The sad part - we have proven coal reserves for over 200 YEARS at current power usage, if coal provided ALL of the power generation of the US. Natural gas reserves - we have more like 30 years IF THAT under the same conditions, and we're already having to IMPORT a bunch from Canada to cover current usage - though like for oil, recent technology has been helping some on those issues.
EPA is being very short-sighted on this issue, like so many others.
This really depends how you look at subsides which are provided by the government. I personally think coal power generation is receives the largest subside of any power generation since they're not charged for all the harm they cause to public health and the environment. I don't understand why people drink it's horrible to dump slug into a river, but it's ok to dump whatever into the air. Clean coal is possible, but when it's done the prices become very comparable to renewable energies.
Manufacture of Solar and Wind equipment generates a lot of toxic waste too. It's just not continuous like burning Coal or Natural Gas, and it's certainly not the issue that Nuclear Waste is.
I also suspect that the "public health" and "environment" damage due to coal burning is overstated quite a bit in recent years - EPA has been cracking down hard on emmisions for quite a while now. Coal mining damage is also overstated in recent years, due to "put the mine back the way it was" regulations that have been enacted. Not saying the damage is ZERO, but it's not the nightmare environmentalists have been portraying it as (and probably never WAS quite that bad in this country - the Soviet Union and a lot of the Warsaw Pact on the other hand got really bad in places).