Coal as a fuel has one thing going for it: cost. It's cheap because it's still plentiful. That's why some 150 new coal-fired electrical plants now sit on drawing boards around the country, and many more around the world. In the short run, coal amounts to the cheapest means of generating electricity.

In the longer run, however, it will become the most expensive. That's the killer problem with coal. Yes, it will stay low-cost for a while. After that, if we continue putting burning coal's major byproduct, carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere, Mother Earth's hot flashes will increase in severity and frequency. And that spells big trouble for our home planet.

Anyone who thinks "liberal propaganda" when they hear that assertion needs to read Joseph Romm's just-out book, "Hell and High Water." It's well-documented, hard to refute and scary.

Superstorms on a scale of Katrina or worse. Suffocating hot spells in warmer climates that will last for months. Extinction of dozens of animal species. Inundation of coastal cities and low-lying countries. And more, making parts of the planet all but uninhabitable.

Many of us alive today won't live to see these changes. But our grandkids will.

"Why didn't you do anything?" they might well ask. Given current evidence from glacier melts, record-setting temperature curves, monster storms and shrinking habitat for animals in colder regions, we have met the environment's enemy, and it is us.

Even if climate change is only partly human-caused, the probable consequences are so catastrophic that we really must begin now. Even President Bush called global climate change a "serious challenge" in his State of the Union speech Tuesday. That's a first for him.

Which brings me to the proposed coal-fired plant in Elk Run Heights in our own backyard.

Let's admit that life amounts to trade-offs. We drive cars, slug down alcohol, puff cigarettes in spite of risks and expenses, addicted to short-term highs and benefits, ignoring long-term costs and dangers. On a larger scale, a coal-fired power plant offers the short-run addictive benefits of cheap power. Someone has to generate electricity somewhere, and pollutants go with that territory.

Yet new legislation looms that will begin to clamp down on carbon emissions. Warning signs have emerged globally that cry for both conservation and efficiency to at least stop increasing atmospheric carbon.

So any reasonable person should know that coal-fired plants will likely become an endangered species, sooner rather than later. In other words, the long run will arrive before we know it.

Then governments globally will either demand new technologies for cleaning up those plants or shut them down. Either way, coal as a cheap fuel will become obsolete. Incidentally, there's no such thing as "clean coal," though some coal plants are cleaner than others.

From what I understand, LS Power currently plans a standard, relatively low-cost, coal-fired plant in Black Hawk County. LS sells electricity to make money, after all. So we can count on LS to get the plant online within current guidelines, but nothing more.

Now, here's an idea. Because there's a good chance that our backyard LS Plant will barely go online before it has to be modified or shut down, why not become the first community in the nation to turn it down in favor of implementing energy efficiency and alternative energy sources?

A regionwide effort in this direction would garner national attention, especially if done in conjunction with refusing to accommodate an all-but-outmoded technology.

And why not encourage regional research efforts to support other technologies that don't contribute to global warming? Geothermal, a promising technology that's barely funded in this country, solar panels for houses and businesses, wind-generators, as well as more bike paths, and a push for conservation, both personally and institutionally all make long-term sense.

During the 1970s energy crunch, we engineered new ways of using energy more efficiently, both personally and institutionally. We could well become the first community to insist that coal-fired plants as now designed cannot be justified for the long run and to find viable alternatives.

Our grandchildren will sing our praises.