Fred Palmer interview: ‘We’re 100 percent coal. More coal. Everywhere’

By Leo Hickman, www.guardian.co.uk
8 March 201 All eyes are on the oil industry as prices continue to rise. But some argue that the biggest energy story in coming years will not be our travails with oil, but the increasing importance of coal, particularly if the much-discussed ‘carbon capture and storage‘ (CCS) hurdles can be cleared. Fred Palmer is at the very heart of this story. Having worked in the US coal industry for more than 30 years, Palmer is the senior vice president of government relations at Peabody Energy, the world’s largest privately owned coal company which bases itself in St Louis, Missouri. Peabody – in large part through Palmer’s role as the company’s key lobbyist on Capitol Hill – is currently leading the energy sector’s attempts to neuter the Environmental Protection Agency‘s (EPA) efforts to curb carbon emissions in the US. This, in part, is the reason why Peabody is a notable target of attack for environmental groups in the US. But Palmer was known to environmentalists long before he joined Peabody in 2001. During the 1990s, Palmer was a central figure in the coal industry’s funding of climate sceptic scientists through a now-defunct organisation called the Greening Earth Society. As the-then president of a coal advocacy group called Western Fuel Association, which funded the Greening Earth Society, he claimed in a 1997 documentary that whenever you “burn fossil fuels, and you put CO2 in the air, you are doing God’s work”. But Palmer says he is now focused on producing a “low-carbon coal future”. As the new chairman of the London-based World Coal Association, and as a board member at FutureGen Alliance, a $1.3bn project in Illinois which aims to build a commercial CCS facility, Palmer recently told me in a wide-ranging interview that the global coal industry is working hard to respond to the “worldwide concern over carbon” … On whether Peabody is planning on diversifying its investment portfolio to include other energy sources, such as renewables: We’re 100% coal. More coal. Everywhere. All the time. …