EDIT
Modern coal mining is so mechanized that relatively few miners are needed to extract the coal. Strip mining, which companies do whenever seams are close enough to the surface, is heavy on huge machinery and light on actual workers. Underground, long-wall mining that is most in use now takes just a few men to run a machine that grinds away at the coal face without leaving behind the pillars which miners once skillfully carved out to hold up the roof.
Biggers also says that promises of many billions of tons of coal still in the ground are misleading, since much of this coal is too deep to be mined. He says the country is in a state of peak coal, similar to peak oil, with reserves already significantly declining. In other words, he says, massive investment in “clean coal” technology, and staking towns’ and regions’ economic futures on coal, will become moot in the not-so-distant future as coal dwindles.
Biggers advocates a “GI bill for miners” wherein the government would subsidize training miners in “green jobs” including the manufacture of wind turbines and solar panels. Like many environmental and civic groups, he dreams of reinvigorating the heartland’s once glorious industrial infrastructure to manufacture machinery and equipment for renewable energy. (Of course the aspects of globalization that led to off-shoring of the steel and auto industries –including vastly cheaper wages and lack of regulations abroad – are also competitive factors in wind turbine and solar panel manufacture).
Biggers delved into the history of coal a decade ago after a coal company strip mined the southern Illinois homestead that his family had lived on since 1805.
EDIT
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/5423/clean_coal_jobs_author_mines_history_to_dispel_myths/
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