Coal?

I read somewhere that new environmental regulations would end up shutting down coal burning electric plants.

Mother Jones discusses the problem of coal, both in digging it up and using it.

For the past decade, Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign has helped toss out two-thirds of 249 new coal plant proposals, avoiding more than 654 million metric tons of carbon that would have seeped into the atmosphere each year....Beyond Coal hopes to close a third of them by 2020 and all of them by 2030, and has employed a full-time staff "working on nothing but figuring out how to shut down these plants and replace them with clean energy," says Sierra Club's executive director Michael Brune.

well, I used to live in the shadow of a huge slagheap, and notice the clean, beaver friendly streams full of trout become red and poisonous as they got contaminiated with the run off from the slagheap. On the other hand, the high unemployment from closing the mine was also a major problem.

So is closing the underground mines good or bad? What about the "newer" methods, which remove the top of the mountains to get coal?

closing the coal using plants stop the air pollution in the US, but would it stop coalmining?
From TPMBarnett's blog:

: My message was that NG prices will stay low long-term but rise somewhat as LNG  exports naturally unfold. US coal, thus displaced, will go to Asia in export for its higher caloric value and lower impurities. Some in industry predict doubling of coal exports by 2020, with India and China as main demanders. 

No, I have no opinion.

But I do know that here in the Philippines, the lack of electricity is a huge problem (it is hot season which means rolling brownouts).

This problem is worse in Mindanao and other poor areas...yet there are rumors that two well publicized "extrajudicial" killings were actually because these guys opposed projects to produce cheap energy (one against mining, another against "exploiting the land of the indigenous" i.e. no hydro electric projects or mining in his area). Of course, they were not killed for being green, but by  those who would reap bribes/ kickbacks from the projects.
Yet stopping large companies from exploiting local resources not only stops development but leads to local poverty and unemployment...And, of course, in the long term, this means deaths from mom and pop type mines collapsing and causing downstream pollution because folks dig on their own.