Unless we all. chooses to "fix what we've got" by making coal-fired power as clean as possible, the entire world could easily fail "the biggest challenge we've ever faced," Entergy Corp.'s chief executive officer said Friday.

Economics and China's rise as a global power are key pivot points in a time when mankind is trying to bring global warming under control, said J. Wayne Leonard to about 200 people gathered at the Statehouse Convention Center for Entergy's annual meeting.

At Entergy's 2005 annual meeting, also held in Little Rock, Leonard told many of those same people that nuclear power was "really the only way to go" in the 21st century because "we no longer can rely on natural gas."

Times have certainly changed. With the average total cost of a nuclear project around billion to billion, atomic power - despite its zero-emissions technology - is now "priced out of the market" in the U.S., he said.

Meanwhile, an uncharacteristic dip in natural gas prices saw Entergy save its 2.7 million customers - including 687,000 in Arkansas - about billion in 2008 by purchasing power on the open market, Leonard said.

Through similar analogies, Leonard argued that renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power - despite all their promise - have hidden costs that must be reduced in order to become viable.

"The price tag to build out wind power is estimated around 0 billion. That's not wind power itself [wind farms], just the grid," Leonard said, adding that grid modernization initiatives could push such costs as high as .2 trillion.

Yet if utilities and regulators focus on carbon reduction and capture technologies, harmful emissions can be reduced by at least 80 percent while saving the global economy nearly trillion, he said.

"Every component for [carbon sequestration] exists. It just needs to be put together," Leonard said. "It's estimated to be half the cost of any other alternative. There are hundreds of years of storage capacity. And there's not as much need for pipelines because most plants sit on top of storage areas."

Such a strategy also addresses China's push to build hundreds of new coal-fired power plants - plus as many as 100 new nuclear plants by 2030 - to fill the growing energy needs of more than 1.2 billion people, he said.

If other nations embrace carbon-capture solutions, perhaps China will too - reducing emissions that would otherwise go unchecked.

Even then, there are no guarantees, Leonard said.

"The hardest truth of all is that the U.S. no longer controls its destiny when it comes to something like this. ... Even if we shut down all of our power plants, China will do what it will no matter what," he said.

"China is the largest Englishspeaking nation in the world. It is also the biggest Internet user. They became the U.S. almost overnight, but without the lifestyle - and don't think they don't know it. They are part of 6 billion people in the East who resent having 1 billion people in the West tell them how to run their economy."