Every week brings new claims that clean, free, inexhaustible renewable energy will soon replace the “dirty” fuels that sustain our economy today. A healthy dose of reality is needed.

Over half of our electricity comes from coal. Gas and nuclear generate 36% of our electricity. Barely 1% comes from wind and solar. Coal-generated power typically costs less per kilowatt hour than alternatives – leaving families with more money for food, housing, transportation and healthcare.

By 2020, the United States will need 100,000 megawatts of new electricity, say EIA, industry and utility company analysts. Unreliable wind power simply cannot meet these demands.

Wind farms require subsidies and vast stretches of land. To meet New York City’s electricity needs alone would require blanketing the entire state of Connecticut with towering turbines, according to Rockefeller University Professor Jesse Ausubel. They kill raptors and other birds, and must be backed up by expensive coal or gas power plants that mostly sit idle – but kick in whenever the wind dies down, so factories, schools, offices and homes don’t shut down.

On a scale sufficient to meet the electricity needs of a modern society, wind power is just not sustainable.

For three decades, US demand for natural gas has outpaced production. In fact, gas prices have tripled since 1998, to $13 per thousand cubic feet today, and every $1 increase costs US consumers an additional $22 billion a year.

With Congress and states locking up more gas prospects every year, this trend is likely to continue – further driving up prices and forcing us to import increasing amounts of expensive liquefied natural gas, often from less than friendly nations.

We simply cannot afford to halt the construction of new coal-fired power plants, though some are trying to do exactly that.

Chesapeake Energy Corp. masterminded and bankrolled anti-coal initiatives in Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas. The scheme was intended to drive up the price of natural gas, and thus profits, by making coal less available and more expensive – with little regard for poor families.

As Kansas discovered after its environmental chief blocked a proposed new coal generator, coal projects also come with transmission lines to carry intermittent wind-generated electricity and more reliable coal-generated power. Wind farms typically do not. Now a dozen Kansas wind projects are also on hold.

Former Clinton Administration environment staffer Katy McGinty engineered the lockup of 7 billion tons of low sulfur Utah coal, worth $1 trillion. Current and proposed air and water quality rules would make it even more difficult and expensive to provide adequate coal-fired electricity. But the facts support more coal use, not less.

Power plants fueled by coal are far less polluting than 30 years ago. Just since 1998, their annual sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions have declined another 28% and 43% respectively, according to air quality expert Joel Schwartz – and new rules will eliminate most remaining emissions by 2015.

Coal-fired power plants are now the primary source of US mercury emissions only because the major sources (incinerating wastes and processing ores containing mercury) have been eliminated. US mercury emissions are now down 82% since the early 1980s; America accounts for only 2% of all global mercury emissions; 55% of global emissions come from volcanoes, oceans and forest fires; and two-thirds of mercury deposition in America comes from other countries, Schwartz adds. (Compact fluorescent lightbulbs or CFLs could become a more serious potential source of mercury than power plants.) Nevertheless, new EPA rules require a further 70% reduction in mercury from power plants by 2015.

That leaves carbon dioxide and catastrophic climate change as rationales for opposing coal. The latest UN-IPCC report again reduces projections for future temperature increases, polar melting and sea level rise. Moreover, increasing scientific evidence suggests only slight warming, climate change controlled primarily by solar cycles, and no storm, drought or sea level trends that exceed historical experience.

Yet, claims about imminent catastrophes have become increasingly hysterical, as a prelude to international climate negotiations in Bali. Continued...