Aerial Photos Show The Sheer Destruction Of West Virginia's Mountaintop Removal Mining

But there's also no getting around the health and environmental concerns associated with both coal mining companies and coal burning plants. One increasingly popular mining method, mountaintop removal mining, could be the most destructive yet - and it also controversially requires fewer workers than other methods of mining coal.

While traditional coal mining extracts coal from underground, the controversial mountaintop removal method uses explosives and machinery to blast away chunks of mountains to get at the coal beneath.

On a recent trip to West Virginia to cover a chemical spill that shut down water for 300,000 people for a week, we rented a plane to take it all in.

Flying above ancient Appalachian mountains that looked from high like snow-dusted moguls, it was jarring to see large sections that had been leveled off flat. Mining operations have radically disrupted massive areas, in an incredibly diverse ecosystem, and there is significant doubt about whether they will truly recover. For all we saw, it was only a small part of 800 miles of mountaintop removal mining in the region.