My father, like most men born in the 1940s, cares as much about conserving electricity as he does about eating.   The only person more excited about turning off lights than my father was my grandmother who had lived through the depression and who was almost as concerned about running out of electricity as she was about running out of orange juice.  I had a strange moment of awakening and introspection recently when my wife pointed out that I have taken on some of my father’s light-related compulsions, specifically, the light related compulsion of turning off the lights while she’s still in the room.  The thought that I was unnecessarily taking on some of my father’s inherited generational eccentricities might have kept me in the dumps if I hadn’t spent last weekend at my brother’s house, which is approximately a well struck five-iron away from a coal mine.

If you don’t know much about science or the environment, you might wonder what a coal mine has to do with my turning the lights off on my wife, and if you know a lot about both you might still wonder what my brother’s house has to do with electricity so allow me to explain.  Even though most people think of coal as the thing you get for Christmas if you put gum in your sister's hair, or one of those things that people used in the same era as quill pens, and picture it as the thing that causes acid rain and cancer, amazingly, 60% of America’s electricity still comes from coal burning factories[1]. 

The reason this is the case is 1) because the coal lobby is well-funded and 2) because the unions involved in finding the coal are well funded and 3) because at one point, people in America believed a nuclear reactor in New York was going to make their children have three heads, even though there are about a million nuclear power facilities in Europe and none of them have ever really had a problem.

Coal has two primary problems, if you don’t count the fact that it’s dirty to touch.  First, it that it is difficult to find, and second, is that the process of turning it into electricity is basically setting it on fire, which is about as problematic as it sounds, especially if you're a fish, or anyone who drinks water.  To the first point, the trouble with coal isn’t so much in finding it, as much, getting it out  from under the mountains where it is located.  Basically, if you want to find it, you just have to go to western Pennsylvania, or West Virginia.  Since people rarely go either of those places, your average person doesn’t run into too much coal but fortunately for those of us who like electricity, the people who are looking for it have a good idea of where to find it.  These days, the way people find coal depends upon where they live.  If they live in Pennsylvania, they dig large holes inside of mountains and then send machines into the hole to retrieve it before sending it down a series of fun-looking chutes and ladders and into a slow-moving train.  If they live in West Virginia they blow off the top 2,500 feet of once-gorgeous mountains, and then bend over and pick it up, before driving across the street to the Applebee’s that is visible from the mine.

While neither method of recovery is terribly environmentally helpful, as someone who has recently viewed both methods, I can say that the Pennsylvania method results in making the immediate area look "basically crappy", instead of "mistakable for a landfill".  The Pennsylvania method is so subtle that if you look out my brother’s window, and hold your thumb so it’s in front of the mine, and then squint at the hillside in the distance, you might think you were in Colorado, until you talked to your neighbor and they had an accent that sounded like a mix between Philadelphia and Kentucky.

The trouble we have with our addiction to coal is that even though it causes a ton of environmental and medical problems, it has never resulted in a war with another country, or in having to prop up various dictators for 80 years who turn around and screw us, so it is, by definition, about four billion times less problematic than our Addiction to Foreign Oil.  Given that politicians only recently came up with the term “Addiction to Foreign oil” it’s probably safe to assume that we’re still about 15 years away from actually doing anything about it, which means we’re probably 30 years away from doing anything about coal. 

After all this thought about the environmental impact of electricity I’m feeling better than ever about turning into my father.   My wife will probably be on board as long as I stop short of diluting the orange juice.