Enlarge (credit: Ashley Cooper)

When used to generate power or move vehicles, fossil fuels kill people. Particulates and ozone resulting from fossil fuel burning cause direct health impacts, while climate change will act indirectly. Regardless of the immediacy, premature deaths and illness prior to death are felt through lost productivity and the cost of treatments.

Typically, you see the financial impacts quantified when the EPA issues new regulations, as the health benefits of limiting pollution typically dwarf the costs of meeting new standards. But some researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have now done similar calculations—but focusing on the impact of renewable energy. Wind and solar, by displacing fossil fuel use, are acting as a form of pollution control and so should produce similar economic benefits.

Do they ever. The researchers find that, in the US, wind and solar have health and climate benefits of over $100 for every Megawatt-hour produced, for a total of a quarter-trillion dollars in just the last four years. This dwarfs the cost of the electricity they generate and the total of the subsidies they received.

Enlarge / A 133-car coal train moves slowly as it's loaded at the Buckskin Coal Mine in 2006 in Gillette, Wyoming. (credit: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. 

The Bureau of Land Management announced Thursday that it would no longer make federally managed lands in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin available for new coal mining leases, drawing condemnation from the fossil fuel industry in the region that produces the most coal in the country, but delivering a boon to the nation’s clean energy transition.

The Powder River Basin, a geological formation that covers much of northeast Wyoming and a portion of southeast Montana, has been the nation’s largest source of coal for decades, with production there peaking in 2008. Since then, demand for coal has plummeted, largely due to the rise of natural gas and renewable energy. Taking federal coal off the table in the basin could all but put an expiration date on the nation’s thermal coal industry.