Real mining men. ibid.
Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels, because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives. Carl Sagan, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
Here, are the stiffening hills, here, the rich cargo
Congealed in the dark arteries,
Old veins
That hold Glamorgan’s blood.
The midnight miner in the secret seams,
Limb, life, and bread. Mervyn Peake, Rhondda Valley
I couldn’t describe the smells of West Virginia, even if I tried. It has something to do with the leaves composting in the woods, the cold trickle of little creeks and waterfalls, the ferns greening up everything. But somewhere deep below, I can smell the rock and the coal this state is built on. Heather Day Gilbert, Miranda Warning
This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time. Aneurin Bevan
The park lies directly downwind from a slew of coal plants. Virtually all of the major contaminants in the local air and water are direct results of coal emissions. Coal produces ozone, which kills trees. Coal produces sulfates, which kill fish. No other park in the country has more ozone or sulfates than Shenandoah National Park. Wil S Hylton
It’s not as though we can keep burning coal in our power plants. Coal is a finite resource, too. We must find alternatives, and it’s a better idea to find alternatives sooner then wait until we run out of coal, and in the meantime, put God knows how many trillions of tons of CO2 that used to be buried underground into the atmosphere. Elon Musk
Money never seems to be interested in strengthening regulatory agencies, for example, but always in subverting them, in making them miss the danger signs in coal mines and in derivatives trading and in deep-sea oil wells. Thomas Frank
The relevant questions now are: How do we move beyond coal? How do we bring new jobs to the coal fields and retrain coal miners for other work? How do we inspire entrepreneurialism and self-reliance in people whose lives have been dependent on the paternalistic coal industry? Jeff Goodell
The end of coal in Appalachia doesn't mean that America is running out of coal (there’s plenty left in Wyoming). But it should end the fantasy that coal can be an engine of job creation – the big open pit mines in Wyoming employ a tiny fraction of the number of people in an underground mine in Appalachia. Jeff Goodell
In the world of energy politics, the sudden vanishing of the word ‘coal’ is a remarkable and unprecedented event. Jeff Goodell
Even the biggest coal boosters have long admitted that coal is a dying industry – the fight has always been over how fast and how hard the industry will fall. Jeff Goodell
Whether it is to reduce our carbon-dioxide emissions or to prepare for when the coal and oil run out, we have to continue to seek out new energy sources. Martin Rees
The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death. James Hansen
Here in the United States, we have between 250 and 300 years of a coal supply. That is more than the amount of recoverable oil contained in the entire world. Tim Holden
Coal companies have a lot of power in the media, and unfortunately a lot of information doesn’t get out. Kevin Richardson
Mountaintop removal coal operations enrich only a handful of elites while impoverishing everyone else in their proximity. Gloria Reuben
In that sense, I became politicized because the people in the coal mining villages who were involved in the struggle knew why they were there. But they couldn’t understand why some pop star from London would want to be there. Billy Bragg
Coal kick-started a revolution in eighteenth-century Britain. Professor Jeremy Black, Why the Industrial Revolution Happened Here, BBC 2013
Two-thirds of the world’s coal and half its iron. ibid.
Coalface of 1935 was a promotional firm for the British coal industry. Britain Through a Lens: The Documentary Film Mob, BBC 2016
1712: the atmospheric steam engine: Thomas Newcomen … His first engine was installed at a coal mine near Birmingham in 1712. The Genius of Invention I, BBC 2013
1952 Smog: Over Four thousand people were dead, and hundreds of thousands more had been hospitalised. The cause of the catastrophe was this: coal. In the winter of 1952 for the first time in years we were burning astronomical amounts of the stuff. Iain Stewart, Planet Oil: The Treasure that Conquered the World II, BBC 2015
Eventually, there were hundreds of billions of trees entombed in the Earth .. Those trees had turned into immense deposits of coal. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey: Lost Worlds of Planet Earth IX, Fox 2014
Our civilisation, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal, more completely that on realizes until one stops to think about it. The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make the machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
Most of the things one imagines in hell are there – heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space. Everything except the fire, for there is no fire down there except the feeble beams of Davy lamps and electric torches which scarcely penetrate the clouds of coal dust. ibid.
The first impression of all, overmastering everything else for a while, is the frightful, deafening din from the conveyor belt which carries the coal away. You cannot see very far, because the fog of coal dust throws back the beam of your lamp, but you can see on either side of you the line of half-naked kneeling men, one to every four or five yards, driving their shovels under the fallen coal and flinging it swiftly over their left shoulders. ibid.
For they are not only shifting monstrous quantities of coal, they are also doing it in a position that doubles or trebles the work. They have got to remain kneeling all the while. ibid.
There is the heat – it varies, but in some mines it is suffocating – and the coal dust that stuffs up your throat and nostrils and collects along your eyelids, and the unending rattle of the conveyor belt, which in that confined space is rather like a machine gun. ibid.
What is surprising, on the other hand, is the immense horizontal distances that had to be travelled underground … If it is a mile from the pit bottom to the coal face, that is probably an average distance; three miles is a fairly normal one … ibid.
Here is the frightful business of crawling to and fro, which to any normal person is a hard day’s work in itself; and it is not part of the miner’s work at all, it is merely an extra, like the City man’s daily ride in the Tube … It is comparable, perhaps, to climbing a smallish mountain before and after your day’s work. ibid.
But by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner; they work would kill me in a few weeks. ibid.
It is not long since conditions in the mines were worse than they are now. There are still living a few very old women who in their youth have worked underground, with harness round their waists and a chain that passed between their legs, crawling on all fours and dragging tubs of coal. They used to go on doing this even when they were pregnant. ibid.
All of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel. ibid.
The sum the miner can actually bring home and call his own does not average more, perhaps slightly less, than two pounds a week. ibid.
Every year one miner in about nine hundred is killed and one in about six is injured. ibid.
There have been cases of the cage crashing into the pit-bottom at its very maximum speed. ibid.
That scene stays in my mind as one of my pictures of Lancashire: the dumpy, shawled women, with their sacking aprons and their heavy black clogs, kneeling in the cindery mud and the bitter wind, searching eagerly for tiny chips of coal. They are glad enough to do it. In winter they are desperate for fuel; it is more important almost than food. Meanwhile all round, as far as the eye can see, are the slag-heaps and hoisting gear of collieries, and not one of these collieries can sell all the coal it is capable of producing. ibid.
Half a mile beneath Yorkshire’s countryside a rare breed of men are at work: but not for much longer. The last deep-coal mine in Britain is about to close. The Last Miners, BBC 2016
This is the story of the last miners. ibid.
There are only 450 deep-coal miners left. ibid.
They’ve endured strikes, pit closures and unemployment. ibid.