I spent yesterday at a conference on coal in Harrisburg.

Titled “The Future of  Coal,” it was sponsored by the nonprofit environmental group, the Clean Air Council.

So is there a future in a warming world for these little lumps of carbon? Undoubtedly. If for no other reason than that we have so much of it and world demand for energy is skyrocketing. Estimates vary, depending on how easy the estimator thinks the coal will be to extract from the ground, but at a minimum the U.S. has 100 years worth of coal reserves.

So perhaps the operative question is: What kind of future?

Technologically, will we be able to strip the emissions of the carbon that contributes to global warming?  How will the economics of it work out? 

Is it better to build a plant in Schuylkill County to convert solid coal to liquid transportation fuel, weaning us however slightly off our dependence on the Middle East? That’s what Fred Palmer wants. He’s with Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private-sector coal company.   

Or is that too expensive and does it result in too much pollution? Is it better to keep making electricity out of the coal and have plug-in cars? That’s what environmentalists like Elizabeth Martin with the Natural Resources Defense Council and Tom Collina with 2020 Vision want.

But all agreed it’s imperative we come to some kind of agreement, and devise some kind of plan. 

Kathleen A. McGinty, secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection, gave the keynote address at lunch. She said everyone – business, environmentalists and the government – will have to stretch. Business can’t expect blank checks. Environmentalists can’t expect 100 percent emission controls. But she was characteristically upbeat: “We can build and invent and grow our way out of this crisis.”

The first step, according to virtually every presenter who spoke into the microphone was this: Conservation.

Some of that will have to be big steps. Slowing and eventually reversing the world’s emissions will take not just a tweak in how we do things, but wholesale changes, the presenters said.  We’ll need new technologies, cars with drastically better mileage, greener buildings.

But smaller, individual steps count, too. So the future will also require changes in the myriad of decisions, however seemingly insignificant, millions of us make in our everyday lives. Things like turning up the thermostat in summer, installing compact fluorescent light bulbs, switching to more energy-efficient appliances. And so much more.