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ENERGY SNAPSHOTS: The coal wars are coming, That is where the carbon issue comes to the forefront, and the U.S. has a quarter of the world’s reserves that make up 90 percent of all of its fossil fuels. Natural gas reserves are much greater than anyone thought. The wind issue is growing in importance;

COAL WARS: Get ready for the coal wars. Forget whatever else you hear about overall energy policy, the real fight -- and the real political problem -- this year in Congress will be how to deal with our nagging reliance on the most abundant component of our carbon-based patrimony.  We can talk until we're blue in the face about offshore drilling, wind power, natural gas, and energy conservation ... but the short-term drift of history still dictates a heavy reliance on the dirtiest and deadliest of all fuels: coal.

The big question in the energy bill -- if there is one -- is how and whether Congress will ask the American people to pay for the cost of controlling the environmental consequences of that reliance, Newsweek notes.

At its core, the president’s energy vision calls for switching our transportation system from oil to plug-in electricity. But 45 percent of all electricity in the country is still generated by coal-fired power plants. In other words, we run the real risk of merely replacing one polluting and increasingly scarce fuel, petroleum, with an abundant but even more environmentally troublesome one, coal.

POLLUTION TAX: An energy bill that, among other things, would tax pollution caused by burning fossil fuels was passed by the House last year. It’s gotten nowhere in the Senate. Obama’s drilling announcement was designed to get the Senate’s attention -- and garner some Republican support.But opening up offshore drilling prospects is politically, the easy part. The hard part is going to be convincing senators from coal-producing and/or electricity-exporting states to go along with any sort of carbon tax. States with power plants that generate electricity from coal read like a roster of presidential swing states.

Among them: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Missouri and North Carolina. And other states with major coal commitments include: Georgia, Arizona, Kentucky and Wyoming. Getting 60 votes for some kind of carbon-pollution tax, even if it’s in the most attenuated cap-and-trade will be next to impossible.

POLITICS: The political problem with coal is more than geography, it is supply: we just have so much it’s tempting to rely on it. According to the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration, we have a quarter of the world’s reserves and on a Btu basis, 90 percent of all our fossil fuel reserves are coal.

We are finding vast new deposits of natural gas -- the Marcellus Shale of the Northeast could be a bonanza -- but for better or worse, we know, and always have known, coal. The big hope now is that we can evolve away from our reliance on it. For Obama’s plan to work in the long run, we have to “de-carbonize the electricity sector,” says Wesley Warren, program director of the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington.

There is some evidence that the “de-carbonizing” process has begun. New federal statistics show it: wind power is on the rise, big time. In 2008, utilities put on line 19,000 megawatts of new generating capacity. Some 8,300 of those megawatts were from wind and only 1,600 from coal (much of the rest was from natural gas, which is less polluting than coal but still problematic). Over the next few years, utilities are planning to put 27,000 megawatts of capacity on line, only 5,000 of which is coal — and 11,000 of which is wind power. But that is not a big or fast enough change to alter the basic equation.

NARTURAL GAS: Bloomberg reports that  Energy Secretary Steven Chu has announced that new natural-gas drilling technologies may have doubled U.S. reserves of the fuel. U.S. natural gas reserves have definitely increased by about 30 percent and “probably has doubled,” Chu said in a speech at a conference in Washington hosted by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

“That’s a big deal because it will be a transition fuel as we go to renewables,” Chu said. The reserves of natural gas that can be recovered from shale deposits using a drilling technique called hydraulic fracturing is “yet to be proven,” Chu said.

MORE WIND: Gov. Bob McDonnell said this week that he recently withdrew his support from the Governor’s Wind Energy Coalition after the group sent out a letter expressing support for a national renewable electricity standard with his name without his permission.

"They sent out a letter with my name on it that I didn't approve, never saw. That's the problem,'' McDonnell said. "Secondly, the contents of the letter said that all the governors that were signatories were supportive of a mandatory (renewable energy standard) that I am not. So that's the problem." U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar met Atlantic Coast governors in February to talk about wind energy and McDonnell joined his wind energy consortium.

"I really want to pursue wind energy,'' McDonnell said. “I think it's a great option for us here in Virginia. We have some of the highest quality winds anywhere in the country. Virginia Beach is supportive of it. This is a tremendous opportunity for us to have -- when you get the infrastructure paid -- a no-cost source of energy but it's going to take a lot of regulatory work to get it done. I'm 100 percent behind quickly exploring the possibility of getting a wind farm off the coast of Virginia Beach."

As the nation searches for ways to lessen its dependency on foreign oil, wind energy is getting a second look in states such as Virginia that had not previously embraced it. McDonnell said he supports a voluntary -- not mandatory -- renewable energy standard

"What I don't want is one, people sending out letters without my approval that say I'm supporting something that I'm not so that's the problem,'' he said. "They are very apologetic. They know they did it."