MidAmerican deal on coal shows that it may be Bloomberg bucks, not Obama, that leads the fight against it
On Tuesday, MidAmerican Energy said it would stop burning coal at five generating units in Iowa by 2016. Its settlement with the Sierra Club affects about 673 MW of capacity.
The announcement came a day after President Barack Obama devoted a surprisingly big part of his inaugural speech to the subject of climate change. It is unknown just what his administration will actually do about it.
The MidAmerican settlement suggests that Mike Bloomberg’s money could speak louder than any eventual government policies. That may be only right in any number of people’s eyes; this is still capitalism.
Bloomberg Philanthropies, of course, has given the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign $50 million over four years, and the club has been making hay with it in its campaign to retire one-third of the US coal fleet by 2020. As the campaign’s website says, 129 retired, 393 to go.
For MidAmerican Energy, the Iowa utility, the Sierra Club settlement sort of fits with the company’s general posture. Although it isn’t a famously “liberal” utility leader, it generates well under half its power from coal and around 30% from wind power. It has the biggest wind power fleet, 2,300 MW, of any regulated utility....MORE
