Coal as an essential element of modern society and the cost

[ThomWV]

The following piece, two paragraphs out of about two pages, is extracted from an essay written in England around 1940. There is a lot to be learned here, its a bit dated, but in truth nothing has changed.

Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what different
universes people inhabit. Down there where coal is dug is a sort of world
apart which one can quite easily go through life without ever hearing
about. Probably majority of people would even prefer not to hear about
it. Yet it is the absolutely necessary counterpart of our world above.
Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to crossing the
Atlantic, and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use of
coal, directly or indirectly. For all the arts of peace coal is needed;
if war breaks out it is needed all the more. In time of revolution the
miner must go on working or the revolution must stop, for revolution as
much as reaction needs coal. Whatever may be happening on the surface,
the hacking and shovelling have got to continue without a pause, or at
any rate without pausing for more than a few weeks at the most. In order
that Hitler may march the goose-step, that the Pope may denounce
Bolshevism, that the cricket crowds may assemble at Lords, that the poets
may scratch one another's backs, coal has got to be forthcoming. But on
the whole we are not aware of it; we all know that we 'must have coal',
but we seldom or never remember what coal-getting involves. Here am I
sitting writing in front of my comfortable coal fire. It is April but I
still need a fire. Once a fortnight the coal cart drives up to the door
and men in leather jerkins carry the coal indoors in stout sacks smelling
of tar and shoot it clanking into the coal-hole under the stairs. It is
only very rarely, when I make a definite mental-effort, that I connect
this coal with that far-off labour in the mines. It is just 'coal'--
something that I have got to have; black stuff that arrives mysteriously
from nowhere in particular, like manna except that you have to pay for
it. You could quite easily drive a car right across the north of England
and never once remember that hundreds of feet below the road you are on
the miners are hacking at the coal. Yet in a sense it is the miners who
are driving your car forward. Their lamp-lit world down there is as
necessary to the daylight world above as the root is to the flower.

It is not long since conditions in the mines were worse than they are
now. There are still living a few very old women who in their youth have
worked underground, with the harness round their waists, and a chain that
passed between their legs, crawling on all fours and dragging tubs of
coal. They used to go on doing this even when they were pregnant. And
even now, if coal could not be produced without pregnant women dragging
it to and fro, I fancy we should let them do it rather than deprive
ourselves of coal. But-most of the time, of course, we should prefer to
forget that they were doing it. It is so with all types of manual work;
it keeps us alive, and we are oblivious of its existence. More than
anyone else, perhaps, the miner can stand as the type of the manual
worker, not only because his work is so exaggeratedly awful, but also
because it is so vitally necessary and yet so remote from our experience,
so invisible, as it were, that we are capable of forgetting it as we
forget the blood in our veins. In a way it is even humiliating to watch
coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own
status as an 'intellectual' and a superior person generally. For it is
brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only
because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain
superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the poets
and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for
Infants--all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to
poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full
of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles
of steel.

http://www.george-orwell.org/Down_The_Mine/0.html

[Brickbat]

1. K&R.

[Subdivisions]

2. Coal was still king in those days. That civilization did just fine. This civilization,

the one which you currently inhabit, is one that can no longer tolerate the by products of coal burning. This civilization, however, is oil-based. As our ability to extract crude oil continues to decline, we will have to revert to coal in many ways, no matter its affect on our climate. Coal and oil gave us this marvelous civilization. And, they will take it away. And that will happen sooner than most are willing to accept.

[ThomWV]

3. Coal is the fuel source for most of the electricity produced in the United States today

And will remain so for the foreseeable future.

I'd have to challenge the assertion that civilization did just fine too. The cost in lives and suffering was intolerable even by the standards of that time - evidenced by reforms in the industry.

[madrchsod]

4. i`ve worked at two very dangerous jobs in my life but

those were nothing compared to going into the earth to earn a living..