If you thought the application to expand a coal-fired electricity plant in Kansas was dead, think again.

Big Coal and their political allies in the Kansas State legislature have introduced a slick new Bill that if passed will make it very difficult for the massive Sunflower Electric coal plant expansion to not go ahead.

Regular readers might recall our extensive coverage of the Kansas coal fight that started in late 2007 after the Kansas Department of Health and Environment became the first government agency in the United States to cite carbon dioxide emissions as the reason for rejecting an air permit for a proposed coal-fired electricity generating plant.

The Department of Health stated that greenhouse gas threatens public health and the environment.

The coal company who lost the bid, Sunflower Electric and their political allies in the Kansas Legislature fought like heck to overturn the ruling. Even coal giant Peabody Energy got into the mix, dropping some big bucks on a fake grassroots organization calling itself "Kansans for Affordable Energy."

From SolveClimate:

The Wall Street Journal's editorial writers again revealed their disregard of basic carbon economics in a piece last Friday that ignored new financial realities in order to stump in favor of more coal power for Kansas."

The tangled web of rhetoric and PR spin is being tightly wove as the Kansas coal plant fight continues.

Case in point, Earl Watkins Jr. is the President and CEO of Sunflower Electric Power Corporation, the company who recently lost its bid to build two new coal plants in Kansas and he's been making the rounds in the State Legislator trying to convince politicians that his company, "... has no fuel bias, meaning they're doing what provides the best fuel supply at the best price."

Watkin's "no fuel bias" is a little hard to believe when the same Earl Watkins Jr. sits on the Board of Directors of the Western Fuels Association, a cooperative business that supplies 17 million tons of coal to electric generating plants across the United States.

A new report has been released providing further evidence that Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius made the right decision in vetoing a Bill calling for the expansion of coal-fired electricity generation in that Sta

DeSmogBlog was referenced today in a New York Times article on the battle over coal power in the US. 

Case in point is this article penned by Kathleen Harnett White of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

Harnett White claims that she courageously made the decision to approve the first new coal-fired plant in Texas in 20 years because she was convinced that, "...equipped with groundbreaking emission controls [the new plant], was a net environmental benefit for Texas."