That sounds like kind of a big deal; citation needed? How does that work, is it just the health benefits of air pollution + the damage to miners?

Air pollution from coal power generation and internal combustion engine automobile driving (diesel being the worst by far) causes strokes, heart attacks, asthma, lung cancer, etc. It shortens peoples lives, makes them worse from a health standpoint and causes many deaths every year.

Imagine just the healthcare cost savings and the productivity gains alone from using cleaner power generation.

Phasing out coal power is a no brainer because there are plenty of alternatives to use, and renewable energies like solar will make our grid more resilient by making power generation more diffuse.

Electrifying cars is a longer-term issue. But if you can electrify cars, you can power them from cleaner sources. Even if you don't power them with cleaner sources, you'd still get less localized particulate pollution.

Whether or not you care about global warming or the planet itself, you'd get big benefits personally for your health and your family's health if we had cleaner power generation.

The $10 Billion per year is just in extra costs passed onto grid customers compared with using natural gas and renewables instead.

http://www.carbontracker.org/in-the-media/phasing-out-coal-p...

This may be true but the health costs are shifted to the consumer, government and health providers. If health damages were factored into the costs of producing energy or as overhead that the fossil fuel industry had to eat, they would have much more incentive to be cleaner and to invest in renewables.

That $10 billion per year is purely in the costs the energy industry is going to pass onto their customers. Once you start counting the health or climate benefits the number goes up.

http://www.carbontracker.org/in-the-media/phasing-out-coal-p...

The issue is that they're mostly escaping market forces due to how they are regulated:

"“Merchant” coal owners operating in competitive wholesale markets have lost nearly half their value in the last two years amid fierce competition from cheap gas and renewables. However, two thirds of coal plants are “regulated” and receive government-approved prices which cover their costs. This means that consumers rather than shareholders pick up the bill for supporting uneconomic coal plants."

Once you start counting actual externalities you get numbers like $5 Trillion a year subsides for fossil fuels globally, as estimated by the IMF, 7% of global GDP:

http://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sonew07...