The problem with passive financial investing (where you direct money, but are not involved in any operational decisions) is that it’s inherently a bet FOR civilizational adequacy—it only takes a partial collapse (or corruption or not-collapse-but-stupid-equilibrium-change) to keep you from getting paid.

That's a good point. Apparently I'm still a believer in civilizational adequacy, at least to this extent! But a lot of this is just lack of alternatives, right? Even if I was to become an owner-operator, my money could still be regulated/taxed/nationalized away, and it's riskier in other ways (e.g., less diversified).

I know nothing about the coal business, but I can imagine they’re already so leveraged that a slight drop in prices will kill them. I can imagine regulatory risks that shut them down (or nationalize their profits by environmental or tax mechanisms). I can imagine that many of the public companies are operators rather than owners of the underlying mineral rights, and most of the long-term value is locked up in private companies and trusts.

Only the middle one is a real issue.

It’s also possible that this is a market failure, and ESG and other irrational capital allocation has made this a great opportunity. I don’t know how I’d get to the truth of it (or more formally, how I’d update from my EMH-on-average-but-highly-variant-per-company prior for this industry), without a LOT of effort and some amount of insider knowledge.

Yeah, I don't know how to do it without a lot of effort either. (The "insider knowledge" I have came from following a former professional coal industry analyst who often shares his views on Twitter and in Twitter Spaces. Seems to be enough so far, but hopefully I'm not just fooling myself / gotten lucky.)

https://futures.tradingcharts.com/marketquotes/QL.html buying a contract for coal to be delivered x years from now costs more as x goes up, for oil and corn it costs less as x goes up.

This seems to be outdated or completely wrong data, as QL is the symbol for Central Appalachian Coal Futures Contract and it was delisted in 2021. But confusingly, tradingcharts.com seems to show the contract still being traded as of 8/12/2022, which I don't know how to explain. I can't find any current data about QL on CME's own website though, or any other website, so this is probably some kind of screwup on tradingcharts.com's part, like maybe they're showing some other futures chart under the QL symbol.

See here for one coal futures contract that is definitely still listed and being traded.

Link a source for the “coal miners pay off in 1-2 years at current coal prices” claim, please?

It's a little hard to find an authoritative source for this, as no professional analyst makes company forecasts based on coal prices staying where they are, and a lot of coal companies have contract commitments made when coal prices were much lower, which makes their most recent results worse than they would otherwise be. Whitehaven Coal seems to be an exception to this. Take a look at their latest quarterly report, and noticed how they generated about 1/4 of their enterprise value in cash, and check out this coal price chart to verify that current coal prices are still about what the last quarter's average price was.