Brian Beutler and Kate Sheppard aren't thrilled with the prospect of using carbon sequestration at coal-fired power plants to help combat global warming. Says Sheppard: "Coal is the enemy of the human race." Beutler "dream[s] of a near future in which coal mines are abandoned, coal workers are employed in emerging green energy fields, [and] coal executives are feeding at the trough of welfare assistance." This War on Coal (Coal's War on Us?) seems a bit irrational, not to mention counterproductive. Obviously the end goal is to get all of our energy from renewable, zero-emissions sources, but that's not feasible in the short or even medium term. A full 86 percent of our energy comes from fossil fuels; almost all of the rest comes either from nuclear power (which has its own problems) or hydroelectric (which has pretty much hit its ceiling). So while we work on figuring out how to make much, much better windmills and photovoltaic cells, we'd better do something, and carbon sequestration seems like a pretty good stopgap solution to invest in, which is probably why Ed Markey and the Center for American Progress are on board. It would certainly be better if no one had to make their living by mining coal, but coal is an undesirable energy source mostly because without carbon sequestration it emits a ton of greenhouse gas. Hating coal qua coal, even if burning it emits no carbon dioxide, just strikes me as a strange fetish we can't afford. --Josh Patashnik