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But Palmer was known to environmentalists long before he joined Peabody in 2001. During the 1990s, Palmer was a central figure in the coal industry's funding of climate sceptic scientists through a now-defunct organisation called the Greening Earth Society. As the-then president of a coal advocacy group called Western Fuel Association, which funded the Greening Earth Society, he claimed in a 1997 documentary that whenever you "burn fossil fuels, and you put CO2 in the air, you are doing God's work".
But Palmer says he is now focused on producing a "low-carbon coal future". As the new chairman of the London-based World Coal Association, and as a board member at FutureGen Alliance, a $1.3bn project in Illinois which aims to build a commercial CCS facility, Palmer recently told me in a wide-ranging interview that the global coal industry is working hard to respond to the "worldwide concern over carbon"...
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On whether the environmental/green energy sector is having an impact on reducing coal use:
"The
has traction in the US, but it is limited. I'm sitting in the heart of the country looking at plants around me in the downtown of an industrial city, St Louis, that was all built on coal. It's been as high as 56% of our electricity generation – last year was 46%. There is no question . There's a very simple reason why: the world has it and the world doesn't have oil. The Middle East is, in part, responsible for our $100 oil, but only a part. There are billions of people on earth who don't have any electricity at all and a couple billion people who don't have adequate access to electricity. The thing that people don't understand about energy is scale. You can make it with a windmill, or solar, or biomass, but you can't do without coal. It's just maths: more people living longer, living better. It's not complicated. There are limited ways to deliver that scale of energy. Renewables will have an increasing role, but it will remain on the margins next to coal, oil, gas and nuclear. All recorded human history says that. Coal has grown faster in the last 10 years than everything else combined even as there's been this massive push for 'anything but coal'. We sure don't act like we talk, let's put it that way."
On whether Peabody is planning on diversifying its investment portfolio to include other energy sources, such as renewables:
"We're 100% coal. More coal. Everywhere. All the time."
EDIT
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/mar/08/fred-palmer-peabody-coal-interview
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