Gregor MacDonald, of Gregor.us, left an outstanding comment on my previous post, What about the C in RE < C? which looked at how the cost of coal electricity generation has actually fallen during this past century of heavy coal use.

In this comment, he imagines coal as an “anti-hero” stuffed with “cheap BTUs.” It’s brilliant stuff, really. Check out this excerpt:

You’ll find that Coal, to the curious and open researcher, keeps inserting itself into just about every energy equation, both historically and contemporaneously. For a writer on a the trail of a narrative arc, coal is potentially both a protagonist and nemesis. An anti-hero, really. And it’s of course not for nothing nemesis coal appears again in such late iterations of advancement like google.org. I mean, you’d think one could simply ignore coal by now. That coal would have been rendered useless, dumb, mute. But no. There is anti-hero coal stuffed with cheap BTUs. And here is the cool thing about coal: coal causes so many problems, while being so useful, that it triggers the search for alternatives. And yet, coal has this really nasty habit of continually pricing–either in nominal “money” terms or in energy terms–just a notch or two below other fossil fuels.

Sigh.

Kind of mirrors what Steven Chu said a while back when he called coal his “worst nightmare.”

Image: flickr/untitledprojects