It is much easier to harvest wood than it is to harvest coal, which requires complex machinery and underground tunnels. Coal also has many impurities such as sulfur and mercury and burning coal puts more radioactivity into the atmosphere than a comparable nuclear plant does. Wood is a renewable resource.

While the coal is there a-plenty and the mines are operating anyway, why not mine it? A balance can be reached that will not require closing the mines and cut down too much forest cover to provide the wood chip. This is a simple question of whether a nation, a company or a person decides to use steam, wood or coal to run its boilers based on the bottom-line and other major social and economic considerations. What one finally chooses is within the freedom given to each one of us under our present laws. Environmentalists cannot impose their principles at the loss of our inherent rights and freedom.