clean coal

America’s Power Army, the sister organization to the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), sent an email this week to its Astroturf ‘army’ laying out the coal lobby’s plans to barrage key Democratic targets in the coming weeks to ensure that energy and climate legislation provides sufficient loopholes to maintain the Dirty Coal status quo. 

America’s Power Army, formerly known by the less-militaristic name Americans for Balanced Energy Choices until August 2008, sent its ‘Eye on Washington’ Fall 2009 update from Washington in the form of a slickly-crafted email blast, complete with personalized introduction (Dear [Insert Recipient Name Here] code) and a banner picture of clear skies with just a few wispy white clouds hovering over the Capitol. 

The Army email says:

It has now been revealed that a Washington, DC PR powerhouse that was recently exposed as being part of an anonymous "grassroots" pro-coal group also has significant ties to the Republican Party.

As regular readers will recall, earlier this week we exposed the ties between a new pro-coal "grassroots" group calling itself the "The Federation for American Coal, Energy and Security (FACES of Coal), and a Washington, DC firm called the Adfero Group. Adfero's client list includes Koch Industries and the US Chamber of Commerce, two leaders in the fight to confuse, distort and deny the realities of climate change - and especially to block government action that might affect their bottom line.

Brad Johnson at the Wonk Room is reporting today that Adfero also has significant ties to another very powerful group in Washington, DC that would love nothing more than to see legislation on climate change blocked, the Republican Party.

Johnson writes: "A new “grassroots” fossil fuel front group, FACES of Coal, is employing a shadowy Republican-staffed company to spread its message. The Federation for American Coal, Energy and Security — a new pro-mountaintop removal campaign that refuses to reveal its “grassroots” members — is employing a GOP Beltway shop to promote its work."

Filmaker David Novack never set out to make a film about the American coal industry, but he couldn't help himself after he witnessed first hand what coal was doing our health and environment.

I first met Novack a couple of years back when I was planning a new project called Coal is Clean/Coai is Dirty. Novack was just putting the finishing touches on his film Burning the Future: Coal in America and he was kind enough to provide me with some footage I could use for my project.

I knew coal was bad in so many ways: increased asthma rates in kids, Mercury in breast milk, smog, climate change, mountain top removal, and the list goes on. But what Novack's done with this film is bring the human voice to the dirty coal story. He makes it so real that you can't help but get angry and want to do something about it.

Burning the Future is the Inconvenient Truth of the American coal industry and anyone who sees it will walk away with a seething passion to fight the coal industry and wail away at the "clean coal" propaganda machine.

The coal industry's spin doctors have been droning on about the abudance of coal for the last year, but new research by Dave Rutledge, Chair of Caltech's engineering and Applied Sciences Division, calculates that the world's coal reserves may be much less "abundant" than the coal industry would like us to think:

"The record of geological estimates made by governments for their fossil fuel estimates is really horrible," Rutledge said during a press conference at the American Geological Union annual meeting. "And the estimates tend to be quite high. They over-predict future coal production."

The coal lobby states that, "within our [US] borders, we have enough coal to last the next 200 years." But by Rutledge's calculations 90% of the entire world's estimated coal reserves will have been produced by 2069.

You can check out a copy of Rutledge's powerpoint presentation here (4MB powerpoint file): Rutledge coal and oil reserves presentation.