wind and solar generation increased by about 55 percent,” said Dev Millstein, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “By 2022, wind and solar provided roughly 14 percent of total electricity needs for the US.”
Those major climate benefits can obscure the air quality benefits renewable power yielded, wrote the authors. So, to determine the impact of that reduction on public health, the authors “used air quality models to track the population exposed to pollution from power plants”, Millstein said, focusing specifically on sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen dioxides (NOx), which are both produced during fossil fuel combustion.
All told, the emission reductions from SO2 and NOx provided $249bn of climate and health benefits to the US, the authors found - a figure Millstein said he found was “noteworthy”. Clearly, he's a master of the understatement.
“These findings can help us target future wind and solar development to provide the greatest climate and health benefits,” observes Jeremiah Johnson, a climate and energy professor at North Carolina State University.
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