LIFE AFTER COAL
In Magoffin County, eastern Kentucky, where Lily Gardner was born, people sometimes play a game when they’re driving on the highway: spot the coal seam. ‘If you’re looking for them, you can still spot a stripe of coal in the mountains there,’ Lily says. ‘People point to that and say, “Look, we still have coal. We could still be mining.”’ The last coalmine in Magoffin County closed in 2015.
Lily is a 15-year-old activist with Sunrise Movement, the prodigious youth climate organization which has, in a matter of months, managed to main-stream the idea that the climate crisis requires a radical transformation of the US economy.
She lives in Lexington now, Kentucky’s second-largest city, but she grew up deep in coal country. And Sunrise, Lily says, though hell-bent on eliminating fossil fuels, insists on empathy for the community she comes from. The movement’s diverse young leaders, Lily says, ‘know what it feels like to be left out of the conversation’.
A just transition
Coal emits the most carbon per unit of energy of any fossil fuel. If climate catastrophe is to be avoided, most of the world’s remaining coal reserves will need to be left in the ground. The prospects for this are different depending where you look. In Asia, where rapidly urbanizing countries seek cheap energy, coal
