This guy has it together. Read the whole article at the link.
forbes.com
...Cline, 59, is one of the most archaic and unpopular specimens of capitalist: the coal tycoon. He doesn't mind people not liking him. He knows that coal fuels 40% of the world's power needs. "People deserve the cheapest energy they can get," he says. "Tell the poor in India and China that they don't deserve to have reliable, affordable electricity."
...Coal is far from dead. Global demand has dipped because of America's shale-gas boom and tighter regulations in China, yet it remains 50% above its level in 2000, at 7.2 billion tons per year, according to the International Energy Agency..
..Cline thinks the carbon crusade is folly: "I'm all for getting sulfur and mercury and nitrogen oxide out of the air--that's common sense," but ultimately, he posits, "global cooling" will be a bigger threat. "I believe in our children's lifetimes that they'll wish they had paid us per ton to put more CO2 in the air." (It's easy to forget that, as recently as the 1970s, fear of a coming ice age was part of the mainstream climate conversation.) Which is why he has no qualms about having built his $2 billion fortune with a series of all-in bets that have taken him from Appalachia to Illinois and now to Canada. He created one of America's biggest publicly traded coal miners, Foresight Energy, and two years ago sold most of his interest for nearly $1.4 billion. He's since sunk $150 million into a new mine in Nova Scotia that may produce 500 million tons of high-dollar metallurgical coal by midcentury. And he has permits to develop 1.7 billion tons more at the Vista mine in western Canada... |
