The Union of Concerned Scientists has released a report today outlining the considerable risks associated with so-called "clean coal" and carbon capture and storage technology (pdf.)

Clean coal has been a persistent theme throughout the US election, with presidential candidates on both sides of the political ledger touting the message that coal is somehow clean. As coal industry commentator and author Jeff Goodell puts it best: 

Clean coal" is not an actual invention, a physical thing – it is an advertising slogan. Like "fat-free donuts" or "interest-free loans."

On his NY Time's DotEarth blog, journalist Andy Revkin writes:

This enduring notion — that the world can have its coal and climate, too, by pumping the carbon dioxide from combustion into the earth — has been promoted by institutions including Peabody Energy, the world’s biggest coal company (see its coal-sales ticker here), and the Natural Resources Defense Council. A group that pushed the clean-coal theme at the Democratic convention, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, will be heading to the Republican convention next week. Environmentalists have attacked the group as the latest in a string of industry propaganda mills.

While coal industry mouthpieces like the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity tout coal as the second-coming of Jesus for the United States, the latest Vital Signs report shows that coal industry employment has fallen by half in the last 20 years, despite a one-third increase in production. 

According to the new report out today by the Worldwatch Institute, a transition to renewable energy sources promises significant global job gains at a time when the coal industry has been hemorrhaging jobs for years.

Andy Revkin's New York Times Dot Earth has published a letter from Vic Svec, Senior Vice President for Peabody Energy, the largest private coal company in the world, reacting to the statement made earlier this week by NASA's Dr. James Hansen that top executives of coal and oil companies should be tried for “crimes against humanity and nature.”

If the "clean coal" advertising on CNN wasn't enough, the coal industry is now going hard after the Leiberman-Warner Climate Security Act.

The Wonk Room at Think Progress has a detailed post up about the latest activities by the coal industry's main front group, the "American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity" (ACCCE).

Here on DeSmog we've been writing a lot about so-called "clean coal," a word that would fit well under Stephen Colbert's definition of truthiness:

what you want the facts to be, as opposed to what the facts are. What feels like the right answer as opposed to what reality will support."

Coal is far from clean, but a $40 million advertising and public relations campaign by a coal industry front group calling itself the "American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity" is doing its darndest to try and convince us otherwise.

So we would like to proudly introduce the Clean Coal Smackdown!