The view from here: In Racine, it isn't unusual to see an elementary school and then some coal plants.

Elisa Young spent her childhood summers with her grandparents in the little farmhouse outside Racine, Ohio, a quiet, hard-working village on the border with West Virginia, well within the still-beating heart of coal country. The Ohio River is a constant comforting roar in the distance. On drives south, this is where the mountains start to show. In 2000, when her grandmother passed, Elisa and her family moved in to become the seventh branch in a tree dating back to when the government gave a long-ago grandfather this land in exchange for his sacrifices in the Revolutionary War. Now, Elisa is fighting a few battles of her own.

A year before she moved here from Athens, with no family history of cancer, the now-44 year old learned of the melanoma in her skin. She learned of a thyroid disorder a few years back, and last year she was told to undergo a regimen of chemo to stave off a separate precancerous condition. But even if she weren't going through all this, she says she'd be angry anyway about all the toxins - blamed for everything from acid rain and cancerous conditions to radioactive contamination and global warming - that spew unfettered into the sky.

She soon learned about six neighbors with a variety of cancers and respiratory conditions, people who'd breathed the air here their whole lives and believed the coal industry had everything to do with how dirty it is. She counted four coal-fired power plants within 10 miles, burning coal that'd long been mined from the surrounding hills. When the wind blew across those stacks and strip-mined peaks, it almost always blew in Racine's direction.

But an epidemiologist who works for several Southeast Ohio counties told her an Ohio EPA study would only be done if the cancers were similar in type. He did note a higher-than-average number of cancers in general, Elisa says, but victory could only come through regulatory change, and how do you prove such a link to legislators struggling to preserve jobs in a dying industry while sitting on small piles of money made from the support of it?

Five more coal burners are being planned in this same area, including one to which Cleveland Public Power is about to make a 50-year commitment. If all goes as proposed by Big Coal, the air above Elisa's little patch of the American Dream just might end up choked with the highest concentration of carbon in America.

"If there was a robber or an addict and he shot me to take my money, he'd be a murderer," she says on a break from her job as a medical transcriptionist, "but if they release all these toxins and I breathe them, and we die a more painful, prolonged death, then no one is held accountable. And that's not really being talked about up there. How many Meigs County lives do you have to take per kilowatt hour of energy?"

IN A STATE with air quality ranking near the bottom of the list, in the place that pumps out some of the worst that we breathe, Elisa Young decided a few years back to found Meigs Citizens Action Now (CAN) and help lessen our historic dependence on coal, still used to turn about 85 percent of the world's wheels. At the opposite end of the state, Cleveland leaders are about to adopt a plan to get two-thirds of Cleveland Public Power's electricity from a proposed 960-megawatt coal-burning power plant, the first old-school coal burner being built in Ohio in about two decades.

By March 1, Cleveland City Council will end a long debate on whether to side with Elisa and actually go green - as Mayor Frank Jackson publicly envisions - or defy the rising tide of public opinion and science by going with the Jackson-supported CPP plan to buy into the plant and emit 7.3 million tons of pollutants into the atmosphere every year. Ultimately, Cleveland would get about 100 of the new plant's megawatts. Advocates say the plan could solidify the century-old city-run utility for well into the future; critics say they'd be boarding a train bound for a cliff.

"We'll be choking and turning brown, while you guys are going green," Elisa quips. Then she adds, seriously, "This is just the energy industry trying to coerce people into making a very poor financial decision. They've gotta get another 50-years' worth of infrastructure in place or they're in trouble."

That's hard to deny. Even the leading Republican candidate for president this year, John McCain, has a plan to further regulate coal emissions toward a more eco-friendly future. Add to that tougher regulations being punched out at the state level, and that means far higher future bills from American Municipal Power-Ohio, the nonprofit supplier trying to build the new plant.

Aside from all that, construction costs for the plant, set to be finished when key AMP-Ohio contracts expire in 2012 and 2013, have skyrocketed from an original estimate of $1.2 billion in 2005 to a total cost (with financing) of $3.5 billion today - a hike that amounts to about $2 million a day.

Still, Ward 17 Councilman Matt Zone, chairman of Council's Utilities Committee, sides with CPP Commissioner Ivan Henderson when he says that buying into the new plant will keep prices from rising so high that CPP would fail, allowing it to avoid the market for a majority of its needs.

Outside a council budget hearing late last week, Zone hadn't wavered from that belief, though he admits it isn't an easy position to assume.

"My bias is not to see any new carbon emissions," he says, noting that he is "known as the environmental councilman." "But it may be that we have to balance environmental justice with economic justice, so we can continue to deliver affordable and available electricity to a primarily low-income customer base."

The Plain Dealer predictably editorialized about all the negative aspects of the plan but sided with the status quo anyway. Since "coal remains King," it stated, it can't matter that the contract favors the bill collector and that the future of the coal market is certainly uncertain. "How quickly [new regulations] get built into law may help determine 20 years hence whether CPP is making a wise investment in 2007. For now, however, the AMP-Ohio deal seems the smartest approach for CPP's customers and for the city."

So they're sure it makes financial sense today; tomorrow's problems are for the kiddies to haggle over. But they might be wrong about even that.

Shannon Fisk, a staff attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, is fighting the construction city by city with Ohio Citizen Action and other environmentalists. He toured the area last week with David Schlissel, the senior consultant with Synapse Energy Economics Inc., and Tom Sanzillo, formerly New York state's deputy comptroller and now senior associate of T.R. Rose Associates.

They met with city leaders to show them their reports, financed by Ohio Citizen Action, that show Cleveland making a grave decision. They felt leaders deserve some contrasts, especially after having been subject to officials from AMP-Ohio, who Fisk says have exposed themselves as global warming disbelievers.

But in a purely business sense, Gordon says the deal is one-sided and uses the most near-sighted forecasts he's seen. "For Cleveland, they don't need another economic mishap," he says.

He and Schlissel recommend patience, at least until it can be seen whose policies become law. Schlissel believes the city should focus more on energy efficiency now, further diversify its portfolio of alternative sources and try to find a company to provide the power it needs for the next decade or two at a better cost than AMP-Ohio. Then CPP will be in a better position to marry.

"It's like they're saying, "We build you a house and we give you a 50-year mortgage, but we can't tell you how much it's going to cost. Okay?'"

Ah yes, the subprime loan: something Cleveland knows about.

AMP-OHIO GAVE municipalities until March 1 to decide. It has to get financing, it told them. Now or never. Some predict that Cleveland could hobble the project by bowing out. Others, like Sanzillo, say "AMP-Ohio would just come back with a better offer."

Nevertheless, the clock is ticking, not just for Cleveland. Oberlin is another of the more than 80 communities deciding on AMP-Ohio's plan. That city was expected to vote last night whether to approve or rescind a power buy. Nathan Engstrom, coordinator of Oberlin College's Office of Environmental Sustainability, is another who'd like to see a moratorium on the construction of coal-fired plants, whether "clean coal" or not. He notes how AMP-Ohio already has gained an OEPA permit without having to pledge to use any kind of system to capture CO2, the main culprit in global warming.

AMP-Ohio has vowed to use a new "Powerspan" technology it promises will reduce key pollutants like sulfur dioxide and mercury, but its permit doesn't require it to do anything. In fact, what AMP-Ohio means to say is that the dirty old 200-watt plant going offline when the new 960-watt plant comes online is much dirtier. But the new plant, of course, will be burning five times the coal.

At the least, environmentalists would like to see AMP-Ohio pledge to use a new gasification plant that burns a coal-based gas for power. No deal.

"As it is now," Engstrom says, "it would be like switching from Marlboro to Marlboro Lights. Coal is an example of something that you don't want to be tied to for decades. What matters is how we envision our communities in the future, how clean they are, and sustainable, and what we believe is the way to get us there and keep us there."

Cleveland council, accustomed to deciding which company is best to soft-patch its potholes or fix its streetlights, is charged with a weighty decision.

"We have no national energy policy right now," Sanzillo says, "so they're kind of in the hole. With this vote, they make national energy policy."

Ward 3 Councilman Zach Reed, utilities vice-chairman, calls this vote the single most important decision he's made. He likens it to the one Detroit made more than a half-century ago to tie itself to an auto industry that's proven itself resistant to change.

"Should we have the mindset of Detroit, that it's always been done this way, so we should just keep doing it like this? Or maybe we should think about something different, or at least wait until after November to see what's going to shake out. The city's supposedly going green, so what message does that send to sign a contract that says for the next 50 years we're going to keep polluting the environment?"

City leaders, who've already spent more than $1 million studying the plan, have wracked their brains. Testimony. Studies of studies. On Friday, Feb. 22, Zone's committee will pore over the findings of another report it commissioned in January from ION Consultants to update the findings of previous studies, then vote soon after on its recommendation to council.

Andrew Watterson, head of Cleveland's sustainability programs, didn't return calls for this story. He noted in the PD in January how the AMP-Ohio deal, which includes a small hydro-plant to help further diversify the city's portfolio, wouldn't cripple the city's plan of meeting Gov. Ted Strickland's proposed energy plan requiring utilities to produce one-quarter of their power from eco-friendly technologies by 2025.

"It sure doesn't help," Reed counters.

But for now, the government is apparently in a state of limbo. In February, after issuing AMP an air permit for the plant, EPA Director Chris Korleski admitted that it had no control to limit any of the plant's air emissions but said the agency would curb the plant's emissions when and if new federal regulations are passed.

"You see," says Nolan Moser, an attorney for the Ohio Environmental Council, "AMP-Ohio needs Cleveland, but Cleveland may not need this power. Cleveland needs CPP, and CPP needs cheap energy, but it's doubtful this plan is going to provide it. The old idea that cheaper energy is going to be dirtier is going out the window."

Councilman Brian Cummins, Ward 15, has been studying this issue for months now. He says he understands both sides of the argument. And he wants more time.

"Even if I wanted to vote against this," Cummins says, "if I can't somehow communicate my rationale to my colleagues, what good is all my work? That's the frustration. It's like now, at the last hour, I can really start to articulate what my real questions are. And it might be too late."

This is one of the questions he says he would like to ask now: "When the sand is shifting like it is, does it feel like we should be building a temple on that spot?"

Environmentalists, Elisa Young included, will gather at Trinity Cathedral (2230 Euclid Ave.) at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 21.