ABSTRACT
Coal suffers from an incredibly bad image. It has few advocates other than the hundreds of thousands whose livelihoods depend on mining and burning coal by the trainload for generating electricity. No one strikes it rich in coal; that metaphor is reserved for oil. For some, coal brings back an image of coal miners who go in hock to buy a set of tools when they are young and quit decades later with black lung, still in hock to the company store. That might be one of the better images. Another would be the mangled bodies of miners caught in mine mishaps or those trapped by cave-ins awaiting their fate in pitch blackness. Still another would be youngsters harnessed to sleds dragging coal up narrow underground passageways on their hands and knees like pack animals or straddling precariously above fast-moving conveyor belts of coal, picking out the rocks. For still others the image of coal is as a pollutant of the first order that has to be eliminated under any or all circumstances. Nothing short of unconditional surrender can appease these environmental militants.
