The Nation: The Dirt on Clean Coal:

[amborin]

snip

"....the Kingston Fossil Plant produces enough electricity to power 670,000 homes and emits nearly 11 million tons of carbon dioxide--the greenhouse gas most responsible for global warming--each year. On December 22 a dike broke at the plant, sending more than a billion gallons of toxic black sludge downhill into the ground, water and homes of eastern Tennessee. The infected area was some forty times larger than the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska and became known as the "nightmare before Christmas.....

snip

"... of the country's 616 coal plants, none are carbon-free or close to it. The viability of an environmentally sustainable future for coal is questionable, and so is the industry's commitment to cleaning itself up.

snip

"Clean coal is like a healthy cigarette," Al Gore likes to say. "It does not exist." snip "It is an oxymoron," Venners says. "Even after the process of cleaning coal, it's not clean."

snip......The ultimate impact of the clean coal lobby will be measured by its influence on Capitol Hill and the corresponding outcome of pending legislation. For that reason, this controversial campaign raises a number of questions that will help shape our energy future for years to come. How serious is the industry about developing clean coal, and can it happen? Does the latest message indicate a more environmentally friendly policy, or just a crafty makeover? Can the same people who told us that global warming didn't exist--or that it was a good thing--suddenly be trusted to help solve the climate crisis?

The driving force behind coal's rebranding effort is the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a $40 million campaign funded by all the major components of the modern coal industry--mining companies, power plants, railroads, rural electric co-ops. ACCCE's ad blitz features sleek piano music and high-tech images of the globe; a panoply of workers voicing their belief in new technology; and, of course, President Obama, speaking at a campaign stop in coal-rich southwestern Virginia. "This is America," Obama tells the crowd. "We figured out how to put a man on the moon in ten years. You can't tell me we can't figure out how to burn coal that we mine right here in the United States of America and make it work." The ad closes with Obama supporters chanting a familiar refrain: "Yes we can!" To promote its message, ACCCE hired a top ad firm out of Vegas and a well-connected Washington PR outfit, spending three times as much last year as the health insurance industry did on the "Harry and Louise" ads in 1993-94.

ACCCE's office in downtown Washington is empty, but not for long. The group just hired Paul Bailey, a former operative for the oil and electric power industries, as its top lobbyist and will soon fill three more upper-level positions, bolstering a fleet of fixers who spent more money than anyone else--nearly $10 million last year--lobbying on climate change-related legislation, according to the Center for Public Integrity. For now, most of ACCCE's staff work elsewhere, in regional offices and from a nondescript office park in Alexandria, Virginia, at 333 John Carlyle Street. That location is infamous, having housed two radical right-wing groups--the Western Fuels Association and the Greening Earth Society--that formed the backbone of the effort to disprove the science of global warming. Out of the widely discredited denialist movement, ACCCE grew."

snip

<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090413/berman?rel=hp_currently>