Jeff Goodell

The end of coal in Appalachia doesn't mean that America is running out of coal (there's plenty left in Wyoming). But it should end the fantasy that coal can be an engine of job creation - the big open pit mines in Wyoming employ a tiny fraction of the number of people in an underground mine in Appalachia.

I'm the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity - using clean, renewable energy as the key - into coal country, because we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.

Well, there's no question that the law passed in 1996 was flawed. It deregulated the wholesale market, meaning the price that the utilities had to pay energy companies for power, but not the retail market.