The coal industry has a new propaganada ad campaign featuring this image:
The Reality Campaign notes the image is “remarkably familiar” to one made famous by the merchants of death:
And perhaps that similarity stems from other similarities between coal and cigarettes, as the Reality folks note:
- Joe Camel was “used in an attempt to distract the public from the facts about tobacco,” and this new image is being “used to distract the public from the facts about so-called ‘clean’ coal”
- “There is no such thing as a healthy cigarette,” and “There is no such thing as ‘clean’ coal.”
I would add that Joe Camel was used to make smoking seem cool and hip, especially to young peple — a crucial target audience to replace the hundreds of thousands of customers who were dying each year from using the product. The new image is used to make smoking seem cool and hip, especially to young peple — a crucial target audience since coal is going to destroy their future.
Related Posts:
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Joe,
As an avid reader of this blog, I know that you, or the other contributors, can help me with this dilemna. I teach a Wellness course at a local 2 yr college. One small piece of (my) the curriculum is ‘Environmental Wellness’. I have at most 2 – fifty minute periods to educate and influence the students perspectives/positions on global climate change. I currently use 1 period for background information and the second period to discuss solutions, both small (personal) and large (local/state/national). Informal polling of the students yields that approx. 20% know and care, 20-30% know and believe it’s a hoax, 25% don’t know and “may be interested”, and 25% don’t know and are “too busy to care”. I teach in an urban setting and I believe the polling accurately reflects the population as a whole. My question is – what’s the best way to utilize 2-50 minute periods? Can you suggest any specific (short) videos, clips, interviews that I can incorporate? Are there any specific Climate Change summaries? If I just list “the facts” they will tune out after 20 minutes or so. I will keep tabs on the reply’s so please fire away with suggestions.
Andy,
My sympathies and, damn …
I also teach at the college level, and as an “academic tinker” I continue to wander through various settings in search of the permanent position.
It is hard enough to visibly change people’s lives with an entire semester to work on it; in two class periods it is impossible to make — again, visible — differences. But differences can and do occur. Each of us can strengthen the insights of those who do have a committment to scientific adequacy, and force those whose only committment is an ideological one to waste yet more energy defending their ideologies against logic and facts.
You might consider a strategic approach of subversion rather than a direct approach of listing facts. For example, you might encourage your students to take a class in Critical Thinking, which is something you can do throughout the semester. If you also teach such courses, I am rather fond of Schick and Vaughn’s How to Think About Weird Things, since it deals with science vs. pseudoscience in a quite explicit manner. If you don’t teach those courses, hunt down the folks in the philosophy dept. who do and shake them by the lapels until they agree to try that book.
The above suggests other strategic components, specifically working across departmental and disciplinary boundaries to create an informal teaching network that focuses upon global scientific literacy rather than “merely” AGW. People who take science seriously as inquiry, rather than merely wrapping themselves in labels that say “science,” invariably also take the issues of AGW seriously as well.
Sorry, I’m just brainstorming on the keyboard. Maybe some of that helps.
A new coal plant in the upper midwest has been approved.
http://www.startribune.com/local/37665329.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUUsZ
The coal plant is to be just on the South Dakota side along the SD-Minnesota border. It was a long fight in the courts, but it appears to be over.
DeSmogBlog has several useful posts today:
Coal lobby PR firm memo boasts about manipulating democrats and republicans
and
Leaked clean coal strategy memo to Peabody Energy.
Well, Joe, I stared and stared at that lump of coal and was unable to see any obvious imagery relating to male genitalia, but other than that, sure. :)
I had a letter to the editor published in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times in which the paper picked up on my use of the phrase “Killer Coal” for the letter’s headline.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/letters/la-le-thursday15-2009jan15,0,280694.story?page=4
I’ve read and appreciated what Joe has had to say in past posts about the Reality Campaign’s misguided and repeated use of the “Clean Coal” phrase, which I strongly agree only serves to reinforce that effective alliteration.
I like the phrase “Killer Coal” because it’s not only another two word alliteration, but it’s also provocative enough to grab attention yet flexible enough to cover coal’s deadly role in mountain top removal, water pollution during mining, black lung disease, toxic waste, mercury poisoning and being #1 with a bullet on the GHG causing global warming team.
Positioning coal as a stone cold killer then makes the logical argument about whether coal deserves the death penalty or merely life in prison.
Andy: I don’t know if this will be any help, but there is a good book out you may have missed since it’s aimed primarily at people in public health and safety.
It’s Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), by David Michaels. He’s at George Washington U’s School of Public Health.
He argues that to keep the public confused about the gazards posed by global warming, second-hand smoke, lead, plastics and other nasty stuff, industry execs have hired unscrupulous scientists and lobbyists to dispute the scientific evidence that would alert the public to these dangers.
He quotes a tobacco company exec, for example, as observing that doubt . . . is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public (and) is the best means of establishing a controversy.”
It’s a thoughtful read that you may want to consider for class use, or, at least, put on your course reading list.
It also prods readers to think critically, which I notice is something that Gary rightfully recommends. It would certainly help students detect the warning flags that surround J. Fred Singer’s work, for example.
Killer Coal, indeed. Kudos Creative Greenius — I’ve been using the term in my blog. There is no such thing as just “coal.” Joe, please mind your article from a few weeks ago, about how phrases ingrain themselves in memory, even as your arguments around them are lost.
A strong PR pushback. An effort to tie the “clean coal” campaign with “safe cigarettes” would seem to be a winner.
Get some simple slogans out to the general public. Slogans that are factual and easy to remember.
Asbestos, tobacco, coal – they all sounded good at one time….
Coal – It’s what’s killing us….
Andy -
there is a great series of videos out on YouTube which try to rephrase the question of what causes climate change to the more important question of what should be done given the probabilities and risks involved. The videos were created by a high-school science teacher and you can find them by searching for his ID wonderingmind42. The first video in the series is called “How it All Ends”.
Hope this helps and gives you another option to address the topic.
Andy, this short animation may be useful:
http://www.wakeupfreakout.org/film/tipping.html
Thanks to all for your ideas (the video clips/links look very good). More suggestions are always appreciated.
Andy
Andy: as a fellow college environmental science professor, I of course contemplate the same issue. There are lots of good visual resources to expose them too, but the most crucial thing is to be able to share your specific observations with them that apply. That means if you have not explored a location impacted by climate change you need to visit one, a retreating glacier, a receding shoreline, a perenially depleted lake-reservoir, New Orleans, etc. etc. and then share your observations. This generation treasures first hand accounts over what they read, and we bring more passion and clarity when we have first hand observations to relate. In my cases it is glacier observations. http://www.nichols.edu/departments/glacier/
Andy: This may be for a younger audience, but I think this high school science teacher has made some really entertaining and informative videos about global warming:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF_anaVcCXg
Let me know what you think.
Whoops, Baerbel got to it first. Sorry Andy, that was my idea too.
perhaps the film, “Everything’s Cool” http://www.everythingscool.org might be well received.
Other film options: “The Eleventh Hour”: http://wip.warnerbros.com/11thhour/mainsite/site.html
or Frontline’s “Heat” with a teacher’s guide here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/teach/heat/
or Earth Focus episodes on Link TV
http://www.linktv.org/search/q/global%20warming/o/relevant/f/earth
Andy, Don’t know whether it’d be useful to you or not, but you need something short and I’ve packaged the core science and consequences into a 1 page website (with a second page of cites to sources) called Forecast of Catastrophic Climate Change. See http://www.climateforecastloyola.info. It emerged from the course I teach in Global Warming Law. (N.B. Firefox browser distorts site.)
Tobacco was indeed the original sin, and it is not surprising to see how many of the denialists got their start as science shills for tobacco, Fred Seitz and Fred Singer to name two. Come to think about it they were active opposing the Montreal Protocols and just about any environmentally beneficial regulation you can name.
It is a malformed URL
http://www.climateforecastloyola.info
Take off the dot from the end
Firefox 3.0.5 is fine
And this site is very strong.. thanks
Andy, this is a recent “Now” program on the oceans and climate change, including a basic look at cryospheric aspects of thermal inertia. It at least provokes some thought:
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/502/video.html
Another site covers the issue too.. this easier to read
http://www.lagreenbean.com/cms/node/105
robert benson — Do I know you from a long time ago?
Internal memo’s from the spin-doctors who started using “clean” and “coal” in the same sentence have been leaked, recently.
A few gems:
“We nearly turned candidate events into clean coal rallies,”
“We did this by sending ‘clean coal’ branded teams to hundreds of presidential candidate events, carrying a positive message (we can be part of the solution to climate change) which was reinforced by giving away free t-shirts and hats emblazoned with our branding: Clean Coal.”
“ACCCE (a coal indusry front group) shaped the debate by finding supporters of the candidates and turning them into clean coal advocates.”
blog post with links to the Jan 14th press release and the original memo, here:
http://changethedream.blogspot.com/2009/01/new-safe-cigarette.html
Smoking is not cool anymore. It used to be cool, but not anymore, since the opinion that it is silly and disgusting has proliferated, partly because we found out it’s really not good for your health.
The same is happening with cleanish coal. We are realizing it’s not as great as advertized, and no longer cool.
Very interesting, I found this blog that called the phrase, and rightly so, “clean coal” a travesty. here is the link:http://www.ethanolplug.com/PlugBlog/tabid/60/EntryId/5/-font-size-2-What-Exactly-is-Clean-Coal-font.aspx
In your blog of Jan 15 you say that “2009 was the year that most deniers finally got over their denial.”
[JR: Huh? Who are you talking to?]