Harry Reid gets another one right

Speaking to Fox Business News, he made the following comment:

The one thing we fail to talk about is those costs that you don’t see on the bottom line. That is, coal makes us sick. Oil makes us sick. It’s global warming. It’s ruining our country. It’s ruining our world. We’ve got to stop using fossil fuel.

He's right.

One of the ways that corporate America boosts its profits is by externalizing costs. They pump pollution into the atmosphere, and they never have to account for the downstream effects to the environment and to human health.

In response to Reid's comments, the Las Vegas Sun has a poll on their website asking if coal 1) makes us sick, 2) causes global warming but doesn't make us sick, 3) hurts our pocketbooks but doesn't make us sick, or 4) is okay overall. Unfortunately, they don't have a fifth option: makes us sick, causes global warming, and hurts our pocketbooks.

An MSNBC story about a 2004 report on the health impacts of coal-fired electrical plants had this to say:

Health problems linked to aging coal-fired power plants shorten nearly 24,000 lives a year, including 2,800 from lung cancer, and nearly all those early deaths could be prevented if the U.S. government adopted stricter rules, according to a study released Wednesday.

Here's Senator Reid making his comments about coal.

In the interview, he also talks about solar power and Ausra, a company here in Nevada trying to bring their technology to market. I wrote a bit about them toward the end of this post from yesterday.