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Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
Forget about that nasty oil or radioactive nuclear waste: If you want to breathe fresh air, says the coal industry, burn, baby, burn!
Oct 5, 2004 | The 30-second TV ad opens with a bald eagle struggling to fly through a smoggy sky. The year is 1970, and the location is a mountain in North America. But wherever this range supposedly is, you would have to wear a gas mask to hike it.
After a few seconds of flapping through the soot, the wheezing eagle gives up, crash-landing on a rock. With a deep cough, like a smoker who has been puffing away for decades, the eagle sputters: "Not a good day for flyin'."
Cut to the next scene; the year is 2004, and the bald eagle is floating above the same mountains. But now the sky is bright blue, dotted with puffy white clouds. The eagle soars, true and proud -- God bless America!
Is this a self-satisfied broadside from environmentalists celebrating the Clean Air Act? Not at all. The free-flying eagle is bringing happy tidings from a group called Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, a 5-year-old nonprofit funded by the coal, rail and power industries. ABEC's primary purpose, apparently, is to promote the notion that coal is, as its Web site declares, not only "affordable" but also "increasingly clean."
A voice-over in the rehabilitated-eagle ad intones: "Thanks in part to clean coal technologies, our air quality has been improving. And by 2015 emissions from coal-based power plants will be 75 percent less than they were in 1970."
The claim doesn't sit well with environmentalists. "What emissions are they talking about? Clearly, they're not talking about CO2 [carbon dioxide] -- there's no question," says Aimee Christensen, executive director of Environment 2004, a political group dedicated to exposing the Bush administration's anti-environmental record. Under Bush, the Environmental Protection Agency has refused to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, even though emissions of CO2 have been closely linked by scientists to global warming, and coal-fired power plants are significant producers of CO2.
No Americans for Balanced Energy Choices would return calls for this article, but the eagle spot, which has been broadcast on CNN, can be seen on the Web here. It's the latest salvo in the industry group's ongoing campaign to promote "clean coal" as a cheap and increasingly green electricity source for the future.
Environmental and corporate watchdog groups have taken pains to debunk the nonprofit front group's trumped-up "Don't worry, love coal" claims, but in an election year where coal-loving swing states such as West Virginia and Pennsylvania are very much in play, both presidential candidates have embraced the "clean coal" mantra. That's easy enough for them to do even if their positions on global warming differ, because "clean coal" is one of those catchphrases that mean less the closer you look at them. Ultimately, "clean coal" is an umbrella term for many technologies, everything from widely available scrubbers that reduce sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain, to cutting-edge carbon-sequestration technologies that hold out the hope of capturing greenhouse gases and storing them under the earth in vast geologic reserves.
With access to energy resources now synonymous with national security, it's not hard to see why King Coal has taken its new spin. "When oil prices started spiking, they started calling themselves domestic, secure energy. They're making people think about coal as a safer alternative to oil and natural gas," says Kert Davies, research director for Greenpeace.
With oil at $50 a barrel, and natural gas prices on the rise, look for more feel-good coal messages. But no matter how high that eagle flies, don't expect it to escape the consequences of global warming anytime soon, no matter how squeaky clean the coal industry claims to be.
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