Why has the world started to mine coal again?

Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 322 points – 10 months ago

With climate change looming, it seems so completely backwards to go back to using it again.

Is it coal miners pushing to keep their jobs? Fear of nuclear power? Is purely politically motivated, or are there genuinely people who believe coal is clean?

Edit, I will admit I was ignorant to the usage of coal nowadays.

Now I'm more depressed than when I posted this

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I don't trust the US Federal government to properly dispose of it. The waste from the Manhattan Project is buried in a landfill, a landfill that's on fire.

The problem isn't fire, it's that the waste at Hanford has leached into the soil and a plume of it is headed towards the Hanford Reach on the Columbia River. There's a mitigation plan in place and it looks like it's ultimately going to work, but it's very expensive and not something that anyone wants to see happen again.

I was referring to the Westlake Superfund site in St Louis right next to the Missouri river

Fair play. That said, please do look up Hanford. It's way bigger than Westlake and is potentially a much bigger problem, though granted, Westlake is problematic as well.