Coal is formed if dead plant matter decays into peat and over millions of years the heat and pressure of deep burial converts the peat into coal.
There have been multiple environmental disasters and mass extinctions on this planet. After death comes life and nature always recovered. We take that for granted and destroy our current environment to get to some resources from the old one.
After blowing up mountains to get coal, companies are required to remidate valley fills to a quasi-natural state. They often use hydroseeds, which contains seed mix, fertilizer, tackifier and dye.
Communities near MTR (Mountaintop removal) mining often suffer from polluted drinking water. Amongst other chemicals, elements like arsenic, selenium or manganese could be consumed day-to-day. One symptom of an overdose/ poisoning can be tooth loss. It also seems like the number of brain cancers is a lot higher in those areas.
CCS (Carbon Dioxid Capture and Storage) is the process of capturing waste CO2 from e.g. fossil fuel power plants and depositing it somewhere suitable underground where it can not enter the atmosphere. Besides injecting CO2 into geological formations like saline aquifers or former gas deposits, it has also been proposed to store it in the ocean. The gas is invisible unless you use a special infrared camera.
Although much of the energy we use in our everyday lives comes from local sources, ultimately the source of essentially all the energy that makes life on Earth possible comes from the sun. A solar cell is a sandwich of n-type silicon (white) and p-type silicon (back). It generates electricity by using sunlight to make electrons hop across the junction between the different flavors of silicon.