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Coal companies have a lot of power in the media, and unfortunately a lot of information doesn't get out.

You can't turn on your television without seeing these advertisements about clean coal, clean tar sands and the claim that there's more jobs associated with fossil fuels than other industries. That's of course not true. But they're hammering that into the voters' heads.

But Big Oil and Big Coal have always been as skilled at propaganda as they are at mining and drilling. Like the tobacco industry before them, their success depends on keeping Americans stupid.

I'd like to say that right now, in the last few years, the Democrats have been closer - have been more pro-environment. The coal industry is pretty well entrenched in the Republican Party and that's one of the things that we need to phase out.

The coal industry is an even larger part of the Australian economy than it is of the American, and it has an enormous amount of political power.

I'm a novelist - not an expert on coal mining. I'm not a politician with an agenda to push. I'm not a reporter presenting facts, and I'm not a sociologist documenting the last struggling remnants of blue-collar America. I'm simply an author who sets her books in coal country because it's where I come from, and it's what I know.

If you want improvements in coal, you've got to keep people in the business.

Coal is cheap, but up to what extent are we going to allow coal plants to operate?