This is a coal mining machine in Finland.

It’s easy to malign coal. And over the past few weeks, the news has been bad. A few days before Christmas, at a power plant operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority, a huge holding pond failed. The resulting spill flooded some 300 acres with coal ash contaminated with a variety of heavy metals including arsenic, lead, barium, chromium and manganese. On December 29, James Hansen, the high-profile NASA scientist who is closely aligned with former vice president Al Gore on the issue of global warming, sent an open letter to President-elect Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, in which he called coal-fired power plants “factories of death.”

While there’s no question that other sources of energy -- particularly nuclear and natural gas -- can provide large amounts of electric power and do so with far less carbon dioxide emissions and pollutants than coal, the problem remains one of scale. (Renewables are fine, but they cannot provide the baseload power and large quantities of power needed in the near term.) But there are significant financial, political, and structural constraints on those alternatives to coal. And those obstacles take us back to a familiar question: If not coal, then what?

A bit of data crunching from the latest BP Statistical Review of World Energy yields a list of the most coal-reliant countries. And that list provides some hints as to why achieving a global carbon emissions reduction plan will be so difficult.

It’s not much of a surprise that South Africa is so coal-reliant. South African giant Sasol produces much of the country’s motor fuel from coal. And China’s heavy reliance on coal is well known. What is somewhat surprising is that of the ten most coal-reliant countries, four are members of the OECD: Australia, Czech Republic, Poland, and Turkey. And of those four, the ones that are most important to Europe and the US are Poland and the Czech Republic.

Poland and the Czech Republic have a long, bad history with Russia. And Gazprom’s recent curtailment of gas flows to Europe through Ukraine has led to a renewed sense throughout Europe – and Eastern Europe in particular – that any reliance on Russia for energy is simply asking for trouble.

Simply put, it is apparent that for countries like Poland and the Czech Republic, coal is going to retain its majority stake in primary energy production for a long time to come. Last week, a friend of mine, Konrad Sadurski, a journalist who works for Gazeta Wyborcza, a Warsaw newspaper, emailed me. “Thank God you don't have cold, cold winters,” he wrote, “and you don't depend on Russian gas.”