John Oliver had an excellent (and humorous) segment on coal in his show last night:
He clearly understands the problems that coal miners face, and a hell of a lot of the problems come from the men who run the coal industry.
Management and the Republicans have turned the miners against liberals and the environment. But the real enemy is and always has been the people who run coal mines. Miners were essentially slaves until unions were able to stand up to management and demand better wages, working conditions and safety procedures. Unions are the only reason coal jobs pay well in the first place.
But as Oliver mentions, employment in the coal industry has been declining for decades, mostly due to mechanization, changes in mining techniques and competition from cheaper sources of energy. That decline has been accelerated in recent years by the decrease in natural gas prices. Natural gas is now cheaper, and more importantly, much cleaner and safer than coal in every phase of extraction and energy production.
These days coal is more expensive than renewables for energy production, and it suffers from many of the same problems: you can't turn a coal-fired power planet off and on at will because you're dealing with tons of coal in a giant furnace that boils water. Since coal plants need access to a lot of water, they must be sited by rivers. And they have to be on rail lines to receive thousands of tons of coal a day.
By contrast, natural-gas turbine generators are basically instant-on and instant-off: just twist a valve. They can be built just about anywhere there's a gas pipeline, and can be as large or small as needed and still be efficient.
Most of the natural gas we use to day is extracted from the ground (in unfortunately destructive and polluting ways) and is not renewable. But it's still just methane, and methane can be generated by any number of natural and artificial processes (bacterial decay, for example). That means natural gas can eventually become a renewable resource, and natural gas turbines will always be viable. Coal plants are toxic dinosaurs.
But at this point it has become clear that burning non-renewable resources such as coal and oil to produce electricity is extremely short-sighted. Those resources are needed to make stuff, like plastics, nylon, steel, carbon fiber, carbon filters, various kinds of silicon products, including solar cells.
A couple of weeks ago Trump trumpeted that fact that a new coal mine was opening up in Pennsylvania. This mine produces high-grade metallurgical (coking) coal or anthracite coal, not thermal (steam) coal or bituminous coal. Metallurgical coal is used to make steel and other products. Anthracite is purer, harder and has a higher carbon content than bituminous coal. It's also much rarer.
This is the biggest reason we should be turning away from burning coal and oil for energy. There is only a finite amount of these natural resources, which we can use to make stuff. Manufacturing creates more jobs throughout the economy and sells for a higher price than a kilowatt of electricity.
One day people will shake their heads incredulously at the idea that we just burned coal for heat in the same way that we are appalled at the idea that people slaughtered whales by the thousands to burn the oil from their blubber for illumination.
Just like Ahab's pursuit of the great white whale, using coal for energy production will lead to a bitter disaster.
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