As a fuel source, coal is a different product from what it was in past decades. Specifically, it is much cleaner. Yet, as always, it is much cheaper and more reliable than renewables such as wind and solar. In the generation of electricity, its real competition is natural gas.

In short, coal looks to remain a mainstay in the domestic energy mix and bodes to help defeat the Malthusian anti-energy crusade.

In a recent edition of EnergyBiz Magazine, Lee Buchsbaum reports on a 1,600 megawatt plant now being built in Illinois by Peabody Energy, the world’s largest publicly traded coal-mining company. When completed in 2012, the project will satisfy the power needs of as many as 2.4 million homes in nine or more states. The giant greenfield plant is a real stimulus plan that helps consumers and injects taxes rather than uses taxes.…

It’s easy to bash coal. There’s no romance in the black rocks that provide about half of the electricity in the United States and about 28.6 percent of the world’s total primary energy. And that bashing has become easier still in recent weeks. A few days before Christmas, at a power plant operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority, a huge holding pond failed, spilling coal ash contaminated with a variety of heavy metals including arsenic, lead, barium, chromium and manganese over several hundred acres.[1] 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.”…