&gt; Also note that these are not costs of production, these are what people wind up paying for it<p>Cost of production and what people pay are two different things. A true accounting would include cost of production and externalized costs. Doing that <i>doubles</i> the price of coal: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;green.blogs.nytimes.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;02&#x2F;17&#x2F;tallying-coals-hidden-cost" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;green.blogs.nytimes.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;02&#x2F;17&#x2F;tallying-coals-hid...</a><p>&gt; Even the study’s most conservative estimate of the uncounted cost of coal — $175 billion a year — would more than double the average cost of coal-fired electricity, the authors found.<p>And most of that is from well-understood and well-measured health impacts of coal pollution:<p>&gt; At this lower range, roughly 80 percent of the costs were from well-documented public health impacts like lung and heart disease<p>So you pay $75 per megawatt hour for coal. And then the poor sap who lives downwind of the coal plant pays another $75 per megawatt hour for <i>your electricity use</i> in the form of dying early from lung cancer.