Essay on Coal: A Human History by Barbara Freese

It produces a great deal of our electricity; however, we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the implications. As Goodell notes on the first page, “We love our hamburgers, but we’ve never seen the inside of a slaughterhouse.” Isn’t that the truth? When we fuel up our cars, we don’t think (much) about the ramifications of our oil dependence. When we flip a light switch, we do not associate that with the coal-driven mountaintop removals in West Virginia. In this book, “BIG COAL” Jeff describes Goodell thrusts those associations right in your face. He covers the history of the industry, tells the stories of the people in and around the business, and while most of the book is based on U.S.-happenings, he does spend a chapter in China. We would imagine the coal industry was none too pleased with Big Coal because it paints a really ugly picture of the industry. Goodell contrasts the coal industry with the individuals whose lives have been negatively impacted by coal in one way or another. He details corruption and politics that allowed the industry to delay implementation of pollution control equipment. And on a big picture level, he argues that continued usage of coal poses a serious threat to the earth’s

Coal discovery dates to the 1300s with the Hopi Natives. This would prove significant some five hundred years later when coal became the predominant source of power in the mid to late 1800s. This would prove even more significant when the Government started surveying the landscape for the best route for the Transcontinental Railroad in 1853. Upon completion of the research, one thing the scouts made clear was the presence of coal in Wyoming and some of the western states. To run supplies from the eastern states to the west they needed the presence of coal to be close and readily available for the coal fueled trains. This played a major role in the industrial revolution the United States was about the experience.

In Brighton, England on January 3, 1758, Julio Jones was born. I was born into the middle to lower class and lived just outside the country side where all the quarry and mines were. My father, Jacoby Jones, worked in the mines while I went to school. My father always told me that coal was a vital ore to mine when he was in the mines, and it helped make early versions of the steam engines. Britain was lucky to have lots of coal and used it to their advantage. Not only that, but because of the location of Britain, it had many ports for all the resources to be traded. People could use their raw materials like coal to trade for made materials. Also, in 1709, Abraham Darby used coal instead of charcoal to smelt ores which increased the quality of

Coal was used for just about everything. It was used for the iron and steel industry, for steam powered transportation, and, of course, for home heating in coal furnaces and in stoves. It was seemingly the major fuel for industry. Coal was increasingly abundant in the mountains from West Virginia to Alabama. The production of coal rose from five million tons to fifty million tons in the twenty five years between 1875 and1900.

This paper will review past practices and policies relating to mountaintop coal mining, evaluate and analyze current research on the impact of coal mining on human health, and provide recommendations for further research guided by logic and in agreement with biblical truth.

The article, “Coal and the Environment”, provides the readers will and understanding of how coal works and also how it is dangerous to our environment. Coal on its own is not dangerous to the environment but once the coal is burned, then pollutants are released into the air causing for less clean air. The government has taken a stand on the industries polluting the air we breathe in everyday with the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. These two acts put restrictions on industries that allow for safer and cleaner air.

The energy we get from coal today comes from the energy that plants absorbed from the sun millions of years ago. When an area is to be mined, topsoil and subsoil are removed from the rock and so is another material, call overburden, to expose the bed of coal. All living plants give solar energy through photosynthesis. When plants die the energy gets out as the plants decay. The whole decaying process gets interrupted which prevents the release of the stored solar energy, then the energy stays locked in the coal. The plant material gets subjected to high temperatures and pressures which causes physical and chemical changes in the vegetation, transforming it into peat and then into coal. The formation of peat is the first step in the geological formation of fossil fuels such as coal. Peat plants is not only the first step for formation but they also capture CO2 itself. There are many effect to the environment when it comes to coal; an example is AMD which stands for Acid mine drainage; it includes the outflow of acidic water from coal mines or metal mines. Mines exposed rocks containing pyrite which reacts to water and air to form acid and dissolved iron and can easily wash into rivers and streams. Coal is a huge impact when it comes to hurting our

Coal has been around for 250 million years, but only has been used since the 1800’s first by trains and now for energy all around the world and many other things that people couldn't think of! Coal is a combustible sedimentary organic rock which is composed of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. It is formed from vegetation which has been consolidated between two other rock strata and altered by the combined effects of pressure and heat over millions of years to form coal seams. There are over 174,000 jobs in the U.S associated with coal and 83,000 of them are mining jobs, Coal miners have found many ways to extract coal from the ground which includes, surface mining, longwall mining, room and pillar mining, and underground mining. “Surface

Coal has been combusted for fuel for thousands of years. However it was not until the last few decades that the consequences of coal use have been fully realized and effort has been taken to lessen the severe environmental harm that can come from the combustion of coal. The fact of the matter is no matter how much we may dislike coal and the detrimental effects of it we, as a nation, depend on coal to live our lives. When we flip a switch and a light turns on we don’t give it a second thought but its not always that simple. Aside from coal’s significant contribution to climate change there have been other disasters stemming from coal and specifically the storage of contaminants extracted from coal combustion. One of the biggest man made environmental disasters of the millennia occurred just outside of Kingston, Tennessee in late 2008. This disaster though not as well publicized as many other disasters has been estimated to have released over 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash several times more contaminants by volume than the Exxon Valdeez oil spill in 1989 (Initial Emergency).

Coal is a black or dark brown combustible rock made primarily out of carbon. It was made a million years ago with fern plants and trees that died and fell in swamps. That prevented organisms from decaying completely, and due to heat and pressure for millions of years, coal was made. Coal fields were surrounding the industrial textile areas, which allowed the British to get access to the coal from the coal fields. When coal was discovered, it was also discovered for its advantage, which is that it is becoming a new energy source, improving the other sources from before.

Throughout the century British coal had become increasingly costly and difficult to mine. Nationalization in 1948 had not altered this. Indeed, there was a case for saying that lack of government investment since that date had added to the problem. For some time Britain had been importing coal from abroad. With the exception of few pits producing particular types of coal, British mines by the 1970s were running at loss.

he coal mining industry started when people in Utah wanted fuel. Lumber at that time in Utah was used just for building, not for fuel. In 1854, the LDS church said that they would pay for the first usable coal mine within forty miles of Salt Lake City. The first coal mine was in Summit County. Its name was Coalville, and it was about forty miles from Salt Lake City. The Mormons built a railroad to the Coalville Coal Mine. They also found a mine that would give them fuel for transportation named Castle Gate Mine. Soon the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad was built from 1881-1883. It went to the Book Cliffs; that was discovered as Utah’s richest coal deposit. Coal mining had three big challenges The first problem with mining was labor. Most people that worked in the coal mines were immigrants that came because they believed that mining would make them rich. The second problem was money. The workers often complained about how low their wages were, and how high the store prices were in mining camps. The last one was a safety concerns. It was very dangerous working in coal mines. You could die from explosions, or gas leaks. Because of those three problems, the workers protested and many strikes occurred. The first strike happened in 1883, at Winter Quarters. They wanted safer working

Oil and coal, as the modern day person knows them today, appear to be vastly different from one another, not only by the means in the ways required to extract either energy sources, but in the way that it functions and how it can be used as energy. However, both of these energy sources do have their similarities, and one of which is their revolutionizing characteristics that transformed their eras and toward present-day times. Coal may have been bulky and required to burn much more of itself in order to travel long distances than was required of oil, but navigation over waters and over land drastically changed in the creation of the steamship and the railway because of the rise of this energy source. Conversely, oil, as aforementioned, did

“One factor contributing to the development of industry in Great Britain was that nation's large supply of coal and iron ore. For many centuries, the British had converted their iron ores to iron and steel by heating the raw material with charcoal, made from trees. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, the nation's timber supply had largely been decimated. Iron and steel manufacturers were forced to look elsewhere for a fuel to use in treating iron ores. The fuel they found was coal. When coal is heated in the absence of air it turns into coke. Coke proved to be a far superior material for the conversion of iron ore to iron and then to steel. It was eventually cheaper to produce than charcoal and it could be packed more tightly into a blast furnace, allowing the heating of a larger volume of iron.” The living standard as well as health increased with the increase in trade, more food products and livestock can be transported to further cities. As the steam engine improved trade and travel, the assembly line did for manufacturing.

Coal, a mineral I have discussed previously, is necessary to our everyday lives. Coal is an incredible source of energy; it heats our houses and buildings, and also fuels stoves. You may often wonder where this extremely useful mineral comes from. Coal does not just appear; it needs to be mined through a process which results in our being able to utilize it. Coal mining is fairly inexpensive, is carried out on a large scale and can be mined in either underground or surface mines.