Grist: U.S. coal companies claim that exporting low-grade coal from the Powder River Basin through ports in the Pacific Northwest to Asia is big business, a sure thing, easily worth the pollution and disruption the new coal infrastructure it would cause. Their case to investors, local communities, and state regulators is based on a simple premise: China`s demand for coal is steady and rising. And that does seem to be the conventional wisdom.
But there are reasons to think the premise is false, and that...