Cutting Emissions Pays for Itself, MIT Study Concludes

Health care savings can greatly defray costs of carbon-reduction policies, experts report.  But just how large are the health benefits of cleaner air in comparison to the costs of reducing carbon emissions?  Researchers looked at three policies achieving the same reductions in the U.S., and found that the savings on health care spending and other costs related to illness can be big -- in some cases, more than 10 times the cost of policy implementation.

"Carbon-reduction policies significantly improve air quality," says Noelle Selin, an assistant professor of engineering systems and atmospheric chemistry at MIT, and co-author of a study published today in Nature Climate Change.  "In fact, policies aimed at cutting carbon emissions improve air quality by a similar amount as policies specifically targeting air pollution."

Selin and colleagues compared the health benefits to the economic costs of three climate policies:  a clean-energy standard, a transportation policy, and a cap-and-trade program. The three were designed to resemble proposed U.S. climate policies, with the clean-energy standard requiring emissions reductions from power plants similar to those proposed in the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Power Plan.

The researchers found that savings from avoided health problems could recoup 26 percent of the cost to implement a transportation policy, but up to to 10.5 times the cost of implementing a cap-and-trade program.  The difference depended largely on the costs of the policies, as the savings -- in the form of avoided medical care and saved sick days -- remained roughly constant:  Policies aimed at specific sources of air pollution, like power plants and vehicles, did not lead to substantially larger benefits than cheaper policies, like a cap-and-trade approach.

Cutting Emissions Pays for Itself, Study Concludes