So most people today heat their home with oil. The advantage of oil is that it’s easy to transport and produces relatively little pollution. Coal on the other hand creates really dirty emissions which would affect the air we breathe. When coal is burned in a power plant, there are more technologies in place to make sure that the smoke that’s emitted isn’t too bad for the environment. But if coal were burned in a person’s house, they probably wouldn’t use the same gas-cleaning technologies that are used by a power plant. Therefore, if a community were all using coal heating, then it would make the air a lot worse to breathe than the current situation where people are using oil, natural gas, and electricity.

For a very long time, people did heat their houses with coal, but now there are “cleaner” technologies that don’t pollute the air as much. Also coal produces about 1.5 times as much CO₂ as oil for the same amount of heat. So if more people burned coal, it could accelerate climate change.