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Dear Friends of JWR:

Many people have requested that we share environmental news by email until
our web site is up and running. To meet that need, we'd like to start by
sharing this article which just appeared in Sunday's New York Times Magazine.
It is somewhat technical but extremely educational and takes a good, hard
look at the coal industry and fossil fuels and the environmental damage being
caused, including global warming. It discusses a number of different issues.
It's quite long and AOL doesn't like long emails, so I'm sending it in two
parts. We won't send items like this often, but we thought this would be of
particular interest since this reporter took a flight over West Virginia much
like we and Kevin flew over Eastern Kentucky on June 19 to see the
devastation in the mountains of his home state. Kevin is working on a letter
to the editor of the Magazine in response to this article and will be posting
his flight experience on www.BackstreetBoys.com. Thanks again for your
interest and your support. We welcome your feedback on this story and if you
don't like what you read, contact your public officials and urge them to
enforce environmental regulations and explore renewable, Earth-friendly
energy sources. Thanks again!

Vicki Hanna, Programming and Public Relations

July 22, 2001

How Coal Got Its Glow Back
By Jeff Goodell
The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/22/magazine/22COAL.html

Twenty-five miles south of Charleston, W. Va., the Appalachians look as they
must have a thousand years ago, rapturously folded against each other and
densely covered with trees. Down a gently sloping mountainside, a conveyor
belt angles toward four coal-storage bins that resemble farm silos. I exit
onto a roughly-paved road and arrive at a small white guardhouse near a
wooden sign: "Hobet 21."

It doesn't look like much. But in fact Hobet 21 covers some 12,000 acres,
almost all of it hidden from easy public view by foliage and mountain
ridges. Hobet 21 is owned by Arch Coal, America's second-largest coal
company, with mines throughout Appalachia and the West. Arch will dig up 100
million tons of coal this year, with six million coming from Hobet 21.

Almost half the coal Arch digs in Appalachia will be obtained by a
controversial method known as "mountaintop removal." Instead of digging the
coal out of the mountains in subterranean shafts, as miners used to do,
workers today -- with the help of enormous machines called draglines that
scoop 100 tons of earth and rock at a time -- simply remove the mountains
from the coal. It's hell on the owls and frogs and human beings who live in
the vicinity, but it's remarkably efficient.

At the guardhouse, I'm greeted by Larry Emerson, director of "environmental
performance" for Arch. A tall, rangy West Virginia native dressed in jeans
and a baseball hat, he is deliberate in his good cheer. "Welcome to our
world," Emerson says, pumping my hand firmly. "I hear you want to see where
electricity comes from."

I follow Emerson's Dodge 4 by 4 up the hill. Looking at the coal-handling
machinery -- the silos where coal is washed of impurities, the loading deck
where it is funneled into rail cars -- I feel as if I'm passing through a
theme-park exhibit about How Life Used to Be in America. All that's missing
are pickaxes and mules. I'm also amazed by the tall piles of glistening
rock; coal has a reputation as a filthy fuel, but in its raw state, it is
shiny and pitch-black lovely.

After a short drive, we suddenly come to a huge barren area -- a man-made
plateau. In the center of this wide-open field, near some rusty trailers, is
the mining office. It feels strangely exposed up here. West Virginia is all
hollows and shadows and twisting roads. This is a different planet.

We park near the office, and Emerson, who has supervised the planting of
trees on reclaimed mine land, hands me some P.R. material touting Arch's
environmental accomplishments. As we chat, a siren goes off in the distance.
A moment later, there's a boom. The earth trembles; a rabbit dashes across
the parking lot and dives under a bush. A plume of smoke rises on the
horizon.

"They're blasting," Emerson explains matter-of-factly.
Yes, they are -- blasting, booming and raking in the dough. Big Coal simply
can't believe its luck. For decades, the industry seemed to be dying. First,
the use of coal for industrial applications, like steel making, was phased
out. In the late 70's, utility companies began switching from coal to
natural gas, which was plentiful, more efficient and less of an
environmental nightmare. During the 80's and 90's, coal prices flattened.

Profits, if there were any, were measured in pennies per ton.
Then, unexpectedly, what one analyst has called "the Perfect Storm" hit the
energy industry. Rolling blackouts in California demonstrated that
electricity is not something that's created by wall outlets; the price of
natural gas shot up to $10 from $2.50 per million B.T.U.; and finally,
George W. Bush of Texas, the state that consumes more coal than any other in
the country, together with Dick Cheney, who hails from the largest
coal-producing state in the country, won the White House. Two months after
taking office, in an about-face that outraged environmentalists, President
Bush "clarified" his campaign pledge to begin regulating carbon-dioxide
emissions from power plants, effectively killing the international Kyoto
treaty on global warming. Considering that American coal-powered plants pump
2.3 billion tons of CO2 into the air each year -- twice as much as the
amount emitted by cars -- Bush's turnaround was a godsend. Then in May, the
administration announced an "energy plan" that openly championed coal,
positioning it as America's favored source of electricity generation for
decades to come.

To anyone who believes that technological progress moves in a straight line,
this has been a weird turn of events. It's as if a wormhole opened in the
cosmos and we slid back to the 1890's. Isn't this the dawn of the 21st
century? Why are we burning rocks to charge our cell phones?

Even before the boom, coal-fired power plants still produced more than 50
percent of the electricity in America. And Big Coal may soon have an even
bigger share: 22 new coal-powered plants have been proposed just in the last
few months. The price of coal has more than doubled since February, while
the stock prices of industry leaders like Arch and its rival, Peabody
Energy, have shot up like dot-coms of yore.

Flush with cash, Big Coal is now working to wipe some of the soot off its
image. The National Mining Association now refers to coal, which is formed
from ancient plant matter, as "buried sunshine." One industry-financed
advertisement features a kid standing on a pitcher's mound in a lighted
stadium, alongside the slogan "Electricity from coal: Essential, affordable,
increasingly clean." It's a deft phrase, considering that in 1999 American
coal-fired utilities filled the air with 18 million tons of sulfur dioxide
and nitrogen oxides, down from 21 million tons in 1990. (These chemicals are
the major cause of acid rain.)

Part of the new spin on coal is that it's the engine behind the New Economy.
Industry executives never tire of suggesting that, without coal, there would
be no semiconductors, no Internet. The first time I talked to Bill Raney,
the powerful president of the West Virginia Coal Association, he said,
apropos of nothing, "Did you know that it takes more energy to charge up a
Palm hand-held than it does to power a refrigerator for a month?" It turns
out Raney's claim is a bit exaggerated; a Palm is roughly 1,500 times less
power hungry than a refrigerator. But Big Coal loves such hyperbole. The
West Virginia Coal Association's Web site boldly claims that "the process of
ordering a book from Amazon.com uses about a half of a pound of coal" and
that computers and the Internet suck up 13 percent of the electricity in
America. In fact, the best studies suggest that such activities consume only
3 percent of the nation's electricity.

To Big Coal's critics, none of these exaggerations are surprising. "The coal
industry has been telling lies for years," says Carolyn Johnson, staff
director of the Citizens Coal Council, a Denver-based environmental group.
The notion that coal is "increasingly clean" galls David Hawkins, director
of the National Resources Defense Council's Climate Center. "When we tried
to pass acid-rain legislation, the industry fought us every step of the way
for 10 years," Hawkins says. "Now, because laws have forced sulfur-dioxide
emissions to go down, they're crowing about it as if it were their
accomplishment." To some, the sins of the coal industry go even deeper.
"Coal is not only wrecking my state," cries Larry Gibson, a local activist
whose ancestral home has been surrounded by mountaintop-mining operations.
"It is wrecking the planet! How much longer are we going to let them get
away with this?"

That's a question many people are asking, especially in the halls of
Congress. A series of political battles is shaping up that will outwardly be
about power-plant pollution and greenhouse gases but in fact will amount to
a kind of character test for the coal industry. The captains of Big Coal
want us to believe that they have turned over a new leaf, that the old days
of black lung and billowing smokestacks and the wanton destruction of nature
are over. They know that it's wise to adopt a public pose of reform. But now
that the Bush administration has placed them at the head of America's energy
table, Big Coal's top players are lobbying behind the scenes for a loosening
of regulations. The stakes in this largely ignored battle are enormous --
not only for the coal industry, but also for anyone who cares about clean
air and cheap electricity.

"This is an important moment for us," says Jack Gerard, president of the
National Mining Association, the industry's main lobbying group. "We have to
seize this opportunity and prove to the world that we are a new industry --
hopeful, open, technologically sophisticated and environmentally sensitive."
It's going to be a big job.

The National Mining Association Building squats on a prime piece of real
estate in Washington. The Mayflower Hotel, site of many power breakfasts and
illicit rendezvous, is right across the street. The building itself, a
square, solid box of black stone, was modeled on the headquarters of the
National Rifle Association and looks as if it could withstand nuclear
attack. Inside, it's freeze-framed from the 1970's, with harsh linoleum and
steel doors. Jack Gerard's office on the top floor has a few
power-politician touches, like a high-backed leather chair and a conference
room off to one side. A watercolor of a mining operation -- imagine coal
barges painted by a shopping-mall Monet -- hangs beside his desk. On the
windowsill sits a toy bulldozer and excavator. There is an industrial
frankness to it all; it's prespin America.

Gerard, 42, is friendly and warm, dressed in a crisply pressed white shirt
and expensive loafers. He has salt-and-pepper hair, a manly handshake and a
manner that's insistently familiar. "Excuse me, things have been a little
chaotic around here," he says, dashing out to hand some papers to his
assistant and double-check his afternoon schedule. A former high-powered
political consultant and legislative director for Senator James McClure,
Republican of Idaho, Gerard has been at this job for only about eight
months, and you get the feeling that this new coal-fired life is even hotter
than he expected. Earlier today, he had lunch with the owner of a Western
coal company who is thinking about the feasibility of building a new
coal-fired power plant in Wyoming and shipping the electricity to
California; this afternoon, he says he has been "keeping tabs" on what's
going on over in the House of Representatives, where the Commerce Committee
is beginning to mark up an energy bill.

But Gerard, despite all the nagging details of his day, really has his eye
on the big picture for the coal industry. And increasingly, that big picture
is focused on a tiny section of the Clean Air Act called New Source Review,
which prohibits power-plant operators from expanding old plants without also
installing state-of-the-art pollution-control devices. Later this summer,
the Bush administration may recommend the dismantling of New Source
Review -- and Big Coal is doing everything it can to make that happen.
While it sounds arcane, the conflict over New Source Review is in fact a
profound challenge to Big Coal. If the regulations are upheld and enforced,
satisfying their stringent environmental requirements could cost the
industry billions of dollars. More important, executives worry that if the
environmentalists win this battle, it could ultimately lead to a whole lot
less coal being burned in the United States. And less coal burned means less
coal mined, which is why Jack Gerard is concerned. "This is a big issue for
us," he says frankly.

The roots of this conflict go back more than 25 years. When the Clean Air
Act, which restricted pollution from smokestacks, was amended in 1977,
utilities fought for and won an exemption for their aging power plants. The
reasoning was that it would be too costly to upgrade older plants to meet
the Clean Air Act's strict requirements and that the plants would be retired
soon anyway. It didn't quite work that way. Many old belchers are still
running full tilt. In the mid-90's, regulators suspected that many
power-plant operators were evading the spirit, if not the letter, of the law
by installing new parts that prolonged the lives of the old power plants
while at the same time avoiding pollution upgrades. In 1999 and 2000, the
Department of Justice, on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency,
filed suit against a total of 51 power plants, charging them with violating
the Clean Air Act. A number of states, mostly in the Northeast, and various
environmental groups piled on with lawsuits of their own. Currently,
American Electric Power, one of the largest utilities in the country, is
being sued not only by the E.P.A., but also by eight states and 17
environmental groups.

"The effect of all this litigation," Gerard tells me, "was to chill the
industry. No one wanted to upgrade or maintain their power plants because
they were afraid of getting sued."

Meanwhile, Big Coal's aging power plants have cranked up the juice.
Electricity from old, heavily-polluting coal-fired power plants rose 15.8
percent between 1992 and 1998, an increase big enough to power California
for a year. In a single year, 1998, these old machines dumped 755,000 tons
of nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere -- the same amount of smog-forming
pollution emitted by 36 million cars. (Overall, the industry has increased
its CO2 output by 20 percent since 1990.)

Although the details are complex, the larger issue at stake in the battle
over New Source Review is straightforward: how long should these old power
plants be allowed to continue spewing pollution with impunity? As some
observers see it, the industry wants to delay reform indefinitely.
"These utilities have a deliberate strategy in place," one industry
consultant explains. "They're just going to keep running the plants as hard
as they can while fighting the lawsuits in court. They know that eventually
they will lose, but the longer they can drag it out, the more money they can
make."

Last summer, Big Coal got a break from an unexpected front: California, a
state that has long been anticoal. After the state's rolling blackouts hit,
suddenly everyone was talking about power plants -- not how filthy they are
but why there aren't more of them. Although California's troubles were in
fact caused more by half-baked deregulation than any shortage of generating
capacity (one recent study points out that the many blackouts occurred when
demand was only 75 percent of available supply), it's much easier to cry for
more power than it is to unravel the complex tangle of California energy
politics. The White House's trumpeting of the energy crisis helped to feed
the myth that America desperately needs additional sources of energy, clean
or no.

To take advantage of this fortuitous turn of events, the National Coal
Council, a federal advisory committee that critics claim is stacked with
coal-industry representatives, cranked out a "white paper" about how to
squeeze even more electricity out of those old power plants. Among the
conclusions the report reached was that the E.P.A. lawsuits had a "direct
and chilling effect" on the operation of the industry's coal-fired power
plants.

The Coal Council's paper was delivered to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham,
who passed it to Vice-President Dick Cheney's energy task force. In May,
when the White House unveiled its National Energy Policy, it was clear that
Big Coal's message had been heard. In the plan, President Bush directed the
E.P.A. and the Department of Energy to conduct a 90-day "review" of the
impact of Clean Air Act regulations on utility-generation capacity. The
report is due Aug. 17.

More important, Bush asked the Department of Justice to "review" all those
pending E.P.A. lawsuits against coal-fired power plants. (A report is
expected this fall.) To environmentalists, it was a disturbing example of
politics interfering with law enforcement, as well as a blatant attack on
the Clean Air Act. To Big Coal, it was sweet relief.

Gerard himself is definitely on the sweet-relief side. "I think the solution
here is fairly simple," he tells me, leaning forward in his chair. "We need
to go back to a pre-Clinton-administration interpretation of the law." As
Gerard explains it, the Clinton administration in the mid-90's began
wielding New Source Review as an ax against the coal industry. But Clinton
wasn't actually the first to do so. The initial crackdown on these
power-plant modifications came in 1988, under the Reagan administration.
The question now is what changes, if any, the E.P.A. will recommend in the
regulations on Aug. 17. Will the agency suggest that today's energy "crisis"
can be resolved only by giving Big Coal some major concessions?
Possibly. But Big Coal's dreams of turning back the clock to the
"pre-Clinton" era were dealt a blow by the recent defection of Senator Jim
Jeffords from the Republican Party. Jeffords's decision to become an
independent not only threw the Senate to the Democrats but also gave him the
chairmanship of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. This
powerful position allows Jeffords, an ardent supporter of clean-air
regulation, to effectively block any legislation that makes life easier for
dirty-power-plant operators.

One measure of how much Jeffords's move has shifted the dynamic is that a
mere two weeks after his announcement, eight power companies involved in New
Source Review litigation announced that they had formed a lobbying group,
the National Electric Reliability Coordinating Council. The group hired
Haley Barbour, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and
a high-profile lobbyist, to help apply pressure in all the right places --
in particular, one assumes, the office of Christie Whitman, administrator of
the Environmental Protection Agency.

As governor of New Jersey, Whitman was outspoken in her support of lawsuits
to limit power-plant pollution; to move away from that position now won't be
easy for her. "This review is not a back-door attempt to weaken Clean Air
legislation," she says. "It's a serious attempt to clarify a very complex
regulation." Whitman also points out that, while the review process is going
on, the Department of Justice has not stopped enforcing the law. "We just
reached a $20 million settlement with a major refinery, so we're moving
ahead."

Although New Source Review is obviously a regulatory and political battle,
it's also, in some dimension, a moral battle. Many clean-air advocates
believe that the utilities have been getting away with this, and other
flagrant abuses of the law, for too long. "If the administration rolls over
on this, it will be a shortsighted, callous move and another example of the
president's caving in to his friends in the energy industry," says Armand
Cohen, executive director of the Clean Air Task Force, a Boston-based group.
"We're ready to kick up a firestorm."

So can Big Coal be made to behave? Gerard, for his part, has been meeting
privately with environmental leaders, trying to convince them that the
industry is not the Big Bad Wolf. But he tells me that a little gratitude
for what Big Coal has accomplished is in order. "What we're doing is good
for the country," says Gerard. "Without coal, America wouldn't be what it is
today."

Getting clearance to visit Hobet 21 required considerable negotiation. I
knew it was Arch's showoff mine, the place where they hold open houses for the
local community. But when I called Deck Slone, a spokesman for Arch, to ask
for a tour, he politely declined, saying, "We're just too busy right now."
Eventually Slone relented and set up a visit -- but only to the reclaimed
area, not the active mining site.

My visit to see reclaimed land is led by Larry Emerson, the "environmental
performance" official, and John McDaniel, an engineer. McDaniel is tall and
lanky and spookily resembles Abe Lincoln, with high cheekbones and a sly
smile. McDaniel is a third-generation miner and proud of it.

After a few minutes of chat at Hobet 21's bare-bones mining office,
McDaniel, Emerson and I pile into McDaniel's truck. McDaniel pops a Black
Sabbath disc out of the CD player so we can roll in pastoral silence across
the open grassy fields. Parts of the land here are scrubby, like a reclaimed
dump; older sections are more lush. We turn down a small dirt road, past
small stands of black alder and Virginia pine, into a grove of young black
locust trees. (Mining companies like locust trees because they suck up
nitrogen, one of the problem gases released by coal-fueled power plants.)
The grass here is waist high; wildflowers are blooming. A meadowlark sings
from above. It's so pleasant, and so well constructed, that I half expect an
animatronic deer to poke its head out of the woods.

"This was all reclaimed about seven years ago," Emerson explains. "As you
can see, the wildlife is beginning to return. In some cases, the habitat is
actually improved for many species." Emerson tells me that his wife is a
horticulturist and that he lives on four acres of land with a pond stocked
with catfish. "I won't tell you that we're improving on what God created,"
Emerson says. "But by opening more land, we're creating the building blocks
for a growing ecosystem. We're also making this hilly terrain more suitable
for commercial development."

We park on a high point overlooking a pond, and I'm getting comfortable with
the view, starting to enjoy it. That's when I'm jarred by the sight, just
over the ridge, of several 240-ton dump trucks grinding over the raw, dusty
hills. Goodbye, eco-paradise.

How Coal Got Its Glow Back
PART 2 -- CONTINUED FROM FIRST EMAIL

"Everyone thinks we just blow these mountains up," McDaniel says, pulling on
a cigarette and leaning against the hood of his Blazer. "But that's not
really the way it works at all. It's really quite an elaborate process."
Later, back in the mining office, McDaniel will show me intricate diagrams
of the mining operation -- the way mountains are dismantled not in one blast
but methodically, layer by layer. "What I like about this work," says
McDaniel, "is the orchestration of all the different parts, from the permits
to the rock trucks. When it all goes right, it's almost like music." And if
a few mountains are lost along the way? "There are lots of mountains around
here," McDaniel responds, sweeping his hand grandly across the horizon.
Of course, many nature lovers feel a bit more protective toward those peaks.
Mountaintop-removal mining presents a thorny problem for a publicly held
company like Arch. Stockholders demand growth and profit, but at what cost?
Unlike subtler forms of environmental destruction, the results of
mountaintop-removal mining are there for the whole world to see. Unless, of
course, you don't let them into your mine.

"We certainly feel that the effects of mountaintop mining are sometimes
exaggerated," says Steven Leer, president and C.E.O. of Arch. In fact, Leer
says, only about one-half of 1 percent of West Virginia has been
mountaintop-mined. (Mountaintop-removal mining is also practiced in Kentucky
and other Appalachian states, but to a lesser degree.) Local
environmentalists like Cindy Rank of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy
says that the one-half of 1 percent figure may be true if you look at the
entire state. But almost all of the mining goes on in the hilly southern
counties, where Rank estimates that close to one-fifth of the land has been
blasted away.

Whatever the actual scale of these operations may be, there's no question
that the environmental damage wrought on the region has been enormous. Some
470 miles of West Virginia's streams have been filled in by mountaintop
mining. Thousands of families have been displaced; streams and rivers have
been polluted by acid runoff. Wherever there is mining, coal companies build
lakes to hold the water used to wash the coal -- the water in these lakes,
called slurry ponds, is a gross, metallic mix of coal dust, mercury, sulfur,
arsenic and other chemicals. In 1972, in Buffalo Creek, Ky., a poorly built
dam at a slurry pond broke, sending a wall of water over the town below,
killing 125 people. Last October, at a mine in Inez, Ky., operated by Massey
Energy, another dam broke, dumping 250 million gallons of coal slurry into
rivers and streams and killing wildlife as far as 60 miles away. Two weeks
ago, unusually high runoff from mountaintop-removal mines contributed to the
flooding that devastated West Virginia.

Joan Mulhern, a lawyer with the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund in
Washington, argues that mountaintop-removal mining is "a blatant violation
of the Clean Water Act." In 1999, United States District Judge Charles H.
Haden 2nd, a Republican, agreed. Responding to a lawsuit brought by
environmentalists and local residents to halt a 3,100-acre expansion of
Arch's Dal-Tex mine, Judge Haden's ruling essentially stopped the state from
issuing new mountaintop-removal mining permits and shut down Dal-Tex. It was
a stunning blow for Arch: the company laid off or transferred nearly 400
people and took a $365 million write-down. Within weeks of the ruling,
Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, long a vigorous supporter of Big Coal,
tried to overturn the ruling with legislation -- only to be opposed by the
Clinton administration. In April, however, the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court
reversed Haden's decision. It is a complex ruling, but essentially the court
decided that the Clean Water Act is superseded in West Virginia by state
laws that permit the destruction of streams during mining operations. Arch
is now applying for the permits to reopen Dal-Tex, while activists are
pushing for the case to be reheard by the Appeals Court.

Whatever the legality of mountaintop-removal mining, the idea that Arch can
somehow keep its operations out of the public eye is naive. The day before I
visited Hobet 21, I arranged an aerial tour of the mines with Susan Lapis, a
local pilot. On a sultry summer morning, we took off from the Charleston
airport in her Cessna 182, climbing through the gray-yellow haze that often
makes the air around Charleston look like L.A. on a bad day.

At about 3,000 feet, the mountains looked like a soft, undulating green
carpet below. About 15 minutes outside of the city, rips in that carpet
suddenly appeared -- wide-open bald spots where raw earth was exposed. I
could see the deep cuts in the earth and the thick horizontal seams of raw
coal. As we headed farther into Big Coal country, the rips and bald spots in
the land became larger and more frequent. Some mountains looked as if they
had been sliced off with a machete. Others were so deeply mined they looked
like miniature Grand Canyons.

We flew south for more than an hour, passing dozens of mines, some active,
some inactive, all naked and raw. Sandwiched between the bright pink flesh
of exposed mountains were enormous slurry ponds of metallic green and gold.
Whenever I looked out at the horizon, there were more mines in the distance.
Eventually, we circled down to 500 feet above Hobet 21. It was enormous and
busy. Giant dump trucks filled with rock scurried around, while huge
scooping machines ripped out tons of earth. In Silicon Valley, it is
commonplace to talk about technology empowering individuals. Here was
empowerment on a colossal scale -- one man with the right machine could
destroy a mountain.

When Bill Raney, the head of the West Virginia Coal Association, walks into
a bar in Charleston on a recent evening, the whole place lights up: "Hey,
Bill!" Raney is slim and folksy, with a thick drawl that clashes with his
well-tailored blue suit. He has a kind word or a joke for everyone in the
room. When the waitress arrives with his Coors Light, she stares at him and
says, "You look familiar." Raney winks and drawls, "A face this ugly is
kinda hard to forget, ain't it?"

The day before, a front-page story had appeared in The Wall Street Journal
detailing how Raney, along with a local coal baron, James H. Harless, had
helped engineer President Bush's electoral victory in West Virginia last
November. The five electoral votes of this longtime Democratic state gave
Bush the slim edge he needed to win the presidency. The piece chronicled the
grass-roots organizing Raney did on Bush's behalf, as well as noting that,
nationwide, Big Coal donated $3.8 million for the 2000 election, tripling
its 1996 contributions. Almost all of that money went to Republicans.
Over his beer, Raney says he was "embarrassed" by the story and chuckles at
the idea that he was the kingmaker in the election. "I just fought for what
I believe in, like I always do," he says. Still, when Raney talks about last
year's election, there's a mix of triumph and relief in his eyes. "We really
worked hard on that," Raney says, speaking for his association, which
includes 78 mining-related companies in West Virginia. "We had a lot at
stake."

Indeed they did. In West Virginia, the immediate fear was that a Gore
administration would find a way to crack down on mountaintop-removal mining.
But more broadly, it was the looming threat of carbon-dioxide regulations
that fired up Big Coal to support Bush. Gore, after all, had written an
entire book about the danger of global warming. And there's nothing that
freezes the heart of a coal-company executive like frank talk about
greenhouse gases. Cars and coal-fired power plants are the two biggest
emitters of carbon dioxide and other gases that are warming the climate. But
when the carbon whip comes down, everyone knows whom they'll go after first.
"We're walking around with a big bull's-eye on our foreheads," jokes James
Rogers, C.E.O. of Cinergy, a Midwestern coal-burning utility.

Twenty miles west of Charleston is the John Amos power plant. Squatting on
the banks of the Kanawha River, this plant run by American Electric Power
consumes up to 26,000 tons of coal a day and generates enough electricity to
light two million homes. Inside the plant, a huge iron-encased turbine spins
in a huge, echoing room as big as a church. Ninety-six pipes feed pulverized
coal dust into a burner at tremendous pressure, where it heats the water
that produces steam that spins the turbine that produces the electricity.
Flowing from the tops of the plant's three enormous cooling towers is what
appears to be a cloud of pollution. It is not. It's just water vapor; the
E.P.A. strictly regulates visible emissions. But though all but
imperceptible, plenty of pollution spews daily from the plant's three
slender 900-foot smokestacks. The largest polluter in West Virginia, John
Amos in 1999 dumped 98,000 tons of sulfur dioxide; 47,500 tons of nitrogen
oxides; and 838 pounds of mercury, just a tiny amount of which in a lake
make the fish unfit for human consumption.

But the real whopper is the amount of carbon dioxide: 16 million tons of it.
This is the Achilles' heel of Big Coal. With respect to the pollutants that
cause smog and acid rain, modern coal-powered plants can compare favorably
with gas-powered plants. But even the newest, most efficient conventional
coal plant emits three times as much carbon dioxide as a natural gas plant.
And old, less efficient coal plants burn considerably more CO2.
For a utility executive, building a new power plant means thinking 60 years
down the road -- the life expectancy of a new plant. It's also a
billion-dollar investment that could be rendered obsolete virtually
overnight by a global crackdown on carbon dioxide. As Manoj Guha, a
technology manager at American Electric, puts it, "You'd have to be crazy to
build a conventional coal-fired power plant right now."

There are ways to deal with carbon dioxide from power plants. The easiest
remedy is creating "carbon sinks" -- that is, the planting of thousands of
trees, which suck up carbon dioxide. And although it's great P.R. for the
power companies (there are so many parrot and jungle scenes in American
Electric's corporate literature that you'd think the company was
headquartered on the banks of the Amazon, not in Ohio), carbon sinks have a
limited usefulness. In 1999, the United States released about 5.5 billion
tons of carbon dioxide from all sources; you'd need a forest the size of
Jupiter to absorb all that.

Another option is more high-tech. Instead of burning coal, a chemical
process can be used that transforms it into a gas, which can then be burned.
Removing much of the carbon dioxide during this process is a fairly simple
job. The downside of gasification, as this process is called, is that it is
relatively untested for power generation; there are only two such plants up
and running in the U.S. Of greater concern to Big Coal, however, is the fact
that they're rather more expensive to build than conventional coal plants.
And it still leaves you with the problem of what to do with the carbon
dioxide once you remove it from the coal. On July 13, the Bush
administration took a small step forward by announcing several partnerships
with private industry to develop new technologies for "carbon
sequestration" -- capturing and storing emissions underground or at the
bottom of the ocean.

For years, executives in the power industry had a "hear no evil, see no
evil" response to any mention of carbon dioxide. Recently, that has started
to change. Progressive leaders in the industry, like Jim Rogers at Cinergy,
were tiring of what he calls "environmental policy through litigation." Last
year, Rogers and others began back-room talks with various leaders in the
environmental movement to see if a long-range regulatory agreement could be
hammered out. In exchange for some kind of broad relief from the current
death-by-a-thousand-blows style of environmental regulation, Rogers and
others were willing to cross the Rubicon and acknowledge that carbon-dioxide
emissions need to drop significantly.

But the powerful hard-line faction of Big Coal, which is led by the Southern
Company, the country's biggest utility, and Peabody Energy, the world's
biggest coal-mining company, would rather go back to rubbing sticks together
than embrace pollution controls. The hard-liners want to keep pumping the
plants as they have done for decades; to them, caving in on carbon dioxide
is unthinkable.

"These guys aren't dumb," says Dale Simbeck, an executive at SFA Pacific, an
energy consulting firm. "In a carbon-constrained world, coal is a clear
loser." Of course, even hard-liners publicly pledge their commitment to
various clean-coal technologies. But they always insist that such changes
can only be made decades down the road, Simbeck says. "The auto industry
uses the same strategy," he explains. "It's always heralding some
magnificent breakthrough just over the horizon, while it fights like hell to
keep doing business as usual in the here and now."

No one embodies this no-compromise philosophy better than Irl Engelhardt,
chairman and C.E.O. of Peabody Energy, which is headquartered in St. Louis.
Engelhardt, 54, keeps a low public profile. (He refused to be interviewed
for this story.) He is a brilliant financial strategist, having successfully
guided Peabody through a heavily leveraged buyout a few years ago. Last
year, he set his sights on taking Peabody public. This meant, among other
things, that as the 2000 election took shape, Engelhardt had a huge stake in
ensuring that the future of Big Coal looked rosy. And nothing clouds that
picture faster than talk about global climate change.

Although Peabody's corporate literature is full of talk about the company's
environmental sensitivity, behind closed doors, Engelhardt himself is
decidedly less progressive. In March, during a meeting on Capitol Hill with
Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a strong advocate of tougher regulations
on power-plant emissions, Engelhardt told the senator, according to several
attendees: "Climate change is just an environmentalist's P.R. tool. There's
no science to back that up." (Through a spokesman, Engelhardt said he
"believes that current climate-change science is uncertain.") Of particular
concern to Engelhardt was the Kyoto treaty, which would have capped carbon
dioxide emissions at pre-1990 levels. During a speech last July at the
Edison Electric Institute, the utility industry's lobbying association,
Engelhardt used classic Big Coal scare tactics, telling the group that
adhering to the Kyoto treaty would require the country to build 68 new
nuclear power plants by 2020 and boost wind power by 22 times today's
output. And the coal industry, Engelhardt implied, would be out of business.
To shape the debate, Engelhardt was not afraid to put his money where his
mouth was. Peabody donated $250,000 to the Republican National Committee
during 1999-2000, and Engelhardt himself gave $100,000 to the Bush-Cheney
inaugural fund. During the same cycle, Steve Chancellor, the head of Black
Beauty Coal, an affiliate that is 82 percent owned by Peabody, gave $344,750
to Republicans. If you add it all up, Peabody, Engelhardt and Engelhardt's
business associates donated close to $700,000 to President Bush and his
party last year.

Not surprisingly, Bush named Engelhardt to the transition advisory team for
the E.P.A.; for a while, his name was in the running for secretary of
energy, a position that eventually went to former Senator Spencer Abraham of
Michigan. Another Peabody executive, John Wootten, served on the transition
advisory team for energy. In mid-March, when Bush abandoned his support of
carbon-dioxide regulations, many saw Engelhardt's fingerprints all over the
decision: "I think you could say Engelhardt got what he paid for," says the
C.E.O. of a major power company.

But that doesn't mean that Big Coal has won the battle. "The pressures to do
something about CO2 emissions are just enormous," says Kris Krause, a senior
executive at Wisconsin Energy. And they are about to get bigger. Senator
Jeffords has made clear to staff members that he will make power-plant
emissions legislation his No. 1 priority this fall. There is a rising sense
that, whatever the complexities of the science of climate change may be,
America can no longer afford to stick its head in the sand. Even Senator
Byrd and Senator John McCain, neither of whom is any great friend of the
environmental movement, have suggested that it is time to start thinking
about a carbon-capped future. It will be a long, hard fight.

By all accounts, the White House was caught off-guard by the uproar that
followed the president's reversal on carbon dioxide. (The morning of the
announcement, one senior administration official crowed to Rusty Matthews,
an energy lobbyist, that it would be "a one-day story.") But contrary to
what you might guess from the White House's flat-footedness on this, there
are senior staff members in the administration who take climate change
seriously and believe we cannot wait another four years to do something
about it. However, these same staff members are trapped in a box. Any
movement by Bush toward a carbon-capped world will anger Big Coal supporters
in states like Ohio, West Virginia and Illinois, all of which were crucial
to his election victory; any movement away from carbon caps will further
underscore the growing public perception that the president is out of touch
on environmental issues and could cause trouble for Republicans in next
year's midterm elections.

So could New Source Review. Christie Whitman has been adamant that this be
seen as an open process and points out that, in addition to four public
hearings around the country, her staff has consulted with more than 96
organizations. But all this public exposure has only heightened awareness of
the issue, turning it into a litmus test of the administration's
environmental commitment and continuing the debate over whether Bush is in
the energy industry's pocket.

However it plays out, there has already been one clear winner in the
fossil-fuel sweepstakes: Irl Engelhardt and Peabody Energy. In mid-February,
while Bush's energy task force was still formulating its policy, Peabody
Energy filed with the S.E.C. for an initial public stock offering. On May
22, just five days after the energy plan was released, Peabody went public.
Tech stocks were tanking, but Peabody defied gravity, opening at $28 and
shooting up to close at the end of the day at $36. Engelhardt's personal
stake of more than 633,000 shares was worth more than $23 million.
After leaving Hobet 21, hoping to get a look at the operation from a
different perspective, I take a drive into the mountains that surround the
mine. I was told that there is a spot between the towns of Big Muddy and
Ugly where you can get a close look at the pit. I drive an hour or so,
passing disassembled 4 by 4's up on jacks, rusting mobile homes and small
but beautifully tended gardens flowering in rare patches of sunlight. At one
point, hopelessly lost, I stop to talk to a pimply kid on a muddy Honda ATV
parked beside the road. I ask him if he knows where I can get a look at
Arch's big mine. Without saying a word, he nods, starts his ATV and heads up
the road. I follow. He turns onto a dirt road, and we come to a small
clearing -- there, a thousand yards or so in the distance, is the open pit.
There are trails down the hill, and I can hear the buzz of other ATV's along
with the grinding of the dragline and the high-pitched whine of dump trucks
struggling up a grade.

"You ride down there?" I ask the boy, whose name was Robby.
"Yeah. It's killer."
"They don't chase you off?"
"Nah. They know we're just havin' fun."
I nod. "Anyone in your family work there?"
"I wish," he says. "Good money. These guys, they all have new boats."
I thank Robby for showing me the spot; he slips on his helmet and rides off
down the hill. A few minutes later, I see him on a far hill in the mine, not
far from where Emerson and McDaniel and I stood earlier, tearing up and down
the hillside with several friends. Add kids with ATV's to the list of
creatures who thrive in reclaimed mine habitat.

Earlier, McDaniel scoffed at me when I asked if coal companies deliberately
site mines in places that are hidden from public view -- we mine where the
coal is," he said. Still, there is something secretive about all this and
about energy production in general. We'd all like to imagine that the wired
world just spins on its own, that electricity comes out of the wall, that
none of this aging and immense and complex machinery -- the dump trucks and
railroad cars and power plants -- really exists. And because we have such
great faith in technology, we want to believe that coal can somehow be made
perfectly clean, that nuclear power can be made completely safe, that wind
farms can stop mutilating birds, that gas can be extracted from the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge in, as the White House often puts it, "an
environmentally sound manner." But producing energy is simply not a zero-sum
game -- at least, not yet. There is always risk and loss; there are always
unintended consequences. Indeed, this is why mountaintop-removal mining is
so controversial. Greenhouse gases are tough to see, but you can't miss a
carved-up mountain: it makes explicit the trade-off we make to keep our
wired world humming. It is the energy equivalent of witnessing the slaughter
of the cow that goes into our hamburger.

Despite its many troubling aspects, coal is likely to remain a big part of
the energy mix in America for a long time to come. Hydrogen-powered fuel
cells are fun to dream about, but in the real world, coal's plentiful
reserves, as well as the entrenched infrastructure -- mines, railroads,
power plants -- mean we aren't going to get off this black rock anytime
soon. The question is, how much damage must be done to the mountains, to the
air, to the water, to our lungs, to the planet? Big Coal can either join Big
Tobacco on the periphery of American life, an isolated empire of denial and
abuse, or it can start listening to its own polished rhetoric about its
cleaning up its act. Granted, embracing pollution controls or mining coal in
ecologically sensitive ways is not cheap. But it all depends on how you
calculate the price.

For now, the boom continues. I stand on the hilltop for a few more minutes
and watch the dragline. The big scooper tears into the earth, lifts 100 tons
of dirt away and dumps it in another pile, with no more apparent effort than
it takes my 3-year-old son to shovel sand on the beach. The dragline works
with an incessant rhythm -- digging, lifting, dumping, digging, lifting,
dumping -- and it is going on here at Hobet 21, and at mines all over the
country, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. As McDaniel explained to me a
few hours earlier, "It costs too much to stop."