I occasionally sign one of those form letters battling some big issue. I rarely edit the form letter and usually forget about it about a nanosecond after I hit the “send” button. But recently the recipients of these form letters have been responding. Here’s an e-mail I received out of the blue today from a guy named Vic Svec shilling for Peabody Energy, the world’s biggest producer of coal:

We appreciate the concern expressed by your recent form letter, and we wish to clear up some obvious misinformation. Peabody strongly supports new clean coal electricity generation to ease energy prices, improve energy security and provide affordable electricity to help people live better and longer. Coal use for electricity generation has more than tripled since 1970, even as emissions have been reduced by more than one-third and this trend will continue. Approximately 135 new coal-fueled plants have been announced around the United States to bring about needed energy. New, clean coal-fueled generating plants will continue to provide environmental improvements, toward an ultimate goal of near-zero emissions from coal. That’s the vision of projects like FutureGen, which enjoys enormous public support and represents a coal-fueled power plant that would capture carbon dioxide emissions and produce hydrogen. Coal use will also grow through Btu Conversion technologies that turn coal into natural gas and transportation fuels.

Business will solve our environmental problems because it’ll be profitable and government should be smaller and less intrusive and we can’t expect it to fix every little problem and the president knows what he’s doing.

Then Vic invited me to learn more at http://CoalCanDoThat.com. So I did. Here’s what I learned:

Peabody Energy is the world’s largest provider of coal to fuel 21st Century energy solutions. St. Louis-based Peabody Energy fuels more than 10 percent of U.S. electricity and 3 percent of the world’s electricity. Peabody ships 7 tons of coal every second of every day — more than 250 million tons per year — to customers in 16 countries on six continents.

Peabody Energy’s mission is to be a world-wide supplier of low-cost energy, which contributes to economic prosperity and a better quality of life. A Fortune 500 company, Peabody is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the appropriate ticker symbol Btu.

In addition to leading the world in safe, low-cost, environmentally friendly coal mining and marketing, Peabody is a forceful advocate of greater coal use to provide 21st Century energy solutions. Here at CoalCanDoThat.com, you will see that current technologies can transform coal into clean electricity, natural gas, transportation fuels and hydrogen. We call it “Btu Conversion”.

In addition to providing leadership in advancing the dialogue and public support for this project, Peabody has 9.6 billion tons of coal reserves to apply to existing and emerging markets. Our coal reserves alone are equivalent of more than 240 trillion cubic feet of natural gas — or more than 10 years worth of current U.S. natural gas demand.

The main problem with the proponents of “clean coal” technology is that they focus almost solely on the conversion of coal into energy part of the equation, which, through technological innovation is not quite as nasty as it used to be. They ignore (because they really have to) the coal extraction process. Peabody is able to extract that seven tons of coal per second because the Bush administration has lifted, undermined (as it were) or blocked any environmental regulation that would have slowed the demountainification of Ohio, West Virginia and parts of Appalachia (see photo above), while “enshrining” the practice of mountaintop mining.

In 2006, Peabody, which has been shucking coal in America since 1926, had sales in excess of $5.2 billion over net income of $600 million — a 13 percent increase for the year. That’s a lot of mountaintops.

But the big coal growth market is China, and U.S. firms are rushing to get in on the coal rush. Firms like Fidelity Investments, OppenheimerFunds, Merrill Lynch, even the Teachers Retirement System of Texas.

The Big Energy machine gins up support for its politics and practices through pseudo-policy groups like the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute that pooh-pooh the idea that we’re facing catastrophic climate change — NOW.

They would have you believe that Al Gore is a quack and coal means jobs (it doesn’t as it’s largely automated) and we’ve got plenty of mountains anyway and business will solve our environmental problems because it’ll be profitable and government should be smaller and less intrusive and we can’t expect it to fix every little problem and the president knows what he’s doing and that’s why government scientists rewrite and redact scientific reports that don’t jibe with the Bush admin’s version of reality.

Yep, we’re all screwed.