The FreeXchange blog at the Economist goes with its ridiculous logic again. The previous time was on the Tata Nano and now its with efficient railroads.

Commenting on Buffett’s buy of the second largest rail company in the US,

ONE of today’s bigger stories is the news that Warren Buffett‘s Berkshire Hathaway will buy up the 77% it doesn’t yet own of rail company Burlington Northern Santa Fe, in a deal that values the company at about $44 billion. Mr Buffett called the purchase an “all-in wager on the economic future of the United States”. He also played up the greenness of the business, saying:

BNSF last year … moved a ton of goods 470 miles on one gallon of diesel. It releases far fewer pollutants into the atmosphere. It saves enormously on energy consumption and … it diminishes highway congestion. Rails last year moved 40 percent, more than 40 percent, over the country. They moved more than all those trucks, just the four big railroads. It’s a very effective way of moving goods. I basically believe this country will prosper and you’ll have more people moving more goods 10 and 20 and 30 years from now, and the rails should benefit.

But while the trains themselves are among the cleanest freight transportation around, their cargo is decidedly not. Almost half of BNSF’s tonnage last year was coal, and MarketWatch estimates that some 10% of the power generated in America comes from coal hauled by BNSF.

For FreeXchange, acknowledging that railroads are an efficient medium of transportation the problem is with the goods it carries. Any business needs to make economic decisions and in this scenario I do not see how BNSF can say deny itself the coal business.  We need to remember that the coal industry is not going to go away anytime soon.

I think the logic does not make sense.