Mountain top removal is another problem. It is a way of obtaining the coal needed to burn in the power plants but it has very large drawbacks to many people. Mountain top removal takes a very large section of a mountain and cuts it down about 800-1000 feet of mountaintop, and then dumping the waste into nearby valleys, often burying streams. This waste pollutes the streams and also the drinking water of anyone living near the site. The poisoned water can cause many health problems.
If we used renewable recourses like wind and sunlight we could totally stop the production of harmful gasses like sulfur dioxide. Windmills are a great example of a way to use wind as a resource to create energy. Even though there will not be a constant flow of wind to turn the windmill a lager field of windmills could still create a lager amount of power. And finding places to put these would not be very hard considering all of the open land that the USA has. Solar power is another way to use sunlight as a resource. During the day time the solar panels could catch the sunlight and create energy for long periods of time but the only problem is that the solar panels would have to cover a large area to be efficient. Yet both of these ways of creating energy would be much better than using coal power plants.
Even by using a combination of windmills, solar power and coal that would lessen the amount of coal needed to burn and overall lessen the pollution being put into our atmosphere to create enough energy for everyone to use in our country.