Carl Bagge; Leader of Coal Industry Group

Carl Bagge, the flamboyant president of the National Coal Assn. from 1971 to 1987 who battled the nascent environmental movement and said he was doing holy work because coal was “God’s fuel,” has died. He was 74.

Bagge died April 25 of a heart attack at a hospital in Boynton Beach, Fla.

Rotund, red-faced, pipe-smoking and with a voice as deep as a mine shaft, Bagge was the lively public face for an industry that was left for dead after the rise of other power sources, but that rebounded with the energy crises of the 1970s and fears about the environmental risks of nuclear power.

Bagge reveled in the resurgence and fought efforts to impose stricter controls on the big coal-burning power plants of the Northeast and Midwest that came under scrutiny in the 1970s and ‘80s.

In 1971, when Bagge took over the presidency of the coal association, whose members included coal producers and exporters, he changed the phone number, which is still in use, to reflect who he said his masters were: (202) 463-2625 (GOD-COAL).

He often told the story of how he got his start in the coal industry, when during his impoverished youth on Chicago’s South Side, his Swedish immigrant father would send him on sorties to the railroad tracks to collect stray chunks of coal to heat their home.

Bagge served in the Navy from 1945 to 1946. He received a bachelor’s degree from Augustana College in Rock Island, Ill., in 1949 and a law degree from Northwestern in 1952.

He worked as an attorney for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railroad in Chicago from 1952 until 1965, when he moved to the Washington area upon being named to the Federal Power Commission. He received bipartisan praise when he argued for loosening the regulation of natural gas rates.

He went from regulating to fighting regulations when he joined the coal association. Among his major battles during the first generation of clean air and clean water legislation were the 1977 amendments to the Clean Air Act that mandated new limits on sulfur dioxide and other emissions.

Nicknamed “Mr. Coal,” he called clean-air groups extremist and decried the demonizing of the fuel. But despite the rhetoric, even his political enemies became friends and sometimes guests at his Swedish-themed Christmas bashes.

In the 1980s, in the face of increasing scientific evidence to the contrary and a growing chorus of complaints from environmentalists and Canadian officials, Bagge maintained that, “Scientists haven’t found any sound evidence of acid rain damage to vegetation in the natural environment.”

Survivors include his wife of 47 years, Margaret Evelyn Bagge; three daughters; a son, and nine grandchildren.