Plenty of renewable energy advocates were irritated over Washington DC’s failure to pass any meaningful energy legislation in 2010. But despite Congress’s inability to pass a cap-and-trade, carbon tax, or any initiative that can wean the United States off of imported fossil fuels, market forces may shift Americans towards cleaner energy sources this decade. Or does coal have a future?

Organizations like the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) have pushed banks to end financing of companies that carry out MTR. The results offer encouragment. Six large financial institutions developed guidelines that advocated a restriction on banking relationships with companies that use MTR mining practices.

Now it appears that spewing pollution into the air from coal powered plants could have been a better solution than what has affected the West Virginia communities of Prenter and Seth, in WV’s Boone County. Residents here have sued eight coal companies that they allege have polluted their water wells by the pumping of coal slurry into old abandoned underground mines.

In one of its clumsier PR campaigns, Greenpeace Argentina decided to place an ad in the Washington Post while Argentinean President Cristina Kirchner was in town. The advocacy group is livid over the plans to build a coal power plant in Patagonia.

Last week the World Bank voted to loan Eskom, a South African energy producer, US$3.75 billion to build a new coal power plant. Politicians in the UK and my beloved USA went ballistic. They howled that it was a tragedy for the World Bank to sabotage the work that has been done at ameliorating climate change.