They don’t discuss the subject too openly outside their own circles, but environmentalists make crystal clear on their Web sites that they want to stop all coal-based power production in this country. They claim coal can never be made clean, so it must be eliminated before it’s too late to do anything about global warming. Ted Nace puts it succinctly in a Grist Web site post: “The stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis.”

That may sound extreme, but Nace is merely expressing mainstream environmentalist thinking. The Sierra Club, for example, tracks the status of all coal-fired power plants in this country on its “Stop the Coal Rush” page. The environmentalists have been remarkably successful in preventing construction of new coal-fired power plants, with 126 having been stopped since 2001, according to the Sierra Club data. And Nace crows that not a single one was started in 2009. Even so, nearly half of all electricity used in the United States is generated by coal-fired power plants, down from a high of 57 percent in 1987.