The Dirt on Clean Coal
By Ari Berman
Ari Berman: The slumping economy has made GOP smear tactics seem petty and shrill--but they're looking forward to their next shot.
In 1955 the Tennessee Valley Authority built what was at the time the world's largest coal plant, near Kingston, Tennessee. More than fifty years later, 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."
The spill underscored the negative images the word "coal" often conjures up--battered communities in Appalachia, underground explosions, exploited miners, brutal strikes and black lung. Yet the American coal industry, which pumps 2 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year and contributes more than one-third of the nation's overall greenhouse gas emissions, is nothing if not resilient. Despite rising public concern about global warming and a growing awareness that coal is an irrevocably dirty business, the industry is spending millions of dollars on a slick messaging campaign stressing its "commitment to clean."
Critics argue that "clean coal" means anything the industry wants it to, pointing out that 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. The Center for American Progress recently released a report showing that the country's biggest coal companies have spent only a fraction of their multibillion-dollar profits developing technologies to curb carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. "The ads and other public clean coal activities are merely designed to delay global warming solutions without suffering a public relations black eye," the CAP report stated.
"Clean coal is like a healthy cigarette," Al Gore likes to say. "It does not exist." Gore is spearheading the Reality Campaign, a countereffort with environmental groups like the Sierra Club featuring an ad by the Coen brothers that's known as "No Country for Coal Men." Ted Venners, founder of Evergreen Energy--a company in Colorado that reduces CO2 emissions from coal by 8 percent compared with traditional coal--shares Gore's skepticism. "It is an oxymoron," Venners says. "Even after the process of cleaning coal, it's not clean."
In the coming months, as Congress and the Obama administration dole out billions in stimulus dollars to kick-start a green economy and draft sweeping legislation to curb climate change, the future of coal will be at the heart of the debate over energy policy. 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.
Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, compares the strategy of these early groups to that of the tobacco industry, which for decades argued that cigarettes didn't cause cancer. "Doubt is our product," Brown & Williamson stated in an internal memo in 1969, "since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public." In 1992 a scientific consensus was emerging around the seriousness of global warming, and President George H.W. Bush attended an international climate change conference in Brazil that laid the groundwork for the Kyoto Protocol. Around that time the Western Fuels Association--a consortium of coal producers--introduced an ad campaign to "reposition global warming as theory (not fact)," Oreskes details in a forthcoming paper. Its print and radio ads posed questions like "If the Earth is getting warmer, why is Kentucky getting colder?" and "How much are you willing to pay to solve a problem that may not exist?" On Earth Day 1998, Western Fuels launched a front group called the Greening Earth Society to promote "positive environmental thinking," namely, the idea that increased CO2 emissions would benefit humanity. The group called CO2 "an amazingly effective aerial fertilizer" and posited that global warming would boost agricultural productivity and create a healthier planet. Greening Earth's founder, Fred Palmer, presented a ready-made villain for the environmental movement. "Every time you turn your car on and you burn fossil fuels and you put CO2 into the air, you're doing the work of the Lord," Palmer said.
Greening Earth and Western Fuels worked in partnership with the Center for Energy and Economic Development (CEED), an industry group co-founded by railroad exec (and future Bush II treasury secretary) John Snow and Steve Miller, a top aide to former Kentucky Governor Brereton Jones. In the mid-'90s CEED lobbied against the Kyoto Protocol, which it called "wrong in its science, wrong in its approach, wrong to surrender, wrong for America." The group employed the research of Frederick Seitz--a fixture in the tobacco industry--to argue that CO2 was "NOT A Pollutant" but rather "Earth's Basic Building Block." "We caution policymakers to fully examine the evidence available regarding climate change and global climate modeling," Miller said at the time. "Indeed, many scientists maintain that
emissions from electric power plants are not contributing significantly to overall warming trends."
CEED and its ilk found a receptive message on Capitol Hill, where the Senate unanimously opposed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, making the United States the world's only industrialized nation to ignore the threat of climate change. Yet a message of denial and confusion got the industry only so far, so the main backers of CEED, including Western Fuels and major coal producers like Peabody and Southern Company, formed Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC) to promote clean coal.
Going forward, CEED and ABEC spent less time disputing the science of global warming and instead featured coal as the lifeblood of the American economy, maintaining that any regulation to reduce emissions would be disastrous. The industry had a willing booster in George W. Bush, who quickly broke his campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant and appointed coal lobbyists to top positions in his administration, granting the industry a long and now familiar wish list of favors, including gutting the Clean Air Act and easing standards for mountaintop mining.
But increasing public awareness of global warming and the Democrats' takeover of Congress in 2006 foreshadowed challenges for the industry. A September 2007 poll commissioned by ABEC showed that 51 percent of "opinion elites"--a sample of upper-income, well-educated, business-oriented Americans--believed that coal was not a fuel for America's future. In 2007 fifty-nine new coal plants were rejected or put on hold; only a dozen have been built since 1990. "We're walking around with a bull's-eye on our forehead," Jim Rogers of Duke Energy told journalist Jeff Goodell.
CEED and ABEC correctly recognized that the industry had to be for something, rather than against everything. In 2007 ABEC quadrupled its ad budget to combat what it called "outdated perceptions about coal," and in early 2008 CEED and ABEC morphed into ACCCE, delivering the fine-tuned message that global warming is real and that clean coal can help solve it. The group used the research from its 2007 poll as the basis for its huge marketing campaign, designed a logo of an orange power cord plugged into a rock of coal and jumped into the presidential campaign.
ACCCE understood that the road to the White House frequently travels through coal country, in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Indiana, Missouri and Colorado. Even Iowa, a place synonymous with corn, gets four-fifths of its energy from coal. So the group showed up early and often, recruiting a "grassroots army" of staffers in bright blue T-shirts to trail the candidates, passing out promotional materials at every stop, co-sponsoring presidential debates and running ads in key swing states. The group spent $2 million at the Democratic convention alone. At a moment of soaring gas prices and deep economic insecurity, ACCCE conveyed a series of easily digestible talking points: 50 percent of the nation's electricity comes from coal; coal is 77 percent cleaner (when you don't include CO2 emissions) now compared with 1970; America is the Saudi Arabia of coal; coal is cheap, plentiful and clean.
One moment during the campaign, in particular, illustrated the enduring power of the coal industry and the emerging imprint of clean coal. At a mid-September stop in Maumee, Ohio, Joe Biden told a questioner on a rope line, "We're not supporting 'clean coal'.... No coal plants here in America. Build them, if they're going to build them, over there and make 'em clean, because they're killing you." John McCain seized on the comment, launching the Coalition to Protect Coal Jobs, and supporters at a Sarah Palin rally in Ohio chanted, "Mine, baby, mine!" CEED co-founder Steve Miller, who had become president of ACCCE, urged Biden to "clarify" his remarks. The Obama campaign quickly responded with a Clean Coal Jobs Task Force of coal-state Democrats. "I support clean coal technology," Obama said in the final presidential debate. "Doesn't make me popular with environmentalists."
On election day ACCCE released a poll showing that 69 percent of "opinion leaders" supported coal as a fuel for America's future, a huge turnaround from the previous September, and Obama prevailed in coal-rich states such as Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania. ACCCE even got Biden to sign a "clean coal" hat.
Much MORE long ARTICLE:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090413/berman/print?rel=nofollow
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