The Ledger of the Dead

In Hefsiba, a neighbourhood of Hadera, people hang out their washing and watch it turn black. A city councillor told a Knesset committee a year ago this week that it takes only a few minutes, and that the houses and cars are covered in coal dust. Another councillor, Yaniv Deri, gave the four oldest units at the nearby Orot Rabin power station a name: the silent murderers.

I thought of Hefsiba while rereading Ian Plimer’s Green Murder. Plimer, an emeritus professor of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne and one of Australia’s best known climate sceptics, published it at the end of 2021. Its subtitle promises a life sentence of net zero with no parole. Its charge sheet accuses the greens of murder: of people kept poor without coal power, of forests and wildlife cleared for mines and turbines, and of economies themselves.

Five years is long enough to audit a charge sheet. A charge of murder is a claim about bodies, and since 2021 the world has run something close to a live experiment. So let us count.

Start with the charge that has aged best. Cold kills, and expensive warmth kills the poor first. A study led from Monash University, published in Lancet Planetary Health in 2021, found about 4.6 million deaths a year associated with cold against roughly half a million with heat. That gap is narrowing. The 2026 Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, a separate annual report published this week ahead of COP31, linked heat to a record 710,000 deaths in 2023, more than 70 per cent of them attributable to human driven warming, and found annual heat deaths nearly 36 per cent higher in the decade since the Paris Agreement than in the decade before.

Then came the winter of 2022. When Russia throttled gas to Europe and prices soared, The Economist estimated that had electricity cost what it did in 2020, its model would have expected some 68,000 fewer deaths across 28 European countries between November 2022 and February 2023, more than the winter’s recorded covid toll.

Plimer can fairly claim partial vindication on the principle. But look at the weapon. Those deaths followed a price spike in gas, a fossil fuel, engineered by a petrostate at war. The winter that proved cheap energy saves lives also proved how lethal it is to depend on fuel that someone else can switch off.

The second charge was the mines. UNICEF has estimated that some 40,000 children work in the mines of southern Congo, many of them digging cobalt for batteries, and that shame has not gone away. But the market has moved faster than the polemic. In 2025, according to the International Energy Agency, lithium iron phosphate batteries, which contain no cobalt at all, made up more than 55 per cent of electric vehicle batteries deployed worldwide. Congo itself suspended cobalt exports in February 2025 and has rationed them by quota since October. The metal at the centre of Plimer’s indictment is being engineered out of the car.

The third charge is the sentence itself. Here the record is plainest. The same agency estimates that global coal demand reached an all time high of 8.85 billion tonnes in 2025. Whatever the greens have done in five years, they have not taken coal away. The world has never burned more of it.

Which brings us to the column the book weighs far more lightly, and to what a record coal year actually means. Our World in Data, drawing on published estimates of accidents and air pollution, puts the toll from coal at about 25 deaths for every terawatt hour of electricity, against a few hundredths of a death for wind, nuclear or solar. Plimer’s charge sheet runs the wrong way: the fuel he defends is, unit for unit, hundreds of times deadlier than the ones he prosecutes. Scaled up, the numbers stop being abstract. In 2021, researchers from Harvard, University College London and other universities estimated that fine particles from burning fossil fuels caused around 8.7 million deaths in 2018, close to one in five worldwide. One of the study’s funders, as it happens, was the Environment and Health Fund in Israel. The figure is contested, but even cautious estimates run into the millions, and every tonne of that record 8.85 billion carries its share. The ledger has a credit column too. The same Lancet Countdown estimates that in at least 77 countries where fossil fuel air pollution has fallen since 2016, cleaner air now prevents some 323,000 deaths a year. A record year for coal is not a reprieve. It is a body count.

Israel offers an unusually honest test, because here the trade off is strategic rather than ideological. The four oldest coal units at Orot Rabin, built in the 1980s and never fitted with scrubbers, were meant to close by mid 2022. The deadline slipped to the end of 2025. A year ago the Electricity Authority wanted three more years, and the grid operator an option on a decade. Their reason was missiles. Israel draws most of its power from a few offshore gas wells, and during the twelve day war with Iran in June 2025, Leviathan and Karish were shut. A coal stockpile on the beach cannot be switched off from Tehran. Plimer would recognise the argument: reliability saves lives.

But Israel kept the other column too. Academic surveys over a quarter of a century have linked the plant to between 50 and 250 premature deaths a year in the region; the lower figure came from the Health Ministry’s own director general in 2016. At the same hearing, a Health Ministry representative remarked that everyone had spoken about energy continuity and nobody about health costs. In January, Hadera approved converting the plant’s two newer coal units to gas over roughly two years, with coal dust expected to fall by about four fifths. It is not a green triumph. It is a compromise between security and lungs, struck by people made to count both.

That is what five years have taught, and what Green Murder still misses. Energy policy is always a choice between ways of dying: from cold, from blackouts, from shells, from soot. On my reading, Plimer fills one column carefully and gives the other far less attention. Many environmentalists commit the mirror image error, pricing the risks of the future while ignoring the miner and the pensioner in the present. Neither is a ledger. Both are speeches for the prosecution.

The station was renamed after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin: Orot Rabin, Rabin’s Lights. Its tallest chimney, 300 metres high, no longer carries smoke; a newer, filtered stack took over. Five years on, the verdict on Green Murder will not be delivered in a courtroom or a seminar. It will be delivered on a washing line in Hefsiba, on the day the sheets come in white.