Coal crisis — Mine disasters show that digging for the energy source has consequences

Underground coal miners work in the darkness, invisible to most of us, and when they die — also in the darkness, from methane explosions or rock falls or any of the hundreds of other hazards they face every day — their deaths usually merit just a few paragraphs in the local newspaper.

The attempted rescue of trapped coal miners, on the other hand, is often headline news. Networks love the real-time drama of the rescue efforts — it's reality TV from the heartland, complete with anguished family members, heroic workers and dodgy mine owners. Sometimes, these stories have happy endings. In 2002, nine miners who were trapped in a coal mine in Quecreek, Pa., for 77 hours emerged as celebrities, feted by Oprah and photographed for Vanity Fair magazine.

But not every mine rescue turns out so well, as the Crandall Canyon Mine disaster near Huntington has reminded us over the past three weeks. When three rescuers were killed trying to dig out the six miners who've been trapped since Aug. 6, the story turned, as Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. put it, "from a tragedy into a catastrophe."

In the coming months, tough questions will be asked about exactly what happened in the Crandall Canyon Mine: Did federal mine safety officials do everything they could to protect the miners? Did Robert Murray, the co-owner of the mine, value profits over human life? And why, at the beginning of the 21st century, when we can download real-time images from Mars onto our laptop computers, has no one figured out a way to track or communicate with coal miners underground?

"This is a defining moment for the history of mining," Huntsman said. "We all expect to come out of this better and smarter and safer."

But if history is any guide, straightforward answers to what happened in Utah will be as rare as oxygen in the collapsed mine. We can expect a hue and cry about mine safety on Capitol Hill, a lot of blame-shifting and finger-pointing and, most likely, some modest mine safety improvements. But you can bet that you won't hear much about the real issue, which is the high cost of the United States' dependence on coal, and whether it's worth the price we pay.

Many Americans think that coal went out with top hats and corsets. In fact, we burn more than a billion tons of coal each year in the United States — about 20 pounds a day for every man, woman and child. We don't burn it in coal stoves, of course, but in big power plants that generate about half the electric power in the country.