Quotes About Coal

But ranchers who cherish the western life and its values also pray for oil wells in their calving pasture or a coal lease on prime grassland. Economics has pressed them into such a paradoxical state. For years, they've borrowed $100,000 for operating costs; now they can't afford interest. Disfigurement is synonymous with the whole idea of a frontier. As soon as we lay our hands on it, the freedom we thought it represented is quickly gone.

Of course methane is a fossil fuel, but as long as it is burned efficiently and fugitive emissions of methane gas are minimised, it is a less harmful fossil fuel than coal and oil and is an important way-station on the global journey towards low-carbon energy.

The Environmental Protection Agency rarely follows up prosecuting coal companies and their fellow polluters, even when the evidence is clear-cut that they are dumping and poisoning entire towns near their projects, and the state regulators are even worse.

Money never seems to be interested in strengthening regulatory agencies, for example, but always in subverting them, in making them miss the danger signs in coal mines and in derivatives trading and in deep-sea oil wells.

You can reduce environmentalism to six words: don't burn coal, don't eat meat. The rest is detail.

The question we face today is: What are we going to do when the coal is gone? And make no mistake it's going. No one has given us an answer that doesn't require the sacrifice of our health and our environment.

My father use to say if coal died, the country died. He was right. Our economy rests on the back of the coal miner. If we did not have the black diamonds of the mountains to burn, we would lose more than half of the nation's energy reserves.

Coal is responsible for as much atmospheric carbon dioxide as other fossil fuels combined and it still has far greater reserves. We must stop using it.

I don't think you have a choice but to pull CO2 back that has already made it out, or is about to make it out, because we are not overnight shutting down all the coal plants.

Unfortunately for the atmosphere, environmentalists helped stop carbon-free nuclear power cold in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and Europe. (Except for France, which fortunately responded to the '73 oil crisis by building a power grid that was quickly 80 percent nuclear.) Greens caused gigatons of carbon dioxide to enter the atmosphere from the coal and gas burning that went ahead instead of nuclear. I was part of that too, and I apologize.

Coal ash, the hazardous byproduct of burning coal to produce power, is a particularly insidious legacy of the nation's dependence on coal.

China's energy is very much focused on coal, and the economy is very focused on heavy industry, which is carbon intensive, so restructuring won't be easy.

To shut off coal, or to say you can't have further coal development, I think is the wrong way to go.

Buckhannon, population 5,639, is a deeply conservative town and long has been. While coal is its past, oil and gas are its likely future. It's a town where guns are sold at yard sales, where Pentecostal churches are nearly as common as restaurants, and where distrust of Hillary Clinton is visceral and deep-seated.

There is no war on coal. Period. There are more coal jobs and more coal produced in Ohio than there were five years ago, in spite of the talking points and the yard signs.

Burning carbon-based substances like oil, gas, and especially coal, produces billions of tons of extra carbon dioxide each year. Methane gas from cows and pigs and other animals on our large farms ends up in the atmosphere as well, trapping more of the sun's energy as heat.

Australia exports millions of tons of coal each year to Asian markets. These same countries are interested in Wyoming coal. I look forward to visiting and seeing a vibrant coal port to better understand the benefits and challenges associated with this method of export.

I was born in London, England during the great fog of 1952, but survived the coal-fueled air pollution with no ill effects and after less than a year in England was carried to Canada by my parents.

The more traditional fuel sources we have relied on as a nation - coal, oil, and natural gas - I'm hoping they can allow us the financial springboard to move to the next generation of energy sources: renewables and alternatives.

Exceptional circumstances can accelerate the gradual process of energy transitions: France's decision to develop nuclear energy on a grand scale is perhaps the best example of how that can be done by government fiat. In contrast, America's accelerated shift from coal has been driven by an inevitable embrace of cheaper natural gas.

By 1842, Britain was using two-thirds of all the coal produced in the Western world.

they took quite a lot of work to keep going. A typical stove in 1899, according to a study in Boston, burned some three hundred pounds of coal in a week, produced twenty-seven pounds of ash, and required three hours and eleven minutes of attention.

Why do energy transitions take so long, anyway? Because… Coal plants are not like computer chips.

The share of global power that comes from burning coal (roughly 40 percent) hasn't changed in 30 years. Oil and natural gas together have been hovering around 26 percent for three decades. All told, fossil fuels provide two-thirds of the world's electricity. Solar and wind, meanwhile, account for 7 percent.