Billionaire ‘philanthropist’ Warren Buffett Owns the Railroad Behind the Scheme to Ship Massive Amounts of Montana Coal to the Biggest Greenhouse-Gas Emitter on the Planet

Photo by Chad Harder

This remarkable story was originally published in the Missoula Independent and was re-printed with permission from the author.

by Matthew Frank, the Missoula Independent

With the heavy spring rains, the Otter Creek Valley, in southeastern Montana, glows green in early July, dotted with sage and bright patches of yellow clover and wild mustard. Ranchland rises gently toward rugged hills and buttes. Otter Creek twists a narrow channel through the middle, reflecting clouds. Otter Creek Road follows the creek. Few pickups pass between the unincorporated community of Otter to the south and the one-gas-station town of Ashland to the north.

A month before and about 6,000 miles away, in Beijing, a city of 20 million, where enveloping smog obscures the surrounding mountains, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer spoke of this Montana valley—or, rather, what’s beneath it. The governor of the state with the greatest coal reserves keynoted a coal conference sponsored by Peabody Energy, the largest private coal company in the world, with massive operations in northeast Wyoming, just south of Otter. Schweitzer and coal companies such as Peabody see economic opportunity in exporting coal to China and other energy-hungry Asian markets. More than a billion tons of coal beneath the Otter Creek Valley could be shipped and burned there.

Schweitzer addressed a crowd of researchers and coal company reps at the coal gasification conference at the Great Wall Sheraton Hotel. “I talked a little bit about energy security in the U.S. and most of the countries that were represented there, and how we share a concern,” Schweitzer told me, speaking recently in his office in Helena. “We’ve become so dependent on oil from just a few unstable regimes, and the sooner we get to a new energy source that’s cleaner, greener, more sustainable, it’s better for everybody. Coal can have a future if we have a solution to CO2″—that is, a way to burn coal and contain the greenhouse gas—”or it doesn’t have a future if we don’t.”

But Arch Coal—and every other coal company in the business of making money—isn’t waiting for a solution. Arch, the second-largest U.S. coal producer, has paid about $160 million to lease 18,000 Otter Creek acres containing 1.4 billion tons of coal from the state of Montana and Great Northern Properties.

Meanwhile, Arch is arranging a way to ship the coal to Asia. On July 1, Arch, Warren Buffet’s BNSF Railway, and billionaire Forrest E. Mars Jr. purchased the Tongue River Railroad Company, which holds a valuable federal permit to build a 121-mile rail link between Miles City and Decker, with a spur connecting to the Otter Creek tracts, at an estimated cost of $550 million.

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Competing with Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness,” the coal front group American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) is launching an online “Factuality Tour” of five states to obscure the toxicity and pollution of coal. As part of the “Factuality Tour,” ACCCE is selling “Factuality” hats, “Factuality” tank tops, and “Factuality” organic baby bodysuits. You can “spread the word” online with “Factuality” widgets and badges. The first stop on the Factuality Tour is ACCCE member Arch Coal’s massive Thunder Basin strip mine in Wyoming:

No amount of PR spending or jazzy jingles can obscure the actual facts about coal: it’s a dirty killer of jobs, health, and the environment. Arch Coal, as can be seen from the Factuality video itself, is profiting obscenely from the literal stripmining of our planet:

Arch Sold Three Billion Dollars Of Coal Pollution In 2008. Arch sold 139.6 million tons of coal in 2008, about 12% of the United States supply, making $354.3 million on nearly three billion dollars of revenue. Employing only 4300 people, Arch produced over 32,000 tons of coal and made $82,400 per employee. Arch Coal’s CEO Steven Leer pulled in $6.56 million.

Arch Coal Is A Top Global Warming Polluter While Doing Nothing To Solve The Threat. The burning of Arch’s coal in 2008 generated about 223 million tons of carbon dioxide, approximately three percent of all U.S. emissions, and 52,000 tons per employee. Despite having made $929 million since 2003, Arch Coal is not investing in a single project to develop the technology needed to capture and store coal’s global warming pollution, according to a Center for American Progress analysis.

Arch Coal Is A High-Rolling Lobbying And Political Spender. Arch Coal spent $970,000 last year lobbying Congress, and has already spent $240,000 this year. Arch gave $116,750 to House members in 2007-2008, and $73,250 to Senate members in 2007-2008.

The average American carbon footprint is about 20 tons a year; the average Chinese carbon footprint is 3 tons a year. As he makes about two percent of Arch Coal profits, CEO Steven Leer’s footprint is over four million tons of global warming pollution a year.