Most of the nation's electricity is generated by the more than 500 coal-fired power plants. Each plant burns around 100 railroad coal cars full per day, 10,000 tons. Over a billion tons of coal is mined, pulverized and burned each year in the USA. Ninety per-cent of the nation's mined coal is for power generation in coal plants. This carbon dioxide trapped in coal was once atmospheric carbon.

Millions of gallons of clean water are turned into waste water at the mine. Water is also used at the power plant to "clean" the exhaust and other processes. Arsenic, mercury, cadmium, radioactive materials and various other wastes are released from the pulverized coal and exhausted into the air through a stack or captured in the process to be stockpiled at the plant or disposed of somewhere else.

As each ton of coal is burned at the power plant, almost three tons of carbon dioxide is belched into the atmosphere as if it was a slag heap. The coal industry pays nothing to dump their waste this way.

Endless commercials and each successive President tell us that "clean coal technology" is an option that the industry embraces and the taxpayers will help fund. If just the CO2 is "sequestered" at the power plant, where will the industry put it? If it is solidified or frozen somehow, it would not fit underground, even if we could find a place that would not leak – forever.

In the words of Ulysses Everett McGill in the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?: “We are in a tight spot.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Dg6DpEAscU