The Persian Gulf may be sitting atop massive oil reserves. But with prices for crude skyrocketing, it makes more sense to sell it than to burn it. Instead, the Gulf is turning to coal for its energy needs -- to the detriment of the climate.

A coal-fired plant belonging to Evonik Steag in Turkey. The company is currently expanding in the Gulf. For Alfred Tacke, CEO of the Essen energy giant Evonik Steag, it's the yellowish-brown pall below that tells him the plane he's on is approaching the Persian Gulf. Beneath the haze, he knows, is Kuwait, which has five large-scale gas- and oil-fired power plants in operation. The power they generate provide around-the-clock electricity for Kuwait's gigantic seawater desalination plants and the country's enormous air-conditioning needs.

"Here, you only need to stick your finger in the sand and you're likely to strike oil or gas," says Tacke, whose energy group ranks fifth among Germany's electricity producers. But Tacke has his own ideas about how to make money in the region. And they center on a different kind of black gold: coal-fired power plants. "We're currently in the process of discussing the conditions for projects of this kind," he says.

As odd as the idea may seem, coal power in the gulf is just one more outcome of skyrocketing oil prices. In a world with dramatically disparate ideas on how or even whether to address the risks of global warming, demand for coal plants across the globe is growing rapidly to the detriment of efforts to increase the production of renewable energies such as solar, hydro and wind.