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Coal mining is an industry rife with mismanagement, corruption, greed and an almost blatant disregard for the safety, health and quality of life of its work force. Everyone knows this. Everyone has always known it.

We don't want to leave the coal in the ground, and that necessarily is going to involve better technology with regard to clean uses of coal.

To shut off coal, or to say you can't have further coal development, I think is the wrong way to go.

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.

The coal industry is a huge industry when we're talking about polluting the environment, our air and our waterways.

From the industry's point of view, the problem is not that coal companies blast the top off mountains, turning the area into a moonscape and polluting the air and releasing toxic chemical into what's left of the local streams and aquifers. It's that the people who live near the mines are too cozy with their cousins.

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

Then there was the whole concept of coal mining, which is a culture unto itself, the most dangerous occupation in the world, and which draws and develops a certain kind of man.