Point of diminish in power plant reached?

Remember back in the 90s where the game SimCity was a hit? Nearly every friend I knew played or heard this game. From there the objective of the game is to flourish your kampung into a pekan, then into bandar and then city or metropolitan. Simple as that. However to achieve that, one need to roll out the proper street, designate the proper zone and the main thing is to build the right power plant for your people. That was how I perceive power plant technology in my early days of life, and had been following that concept ever since.

There was always

• coal, the dirtiest SOB piece of crap in the game where it automatically brings your pollution to level 3, followed by
  
• natural gas (environment ok but expensive),
  
• hydro (great if you have a Niagara fall near your city),
• solar (high maintenance),
  
• wind turbines (need alot and low output kW),
  
• Nuclear (risk radiation, high output kW),
  
• Microwave and
  
• Fusion power plant

Currently I would say we're around the Nuclear region as the developed country had them and there are no 'more advanced' power plant around that I knew of.

However, latest news from US shows they are back to explore clean coal, Europe is also into coal, and of course Russia also likes coal now as there is no demand on their nuclear waste (e.g. Plutonium). So technically we're going back to coal, and this made the PC game Simcity, the board game Power Grid, and even many sci-fi movie obsolete.

Well that's a start, as gas and oil is reaching a record high price (USD118 per barrel as of now), all fossil power plant project had been switched to the coal, rather than oil or gas. So basically environment will get screwed anyway. I don't know the footprint involved but I can bet for every 10 person who strictly adhere to greenpeace advise, just 1 person who is poor and drive a 1985 Toyota Crown diesel will just offset the pollution made. Imagine what 5 coal plant will do.

I am not a green person, just wondering why the fuss on the Earth day, global warming and greenpeace are all about. The effort is being screwed by politician and government in just a few implementation, and someone need to fix the concept of technology on power plant.