China reaps rewards, dangers from coal-based energy

BEIJING: Forty years of digging for coal have left the miner with tuberculosis and drained his village water supply. But he, like China, clings to the resource as his economic mother lode.

“If I did farming, it would take me a year to get what I make in a month,” said the 55-year-old, surnamed Di and sporting the blackened fingernails of someone who has spent most of his days beneath the hills of China’s poverty-stricken Guizhou province.