Although a new legislation sets deadlines for fossil-fuel power facilities
Illinois coal mining continues to be a major source of climatechanging emissions With a new state law that bans coal and gas-fired power by
2045, Gov. J.B. Pritzker promises that Illinois will help stop — and even reverse — climate change. However, the rule ignores the state's most significant source of climate-changing pollution: coal mining.
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ccording to a Chicago Tribune estimate based on a calculation created by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, out-of-state corporations burning Illinois coal discharged more than 57 million tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the sky in 2020 alone. The state's coal and gas plants, on the other hand, emitted 46 million tons of CO2 throughout the year. The disparity underscores Illinois' continued role as a major coal supplier, even as the state and the country as a whole move away from coal-fired power generation. Pritzker and state lawmakers avoided publicly tackling Illinois' coal sector because it produces jobs and pay taxes, albeit with a fraction of the employees it formerly employed in a section of the state nearer to Tupelo, Mississippi, compared to Chicago.
"It's one aspect to hault importing coal into your territory but another to completely stop mining the same well within your own borders," commented Barry Rabe. He is a teacher of public policy at the University of Michigan and studies issues related to energy. According to federal figures, Illinois was only third in the amount of coal pulled out of the ground last year, behind Wyoming, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Foresight Energy, a bankrupt St. Louis-based firm that obtained the rights to latent coal seams in four southern Illinois counties in the mid-2000s, supplied more than half of the 32 million tons mined in Illinois. Almost all of Foresight's coal is exported to other states and nations. Longwall mining, which uses robotic equipment rather than people to mine coal, saves
