This paper revisits the causal relationship between coal consumption and real GDP for six major coal consuming countries for the period 1965-2005 within a vector autoregressive (VAR) framework by including capital and labour as additional variables. Applying a modified version of the Granger causality test due to Toda and Yamamoto [Toda HY, Yamamoto T. Statistical inference in vector autoregressions with possibly integrated process. J Econom 1995;66:225-50], we found a unidirectional causality running from coal consumption to economic growth in India and Japan while the opposite causality running from economic growth to coal consumption was found in China and South Korea. In contrast there was a bi-directional causality running between economic growth and coal consumption in South Africa and the United States. Variance decomposition analysis seems to confirm our Granger causality results. The policy implication is that measures adopted to mitigate the adverse effects of coal consumption may be taken without harming economic growth in China and South Korea. In contrast, for the remaining four countries conservation measures can harm economic growth. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.