Here's a piece of coal.

Coal. Hint of silt.

Coal is a fossil fuel.

When this happens, they're compressed under tons of pressure, and turned into carbon based fossil fuels

Coal dust.

We have used our ration of coal for the week.

Bioenergy is oil.

When that gas blows up, people die.

The thread that links them all our addiction to carbon based fuels,

Give me some sense of the numbers of new coal fire generating plants.

This is the story of how Harriet came to pay attention.

Now, what does this have to do with energy?

More coal doctor.

The coal belt in Northern China,

The argument that it's a bridge fuel makes sense, because the amount of CO2 per unit of energy is lower than oil and coal, correct?

The reason why is because of the radioactive releases from coal.

They substituted coal for oil.

Geologists scoured America.

The coal is burning.

Massive coal reserves.

A crow is as black as coal.

But I brought along here a lump of coal right here, one lump of coal.

Oil is a problem, and coal is the most serious problem.

Coal consists mostly of carbon.

The coal in the stove is burning.

Much of the high quality anthracite coal is gone,

But in the meantime, for the next decade at least, the name of the game is hydrocarbons.

Of those, only nuclear and hydro are green.

They burned some coal.

But as you think of coal, this is what burned wheat kernels look like.

it's a hot coal.

In all of this time, 650,000 years, the CO2 level has never gone above

This country is rich in coal.

One of the coal industry's ads around Christmas was this one.

And so the question is Can you actually get that to zero?

At the Headwaters itself,

China had been the most powerful nation in the world and they came to the United States in search of coal, and they found it, and, in fact, they found lots of it right here.

Coal is not always black.

(Laughter)

Thorium reactor that Nathan Myhrvold's involved in.

You burn the gas, that radon's being released. Nobody counts that radon against the gas.

English economist William Stanley Jevons realised that Better steam engines made coal a more cost effective fuel source, which led to the use of more steam engines, which increased total coal consumption.

Al Gore This is the source of much of the coal in West Virginia.

Hands weathered and worn and proud of it.

When the Industrial Revolution started, the amount of carbon sitting underneath Britain in the form of coal was as big as the amount of carbon sitting under Saudi Arabia in the form of oil.