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.

But overall, Obama's record on the environment has been uninspired - and that's putting it kindly. He hasn't stopped coal companies from blowing up mountaintops and devastating large regions of Appalachia.

If you think Wall Street firms have it good, you haven't looked closely at Big Oil.

Extracting oil from the tar sands is a nasty, polluting, energy-intensive business.

Coal boosters like to tout coal as cheap and plentiful - well, not anymore. At least not in China.

Not since the days of George W. Bush's 'Clear Skies' and 'Healthy Forests' initiatives has America been presented with a project as cravenly corporate and backward-looking as the Keystone XL pipeline.

One of the pillars of backward thinking in America is the idea that you can have jobs or you can have clean air and water, but you can't have both. That myth has been busted a thousand times, but still it lives on.

It's not all Obama's fault: His plans to rebuild America's energy infrastructure have been hampered by the recession, and his efforts on global warming have been stymied by Tea Party wackos and weak-kneed Democrats in Congress.

In the Arctic, things are already getting freaky. Temperatures have warmed three times faster than the global average.

When it comes to global warming, coal is the gorilla in the room.

Today, we're very dependent on cheap energy. We just take it for granted - all the things you have in the house, the way industry works.

The oil industry fought hard to keep Keystone alive, making wildly exaggerated claims that the pipeline - the country's largest infrastructure project - would create tens of thousands of jobs and decrease America's reliance on oil from the Middle East.