US citizens: call for reforming the way coal companies arrange to pay for cleanup, so that they can't evade the obligation.

Here's what I said.

Please reform the law so that coal companies cannot sneak out of their obligation to pay for cleaning up mines. There must be no way they can arrange to spin off a subsidiary to go out of business and evade the responsibility. They should not be allowed to do self-bonding; they should have to buy insurance.

The likelihood that coal mining will decline, as we put a stop to the air pollution it causes, will increase the temptation for coal businesses to adopt a short-term attitude that encourages cheating.

A secondary benefit of this change will be to discourage coal mining and coal burning. We need to make coal mining decline faster, for public health (coal emissions are toxic) and to help curb global heating.