The skinny on American coal over 2009

Keeping in touch with what is actually happening with energy – the shifts and battles – is tough. Both the general media and the business press have their distorting prisms, which mostly focus on the sensational rather than the evaluative. So it was refreshing to read this 2009 roundup, published in yesterday’s Huffington Post, from Bruce Nilles, one of the main campaigners against American dirty coal. It’s an encouraging picture: no coal plant construction starts over the year, for the first time in six years; 26 proposed coal plants defeated/abandoned; some massive projects indeed brought down.