Burning The Future: Coal In America

Documentary filmmaker David Novack makes no bones about where he stands on "mountaintop removal mining" in West Virginia: He's with ecologist Ben Stout, who calls it "wholesale environmental devastation for cheap coal." While acknowledging that no one administration, coal company or piece of policymaking is to blame, Novack constructs a coherent argument that inexpensive electricity is far more costly than the average American realizes.

Novack suggests that just as many consumers don't realize that fully half the electricity they consume is produced by burning coal, they also imagine that coal mining is about tunneling. But today's coal industry relies heav...