• Mining

    • Mining gives us the stuff we need to produce energy, houses, cars, computers, and thousands of other products. But mining can be nasty business.

    • Mining

  • Coal mining

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  • tons mined
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    • Coal powers the world

    Coal is the largest source of electricity in the world. Each year we mine enough coal to give almost 1 ton of it to every single person on the planet.

    It harms the environment

    Environmentally damaging surface mining methods have overtaken underground mining as the predominant way of extracting coal.

    Visible from outer space

    There has been the rise in so-called mountaintop removal mining, where tops of whole mountains are blasted away to get to the coal seams underneath. Several open-pit mine craters are so large that they are visible from outer space.

    Our mining of coal is growing

    If nothing changes, we will have increased our coal consumption with over 50 percent by 2030. Most of this enormous increase will be happening in India and China.

    The burning of coal is another story

    Check out Energy & Climate section to explore the damaging effects of turning coal into energy

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