When you read about the shortages of natural gas and delayed deliveries of propane and oil during the latest cold snap, ❄ you have to wonder why more New Yorkers 🏠 don’t choose to heat with anthracite or bituminous coal.
Coal has a lot of advantages for home heating. It’s relatively inexpensive and once a coal fire is built it lasts for a long time and puts out an intense heat. 🔥 Many coal stoves don’t require any electricity. Their mechanisms are simple and reliable. It’s like wood heat – only better. Sure it takes a little bit skill to start a coal fire and bank the coals, but once a coal stove is operating it can go for a day or longer with minimal work.
But probably the biggest advantage to coal is it is a secure fuel, like wood is, only with less work. You can have coal delivered to your house for the whole winter, and placed in a large pile. But if you have a pickup truck, you don’t have to have coal delivered. You can get a pickup truck load of coal from one of many coal retailers including many hardware stores and garden supply stores.🚚 You aren’t reliant on a single coal supplier to get your coal from if you haul your own coal.
Farming and rural areas more commonly use coal for heat, especially in the Southern Tier and Finger Lakes.🐮 You see lots of places selling coal there, ready to be purchased and hauled to your home or farm. Sure you can get coal delivered but the fact that you have the ability to shop around and haul your own coal home is a major advantage that people often overlook when choosing a heating fuel for their home.
If wood heat isn’t practical, I know that I would definitely look towards coal for heating a home.🌲 Coal is not renewable and its also a fossil fuel that emits carbon but so is oil, gas and propane. But unlike those other fossil fuels, coal can be stored on-site to provide a homeowner with heat throughout the winter, no matter how cold. Reliability and having a fuel supply you can haul with your own vehicle is a good thing to have in the bank. 🏦
"Ask most Americans what they know about coal in central Appalachia, and they’ll tell you it’s a dying industry—one that US president Donald Trump famously vowed to revive during the 2016 election. “We’re going to put those miners back to work. We’re going to get those mines open … I see over here a sign, it says ‘Trump digs coal.’ It’s true. I do,” he told a rally in Charleston, West Virginia, in May 2016. “You’re going to be working your asses off.”
"But the idea that the region’s coal industry is dying is not quite true. For much of the hundred-plus years of its existence, the industry has been on a kind of artificial life support, as state and federal governments have, directly and indirectly, subsidized coal companies to keep the industry afloat."
"The costs of this subsidy aren’t tallied on corporate or government balance sheets. The destruction of central Appalachia’s economy, environment, social fabric and, ultimately, its people’s health is, in a sense, hidden. But they’re plain enough to see on a map. It could be lung cancer deaths you’re looking at, or diabetes mortality. Or try opioid overdoses. Poverty. Welfare dependency. Chart virtually any measure of human struggle, and there it will be, just right of center on a map of the US—a distinct blotch. This odd cluster is consistently one of America’s worst pockets of affliction."
It's interesting to watch the progress they've made at the Winslow Hill Elk Area and also the Flight 93 Monument ...
"Such aggressive bulldozing is part of a new and evolving approach to healing forests destroyed by decades of surface coal mining in Appalachia, from Alabama to Pennsylvania. These lands were supposed to have been reclaimed in recent decades under the 1977 federal Surface Mine Control and Reclamation Act. But scientists and conservationists say that many of those reclamation efforts were failed or half-hearted efforts that did little more than throw dirt, mining debris, grass, and non-native trees over scarred lands."
"Now, Green Forests Work and other groups are attempting ecological do-overs with the aim of restoring native forests on large swaths of previously reclaimed public and private lands throughout Appalachia. The deep-ripping technique developed by Barton, with support from a team of other scientists, involves uprooting the non-native trees and grasses planted by coal companies and starting the entire land restoration process from scratch."
"At 2,000 acres, Cheat Mountain is Green Forests Work’s largest undertaking since it began operating as a nonprofit in 2013. Barton has partnered with public and private funders to coordinate the planting of more than 2 million trees on 3,300-plus acres in Appalachia. Other former mining sites that it is tackling include a 130-acre plot within the Flight 93 National Memorial near Shanksville, Pa., the former mine site where one of the four hijacked planes crashed on Sept. 11, 2001; a 110-acre site near Fishtrap Lake in Pike County, Ky.; and a 86-acre area within the Egypt Valley Wildlife Area in eastern Ohio. These and other planned restoration sites are part of an estimated 1 million acres that the federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE) has designated as legacy coal mine sites."
"Trump has likely done all he can do to help the industry, said Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the National Mining Association, which represents major U.S. coal companies."
“The government is no longer against us,“ he said. ”We now only have market forces to contend with.”
"The Trump administration will scuttle an Obama-era clean power plan aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, made the announcement in Hazard, Ky., on Monday, saying the rule hurt coal-fired plants. "The EPA and no federal agency should ever use its authority to say to you we are going to declare war on any sector of our economy," Pruitt said, speaking at an event with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. "That rule really was about picking winners and losers," the EPA administrator said, adding that the rule change would be signed on Tuesday. The announcement had been anticipated. It would eliminate the Clean Power Plan that was put on hold by the U.S. Supreme Court and therefore never implemented."
In August 2017, there were 51,000 coal mining jobs. That’s up from the 50,200 jobs when Trump took over the White House. But it’s down from August 2015 when there were 63,100 jobs mining coal, and 73,300 jobs in coal mining 15 years ago in August 2001.