Move away from coal

The Providence Journal: In the 19th and early 20th centuries, a miner was a kind of slave. Paid pennies an hour, he was almost owned by the mining company. He had no choice but to live in the company town, rent company housing, and buy his necessities at the company store. And the work was often fatal.
If miners didn't like that they were controlled lock, stock, and barrel to perform deadly work, they could say so. And when they did, the bosses on more than one occasion got out the Gatling guns.
Today, miners make far better wages -- the West Virginia annual average of $55,000 is handsome in those parts. The mining families may live and shop where they like. And with the federal government regulating the mines, safety has increased.
There is an ad by General Electric showing svelte, glistening guys and dolls mining to the catchy tune of "Sixteen Tons" -- an ad proclaiming "clean coal." But it's a hoax: Mines continue to be bad places to work. Recent tragic events make that all too clear.
All the regulation and technology in the world will never make mining safe. Fires, explosions, cave-ins, run-overs by the huge mining vehicles: These are the facts of life for the miner.
Baking powder
The United States has a quarter of the world's coal reserves, and millions of Americans use electricity and products that come from coal. Coal fuels half our electrical generation, and goes into baking powder, linoleum, insecticides, sugar substitutes, pesticides, soda water -- countless items.
We're not likely to end coal mining. But we can certainly be wiser about how we use this resource.
Coal is plant life that died eons ago -- it is thus stored sunlight. Tossed into furnaces, it is burned to boil water. The steam from the heated water turns a turbine. The turbine makes electricity. The electricity flows down a transmission wire and glows in your light bulb. This is a great convenience. Nevertheless, our use of coal imperils miners, sickens those who breathe air polluted by coal combustion, and produces greenhouse gases that are raising the temperature of the planet. Not the least of the effects is coal mining's ravaging of the countryside.
Now is past time to move away from this filthy, lethal form of "dead" sunlight to the clean, benign energy that comes from actual sunlight -- through solar, wind, and wave power.