Workin' in a coal mine. Goin' down, down, down.

Between song and film, there's always been a ton - make that 16 tons - of romanticism around coal mining. Sure, plenty of the content is around disaster (How Green Was My Valley) and/or violence (The Molly Maguires). But, oh those songs: Coal Miner's Daughter, 16 Tons, Schooldays Over, and Workin' in a Coal Mine, Going Down, Down, Down). 

Sure, there's You Are My Sunshine, Here Comes the Sun, and Good Day Sunshine (among 62 billion songs about the sun), and They Call the Wind Mariah, but I don't believe that quite the same cultural markers will grow up around solar panels or wind turbines (let alone fracking).

But the rich cultural and economic history and mythology surrounding coal mining doesn't make up by just how god-awful coal is both for the environment and for the health and well-being of miners (even if it did make for a relatively decent living for those okay with the trade-off between black lung/cave ins and a paycheck). 

The reality is that the coal industry, like the song says, is going down, down, down. 

The United States mined 706 million tons of coal in 2019 — the lowest total since 1978.

That's a 7 percent drop from the previous year, continuing a decade-long decline in overall output since the coal-mining sector's peak production in 2008.

Wyoming, the top coal-producing state, saw a 9 percent drop in 2019. Arizona stopped mining coal altogether after the Navajo Generating Station, the largest coal-fired facility in the western United States, and the adjacent mine both closed. (Source: Washington Post)

And this year -  between the Corona Depression and the acceleration of the market forces that, despite Trump's fool's gold promises to keep it alive, and his roll-back of EPA regulations (clean air? who needs it?), have been driving the coal industry into the ground for years now - promises to be even worse.

The country is projected this year to get more power from renewable energy than from coal for the first time, according to the Energy Information Administration. 

Here's hoping the, coal-wise, 2020 lives up to this promise. (At least there's one benefit to a recession.)

Good riddance. 

Coal is not entirely going away. Not just yet, anyway.

Despite the decline domestically, coal is still the leading fuel for power generation worldwide.

Which is why, even without a pandemic, you see all those pictures of folks in Beijing wearing masks as they bicycle around in the city's fetid brown air.  

Few would argue that coal is anything other than tremendously bad for the environment and we need to keep moving all of our power plants off of it, and find alternative fuels for steel making. I'd say that at this point in time, the only thing coal is good for is making a snowman. And, yes, I am old enough to have lived in a home fueled by cold, and to have made plenty of snowmen that used coal for face and buttons. 

Of course, I never produced a snowman quite this good looking. Sure, my mother might have spotted us an old rag to use for a scarf, but one of my father's old hats? Forget about that.

And, of course, given the state o' the environment, it's not clear that we'll ever again have enough snow to roll out a respectable snowman...

Sigh.