Can you give good things about coal?

Answer 1

It makes electricity.

When I was a child, our house was heated by coal and my mother cooked on a big black coal stove in the kitchen. There were two coal bins in opposite corners of the basement. Once a week, a dump truck filled with coal would back up to, first on one side of the house, then the opposite side (fortunately the house was on a corner), open the hinged basement window, swing a chute attached to the truck to the open window and dump a ton or so of coal in each bin. The sound of the coal thundering down the chute woke me on many mornings. My father, and then my older brother carried the coal in buckets, called coal scuttles, from the coal bin to the furnace and with a small shovel, fill the hopper in the furnace with coal. A scuttle of coal was carried to the kitchen for my mother to use in the stove as needed. They used wood or newspaper to start the coal burning. The wood, called kindling, also had to be cut. In addition to that labor, every day or two, the ash had to be removed, using the same small shovel and scuttle. The ash was scooped out and dumped into an ash can (same as a trash can), which was emptied by an 'ash man' about once a month.

The moral to this story is, that when you have to physically haul your fuel and physically clean up after its use, you are far more careful in its use.