I originally posted this comment on my FB 4/18/22, before the recent SWVA and EKY flooding. It was true then and it’s true now! “Coal is responsible for over 800,000 premature deaths per year globally and many millions more serious and minor illnesses. Mining and refining coal into useable fuel poisons water and destroys the land. Mountaintop removal has desecrated our once lush mountains.Take a look at Google Earth and look at the gray, barren abandoned strip jobs. It’s sickening. Just a bunch of ugly bald spots. Coal conglomerates have diverted trillions of dollars of coal money out of our region and we are left with the damage, pollution and health impacts. Reclamation does nothing, the grass and trees planted on old strip jobs are dead with a year or so. Nothing can live there. Coal companies blast off the top thousand feet of mountains and just push it into the valleys and streams below, killing everything in its path, filling in the streams and killing wildlife. In far SWVA alone we have lost over 2000 miles of streams due to mountaintop removal, which has led to flooding being an annual thing here when it used to be once every few years. When we get a lot of rain, there are not enough streams left to hold it. Burning coal pollutes our air and kills people, a lot of people. Had coal producing communities not spent the last 50 years fighting against renewable energy there would be no out of work miners. Instead the former mine lands would be home to solar and wind farms, which need employees too. Our bills would be cheaper, our water cleaner and our kids healthier. I realize coal mining has been a lifeline here. Both my grandfathers were coal miners who died fairly young, my dad was a coal truck driver for years. But coal has had its day. Burning coal for electricity is a more than a 100 year old technology and it’s very outdated. It is well beyond the time for our little corner of the world to enter the present before the future leaves us in the past.”