At the recent Michigan Energy Fair, clean energy advocates challenged Governor Granholm’s silence concerning eight new coal plants proposed for Michigan.

As she entered the fairgrounds, they held up a big banner: “Coal Is Not Green, and neither is Governor Granholm if she brings 8 new coal plants to Michigan.”

Yup: Eight companies want to build new plants here—an unprecedented, unnecessary coal rush in the middle of the world’s largest freshwater supply. The plants’ hundreds of pounds of mercury would mostly fall into those lakes; their millions of tons of CO2 would further warm our world and further lower Great Lakes water levels.

All of that new coal would also be a showstopper for the green energy companies the governor is so bent on bringing to Michigan—once Lansing enacts a respectable clean energy policy, like 26 other states have, including, most recently, Massachusetts.

But Lansing remains paralyzed on clean energy, and so does the governor when it comes to coal, even though Michigan is at the epicenter of America’s coal wars.

The governor ignored the banner and the young adults holding it, walked to the grandstand, and told about 1,000 people how important green energy and manufacturing could be to Michigan’s poleaxed economy. But very late that same evening, the Republican-controlled state Senate gutted the already embarrassingly weak energy bill that the Democratic-controlled House passed in April.

In a meet and greet after her speech, banner conspirator Lynette Grimes of Benzonia asked Governor Granholm why she’s doing nothing to stop the coal rush. According to Mrs. Grimes, the governor said that it wasn't up to her, that this was not a unilateral decision, why would anyone think she wants coal plants, and it is just not in her power to do anything about it—a statement that would make former Governor Engler laugh out loud.

If Ms. Granholm is so powerless, why then, in May, did her Department of Environmental Quality go to court to, in effect, argue in favor of new coal? DEQ lawyers told the judge that the department could legally ignore a formal petition by Citizens for Environmental Inquiry for a freeze on coal plant permitting while the state writes regulations for CO2—the chief climate-changing gas. Apparently, DEQ can act to expedite new coal, but not to slow it down.

Whether you believe them apples or not, this is a far cry from what the governor of Kansas did recently, and what a judge in Georgia did last week.

One glimmer: The governor said at that fair that she’s considering “feed-in tariffs”— requiring utilities to pay good money, not the pittance in the state’s net-metering law, to customers who generate green power for the grid.

But that means taking on DTE Energy and Consumers Energy—who, under cover of the Michigan Jobs and Energy Coalition, are pounding the airwaves to push for the Legislature’s protectionist energy bill, which would lock in those companies’ customers and force them to pay the big new rates necessary to finance (in Consumers’ case) a new coal plant or (in DTE’s case) a possible new nuke plant.

Given the governor’s silence on coal and on the Legislature’s energy shenanigans, and her administration’s rejection of CEI’s CO2 petition, just how hard she would push for a feed-in tariff is unknown.

Our governor should stop trying to make nice with her opponents, who don’t respond to nice, and call them out for slowing Michigan’s move to 21st -century energy production. Either that, or start wearing coats with pockets big enough for large lumps of coal.