Dear Editor,

Coal mining has always been a dirty, dangerous business, but mountaintop removal takes the devastation to new lows. After blowing up more than 500 mountains in Appalachia to uncover coal seams, mining companies have dumped millions of tons of waste into the valleys below, burying or polluting more than 2,000 miles of streams, poisoning drinking water, and wiping out entire communities.

Twenty-five million Americans including 1 in 10 children have asthma, and coal-fired plants are a primary contributor to their misery.

It gets worse. Every year, soot from coal-fired plants kills an estimated 13,000 Americans and is responsible for $100 billion in healthcare costs. Old, out-dated coal plants are also the single biggest source of mercury pollution which causes birth defects and developmental damage in young children.

After coal is burned, the leftover toxic ash containing arsenic, lead, cadmium, and other heavy metals is dumped in thousands of poorly regulated sites nationwide. Those poisons spill or seep into the ground and contaminate drinking water.

Finally, coal plants are our largest source of greenhouse-gas emissions. Every ton of coal burned generates three tons of carbon dioxide pollution. In 2002 government officials proposed building more than 150 coal-fired power plants nationwide which would have emitted an estimated 585 more tons of pollution annually for the next 50 years.

Here’s the good news. Despite fierce opposition from the influential and well-funded coal lobby, thanks to more than a dozen environmental groups led by the Sierra Club that I belong to through a combination of community organizing, strategic communications, and aggressive litigation we stopped those 150 plants and more. The playing field was leveled a bit by a generous $50 million donation from Bloomberg Philanthropies.

But we can go further and clean up or shut down the existing fleet of deadly plants. Equally important, we can advance solutions like solar and wind power that will protect our air and water and offer well-paying jobs. Hopefully this is the beginning of a clean-energy transition.