Beyond Coal: No Longer Cheap—So What Next?

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When it comes to power generation, coal isn’t cheap. Both power plant and fuel costs are up by nearly 300%, and projected to rise farther. Even before factoring in the risks of future greenhouse gas legislation.

And yet we continue to operate under the assumption that coal is cheap — to the extent that we have largely framed our greenhouse gas policy conversation as a tradeoff between environmental stewardship and the cheap coal fantasy.

On balance, this is good news, because it means that the perceived conflict at the heart of our current climate change debate is false.