What It Costs Us - washingtonpost.com

a Here is a worthwhile piece by the author of Big Coal, which was much discussed here at Undismayed last summer and is now in paperback.

What It Costs Us - washingtonpost.com: "Many Americans think that coal went out with top hats and corsets. In fact, we burn more than a billion tons of coal each year in the United States -- about 20 pounds a day for every man, woman and child. We don't burn it in coal stoves, of course, but in big power plants that generate about half the electric power in the country.

Politically, the war in Iraq has been a boon for coal, allowing coal-friendly politicians to tout America's 250-year supply as a substitute for our addiction to Middle Eastern oil -- even though, in the real world, there is no overlap between coal (used to generate electricity) and oil (used for transportation fuels, among other things). This is not to say that the coal industry would not dearly love to get into America's gas tank. In recent months, it has pushed hard for subsidies and tax breaks that would accelerate the construction of coal-to-liquid plants, a technology developed by the Nazis during the 1930s that can transform coal into liquid fuels such as diesel (for technical reasons, it's very difficult to make gasoline from coal).

Coal boosters argue that today's industry is nothing like the industry of yore, and that many of the problems with the fuel -- like the fact that air pollution from power plants kills people -- have been solved by new technology. Coal is cheap, plentiful and clean, they say. What's not to like?

....

Digging up hard-to-get coal will also devastate Appalachia, where huge mountaintop-removal mines have already buried 700 miles of streams and 400,000 acres of forests. (Mountaintop-removal is a particularly destructive form of mining in which entire mountains are blasted apart to expose the coal seams inside; the rubble is typically dumped in nearby valleys.) Instead of strengthening oversight of this type of mining, the Bush administration proposed last week to loosen regulations and allow it to expand. One recent study estimated that if this practice continues, within 40 years the region disemboweled by mining will be approximately the size of Rhode Island."