What are the environmental and public health impacts of Americas use of coal?
It’s hard to come up with a good estimate, in part because the impacts are so enormous. But let’s start with the consequences of mountaintop-removal mining in Appalachia. (Mountaintop-removal mining is a particularly destructive form of strip mining in which entire mountains are blasted apart to expose the coal seams inside; the rubble is typically dumped in nearby valleys.) Over the last several decades, 1,200 miles of streams and more than 400,000 acres of forests in Appalachia have been destroyed by mountaintop-removal mining. One recent study estimated that if this practice continues, within 40 years the region devastated by mining will be approximately the size of Rhode Island. Burning coal is also a major contributor to air pollution. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, a respected scientific advocacy group, annual emissions from a typical 500-megawatt coal plant include 10,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, the main cause of acid rain, which damages forests, lakes, and buil
