There are a number of adverse health and environmental effects of coal burning especially in power stations, and of coal mining. These effects include:

• Coal-fired power plants shorten nearly 24,000 lives a year in the United States, including 2,800 from lung cancer
• Generation of hundreds of millions of tons of waste products, including fly ash, bottom ash, flue gas desulfurization sludge, that contain mercury, uranium, thorium, arsenic, and other heavy metals
• Acid rain from high sulfur coal
• Interference with groundwater and water table levels
• Contamination of land and waterways and destruction of homes from fly ash spills such as Kingston Fossil Plant coal fly ash slurry spill
• Impact of water use on flows of rivers and consequential impact on other land-uses
• Dust nuisance
• Subsidence above tunnels, sometimes damaging infrastructure
• Uncontrollable underground fires which may burn for decades or centuries.
• Coal-fired power plants without effective fly ash capture are one of the largest sources of human-caused background radiation exposure
• Coal-fired power plants emit mercury, selenium, and arsenic which are harmful to human health and the environment
• Release of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, which causes climate change and global warming according to the IPCC and the EPA. Coal is the largest contributor to the human-made increase of CO₂ in the air