I suppose I’m not helping my karma situation by referring people to an article that the author claims could cost him his job (in the title even!), but I’m gonna do it anyway. Devilstower, a lifelong employee of the coal industry, has posted a magnificent assessment of the evolution of the modern coal industry at DailyKos.

For practically every minute of my life, I've been involved in coal. I grew up in a part of Western Kentucky that was then the biggest coal producing area in the country. When I was small, my home town held a "Strawberry Festival," because the country produced a good part of the nation's strawberries. By the time I was a teenager, the festival was renamed as the "Coal Festival." Those strawberry fields were long gone.

People who call themselves “green” like to talk about how bad coal is. In a lot of ways they’re right, but it’s also important to recognize that coal is no longer the building-blackening sootmonger of the Industrial Revolution. Of course, improvement does not necessarily translate to excellence. All the same, increasing reliance on coal-generated power is currently one of only two viable alternatives to petroleum-based power, the other being nuclear, which greens tend not to like much better than coal. The only other option is the speculative and uncertain “something else.”

I’m not much of a betting man, but I can offer pretty good odds that the solution to our dwindling oil supply is not going to be a single one of these different possibilities, but a combination of all three. Obviously we want to maximize the role of alternative renewables, but we also need to come to terms with the fact that there will be an expansion of coal (definitely) and nuclear (probably), and try to understand these technologies well enough to mitigate the potential damage. Thoughtful analysis like devilstower’s is a step in the right direction with respect to coal – any takers for looking at nuclear?