About

President Trump loves “beautiful clean coal.”

Burn More Coal (BMC) is a pro-coal electric utility shareholder activist group dedicated to promoting the increased use of coal as a fuel for electricity generation.

The Problem

Between the:

  • Regulatory war-on-coal;
  • Advent of cheap natural gas;
  • Endless wind/solar subsidies; and the
  • Greenwashing/political correctness/virtue signaling benefits of wind/solar,

the coal industry is struggling to maintain, let alone expand market share.

The reason? The coal industry is at the mercy of its customers — i.e., politically correct electric utility CEOs and their boards.

Left to their own devices, electric utility managements can be counted on to take the easy way out when it comes to coal. CEOs and board members get praised from both sides of the political fence for switching out of coal, while criticism is muted.

  • Environmental activists praise utility managements for switching to renewables.
  • While free market advocates oppose renewable subsidies, they support utilities’ embrace of cheap gas as evidence of the free market working to “solve” the alleged problem of global warming.
  • Poorly organized ratepayers (and the often politically correct utility commissions that are supposed to protect them) have so far been an ineffective constraint on CEO conduct.
  • As long as dividends (funded by defenseless ratepayers) keep coming with a steady stock price, shareholders also tend to acquiesce to whatever the utility CEOs decide.

Bottom line: Coal market share is in ongoing jeopardy. Electric utility CEOS are to blame. No one has been doing anything about the CEO problem. Burn More Coal aims to change that.

What will BMC do?

BMC will buy and own stock in publicly traded utilities. BMC will be an activist shareholder to persuade electric utilities that burning more coal is best for their shareholders, ratepayers and the environment. BMC intends to Make Coal Cool Again.

BMC is led by:

  • Fred Palmer served from 2001 through June 2015 as Peabody Energy’s senior vice president of Government Relations, which included service on the Executive Leadership Team. Most recently he served as a special advisor to the office of Peabody’s executive chairman. Prior to joining Peabody Energy, Palmer served for five years as General Counsel and 15 years as chief executive officer of Western Fuels Association, Inc. While at Western Fuels, Palmer served on the Board of Directors of the National Mining Association and in that capacity served as chair of the NMA Legal Committee with a focus on coal and climate policies during the Clinton/Gore years in the 1990s. He is a member of the National Coal Council where he is chairman of the New Markets For Coal Subcommittee, Coal Policy Committee. During his service to Peabody Energy, he was Peabody’s representative on the Board of Directors of the World Coal Association and served as its chairman from November 2010 to November 2012. He also represented Peabody on the Board of the FutureGen Alliance from its formation until June 2015. Additionally, he is a member of the California and D.C. Bar Associations.
  • Steve Milloy is a securities lawyer, biostatistician, author, activist, former coal industry consultant/executive, and publisher of JunkScience.com, the web site that popularized the term “junk science.”  Milloy co-founded the former Free Enterprise Action Fund (Ticker: FEAOX), a publicly traded mutual fund that successfully advocated as a corporate shareholder against climate alarmism during the 2000s. FEAOX, among its other accomplishments, successfully pressured companies like ConocoPhillips, Caterpillar and BP to drop out of U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) which brought about the demise of that corporate-green activist partnership formed to lobby for cap-and-trade. Milloy authored the first SEC-approved climate skeptic shareholder proposals. As a member of the Trump EPA transition team, Milloy advocated for many of the regulatory reforms now being implemented at EPA. Milloy is the author of several Amazon.com best selling books, including: “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA” (Bench Press, 2016) and “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them” (Regnery, 2009).