I'm a little nervous. In the past week, Sen. Hilary Clinton has hinted at supporting mountaintop removal mining, Sen. Barack Obama has re-embraced so-called clean coal technology which Sen. John McCain has long touted as well. One of these three is going to be our next president, and they're all promising a bright new future - so why are they stuck on this dark energy source from our past?
I was relieved to see that the majority of Americans have a better idea: according to a recent poll by the Pew center, more than 80 percent of Americans support increased federal funding for alternative energy. Can you take a moment to tell the candidates to get with it, and stop championing coal?
No matter how the industry tries to pretty it up, coal is filthy and dangerous. And while the candidates talk about coal jobs, the reality is that even though coal mining has gone up in the last fifty years, employment in the industry has fallen 80 percent as a result of automation and the advent of mountaintop removal mining.
Who benefits from the use of coal? The coal industry. Who loses? Everybody else. We lose our health, our forests and mountains, and we speed up global warming.
All the candidates are talking about "change" - but it's hard to imagine a more environmentally regressive energy choice than coal - the stuff we've been dangerously dependent on for more than a century. Please ask our candidates for real energy leadership - and to break away from coal: