Via DesmogBlog

If you were fooled by the multimillion dollar “clean coal” PR marketing campaign take a look at this video footage of a massive flood of toxic coal sludge from a dam that burst at a local coal company’s processing plant in Tennessee yesterday.

The spill covered as many as 400 acres of land with toxic ash as high as six feet deep.

You can go here to see some local TV news coverage. Here’s some raw footage of the spill zone:

Read more

The coal industry is attempting to organize bloggers to promote their false “clean coal” propaganda. The Reality Coalition, a group of national environmental organizations, have begun airing the message that “There’s no such thing as clean coal,” to counter the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by coal-powered corporations to pretend that coal is a “clean” fuel. So the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) and Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC), essentially one coal propaganda group with two different faces, is fighting back with an email blast asking people to join their “Blogger Brigade”:

You can get into the debate. If you are interested in becoming an active member of ABEC’s Blogger Brigade just send me an e-mail to abroadhurst@balancedenergy.org and let me know you’re interested. One of our team members will give you a call and walk you through the process. It’s really easy – and for those of you who don’t already Blog, it is fun! You can join the online debate that’s already going on and you and others can remain anonymous (if you want to) at the same time! We’ll even set up a little competition to see how many Blog entries each person can make.

Notwithstanding the strange capitalization of “Blog,” this is the latest in a series of netcentric efforts from the coal public relations people. They’ve launched a Facebook page, Twitter feed, and have littered blogs with comments defending coal.

No matter how large ABEC’s “Blogger Brigade” gets, they still won’t be able to hide the toxic and dirty reality of coal. Yesterday morning, a dike at the Kingston coal-fired power plant in Harriman, Tennessee broke, letting loose a deluge of about 500 million gallons of coal slurry into tributaries of the Tennessee River, destroying twelve homes and derailing a train.

Watch the startling news footage:

Now that’s something worth blogging about.

Full email: Read more

Our guest bloggers are Daniel J. Weiss and Alexandra Kougentakis, a Senior Fellow and the Director of Climate Strategy and a Fellows Assistant at the Center For American Progress Action Fund.

Yesterday, the Center for American Progress released “Clean Coal Smoke Screen,” which documented that the coal and utility companies that belong to the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) have invested only a paltry percentage of their profits to develop technologies to reduce global warming. ACCCE attempted to push back by releasing a list of research efforts to capture coal’s global warming emissions:

The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) today released a list of more than 80 carbon capture and storage demonstration and research projects, predominantly underway in the U.S., proving again that the coal-based electricity sector is moving aggressively towards bringing advanced clean coal technologies to the marketplace domestically and abroad.

In fact, this list did not prove that ACCCE members are “moving aggressively” in carbon capture and storage research. A quick review of the list found that most of these research projects are undertaken by the Department of Energy in cooperation with non-ACCCE entities. The projects on the ACCCE list fall into the following categories (projects before 2001 are not included here):

– 18 with ACCCE members in a joint CCS-related project

– 18 are joint National Energy Technology Lab and regional Carbon Sequestration and Leadership partnership projects

– 13 are joint DOE-university projects

– 12 projects are joint projects between DOE and non-profit or non-ACCCE for-profit partners

– 8 projects are joint DOE-U.S. energy lab projects

– 10 are foreign projects

– 6 are joint projects by the DOE or National Energy Technology Labs and regional Carbon Sequestration and Leadership partnerships; while the partnerships in this group include ACCCE members, these particular projects did not include ACCCE members as primary sponsors

– 1 with an ACCCE member partner in a non-CCS project

– 1 project is funded by the DOE only

– 2 are private projects by non-ACCCE members

Only 18 out of 89 projects on ACCCE’s list are CCS-related projects involving investment from ACCCE members. Sixteen of the 18 were recognized in the Center for American Progress analysis, which relied on information provided by ACCCE members. Two additional recently announced projects that were not on the ACCCE list were accounted for by the Center for American Progress as well. All the ACCCE list proves is that the federal government has undertaken many CCS projects with little monetary involvement from the “coal-based electricity sector.”

Our study found that ACCCE companies made 17 times as much money in 2007 alone as their total multi-year investment in CCS research –- a fact not refuted by ACCCE’s press release. Despite this miniscule investment in carbon capture and storage, we fully expect ACCCE and its member companies to continue to urge Congress to delay and weaken greenhouse gas reduction proposals, and to use taxpayer dollars to fund the research the coal industry should be doing themselves. Hopefully, Congress will not be fooled by the clean coal smoke.

Until the election, this long-beloved annual traditional of Climate Progress was a lock for one person — last year’s winner. After all, like Time magazine, our Person of the Year is awarded to the person or group who “for better or for worse … has done the most to influence the events of the year” in the climate arena.

Now the judges are split. On the one hand, no person on the entire planet, heck no semi-sentient lifeform in the entire solar system, has week-after-week worked so tirelessly, given 110% evey day, to high-impact misleadership on the issue of the century than George W. Bush.

Indeed, even after the election, when you think he is not just a lame duck, but a duck in need of a hip replacement, electroshock therapy, and CPR, his EPA administrator undoes perhaps the only recent glimmer of hope to come out of the one tiny enlightened corner of the entire executive branch that Darth Dick Cheney had apparently not cowered into conscienceless, self-destructive, obedience — when the EPA Environmental Appeals Board voted to stop new coal plants cold. But as the NYT reported Friday, “Officials weighing federal applications by utilities to build new coal-fired power plants cannot consider their greenhouse gas output, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency ruled late Thursday.”

Of course not. Sure the Supreme Court ruled against the Bush Administration, decided carbon dioxide was a pollutant, and ordered EPA to start regulating it under the Clean Air Act. But they didn’t reckon on George Bush ruling against them.

On the other hand, Bush and Cheney never counted on the American people ruling against them. And now the country will be lead by the greenest, most scientifically informed, radical pragmatists in the history of the Republic:

Read more

The anti-clean-coal Reality Campaign is a coalition of some very serious groups and smart people. They have the same goal that all CSAs (climate science advocates) do, namely to stop building new dirty coal plants (and presumably to start shutting down existing ones). But I just don’t think they have figured out an effective way to attack clean coal clap trap yet.

I criticized the first ad of the Reality Campaign (see “Memo to Gore: Don’t call coal ‘clean’ seven times in your ad“). I think that costly TV ad is actually counterproductive, and probably leaves in the memory of most casual viewers (i.e. the target audience) either a neutral or positive view of “clean coal.” I can’t believe Frank Luntz or the fictional Don Draper — or any set of leading PR people the Campaign might get pro bono — would ever sign off on such an ad.

Now they have a new uncompelling “Smudge” ad, which again is simply too clever by half. Judge for yourself:

At least they only repeat “clean” twice, and at least this appears to be a web only ad that won’t cost them much money. I’m interested in your impressions. I see a lot wrong with this ad.

Read more

[Post your picks below.]

In my defense of Obama science pick John Holdren against the deniers and delayers, I wrote:

Amazingly, [NYT science writer] Tierney quotes CEI attacking Holdren. Now CEI is itself probably one of the top five anti-scientific think tanks in the country. It has taken $2 million of ExxonMobil money in the past decade to run an anti-science disinformation campaign with ads that claim the ice sheets are gaining mass when they are losing it and ending with the absurdist and suicidal tag line, “CO₂: they call it pollution, we call it Life!” And those are only some of their ads aimed at destroying the climate for centuries. No reputable science journalist would quote CEI’s opinion on science or climate issues.

Science blogger Joshua Rosenau, who spends his days at the National Center for Science Education defending the teaching of evolution, emailed me a question about the second sentence, which led to this post:

Read more