By Ian Kirkwood

May 2, 2016 - Asbestos is widely accepted as an industrial catastrophe, an insidious mineral responsible for the slow and agonizing deaths of thousands of people involved in its mining, its manufacturing and its use.

But if we were doing a cost-benefit analysis of asbestos, how would we calculate the value of all of the lives saved because asbestos in brake pads stopped millions of motorists from crashing into the cars in front of them? Especially in the decades before suitable alternative materials were developed for brake linings. Or what about the people whose lives were helped through the provision of cheap fibro wall cladding, making housing affordable housing for millions of less-well-off people across the world?

I’m not saying that asbestos should suddenly be given a clean bill of health. It shouldn’t. But it does go to show that we should assess the full breadth of a situation before rushing to judgement.

I am moved to these thoughts by the new Lower Hunter particle and dust studies published this week by the NSW Environment Protection Authority. In the same way that an earlier suite of Upper Hunter studies found that wood smoke from household heaters was a major cause of particulate pollution in the coal-mining areas of Singleton and Muswellbrook, so the new studies have largely cleared coal as a contributor to air pollution in the Lower Hunter, pointing instead to sea salt. Sticky salt certainly gathers overnight on my car parked in the street at Hamilton.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the new study has been less than warmly received by the environmental movement, wedded as it is to highlighting the negative impacts of coal.

Re-interpreting the figures in Friday’s Newcastle Herald, activist James Whelan said that when naturally occurring particles were excluded, coal accounted for between about half and two-thirds of what remained.

That may be the case, but the EPA’s findings indicate that coal is not the widespread pollutant its critics have made it out to be.

In February last year, an organization known as the Climate and Health Alliance called for a moratorium on new coalmines, saying coal-related air pollution was costing the Hunter Region more than $650 million a year. Nationwide, the climate alliance quoted a 2009 report from an organization called the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering that “found the health costs of burning coal are equivalent to a national health burden of about $2.6 billion a year”.

Closer to home, Lake Macquarie City Council said in 2013 that air pollution from coal-fired power stations was costing the city about $50 million a  year.

All of these studies relied in part on figures obtained from the federal government’s National Pollutant Inventory, which record in substantial detail the actual emissions made by our major industries.

So, Bayswater power station, for example, put some 1240 tonnes of PM2.5 and PM10 particulates into the atmosphere in 2014-15, as well as other contaminants including arsenic, boron, hydrochloric acid and oxides of nitrogen. But the sheer volume of atmosphere means that by the time these contaminants reach the EPA’s monitors, they have generally dispersed to acceptable levels. If nothing else, the new EPA studies must surely mean that someone needs to go back and look again at the claims being made about the health costs of coal. But even if coal combustion does have negative health impacts, they must surely be weighed against the fuel’s otherwise positive contributions to our way of life.