From the Fallows article I mentioned yesterday:

The group has sponsored research on sequestration, on post-combustion capture, and on the “cleanest” of the emerging pre-combustion coal technologies—“underground coal gasification.” In this process, jets of air (or pure oxygen), sometimes with steam or various chemicals, are blasted into coal seams deep underground. They interact chemically with the coal to produce a gas that flows back up a pipe and can be burned. It leaves in the ground much of the carbon, sulfur, nitrogen, and other elements that create greenhouse gases and other pollutants when coal is burned.

“And this can be very cheap,” Sung told me. “You don’t have to mine the coal. You don’t have to send men underground or haul coal around or dispose of ash. All the dirty stuff stays buried.” Because of these and other savings, he said, coal used this way could match or beat the price of today’s standard dirty power plant.

This is fascinating. The coal industry serves as a double whammy: it has money, which means lobbying power, and that lobbying power opposes renewable energy because it competes with coal. But it also employs a bunch of people, which means all those people, and their families, oppose a shift to renewables too. Say what you will about green growth, I'm fairly sure that in the power industry, a major wind or solar installation is going to employ far fewer people than a coal plant with associated mining activity (though to be fair I need to check that. I'm simply assuming there are only so many openings for solar panel squeegee-ers). But what if coal started employing fewer people? Could that significantly change the political calculus?