Coal? Yes, Coal.

[Dogmudgeon]

Oh. My. Gawd.

Coal? Yes, Coal.

As evidence of global warming mounts, companies everywhere are going green. But not Peabody Energy Corp. Gregory H. Boyce, chief executive of the world's biggest coal company, is one of the few prominent opponents of climate regulation whose position hasn't softened one bit in recent months. Asked in March whether high levels of CO2 in the air are harmful, Boyce said: "I think the simple answer is we don't know." Just a few weeks earlier the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that evidence of global warming is "unequivocal" and predicted dramatic changes in the environment.

...

It might seem easy to dismiss Boyce as an industry booster with his head in the sand, someone doomed to learn the hard way the dangers of ignoring a strategic challenge of this magnitude. Except that he knows better than most the strong demand for coal around the world and the practical challenges that stand in the way of kicking the coal habit. Armed with this understanding, Boyce is making a controversial and contrarian bet that America's energy future is going to look a lot like the present.

Boyce also argues there is a clean option for coal, albeit one that's at least five years off. A new kind of coal-burning power plant would trap CO2 before it hits the atmosphere and bury it below ground. Along with the Energy Dept. and others, Peabody has agreed to invest $25 million in the $1 billion multiyear project, dubbed FutureGen.

While environmentalists may revile him, Boyce has plenty of fans on Wall Street, where 17 out of 20 analysts covering Peabody rate it a buy, according to Thomson First Call. The stock has had a choppy 12 months and closed at 48.59 a share on Apr. 24, well below its May, 2006, high of 76.29, but well above its May, 2001, adjusted IPO price of 8.68. Analysts blame a warm winter, not CO2 worries, and predict a rebound. "There's no doubt that over the next five years there will be some form of carbon legislation," says Mackenzie B. Davis, co-manager of the RS Global Natural Resources Fund, a major investor in Peabody. "There's also no doubt coal will be part of the energy solution."

Boyce is no fool, but he is dramatically underplaying the impact of coal. Even with advanced scrubbers, coal-fired generators are far dirtier than most people realize. What a badly-run nuke would release in radioactive material in a major accident, a coal-burning generator releases as a normal routine -- and the material has a much longer half-life, too (it's mainly uranium and thorium).

THIS is what we will be building instead of wind farms, solar arrays, and of course, those dreaded nukes.

--p!