The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency held meetings on air pollution coming from NV Energy’s coal-fired Reid Gardner Generating Station on May 3, and it quickly turned into an argument between community health and jobs: The health of the Moapa Band of Paiutes, who live next door to the plant, versus the jobs for men and women in Overton and Logandale who commute to work at the plant.

Some of the workers, such as plant director David Sharp, insisted that the issue on hand was not overall air pollution coming from the coal plant, but regional haze created by the nitrous oxide as one of a stew of emissions from Reid Gardner’s smokestacks.

Advocates for coal want to take the conversation away from overall health and environmental pollution. The more narrow the focus, the less likely they will have to clean up the most polluting form of electrical generation that we have.

Fortunately, speakers from nonprofit groups, the Moapa Paiutes, scientists and others attended the May 3 hearings (one near Moapa, the other in Overton) to give balance to the statements from the plant workers.

Some of the workers insisted that their children, farther away from the plant than the Moapa Paiutes, were healthy, discounting the horrific health problems that the Native Americans are experiencing. Others noted that with the failure of required monitoring and treatment equipment, the plant is regularly shut down. (Apparently this is not uncommon, which did not fill conservation-minded observers with the confidence in the process that the speakers seem to have intended.)

And the plant works and NV Energy executives insisted that the plant (responding to federal oversight and rules) is a lot cleaner than it used to be. That is undoubtedly true, but still a relatively low hurdle.

In the end, everyone had sympathy not only for the Paiutes, but for the plant workers. The transition to a clean-energy economy is happening all over the country, and perhaps nowhere more than in Nevada, where a handful of planned coal plants have been scrapped and the Reid Gardner plant itself has been shut down for weeks as NV Energy takes advantage of rock-bottom natural gas prices to generate electricity from a much cleaner source.

Coal, of course, is touted as being cheap, but its fans don’t count the health impacts downwind of the plants – and as Assemblyman Tick Segerblom pointed out in a Las Vegas Sun editorial recently, eventually we are all downwind. And they don’t count the huge environmental impacts of strip mining and leveling mountains. And they don’t mention that Nevada doesn’t have any significant coal reserves, so the fuel needs to be imported from out of state, at high cost.

We do, however, have lots of geothermal, wind and solar potential, and that has the coal crowd nervous.

The handwriting is on the wall. Coal is just too expensive and unhealthy. The coal-plant workers eventually will have to find other employment, in or outside the energy sector. And it won’t be the EPA or conservationists that force the transition – it will be a profound change in the economy of energy production.