Why are so many Australians so sniffy about the coal industry? Everywhere I go I meet someone who has a beef with the black stuff. And it isn’t just the usual suspects — those green-hearted weepers for Gaia who think any kind of rummaging in the earth for combustible resources is a crime against nature, and who are hilariously unaware that their unproductive lives of tweeting and thrift-shopping would be impossible if a couple of hundred years ago man hadn’t burnt copious amounts of coal and in the process invented the modern world.