Book Review: Big Coal -- Jeff Goodell

Being from the heart of Appalachian coal country, I couldn't pass by a book titled Big Coal. Knowing a little bit about the Bush administration's rewording and minimizing of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and neutering the Environmental Protection Agency, the subtitle, The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future, was a clincher for me. I just had to read it.

This dark tale begins in China, where coal is firing their rapid industrialization, is key to the rapidity of their economic growth in the past decade. But the coal being burned to produce the energy for this industrialization is not only dirty and the plants unfiltered, the conditions wherein the Chinese miners work are criminally negligent. Jeff Goodell paints a picture of cities filled with tangible, dirty, smoke-filled air reminiscent of coal towns and cities of turn-of-the-century (20th) industrial towns. He paints a picture of working conditions in the mines that makes America's mining operations look heaven-sent. And the World Health Organization estimates that 355,000 people die a year in northern China and Korea from coal-related deaths (respiratory disorders and infections, mining deaths, production accidents, housefires). And then he completely covers the black with green and gold, for the industry is extremely lucrative for those who own the extraction companies. And, finally, Goodell throws on a heavy coat of whitewash, so heavy the green, gold, and black disappear, the artistic result of Big Coal's amazing campaign to not only clean up their image but to appear necessary and innocuous, saviors of our lifestyle. But that's all background.