Shiny New Peabody Coal PR Blitz Flops In Australia (Bonus - Bjorn Lomborg!)

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As DeSmogBlog has reported, the claims from Peabody Energy and others that the world’s poorest countries should be pulled from poverty on the back of coal are coming under increasing scrutiny. Australia’s Minerals Council of Australia, the peak industry group representing the coal industry, said that any suggestion that the industry was using “energy poverty” as “industry propaganda” were “as inaccurate as they were offensive”

Later on at the Peabody-sponsored event Dr Bjorn Lomborg, Danish political scientists and founder of the US-registered Copenhagen Consensus Center think tank, echoed the claims from Kellow that fossil fuels were the tool to lift the world’s poor – particularly in sub-Saharan Africa – out of poverty.

Both Kellow and Lomborg relied on projections from the International Energy Agency to claim that it was inevitable that developing countries would burn more coal. While some projections from the International Energy Agency do find this, the figures also come with a climate health warning. The IEA also states that the projections cited by Peabody and Lomborg are in line with a scenario that would deliver between 3C and 6C of global warming for Africa by the end of this century.

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In a later press conference, I asked Dr Lomborg how much of the poverty reduction he hoped could be achieved would be wiped out by climate change impacts in the region 4C. He said that “you would have to run the models” but they were “very crude in a number of different ways”. He said while “obviously, you could get some numbers out of the models, they really won’t tell you anything”.

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http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/11/14/youth-climate-coalition-peabody-energy-boss-we-dont-want-your-coal