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The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) has hired two new public relations firms to hock its message in the wake of the disastrous job done by Bonner & Associates. 

ACCCE has retained HDMK, a PR firm with very strong ties to former President George W. Bush and the Republican Party, to manage its national media efforts, while Dan Ronayne, a managing director of the Howard Consulting Group, was retained to work with regional reporters.

HDMK is run by Terry Holt, the national campaign spokesperson for George W. Bush in the 2004 election and the former spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner.  Other HDMK partners include Trent Duffy, a former deputy press secretary to President George W. Bush, Jim Morrell, former deputy chief of staff to the House Republican Conference and a speechwriter for former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL), and Chad Kolton, another long-time Republican communications operative who served in the Bush administration as press secretary at the OMB and FEMA.

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Reports of the president’s lame duck status – his impotence, if you will – have been vastly exaggerated. Even as he has all but given up on rescuing the faltering economy (which, given his track record, isn’t necessarily a bad thing), he and his advisers have been redoubling their efforts to squash what is left of his predecessors’ environmental legacy.

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Carbon ranching is a way to protect rainforests, which inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen to help cool the planet. At present, these woodlands are threatened by logging, mining, cattle production and, increasingly, sugar and palm oil plantations to fuel growing demand for ethanol. In fact, destruction of the world’s tropical forests now contributes more to global warming than China’s well-publicized industrial-pollution surge.

A pledge to help poorer nations reduce carbon emissions caused by slashing and burning their forests was in the final communiqué issued at the Group of 8 summit in Germany. The Bush administration has financed some tropical forest conservation projects in the past. Now, as Congress energetically debates new climate-change legislation, greater incentives for carbon ranching are advocated. As usual, the solution is simple economics.