Pay Every Coal Miner Five Million Dollars to Stay Home

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are about 38,900 working coal miners in the United States as of early 2026, 17,800 working on the surface and 21,100 underground, making "coal mining" a smaller occupation than "working at Arby's."

Meanwhile, the coal industry imposes an annual external cost on American society somewhere between $200 billion and $500 billion.

Taking the low end of the harm and overestimating the workers, $200,000,000,000, ÷ 40,000 = $5,000,000 in annual external costs per coal miner.

Thus, it would be cheaper to pay every coal miner in America five million dollars a year to not mine coal. This isn't a joke, this is replicated, reliable empirical science.

The full-cost accounting literature

In 2011, a team at the Harvard Medical School Center for Health and the Global Environment published "Full Cost Accounting for the Life Cycle of Coal," counting up every documentable harm coal imposes on the American public across its entire lifecycle, including all the mining accidents, black lung, water contamination, mercury in fish, sulfur dioxide converting to fine particulate matter in human lungs, mountaintop removal, and climate forcing. Their central annual estimate, in 2008 dollars, was $345.3 billion, with a conservative floor of $175.2 billion and a ceiling of $523.3 billion. Converted to 2026 dollars, that's a central estimate of $534 billion. (As the authors noted, the central figure was an underestimate because many harms could not be quantified at all). The cost of the harm is double or triple the cost consumers see on their energy bills.

Separately in 2011, environmental economists Muller, Mendelsohn, and Nordhaus (the last of whom would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics) integrated air pollution damages into the national accounts and ran every U.S. industry through the model. Coal-fired electric generation was the single largest industrial contributor to external damages in the entire economy. Its gross external damages ranged from 0.8 to 5.6 times the industry's total value added. That is to say, for every dollar the industry generated in revenue, wages, and profits combined, it generated between an equal amount and over five times as much economic damage.

Coal soot is not generic soot

In 2023, a study led by researchers at George Mason, Harvard, and the University of Texas analyzed Medicare records covering 650 million person-years and 38.6 million deaths. Using atmospheric transport modeling, the researchers tracked how sulfur dioxide from 480 American coal units converted into airborne sulfate particulate and drifted across the country over the following weeks. Epidemiologists had long assumed that all fine particulate matter (PM2.5) was roughly equally toxic regardless of source, but PM2.5 from coal combustion is 2.1 times more lethal than PM2.5 from other sources like vehicle exhaust or dust. A one microgram per cubic meter increase in annual coal PM2.5 exposure raised all-cause mortality by about 1.1%. Coal soot is rich in sulfates, black carbon, and heavy metals, and it kills people at twice the rate ambient particulate pollution otherwise does. Across the 21-year study period (1999 to 2020), the researchers attributed 460,000 premature deaths to coal-plant PM2.5 alone.

When defenders of coal speak of the "war on coal," they mean the regulatory regime of scrubbers, mercury rules, and interstate air quality standards that drove annual coal-attributable deaths from over 43,000 down to roughly 1,600 by 2020. It's no hyperbole to say they want more people to die; that's simply a fact.

Paying extra to be poisoned

In competitive electricity markets, generators are supposed to run in order of cost: wind, solar, and efficient gas plants first, expensive coal only when demand peaks. But vertically integrated utilities routinely "self-commit" their coal plants, forcing them to run even when the coal being burned costs more than the electricity is worth, then passing the loss to captive ratepayers. The Rocky Mountain Institute calls this "uneconomic dispatch," and it cost American ratepayers $14.3 billion between 2012 and 2022, with $5.3 to $5.6 billion of that concentrated in the monopoly utilities of the Southeast. In the hardest-hit areas, households pay $100 to $200 extra per year just to subsidize coal plants that are burning coal just for the sake of burning coal.

RMI found that the pollution just from uneconomically dispatched coal imposes $13 billion to $26 billion in health damages every year. Between 2015 and 2023, communities absorbed an estimated $236 billion in added health costs from this single wasteful and inexcusable practice, including 3.4 million instances of increased inhaler use and more than 53,000 entirely new diagnoses of asthma in people who would otherwise never have developed the disease.

Again, none of this is an exaggeration: we pay billions extra for electricity nobody needed to fund pollution that costs them tens of billions more in hospital visits and shortened lives.

The subsidy iceberg

The pattern holds globally. The IMF's 2025 fossil fuel subsidies update, covering 170 countries, found that explicit subsidies (direct fiscal transfers and underpricing relative to supply cost) ran $725 billion in 2024. Implicit subsidies (i.e., allowing fossil fuels to 'externalize' and not pay for the damage they cause through air pollution and climate change), ran $6.7 trillion, or 5.8% of global GDP. Coal accounts for nearly two-fifths of that combined figure, largely because of its unpriced health and climate toll.

The IMF found that eliminating just the explicit subsidies (only a tenth of the total) would nonetheless cut global CO2 emissions 6% by 2035 and prevent 70,000 premature deaths a year. Full reform, forcing fossil fuel producers to pay for the harm they cause, would cut emissions 46% and prevent 1.1 million premature deaths annually. And before someone tells you that would fall hardest on the poor, that part has been modeled too: of every dollar spent on fuel subsidies, the poorest 20% of households receive eight cents.

And then there is climate

None of the figures above fully price carbon. The federal government's most recent rigorous estimate of the Social Cost of Carbon, built on peer-reviewed integrated assessment modeling published in Nature, puts the damage of a ton of CO2 at $190 for 2020 emissions, rising to $230 by 2030, using a 2% discount rate. At a 1.5% rate, the 2020 figure rises to $340 per ton. Apply the central estimate to the U.S. coal fleet's annual emissions and you get climate damages on the order of $100 billion to $150 billion per year from American coal alone. The current administration dissolved the interagency working group that maintained this estimate on Inauguration Day 2025, reviving the earlier approach that suppressed the figure to between $1 and $7 per ton by counting only domestic damages at a steep discount rate. But changing the accounting doesn't make the harm go away, it just conceals it.

The ash never goes away

Burning coal also leaves behind 70 to 130 million tons of coal ash laced with arsenic, lead, mercury, chromium, lithium, and radium. For decades it was dumped into unlined pits sitting directly in groundwater, and the industry's own monitoring data shows that 91% of regulated coal ash sites are contaminating surrounding groundwater above federal safety standards.

In spring 2026, the Trump administration's EPA proposed sweeping amendments to the coal ash rules to make them worse. The changes:

• exempt hundreds of older dumps from federal oversight,
• allow contamination to be measured 150 meters from the dump rather than at its edge (legalizing what advocates accurately call "zones of contamination"),
• permit states to raise allowable levels of lead, cobalt, and lithium in contaminated water,
• allow ash to remain sitting in groundwater while actively leaking, and
• remove restrictions on using coal ash as structural fill in residential developments.

At least 88 coal ash dumpsites sit within two miles of a Great Lake, the drinking water supply for tens of millions of people.

The reliability myth

If you've ever seen any discussion of renewable energy on television, it has inevitably been described as less "reliable" than fossil fuel sources, but that simply isn't true. During Winter Storm Uri in 2021, frozen fossil fuel plants and collapsing gas supply forced the largest manually controlled blackout in U.S. history and killed 246 people. During Winter Storm Elliott in 2022, a record 90,500 megawatts, 13% of all generating capacity in the Eastern Interconnection, failed or ran at reduced output, with natural gas accounting for 63% of the unplanned outages.

The same is true for coal, as shown this January. During Winter Storm Fern, coal plants in PJM posted an 18% forced outage rate, 2.5 times the rate of wind. In SPP, gas outages hit 25% against 1% for wind. Coal plants don't have any particular immunity to the weather, and can fail in the cold for a variety of reasons, including brittle conveyors and frozen sensing lines on boilers. Wind in PJM, meanwhile, produced 202% of its expected output during the peak of the storm, effectively holding the grid together while the thermal fleet froze. The plants being kept alive in the name of reliability are among the least reliable assets on the grid precisely when reliability matters most.

The tally

Roughly $100 billion a year in air pollution mortality and morbidity, even from today's smaller fleet, another $100 billion or more in climate damages at the federal government's own carbon valuation, tens of billions in uneconomic dispatch waste and its associated health costs, the permanent poisoning of groundwater under more than nine in ten ash sites, a fleet that fails in bad weather and pointlessly burns excess coal in good weather. Even on the most conservative reckoning, the external cost lands around $200 billion a year, and credible estimates run past half a trillion. All of it to sustain an industry that the American Economic Review concluded destroys more value than it creates, and that employs fewer people than a roast beef sandwich chain.

Forty thousand miners paid five million dollars each to stay home would be a bargain.