But at what price?

That’s the question Jeff Goodell tackles in Big Coal, The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future. His answer: America’s addiction to coal — like its addiction to foreign oil — is a pact with the devil that has lulled us into perilous complacency while it despoils the world around us. “The most dangerous aspect of our continued dependence on coal,” Goodell writes, “is not what it does to our lungs, our mountains, or even our climate, but what it does to our minds: it preserves the illusion that we don’t have to change our thinking.” The question that must be answered is this, he says: “How much risk are we, as a society, willing to take in pursuit of cheap energy?”

Goodell, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and the author of several books, was dispatched to the coal fields of West Virginia in 2001 by The New York Times Magazine to report on coal’s comeback in the wake of George Bush’s election. West Virginia, a historically Democratic state, had provided what could be seen as Bush’s margin of victory in 2000. Goodell, like others who have encountered the dangerous and insular world of coal mining, was captivated by “the rock that built America.” He knew he was onto a good story.

After writing the Times piece, Goodell spent three years reporting and writing Big Coal — three of the four hottest years on record, he notes. Much of the information he gathered is not new, but he has assembled it deftly, like a prosecutor laying out the counts in a powerful indictment. The result is persuasive journalism at its best — hard facts recounted in decidedly human terms. Goodell succeeds by seamlessly weaving together the political and economic issues and the health and environmental costs of coal.

Describing the human and environmental devastation wreaked by mining in West Virginia, for example, Goodell writes, “The 13 billion tons of coal that have already been dug out of the state have brought little more than heartache and poverty. But if you will just let us blast one more mountain, haul out one more trainload of coal, everything will be okay. The irony — and genius — of this argument is that the farther the state’s economy declines, the more potent the argument becomes.”

The coal industry — and its allies, the railroads and power companies — wield enormous clout in Washington and in mining states. In coal-rich, dirt-poor Mingo County, West Virginia, drinking water supplies are heavily contaminated with toxic metals, yet state and federal officials pay little heed. “The coal companies control everything down here,” a local doctor told Goodell. “They just do whatever they want.”

The same is true in Washington, which is the payoff for years of political contributions to members of both parties from coal and its pals. Look no further than Appalachia, where mountain-top mining is flattening the landscape. The practice — which involves lopping off mountains to reach buried coal seams — became practical (and legal) thanks to a few word changes in federal mining rules. The debris from mountain-top removal was simply reclassified from objectionable “waste” to legally acceptable “fill,” a semantic legerdemain by an Interior Department official who, before 2000, had been a coal-industry lobbyist. Eventually, an area larger than Rhode Island may be reshaped.

The coal industry has lived off taxpayers’ largess for decades, sucking up subsidies by the billions. “Big Coal is much better at touting new technology than actually putting it to work,” Goodell writes. Consider the quest for “clean coal,” the ultimate oxymoron. Clean coal is nothing more than “an expensive political decoy.”

It’s not just the mining companies who wield power; coal users also carry huge political muscle. Goodell profiles the Southern Company, supplier of electricity from coal to much of the Southeast. Southern is known as “the T. rex of the power industry,” not only because of its size but also for its “prehistoric” attitudes toward air pollution. Southern and its affiliates contributed $4.4 million to national parties and candidates between 2000 and 2004; during the 2000 election, at least five Bush Pioneers (fund-raisers who brought in at least $100,000 in contributions) were Southern Company executives or lobbyists.

Is it any wonder, Goodell asks, that the American landscape is still dotted with what he calls the “big dirties” — coal-fired plants that belch out tens of thousands of pounds of dangerous pollutants? Half of all Americans live in areas where air pollution levels exceed national health standards. But not all pollutants are created equal; coal-fired power plants annually pump forty-eight tons of mercury into the air, among other toxins. One in twelve women of childbearing age already has an unsafe level of mercury in her blood.

The bill is coming due very soon, warns Goodell, who writes compellingly of the impending “economic hurricane of global warming.” With its allies in the White House, and its spinmeisters on Madison Avenue, “Big Coal’s goal is to keep us comfortable, not curious,” explains Goodell. “It’s not hard to understand why. Coal is by far the most carbon-intensive of all fossil fuels . . . so any limits on CO2” — carbon dioxide — “emissions will hit coal hardest.”

In the absence of tough emission controls, new coal-fired plants are being thrown up around the globe. Goodell takes us to China, “the world’s premier coal junkie,” which is in line to surpass the gluttonous U.S. as the largest greenhouse-gas polluter in the world. American energy companies, meanwhile, have descended on the country touting “new” and “better” technologies for consuming coal.

Despite what the coal industry would like us to believe, the solutions to climate change are not technological, but political. “Right now, the biggest impediment to change . . . is the idea that we are dependent on the very thing that is killing us,” Goodell concludes. “Those arguments amount to nothing less than blackmail.”

Back in January, as the media kept vigil at the Sago mine, more than one commentator expressed surprise that people actually were still engaged in the dangerous and primitive business of prying coal from deep inside the Earth — and that America was so dependent upon their efforts. Before the next mining disaster — and there will be one — let’s hope they read Big Coal and learn just how addicted we are.

Susan Q. Stranahan wrote about national and regional environmental issues for The Philadelphia Inquirer for twenty-eight years. She is the author of Susquehanna, River of Dreams.