Moving to renewables is a lengthy process.
The work of a generation at least, and smart.
Jeff Goodell, author of ‘Big Coal’:
“The biggest problem with our bounty of coal is not what it does to our mountains or the atmosphere, but what it does to our minds.
“It preserves the illusion that we don’t have to change our lives. Given the profound challenges we face with the end of cheap oil and the arrival of global warming, this is a dangerous fantasy.
“If we had less coal, we might replace the 19th-century notion that we can drill and burn our way to prosperity with a more modern view of efficiency and sustainability.
“Instead of spending billions of dollars each year to subsidize tapping out yet another finite resource, we’d pour that money into solar energy, biofuels and other renewable resources.
“We’d be creating jobs in new industries, not protecting them in old ones. And we’d understand that the real fuel of the future is not coal but creativity.”
The EPA has refused hundreds of new permits, not to protect a mountain nor to divert carbon, but because 100s of miles of waterways are being destroyed.
Mines have demolished 500 mountains — about a million acres — buried hundreds of valley streams under tons of rubble, poisoned and uprooted countless communities, and caused widespread contamination to the region’s air and water.