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Jeff Goodell is a New York Times bestselling of author of seven books, including The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World, which was picked as a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2017, as well as one of Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction in 2017. Goodell's previous books include Sunnyvale, a memoir about growing up in Silicon Valley, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and Big Coal: the Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future. He is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he has covered climate change for more than a decade.
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Why did you decide to write a book about coal?
In the spring of 2001, the New York Times Magazine sent
me down to West Virginia to write about the comeback of the coal industry. Coal
had played an important role in the election of George W. Bush in 2000 — West
Virginia, an important coal state which hadn’t voted Republican in many years,
was widely credited with giving Bush his margin of victory — and it was clear
that coal would play an increasingly important role in America’s energy future.
But visiting West Virginia was an eye-opening experience for me, in part
because, like many Americans, I’d naively assumed that coal had gone out with
top hats and corsets. I was astonished to learn that the United States burns
more than a billion tons of coal a year, mostly to generate electricity. More
than half our electric power comes from coal-fired power plants. In West
Virginia, I got a close look at the high cost of our dependence on coal — not
just the hundreds of square miles of mountains that have been decapitated by
strip mines in the southern part of the state, but also the poverty and hardship
that I witnessed in many coal-mining towns. I began to ask some obvious
...
Poet, essayist, and naturalist, Diane Ackerman is the author of many highly acclaimed works of nonfiction, including A Natural History of the Senses -- a book beloved by readers all over the world and the volumes Deep Play, A... (more)
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Dani Anguiano writes for the Guardian and was formerly a reporter for the Chico Enterprise-Record, where she covered Butte County, including Chico and Paradise. Having lived in Butte County for a decade, Anguiano now resides ... (more)
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