The real issue here is that there are both benefits and costs to carbon, and both benefits and costs to limiting carbon emissions.  In fact there are both benefits and costs to global warming.  The Earth is currently in what is rightfully called a “climate optimum” where temperatures are optimal for life.  What is completely buried by the alarmist crowd is that the net effect of the 0.8 deg Celsius of current warming since 1880 and for another full 2.0 degrees Celsius of warming above what it is today is calculated by climate scientists to be of net benefit to humanity and the Earth.  It is only beyond the additional 2 degress that the balance turns negative.  This is why the target has been to stop warming by this point. 

Coal’s primary benefit to the world today is providing low-cost electricity.  The true comparison to be made is not coal to gas or coal to nuclear but coal electricity to no electricity.  1.2 billion people in the world have no electricity in their homes.  Billions more still burn wood, charcoal, or dung inside their homes for cooking and heating.  The terrible air quality from this practice is far worse than that from even unscrubbed coal plants and is estimated by WHO to kill 3 million people each year.  And the CO2 from all this inefficiently burned biomass is not carbon neutral, because it is coming from deforestation of the ancient carbon sink forests and peat bogs of Asia, Indonesia, Africa, and South America. 

We certainly need to accurately count the costs of carbon, social and otherwise, but we also must count the benefits of hydrocarbon fuels and the costs and benefits of alternatives.  This is the only way to craft sound energy policy.  The social costs avoided by curtailing carbon need to be weighed against the social costs of curtailing carbon.

The social costs of replacing cheap coal electricity with higher-cost, lower-efficiency, arbitrarily intermittent alternatives such as wind and solar are to inflate the price and reduce the reliability.  Dramatically higher electricity costs across Europe that correlate to the high penetratrion of wind and solar have created an increasing wave of energy poverty and forced the poorest to raid their national forests for firewood because they can’t afford electricity.  The number of people who die of temperature extremes in winter and summer is statistically linked to the price of energy, and bad “renewable” electricity policy is literally killing people in the developed world by increasing energy poverty just as bad “renewable” biofuel policy is killing people in the developing world by displacing food agriculture with fuel agriculture and forcing hundreds of millions more into food poverty.

Additionally, it is important to calibrate the costs with the latest science.  The just-released 2013 IPCC Working Group I report that represents the scientific consensus needs to inform the calculations.  This 2,216 page report reads far differently than the 20-page Summary Report that got all the media airplay.  This is because the 20-page Summary Report is a political consensus document, not a scientific consensus document.  For example, when the advanced copy of the summary report was released, the western governments with a political stake in climate change alarmism were not pleased by its frank acknowledgment of a 15-yr hiatus in warming or its frank admission that all of the climate models had overshot actual temperature rise by more than a quarter of a degree C. German politicians called for the reference to the warming slowdown to be deleted, saying it wasn’t fair to consider trends shorter than 30 years. US politicians urged the authors to include the ‘leading hypothesis’ that the reduction in warming is linked to more heat being transferred to the deep ocean despite the fact that 3 out of 5 studies considered by the IPCC showed ocean warming had also slowed.  The increase to 95% certainty of human responsibility for climate change is a complete political fabrication and appears only in the summary report as it was not justified by the data and was not a point of consensus for the scientists themselves.  Here is a record of how each nation negotiated the language it wanted to see in the summary report. http://judithcurry.com/2013/10/01/negotiating-the-ipcc-spm/.

The full report is actually quite honest and evenhanded because it was not politically scrutinized. It is therefore very instructive to find that it does not support the quasi-religious dogma of the doomsday alarmists, but rather openly acknowledges lack of consensus, contrary evidence, failed model predictions, alternative theories, and assumptions used in place of hard data in key areas.  It backs aways and recants from statements in AR4 and earlier IPCC reports of increasing droughts or hurricanes or imminent climate catastrophes or irreversible tipping points.  In other words, it is refreshingly scientific, much more moderate,  and should be cause for recalibrating the long-term costs of GHG emissions against the near-term costs of mitigating those emissions.  Read it here (http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/uploads/WGIAR5_WGI-12Doc2b_FinalDraft_All.pdf).

The current White House approach was conducted behind closed doors, without broad participation, without the benefit of the latest IPCC report, and was based upon a raft of unscrutinized assumptions about such fundamental variables as the discount rate to be applied to future costs.  It also amazingly ignored methane, nitrous oxide, nitrogen triflouride, and other GHGs that are hundreds and thousands of times more potent at global warming than CO2 but are emitted by politically favored activities such as farming, biofuels production, and solar panel manufacturing.  The nation and the world needs a far better basis upon which to make energy policy that literally affects the lives and deaths of current and future generations.