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In "Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future," journalist and author Jeff Goodell offers a sweeping overview of coal's past, present and future role in human affairs, focusing closely on the environmental, health and safety impacts of what he bluntly calls the United States' "addiction" to coal-generated electricity.

"Big Coal has thrived largely because the costs of air pollution, miners' safety, devastated mountains, and global warming are invisible to us as consumers of electricity," he argues.

The book is no environmentalist polemic, however. Goodell approaches his subject methodically and fairly, giving due recognition to key complexities and ambiguities.

He emphasizes the historical antecedents that led to contemporary reliance on coal, acknowledges its crucial role in modern economies, and clearly respects workers who toil in coal-related industries. ("Keeping America powered up is not an easy job," he writes, "and the people who do it deserve our admiration and thanks. They certainly have mine.")

Still, "Big Coal" is unquestionably point-of-view writing, which no one could mistake for a conclusion-evading exercise in he-said, she-said reporting. Goodell strongly stresses the problems of current and continuing reliance on coal and what he regards as the decades-long shortcomings of regulatory efforts.

At the end of the book, he recognizes that coal will continue to be mined and burned for many years to come but urges a dedicated effort to use it wisely while hastening the move toward alternatives:

"In the coming decades, the great danger is not that the world will burn more coal – that's a given – but that we will burn it badly, cheaply, exploitatively," he concludes in the epilogue, titled "Empire of Denial."

Goodell is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine. He wrote an article for the latter publication in 2001 – "How Coal Got its Glow Back" – which described the coal industry's "comeback" in the early months of the Bush administration. Then, in 2002, he edited a book by coal miners who had been rescued from the flooded Quecreek mine in Pennsylvania.

"Big Coal" is the product of three years of subsequent research and writing, bringing the subject up to the fatal Sago mine disaster in West Virginia this year. Goodell expands upon some of the themes he explored in the Times Magazine article and discusses with the Quecreek incident, but his scope is far broader this time.

At the outset, he makes clear that he is not simply writing about the coal-mining industry. He explains in the introduction that he uses the phrase "Big Coal" as "shorthand for the alliance of coal mining companies, coal-burning utilities, railroads, lobbying groups, and industry supporters that make the coal industry such a political force in America."

Indeed, the political power and influence of Big Coal – both now and in the past – are at the heart of much of Goodell's treatment of that cluster of industries, organizations and individuals.

The book is not simply a work about energy politics, however. Rather, it presents a a multifaceted picture that weaves together clear political and economic analysis, colorful historical background, technical and scientific discussion, and on-the-ground vignettes portraying the lives of people who work in, or are otherwise affected by, coal and its use. This varied approach is one of "Big Coal's" considerable virtues.

The book is divided into three sections of roughly equal length. The first, "The Dig," deals with coal mining and transportation. The second, "The Burn," focuses on electric utilities' use of coal. The third, "The Heat," is about coal's huge and growing role in global warming. (While the book is mainly about coal in the U.S., a final chapter in the global warming section deals with the expanding use of coal in China.)

Some of the material in the book will undoubtedly be familiar to environmental journalists already – for instance, basic elements of the author's discussions of recent battles over stricter regulation of particulate pollution, New Source Review, "Clear Skies," and mercury regulation.

Other parts are likely to be less familiar, such as Goodell's discussion of current health research on "ultrafines" – the exceedingly fine pollution particles "about the size of a single bacterium cell."

Especially valuable are the numerous glimpses that the author provides into the lives and attitudes of Americans who are employed in coal-related industries or feel the direct impacts of coal's use.

One passage from his account of his trip aboard a coal-hauling train ("the carbon express") is a good example of the fascinating anecdotes sprinkled throughout the book:

"Most railroaders are far less dogmatic than management about the virtues and vices of burning coal. Perhaps this is because their politics are far more liberal, or simply because hauling coal is nowhere near as fun as hauling freight. Whatever the explanation, few railroaders I talked to had any particular soft spot for coal. Anderson was even blunter about it than most. 'I'd like to see them cut down on coal, even if it means losing my job,' he told me, his feet up on the dash as we cruised across the prairie where his Sioux ancestors once hunted vast herds of buffalo. 'I think about burning all this coal in the power plants, hurling all this stuff into the air – the problems are only going to get worse as time goes on. What about our kids, our grandchildren?'"

For all readers, "Big Coal" provides a useful (if avowedly critical) primer on a subject whose importance will certainly grow in the years ahead.

For environmental journalists, even those whose professional roles do not permit the sort of opinion-rendering approach allowed to book authors, Goodell also presents a vivid example of how to tell a complicated story in a way that is consistently interesting and comprehensible.

Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future, by Jeff Goodell. Houghton Mifflin Company, New York; ISBN-13: 978-0-618-31940-4 and ISBN-10: 0-618-31940-9.