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COPYRIGHT 2006 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
On a cold morning in February 2005, the school gym at Nashville Community High School in southern Illinois was jammed to the rafters with local residents and kids. More than 2,300 students had been dismissed from morning classes and bused in from around the region. Squads of cheerleaders cartwheeled across the gym floor, while the Nashville Hornets school band filled the gym with rousing songs. "Opportunity Returns," a banner proclaimed, quoting Illinois Governor Rod R. Blagojevich's campaign slogan to bring prosperity back to southern Illinois.
Opportunity was returning in the form of a $2 billion coal-fired power plant, which the world's largest coal company, Peabody Energy Corporation, of St. Louis, was about to build just a few miles southwest of Nashville. According to the governor, the plant, to be known as the Prairie State Energy Campus, would create 2,500 construction jobs, 450 permanent jobs, and $100 million or so a year in spin-off revenues. A phalanx of Peabody executives was on hand to show their support. Peabody's CEO at the time, Irl F. Engelhardt, stepped up to the microphone. The technology Prairie State will use is absolutely the best that has been put together on a coal plant," Engelhardt assured the crowd. "Prairie State is an important step forward in terms of the cleanliness of coal plants, and ultimately will help us get to near-zero emissions from coal plants."
A few local politicians chimed in, the band struck up the Hornets' fight song, and there was a lot of clapping and backslapping. Even the kids in the bleachers, most of them born long after the coal industry had died in the region, were on their feet cheering. "Coal is U.S.A.!" someone shouted. "Coal is U.S.A.!"
For Big Coal--the alliance of coal mining companies, utilities, railroads, and lobbying groups that make coal such a powerful political and economic force in America--the slogan "Opportunity Returns" is a rather coy understatement. "Boom" is more like it: the world is in the midst of an unprecedented love affair with coal. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the energy equivalent of some 1,350 thousand-megawatt coal-fired power plants will be built by 2030. Forty per cent of them will be in China, where coal is fueling a stunning economic transformation. India will add another 10 percent or so, and most of the remaining half will be added in the West. In the United States, the IEA predicts, about a third of the new electric-generating capacity built by 2025 will be coal-fired. Besides Peabody's Prairie State plant, more than 120 new coal plants are now in the works throughout the nation.
Many people think coal in the U.S. went the way of top hats and corsets. In fact, the U.S. depends more on coal today than ever before. Americans consume, on average, about twenty pounds of it a day. Roughly half the nation's electricity comes from coal--more than a billion tons of it a year. In fact, electric-power generation is one of the largest and most capital-intensive industries in the country, with revenues of more than $260 billion in...
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