Hunting for $1 billion of stimulus spending in rural Illinois.

Too late to call David, we drove to St. Louis to attend another stimulus event. Back in Mattoon at 4 p.m. the next day, we find David outside City Hall at a skate-park demo. David helped arrange FutureGen's arrival, and even he is only "cautiously optimistic" that the plant will eventually be built. FutureGen still has to find additional funding, and more geological surveys have to be done before ground is broken. David says the government feels comfortable with the environmental risks. He calls the "scenarios of catastrophe" "extremely improbable." It's all worth it if it creates jobs for Mattoon and puts it on the international map as a place for carbon-sequestration research.

If anyone could show us FutureGen, it was David. He drew a map from memory, pointing us back to Dole and DeWitt. It had been right on the corner all along. Seven tenths of a mile wide by 1 mile long, it was impossible to miss once you knew where it was. And impossible to see when you didn't.

Finally, we knew our destination. A left on DeWitt; past the Rural King; a left on Dole. There it was.

The future of clean coal looked very green, indeed. The land appears to still be a farm for somebody. Crops were planted in their neat rows; birds dove in and out of cornstalks. There was a stillness to the place that was accentuated by the quiet whir of cars across DeWitt's asphalt. Here on the edge of Mattoon was to be the future of Mattoon. But for now, FutureGen looked like all the other farms. Nothing suggested $1 billion of taxpayer money would soon rest on top of it, nor a sea full of carbon below.