I was with you until you got to the line:

the nation will be spending proportionally much more of its GDP on energy than it does now. Meanwhile, the energy cost of building new infrastructure of any kind will be higher. Therefore it is likely that insufficient investment capital will be available for the large number of new energy projects required.

That strikes me as an awfully naive view of capital markets, only true if (a) total capital available for investment is fixed; (b) total capital available for investment in energy assets are fixed and/or (c) total capital available for investment in energy assets is unresponsive to the price of energy.

None of those are true.  There are good reasons why the coal as a transition fuel argument is bogus, but this isn't one of them.

Imagine you are an exxonmob or peabody boardroomate.  From that POV it would make sense to keep energy prices on the rise enough to sap the political and financial will from your enemies.

But not boost energy prices quickly enough to make alternative energy sources cost competitive.

It's easier to understand the diversion strategery of "clean" coal and "clean" gas guzzling in this light.  They want their earnings to increase every quarter, forever.

Beat the competition and that is possible?  Beat them anyway you can.  "Winning is not the main thing in life, it is the only thing."  

If renewable energy and conservation actually reduce energy prices?  It's 66 cents per gallon to replace gasoline/ethanol with electricity in a plugin hybrid, and wind power is surpassing every other source in terms of low cost grid power.

Maybe then the ever rising price strategery would backfire on the old energy economy barons.  Low cost distributed power to counter their oil wars and MTR and tar sand cookery.  Solar panels on your roof charging your plugin vehicle, hybrid car or bikes.  Or powering electric mass transit through the grid.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

the oil companies/countries don't want the price of oil to be so high, and why Saudi Arabia turned on the spigots in the mid1980s, so that they could kill off renewable energy.  They're stuck now because, although apparently you don't believe it, there is only so much oil in the ground, so they will party until the end comes, but they don't want to end to come.

By the way, when my family was in Norfolk VA recently, we discovered that Newport News Virginia is the country's largest coal exporting port, it's where the high-quality coal goes from West Virginia, etc., all over the world.

I'll have to follow the links to see if this is explained, but does Heinberg realize that lack of high BTU content coal was not the driver for switching to lower energy value coal? The low energy content western coal is inherently lower in sulpher (and very cheap to mine in strip mines). This makes it a "higher value" fuel when the cost of sulpher clean up is factored in. It's all about the bottom line.