Doing their usual bit to assist the global-warming industry, today’s Greenwire has a sob story about how natural gas is finally getting together to push back against that mean old, well-organized, financially monstrous and utility-backed coal. This repeats a refrain gas-industry types have of late increasingly been uttering among themselves.

Please. At a meeting with the Union of Concerned Scientists and other greens to figure out how to hatch Kyoto, I sat next to some industry heavies — who shall for now, both at the individual member company and trade association level, go nameless – when subbing for Kenny Boy on maybe day two of my approximately three weeks of glory with Enron in 1997. In short, they helped invent this whole thing to begin with. It’s a little late – as well as unseemly – to cry about the other guy hitting back.

Now, I am not an advocate in favor of coal over gas, vice versa, or in fact of any state intervention trying to pick winners and losers. I view my role and Planet Gore’s as working to ensure some rationality in the “global warming” debate. Of course, to my mind that means no absurd rationing and tax schemes like Waxman-Markey — which no one claims would do anything anyway but reward a bunch of lobbying constituencies, at the economy’s (and our individual) expense, with further great risk to our national security. Therefore, we gotta call fouls when we see them.

For example, today, Greenwire sets up the utility industry as a proxy for the coal industry — because coal is preferred by utilities to this day (when they can fight through the obstacles placed in their path) as it is more affordable, abundant, and reliable. With that done, the Greenwire piece paints a woeful picture of utilities vs. natural gas, pointing out a disparity between lobbying dollars spent. That’s all well and good — except for one thing: the utilities mostly lobbied in favor of Waxman-Markey just like natural gas, just looking to carve out rents. Are those rents found in securing a long-term future for coal? No, unless you’ve got your telescope backwards. They are primarily for fuel switching, if also seeking to forestall such a mandate from coming down on them overnight when their investments have economically useful lives measured in a multiple of decades.

These utilities most definitely not lobbying in favor of coal include what are likely the most aggressive industry lobbying entities, USCAP members Duke Energy (Ken Lay protege Jim Rogers was an early proponent of this scheme to provide windfall rents), Exelon, windmill rent-seeker FPL, NRG Energy, PG&E and PNM Resources. This doesn’t mention AEP, which lobbied for the bill apparently because they get to add a percentage to the billions they’ll have to spend, passing it all along to the consumer with a nice profit return on its lobbying.

As pointed out here, the same was true of utilities lobbying for Waxman-Markey’s predecessor, the disastrous floor-flop of Lieberman-Warner in the Senate.

Greenwire also quotes Planet Gore’s Steve Hayward as saying that “coal did very well” in Waxman-Markey . . . without noting Steve’s intention, which I can only assume was apparent in the interview, as meaning relative to the purpose of the enterprise, which the president has admitted is to “bankrupt” coal and anyone who tries to burn it. No, coal didn’t “do very well” in the grand scheme of things in having a bill that targets them for extinction pass the House simply because political self-preservation led members to delay coal’s execution until said members are out of office. Sheesh.

So, it seems you’re going to need to keep such things in mind as natural gas resumes and escalates its war on coal, begun more than a dozen years ago — led by Enron and with the likes of the Union of Concerned Scientists.