One of the questions most commonly asked by young environmentalists and would be world warriors is “Is coal renewable?” This is an innocent enough question, but to anyone that knows a thing about the way the world and fossilization works, it’s a simple one. The answer is no. Coal is a non renewable resource and no matter how many times you sit there wishing that the answer to your question is coal renewable will be yes, it will forever be no. It takes a lot of decomposing plant and animal matter to form into what we now know as coal, and it takes millions upon millions of years. This means we’re basically burning through thousands and thousands of dead plants and animals daily and since it takes millions of years to form new coal with lots of decompression and other earthly movements and such, we won’t be able to have a renewable source of coal for another million years. So technically in a sense, as long as things live to someday die, coal is renewable, but not conventionally, because it isn’t something that will ever renew during our lifetimes and chances are the earth will be gone and destroyed before we ever see the things that are dying now turn into coal later.
Is this scary to you? Well it should be. Once you realize the ridiculous rates at which we are consuming coal and burning it up, it should be obvious that this isn’t something that we should be doing away with so fast. Yes there were billions of plants and animals and miscellaneous organic material that lived before humans basically took over, but we will burn through this someday and we still have not yet had time to slow down and form a contingency plan.
Unfortunately though alternative energies are probably a much better use of investor money, none of the money is going to the research of more renewable energy sources because the coal industry is more immediately profitable and at least for the time being there is no victory in sight for coming up with something that is as efficient and cheap to produce and in such large quantity a coal is. So to those people wondering is coal renewable, it is important to let them know that it is not so that they can tell others and these people can tell others and eventually it will become firm and clear that we need to turn away from coal for the time being, because we already don’t have much time left.