I think it's important to consider the amount of fossil fuels we are using. One example that springs to mind at one of the older coal power plants in WV they decided to change the location where they deposited the coal ash that was left over. It turns out over the last 40 years they had just kept making a larger mount and it was about to become the tallest mountain in the state. Now you might wonder how this ends up but the simple fact is coal is mindbogglingly cheep. There is literally mounds of the stuff which you basically pickup off the ground. (It's slightly worse than that but not by much.)
In Appalachia there are coal fires that have been burning for thirty or forty years, and they are allowed to keep burning because the coal is worth less than what it would cost to pipe in enough water to put out the fires.
