• I will talk about how safe the practice of coal mining is and how in terms of a cost-benefit analysis it is not worth mining it for energy purposes. 200,000 Dead in US. 50,000 with disease.
• Coal contains small amounts of sulfur (SO2), trace amounts of mercury and radioactive materials.
• Coal has had an irreversible effect of the landscapes of the great US, shaving off mountains, creating hills, and deforesting our lands.
• Coal is a fossil fuel, non renewable. It will run out. Why build a reliance on something that could only be around for 150 years if usage marginally grows.
• Causes air, water, radioactive (more then nuclear), land pollution.
• It’s heavy and cumbersome.
• There are inexpensive alternatives, N. B. Wind at 4 Cents an hour per KW vs Coal’s 8 Cents an hour per KW.
• New technologies fail to counter act CO2 problems with global warming.
• Coal gasification does not work.

I would like to quote from a little folk ditty I know called, The Springfield Mining Disaster: Bone and blood is the price of coal, Listen to the shouts of the black faced miner, Listen to the call of the rescue team, We have no water, light or bread, So we're living on songs and hope instead, There's blood on the coal, and the miners die, In roads that never saw sun or sky. – Touching piece? Well there is solid truth behind it. I think we have all seen the horrors of mining, human life being reduced to a black piece of blood drenched coal. I don’t think I need to stand here and wax poetic about the dangers of mining. But I will stand here, 43 days in to a fresh new year, and read you these names:

-Thomas P. Anderson, 39
-Alva Martin Bennett, 51
-Jim Bennett, 61
-Jerry Groves, 56
-George Hamner Jr., 54
-Terry Helms, 50
-Jesse L. Jones, 44
-David Lewis, 28
-Martin Toler, 51
-Fred Ware Jr., 58
-Jack Weaver, 51
-Marshall Winans, 50
-Haskell Sheppard

And that is not counting the 26 who died in a mining accident in china last week. Bone and Blood is the price of coal.

But what are we getting for our bone and blood, some wonderful drug, a miracle product? No, we are getting a dirty lump inefficient fuel that produces CO2 and causes global warming and pushes fumes that create air pollutants.

So we are not only killing our country men in search of coal. We are killing our grandchildren. Wait no. I doubt we will even have grand children at this rate. Our esteemed text book author estimates that coal kills 65,000 to 200,000 people in our country per year per year. I would like to read those names but I can’t.

I also don’t have enough time to read the names of the 50,000 people with respiratory damage due to coal.

But I do have time, in closing to tell you this: Coal is expensive in human life. It disturbs our land. It disturbs our waters. It disturbs our air. Coal kills. There are other ways. Look not towards coal, a technology of the past, but to a different way, because coal may not be expensive in dollars, but it sure is in lives.