There's another symbol to consider. Namely? Coal as cheap, lethal, junk that should've been abandoned years ago.
Basically, this would be a sort of interesting opposite to nuclear on the spectrum of psychology.
See, if nuclear represents scary new technology with terrifying possible side effects, i.e. radiation, than coal should represent out of date technology that should've been abandoned a long time ago.
An advantage here is that, unlike nuclear, the more the public looks at coal, the more disadvantages that come to light.
To further help the above, perhaps we could another power source, like Nuclear, come dashing in to replace it. The idea would be high technology replacing out of date crap getting people killed.
This work?
Maybe, the key is how we actually get the public thinking that way. There were the infamous smogs and so on, and acid rain, but as I understand it those were mostly solved with better filtering technology. Carbon emissions, I can't think of a way to get people worried about climate change much earlier than they did IOTL. And the other big problems - mercury and other pollutants - are invisible if you aren't a statistician.
I'm thinking about ways to change the early course of the environmental movement, make them look at coal the way they looked IOTL at nuclear and DDT, so we can get some of what you're talking about going. We'd need to either bring forward the emergence of environmentalism or push back the development of atomic energy - not just the power plants, the bombs, too. The problem is, I don't know much about the early history of environmentalism.
Something like this, maybe. History goes roughly as OTL until 1945. Then, we prevent the Cold War. This is a PoD I've pushed before, but I think it works. Let's say Stalin gets killed by a German bomb in 1944, and Beria or someone else conciliatory takes over in Russia. Wallace stays VP and takes over in the US. We stir up some extra trouble between the US and UK, just to add a little extra zip to the sauce. The US and USSR reach a deal on atomic disarmament in 1946, and reunification and neutralization of Germany in the late 40s. The Cold War never starts - the two superpowers don't
like each other, but they're rivals, not enemies.
Meanwhile, atomic energy is in the hands of the UN, who don't do much with it. But one thing they do do is make lots of useful radioisotopes - this was a big thing in the late 40s, tailored radioisotopes for scientific research. See, the lovely thing about radiation is it's
real easy to detect, and if you pick the right element, you can track anything. That's part of why the early environmentalists latched on so strongly to fallout as an issue - you can
track fallout the way you can't track, say, mercury emissions from coal plants - or, at least, you can't track them unless you mix a radiotracer in there. Then you can track them easily.
So we use that to both get environmentalists worrying about coal power in the 50s and 60s, and put atomic energy as the benign supertechnology (that is symbolically associated with lovely lefty stuff like the UN and not weapons) that reveals the iniquity of the polluting industrialists and is waiting in the wings to save the day.
Then, once people are good and bubbling about the horrors of coal, we have a super-Centralia or something like it in the 70s.
I'm not sure that works - I really don't know much about the history of the environmentalist movement - but maybe someone else can fix it up.
