Utah is in two basic pieces: there’s a Northern half which looks sort of like Switzerland and a Southern half which looks sort of like Mars. The coal reserves are in the part which looks like Mars and there’s no rational reason for any part of that to be off limits for coal mining of any sort. The only thing the region is any sort of a “preserve” for would be tarantulas.
Aside from the national parks, I agree with you.
The National Parks in Southern Utah get quite a bit of visitation so there's obviously a lot of people that disagree with you that there is no need to preserve such areas.
If we try and insist there is nothing there worth preserving, we will lose this fight.
We need to convince people that we can extract the coal with minimal impact and still preserve the natural beauty of the area, which can be done.
We can't get all the coal in that way, but there is a huge amount of coal there. We can't let out opponents get away with saying because all the coal can't be extracted without significantly damaging the area, none of the coal should be extracted.