Millions of people live without access to electricity. Now it’s a battle between coal and renewables to bring cheap power.
Miners were fired by a sense of solidarity but also by dangerous working conditions, which produced high death and injury rates.
Janet Lindenmuth/Flickr
Miners were among the first workers to organise into trade unions from the middle of the 1700s, battling a lack of legal recognition and resistance from the mine owners.
Coal powered the machinery and lit what English poet William Blake described as ‘dark satanic mills’.
Sam Leighton/Flickr
Despite its insidious influence on the climate and our health, coal has a lesser-known positive side to its otherwise dark soul. It has provided us with some stunning fossils.