Time for Environmentalists to Compromise on Coal

(MoneyWatch)  There have been plenty of articles lately on the uncomfortable predicament of the coal industry, but this one from MSNBC carries more detail than most:

In recent weeks, a group of rural Montana electric co-ops abandoned a partially built 250-megawatt coal plant, ending a four-year legal campaign by environmentalists to stop the project ...

Other plants are moving forward in Montana and at least a dozen other states, but the exodus from coal has hit every corner of the country. On Thursday, two more were shelved -- plants in Iowa and Nevada that would have generated enough power for 1.6 million homes. ... In 2007, the Department of Energy forecast 151 plants would be built in coming years. The agency's latest forecast put the figure at 95.

In short, environmentalists from organizations like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, as well as the less organized generational uprising against greenhouse gas-intensive power, have had great success with an all out, no-holds-barred assault on coal. If there were any points to be scored, the offense would be far ahead.

As a result, only the strongest, most determined companies are managing to go ahead with their coal projects. But even for companies with the grit to fight environmentalists, the anti-coal movement is becoming more of a threat to coal every day. New coal plants are an endangered species.

However, a few paragraphs on MSNBC provides what is, to me, the meat of the story (my emphasis):

The Sierra Club's Nilles acknowledged his group's anti-coal campaign has so far made little headway with existing coal plants. Those plants produce about 2 billion tons annually of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide -- roughly a third of the United States' total global warming emissions.

This is a huge problem for coal's opposition. New plants, with the latest emissions-lowering technology (imperfect as it is), are being blocked left and right. But the oldest, dirtiest plants burn on uninhibited. Legally, there's not much that can be done about them until a carbon cap or tax scheme is in place -- and even then, most plants will be able to continue profitable operation for years.

Of course, the anti-coal groups would like to find a political way to shut down existing plants. But for now, and the immediate future, there's no way renewables -- meaning solar and wind power -- can replace coal, especially for baseload electricity. Therefore, if no new coal plants are built, our existing ones will have to keep meeting our needs. Politicians will sense that the greater danger to their own kind of power is in creating the conditions for rolling blackouts, so they won't make new rules to get rid of existing coal.

The solution? I think a sensible idea is for environmentalists as a group to agree to a one in, one out policy for coal. That would mean environmental groups effectively giving amnesty to projects that aim to build the most technologically advanced plants possible -- if they're being built to replace an old, inefficient one of equavalent capacity. Utilities would thus have a new incentive to become cleaner, while environmentalists' efforts to keep the overall number of coal plants steady, and diminish it over time, could continue unabated.

At some point, an attitude barring all compromise becomes a liability. For coal's opposition, that point is at hand.