Capitol Power Plant Protests Heighten Danger for Coal

(MoneyWatch)  What do Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Power Plant, an E.ON plant in Kingsnorth, England and a mine in Konin, Poland have in common? Two things: The first is coal, and the second is a problem with protesters.

Coal companies and investors have long known lower profit margins lay ahead due to carbon regulations and more difficulty in getting plants permitted. But one wonders if they foresaw an increasingly effective public campaign against their resource.

The Capitol Power Plant is getting attention right now because a protest that hasn't even happened yet appears to have spurred politicians to action. Run by the Architect of the Capitol to heat nearby government buildings in D.C., the plant is aging and inefficient. Yet meddling by congressmen from coal-mining states has allegedly kept the plant burning a fuel mix including coal, rather than switching over to pure natural gas, which would be cleaner.

A relatively small protest scheduled for this Monday -- at one point it was touting 2,500 sign-ups -- was organized to try to force the plant to make the switch. Yet the two ranking senate Democrats, senators Pelosi and Reid, have pre-empted the protestors by asking the Architect to get rid of the coal.

The cynic in me says the senators, like any good politicians, are seeking to turn the attention to themselves. But in the process, they've also brought far more attention to the event itself, which is still set to happen, and will now get more national coverage when it does.

For some, it will be the first time seeing significant protests against coal. Yet there was already a rising tide of the same. At Kingsnorth, activists have been heckling plant owners and workers for months. At Drax, another English plant, they went much further, hijacking an entire coal train. The Polish protests were led by Greenpeace, an organization that exists to make a nuisance of itself and as such is sometimes ineffective, but seems to be increasingly zeroing in on coal. Other actions have happened in the United States, China and Australia.

Notably, many would be occurring even without groups like Greenpeace. There is a grassroots movement, and every day it bears more resemblance to the decades-ago backlash against nuclear power, one of the two major factors that led to the end of the use of that fuel in many countries (the other being higher cost).

Nuclear, it should be noted, never had a hundred percent of the people against it. What it did have was an extremely dedicated core of opposition -- people who did not want nuclear power, come hell or high water. Those outspoken opponents overwhelmed nuclear's supporters. Soon, that may be the case with coal.

The video made to entice people to the Capitol protest, made by Dr. James Hansen, a NASA scientist who has long been at the forefront of the climate debate, is below.