Coal Companies
Lots of people (read: environmentalists) love to complain about coal companies. Now if we could economically run this country off of wind and solar power, that would be fantastic. I think the chances of that are even worse then the chances of me collecting social security. So I am not an anti-renewable energy guy, I am just a realist.
So back to coal. Do you know why we use so much coal?
It’s cheap.
It’s abundant.
It’s easy to transport.
And did I mention it’s cheap?
Those reasons (mainly because it’s cheap) are why coal provides 51% of the electricity in this country. Solar and wind energies are too expensive to produce, political and environmental reasons keep us from building more nuclear power, and there is no where else to build hydroelectric dams.
So we are stuck with coal. We can all either lower our electricity consumption by 50% and kiss our AC and plasma TV’s goodbye, or we can pay 5 to 10 times more for our electricity. It’s not the best situation, but coal is the most cost efficient power source that is available to us in large quantities.
Imagine, our situation if we had no coal????