During the Indistrial Revolution half of the world's coal came from Britain. We still rely heavily on it today to meet our energy needs, but now we input more than we produce. Burning it introduces large amounts of gases into the atmosphere that harm the environment in a variety of ways. In this unit it will become apparent that the most appealing quality of coal is that there is plenty of it. This study unit is just one of many that can be found on LearningSpace, part of OpenLearn, a collection of open educational resources from The Open University. Published in ePub 2.0.1 format, some feature such as audio, video and linked PDF are not supported by all ePub readers.