King Coal v Cheaper, Cleaner Natural Gas.

If I really think about it, most days of my law practice have had something to do with fossil fuels: various forms of petroleum, natural gas or coal as fuels or pollutants–from making, using, transporting and storing them to cleaning them up. Thirty-three years ago, “constrained abundance” was the term used to describe coal reserves in the breakthrough book Energy Future edited by Robert Stobaugh and Daniel Yergin. And the writers of the chapter on coal, Mel Horwitch and Frank Schuller, would still be right about that: there is still lots and lots of the fossil fuel that helped transform America from a farming to an industrial nation. And there is still lots of it–of different grades and sulfur content–in the ground around the world. Generally, it’s been plentiful and cheap but dirty stuff. Yet not so cheap in recent years. Apart from the fact that environmental regulations on air pollution made it much more expensive to burn coal, the price of cleaner-burning natural gas and synthetic natural gas has trended down in recent years. Various environmentalist groups will applaud the decline of coal. But there are obviously tough regional economic problems–and that human cost we all forget about in wonky policy arguments on “energy security”–for later generations of coal-producing workers and their companies all over America. But I like the fact that coal is still an election issue, even if it’s a waning issue. msnbc.msn.com/id/49181234/ns/us_news-christian_science_monitor/?ocid=msnhp#.UGOEjbJmQp4