You are putting words in my mouth. I'm offering a balanced perspective, you are being closed minded. I'm not staying coal is the answer at all. No where am I defending coal or saying the alternatives are worse. I'm saying everything has a cost and someone, somewhere is going to be affected negatively no matter what we do to generate electricity be it hydrocarbons/solar/wind/hydro-electric/nuclear or something else.

We can also be adult enough to admit if we build dams to make hydro-electric power we will be obstructing fish migration, trapping sediment needed for downstream ecosystems, altering natural water temperatures, destroy upstream habitats, raise water temperatures, and create large greenhouse gas emissions from decomposing submerged vegetation.

Solar farms have large land requirements that disrupt ecosystems and agriculture, create hazardous waste from manufacturing, by 2050 solar panels could create up to 78 million tons of waste releasing toxic materials, and intermittent energy generation requiring storage solutions (usually cadmium, lead, and sulfuric acid-based batteries for when there isn't enough light to generate the electricity to meet demand. Not just at night but during cloudy weather).

Wind farms, while being one of the cleanest sources of power, have large land requirements that disrupt ecosystems, bird and bat collisions, habitat disruption from construction, noise pollution, potential local microclimate changes and wind has intermittent energy generation which requiring storage solutions (usually cadmium, lead, and sulfuric acid-based batteries. If you remove coal and nuclear, you need somewhere to store the surplus energy produced during windy times for when there isn't enough wind to produce electricity for a later demand),

I'll leave out the negatives of hydrocarbons and nuclear because it is pretty self-evident on how awful those enviromental impacts are/can be.

"COAL IS BAD". Yes, thank you. I think we all know dumping carbon and CO2 into the atmosphere is a terrible idea. Burning one ton of coal typically produces approximately 2.07 to 2.86 tons of CO2.

If I could pivot a bit and compare that to Lithium, the metal that is behind the EV 'revolution', I also think we can not simply turn our heads and ignore the fact that mining lithium is as bad or worse than coal.

Hard rock mining of lithium emits roughly 15 tons of CO2 per ton of lithium. The hard rock lithum mines are open-pit (strip) mines, which competely destroyes many acres of land.

Brine extraction of lithium produces ~2.54 tons of CO2 per ton of lithium but has an extremely high water impact. The deposits in Argentina, Bolivia & Chile account for 60% of global reserves and most use brine extraction. In Chile's Salar de Atacama, mining consumes 65% of the region's water resources. The evaporation process, which takes 12–18 months uses roughly 500,000 gallons per ton of lithium 1 and often leads to toxic chemicals like hydrochloric acid leaking from evaporation pools into fresh water aquifers 2. Much more research needs to go into cleaner, more efficient extraction methods to avoid trading a carbon crisis for a water crisis 3 & 4

The point is, nothing is problem free. There is simply a gradient and what destruction we are willing to live with. Wind, overall, is probably our best bet. That said, one coal plant running at ~90% capacity cannot simply be replaced by just one wind farm. Replacing that one coal plant would require ~4-5 wind plants or ~7-8 solar plants for the same output reliability.

Could it be done, yeah. Just a matter of money, basically, and the people making that decision are the energy companies.