"And then there's the energy we all take most for granted: electricity. Over the next twenty years just meeting projected demand will require between 1300 and 1900 new power plants. That averages to more than one new power plant per week for the next 20 years."
–Vice President Dick Cheney, May 2001

"Even coal has some limits. We have thousands of years, apparently, of coal. But what we don't seem to have anymore is even tens of years of high-quality, black, high-BTU, anthracite coal. And what we're substituting it now with, is brown coal that's so brown that it's low sulfur, because it doesn't have much coal in it. I'd encourage all of you to go to the New Yorker magazine in early October. They had two back-to-back articles called 'Coal Train I' and 'Coal Train II,' written by John McPhee – fabulously good articles. 'Coal Train II' traces you through the activities to fill up a unit-train that's a mile-and-a-half long, in the Powder River Basin. It's a hundred and twenty-four rail cars of nineteen thousand tons of coal. And then he rides the rails for five days to get to twenty miles outside of Macon [Georgia]. And then he describes beautifully this process of flipping the rail cars upside down and pneumatically sucking out the coal, and then the train starts back five days being empty. But nineteen thousand tons of brown coal creates eight hours of electricity. That's low quality coal."
–Matthew Simmons, Chairman of Simmons and Co. International energy investment bank, in lecture at the Miller Center for Public Affairs, University of Virginia, November 30, 2005.

"Plant Scherer burns nearly thirteen hundred coal trains a year – two thousand miles of coal cars, twelve million tons of the bedrock of Wyoming. It unloads, on average, three and a half coal trains a day. On a wall inside the plant are pictures of yellow finches, turkey vultures, and other local wildlife on Plant Scherer's twelve thousand acres of land. Asked why Plant Scherer needs twelve thousand acres (six miles by three miles), Woodson answered readily, 'Because we are thinking of expanding.'"
–John McPhee, "Coal Train II," New Yorker, October 10, 2005, p. 71

One of the sad implications of our energy predicament is arguably that as a civilization we will not long have the capacity to continue the sort of researches typified by the LRC and the HST. Isn't it time that this became a topic of discussion among scientists?