We live in ten times cleaner environment than man has ever lived. Affordable domestic energy saves lives. Pneumonia, high cost of energy and thus people living in sub standard housing, using extension heaters, using kerosene heaters in doors, many people lighting the gas stove for a bit. In rural areas, wood stoves.
Coal fired generation plants with modern scrubbers delivering electric heat is clean, and could be well cheaper.
“Coal is plentiful and cheap. I don’t see it as dangerous at all, other than any industrial activity with large equipment, weights, pressures is so.
We live in ten times cleaner environment than man has ever lived. Affordable domestic energy saves lives. Pneumonia, high cost of energy and thus people living in sub standard housing, using extension heaters, using kerosene heaters in doors, many people lighting the gas stove for a bit. In rural areas, wood stoves.
Coal fired generation plants with modern scrubbers delivering electric heat is clean, and could be well cheaper.”
You make some excellent points, and, of course, I would support using coal as a last resort, rather than have folks freeze to death in their own homes.
But I would like to use (and train people) nuclear energy, drilling & building more refineries FIRST, because they are safer, and more healthful, than coal for the workers.
By some estimations almost 3% of the coal miners get Black Lung disease, and dying way underground in a coal mine as too many have (including recent history), must be an awful way to die, and in their prime of life, leaving behind their wives and children.