Don’t miss Rolling Stone magazine Coal’s Toxic Sludge. Yes, “clean coal is a myth” and deadly. But it’s “barely regulated, and everywhere,” makes miners and their investors very rich, and it’s one of America’s biggest resources. Investors beware, Jeremy Grantham, one of America’s most respected money managers warns: “We’re Running Out of Resources” … oil is past its peak and “nothing can reverse the decline” … anthracite is “basically mined out” … bituminous has “probably also passed its peak.” So investors be warned: Grantham’s GMO firm manages $100 billion and he doesn’t like what he sees ahead for his fund’s investors. Back in 2007 Grantham was one of the few early warnings of the subprime meltdown. Listen to him, even though he can’t do much because Big Oil, Big Coal and their lobbyists have a power grip on Washington’s throat.  Some day we’ll have to invest differently. Jeff Goodell asks:

Can Obama crack down on America’s second-biggest river of industrial waste? Big coal has spent millions of dollars over the past year touting the virtues of what the industry calls ‘clean coal,’ but it’s no secret that coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel. When you burn it, coal releases monstrous quantities of deadly compounds and gases — and it all has to go somewhere. The worst of the waste — heavy metals like arsenic, cadmium and mercury, all of which are highly toxic — are concentrated in the ash that’s left over after coal is burned or in the dirty sludge that’s scrubbed from smokestacks. Each year, coal plants in the U.S. churn out nearly 140 million tons of coal ash — more than 900 pounds for every American — generating the country’s second-largest stream of industrial waste, surpassed only by mining. If you piled all the coal ash on a single football field, it would create a toxic mountain more than 20 miles high.

And we’re worried about China, who’s now ahead of us in alternative energy investing. And we refused to lead in signing strong accords in Kyoto and Copenhagen. Here’s Goodell’s take on our lack of leadership: “As the World Burns: How Big Oil and Big Coal mounted one of the most aggressive lobbying campaigns in history to block progress on global warming.”

The Senate’s failure to act helped torpedo the talks in Copenhagen, which not only failed to produce a binding treaty but postponed meaningful action until 2015. It has also left Obama with no clear strategy of how to move forward. “We’re staring into the abyss,” says Dan Dudek, chief economist for the Environmental Defense Fund. The best hope is that Democrats manage to pass a climate bill this spring, paving the way for an international treaty that will cut carbon pollution before rising sea levels engulf low-lying nations. “It’s really about getting people to focus on fact and not fiction,” says Sen. Kerry, who will play a key role in guiding legislation through the Senate. “As long as we can argue this on real science — not on phony numbers trumped up to scare people — I believe we can get to the place where people realize that curbing climate change will strengthen America’s economy and enhance our security.” …

The most disturbing achievement of the energy industry in the battle over global warming is its success in lowering our expectations. Climate activists like to talk about mobilizing all of America’s resources, as we did during World War II, to fight global warming. But as the failure to pass the climate bill reveals, it may be easier to defeat a dictator like Hitler than to overcome internal threats to our future as powerful as Big Coal and Big Oil. Despite the near-certainty of a climate catastrophe, there are no crowds marching in the streets to demand action, no prime-time speech from President Obama. Even the most aggressive climate legislation the Senate might pass — something on par with the House bill — will still fall tragically short of what climate scientists tell us needs to be done to avoid the looming chaos and destruction. In that sense — the only one that ultimately matters — the battle over global warming may already be over.

Unfortunately, this fear may emerge as reality given the short-term mindsets of Washington politicans, the coal/oil/energy industry and their lobbyists who appear on track to fulfilling the predictions made by evolutionary anthropologist Jared Diamond’s best-seller “Collapse” where he warns, a “society’s demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power.” Warning, America may have peaked in 2000.