The coal industry lobbying outfit now mired in a forgery scandal is planning to plant questioners at “town hall meetings” and “lawmakers’ offices,” Politico reports. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), despite the revelation it was responsible for forged “grassroots” letters to members of the House of Representatives attacking the American Clean Energy and Security Act, is pressing forward with an aggressive Astroturfing campaign going after U.S. Senators, who are now considering the legislation:

The coalition also plans to deploy teams to question senators at town hall meetings, advertise at state fairs and other summer events and visit lawmakers’ offices back home.

ACCCE’s campaign, representing coal interests from General Electric to Peabody Energy, requires the efforts of multiple Astroturfing companies, including primary contractor Hawthorn Group, as well as known fraud shop Bonner & Associates, and marketing firm R & R Partners.

The “ACCCE Army” will be joining right-wing Astroturf efforts funded by the oil and gas industry to disrupt Congressional town hall meetings across the nation. Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, both bankrolled by oil and gas giant Koch Industries, are orchestrating the “tea party protests” and have hired dozens of field staff to spread misinformation about clean energy and health care reform. Yesterday, FreedomWorks released its “August Action Recess Packet” for disrupting town hall meetings:

It is essential that we don’t let the pressure up. While Senators and Representatives are home for their August recess they need to hear from you, regardless of party. Many hold town hall meetings that are open to the public, check our map to see if there is one nearby and take our questions to ask them on the record whether they can risk losing even more jobs under Cap and Trade or if they plan on raising taxes for government run health care. In addition to attending town hall meetings, please call and visit district offices asking the same questions.

As Media Matters Action explains, the FreedomWorks energy talking points are just as fraudulent as ACCCE’s “clean coal” campaign.

The stack of forged letters opposing clean energy reform on behalf of the coal industry is growing. Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA) has revealed that he not only received forgeries purporting to come from black and hispanic groups, but also senior citizen and women’s advocacy organizations as well. Yesterday, Perriello’s office told reporters that in addition to the five NAACP letters and one Creciendo Juntos letter forged on behalf of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), “two other letters were forged to appear as if they had been sent by the Jefferson Area Board for Aging, a Charlottesville agency, and the American Association of University Women.” Perriello, who cast his vote in favor of the American Clean Energy and Security Act despite this fraud, discussed the scandal on Rachel Maddow:

Obviously, anything like this, where someone is claiming your letterhead and then claiming your position is just outrageous. They also did JABA, the Jefferson Area Board for the Aging, which is one of these great service organizations in our community that helps our seniors. And for them to get dragged into something like this really is, I think, a blow to folks in the area. But it’s also just a turn-off again to these sorts of corporate-lobbying tactics.

Watch it:

Neither JABA nor the American Association of University Women did any lobbying on the American Clean Energy and Security Act, and both organizations first learned about the fraud today. Since the scandal broke last Friday, ACCCE has placed the blame on its contractors, the Astroturf specialists Hawthorn Group and Bonner & Associates. However, ACCCE has known and kept silent about the fraudulent campaign against the clean energy legislation since June, even as the two other members known to have received fraudulent letters, Reps. Kathy Dahlkemper (D-PA) and Chris Carney (D-PA), voted against the bill.

Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), the chair of the Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, today sent a letter to ACCCE requesting information about its role in the affair, including the full details of all of the fraudulent letters sent on its behalf:

The deliberate inaction prior to the House vote and the extended silence after the vote — some 40 days after ACCCE knew what had happened — raises serious concerns.

The coal industry front group embroiled in an Astroturf scandal is now arguing that mountaintop removal coal mining helps communities “hampered because of a lack of flat space.” Joe Lucas, vice president of communications for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), told the Guardian that dynamiting the tops off of mountains — far from being the “rape of Appalachia” — is actually a boon to rural communities:

I can take you to places in eastern Kentucky where community services were hampered because of a lack of flat space — to build factories, to build hospitals, even to build schools. In many places, mountain-top mining, if done responsibly, allows for land to be developed for community space.

The concept of “responsible” mountain-top mining is laughable, as Mountain Justice explains:

Traditional mining communities disappear as jobs diminish and residents are driven away by dust, blasting and increased flooding and dangers from overloaded coal trucks careening down small, windy mountain roads. Mining companies buy many of the homes and tear them down. Dynamite is cheaper than people, so mountaintop removal mining does not create many new jobs.

Mountaintop removal generates huge amounts of waste. While the solid waste becomes valley fills, liquid waste is stored in massive, dangerous coal slurry impoundments, often built in the headwaters of a watershed. The slurry is a witch’s brew of water used to wash the coal for market, carcinogenic chemicals used in the washing process and coal fines (small particles) laden with all the compounds found in coal, including toxic heavy metals such as arsenic and mercury. Frequent blackwater spills from these impoundments choke the life out of streams.

ACCCE’s Joe Lucas — who can’t even admit that coal pollution contributes to global warming — is giving new meaning to the idea of the Flat Earth Society.

The coal industry’s top front group has admitted to hiring Bonner & Associates to block clean energy reform. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), a public-relations juggernaut funded by electric utilities, mining corporations, and other coal interests to derail mandatory limits on global warming pollution, “acknowledged” paying for Bonner’s “outreach” fraud — the forging of letters from civil rights organizations opposing the American Clean Energy and Security Act:

The group American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity acknowledged this afternoon that it had contracted Bonner & Associates earlier to perform “limited outreach,” but the advocacy group denounced the firm’s actions.

ACCCE’s choice of Bonner comes a little surprise, as Bonner has built a reputation as one of the most effective and amoral Astroturf companies inside the Beltway, having generated “grassroots” campaigns on behalf of the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries.

When not paying for Astroturf fraud, ACCCE was the top lobbyist on climate change and clean energy last year, spending $10.5 million on powerhouse lobbyists such as the Podesta Group and Guinn Gillespie. ACCCE has been praised for the “sophistication” of its public message of supporting mandatory emissions limits in theory while virulently opposing the passage of any actual legislation.

In addition, ACCCE has a $20 million budget for online campaigns for “shaping public attitudes” in favor of coal, has run tens of millions of dollars of television and radio ads, has handed out “clean coal” t-shirts and baseball caps, and even promoted “Frosty the Coalman” carols.

More about ACCCE from the Wonk Room Resource Library.

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Competing with Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness,” the coal front group American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) is launching an online “Factuality Tour” of five states to obscure the toxicity and pollution of coal. As part of the “Factuality Tour,” ACCCE is selling “Factuality” hats, “Factuality” tank tops, and “Factuality” organic baby bodysuits. You can “spread the word” online with “Factuality” widgets and badges. The first stop on the Factuality Tour is ACCCE member Arch Coal’s massive Thunder Basin strip mine in Wyoming:

No amount of PR spending or jazzy jingles can obscure the actual facts about coal: it’s a dirty killer of jobs, health, and the environment. Arch Coal, as can be seen from the Factuality video itself, is profiting obscenely from the literal stripmining of our planet:

Arch Sold Three Billion Dollars Of Coal Pollution In 2008. Arch sold 139.6 million tons of coal in 2008, about 12% of the United States supply, making $354.3 million on nearly three billion dollars of revenue. Employing only 4300 people, Arch produced over 32,000 tons of coal and made $82,400 per employee. Arch Coal’s CEO Steven Leer pulled in $6.56 million.

Arch Coal Is A Top Global Warming Polluter While Doing Nothing To Solve The Threat. The burning of Arch’s coal in 2008 generated about 223 million tons of carbon dioxide, approximately three percent of all U.S. emissions, and 52,000 tons per employee. Despite having made $929 million since 2003, Arch Coal is not investing in a single project to develop the technology needed to capture and store coal’s global warming pollution, according to a Center for American Progress analysis.

Arch Coal Is A High-Rolling Lobbying And Political Spender. Arch Coal spent $970,000 last year lobbying Congress, and has already spent $240,000 this year. Arch gave $116,750 to House members in 2007-2008, and $73,250 to Senate members in 2007-2008.

The average American carbon footprint is about 20 tons a year; the average Chinese carbon footprint is 3 tons a year. As he makes about two percent of Arch Coal profits, CEO Steven Leer’s footprint is over four million tons of global warming pollution a year.

The top public relations group for the coal industry is looking to shape public attitudes online, with a $20 million media budget for Internet-based advertising alone. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) is on the search for a “Vice President, Paid and Digital Media” to increase the public’s “appreciation for the use of coal”:

The Vice President, Paid and Digital Media is responsible for implementing proactive digital media and traditional media placement strategies as a component of an integrated national communication program designed to 1) support coal-based electricity advocacy initiatives and 2) increase the public’s awareness of and appreciation for the use of coal to generate electricity.

This position, according to recruiting firm Korn/Ferry International, will oversee the public relations and media placement firms under contract and manage an annual media budget in excess of $20 million: more than $3 million for “digital media programs” (like the “Clean Coal Carolers” and a “Blogger Brigade“) and greater than $17 million for “media placement.”

ACCCE’s planned digital onslaught is just one component of a comprehensive, national public relations campaign to misinform the public about coal. In 2008, ACCCE spent over $45 million on its deceptive messaging, including $10.5 million to lobby Congress. The PR firm Hawthorn Group has bragged about its “grassroots campaign” for ACCCE involving “sending ‘clean coal’ branded teams to hundreds of presidential candidate events” and “giving away free t-shirts and hats emblazoned with our branding: Clean Coal.”

The Wonk Room received the job description when Korn/Ferry approached Center for American Progress Action Fund’s Associate Director for Online Advocacy, Alan Rosenblatt, about the job. Alan tells the Wonk Room:

While some may work just for money, progressives work for values. Which might explain why this headhunter was naive enough to recruit me despite the fact I work for an organization that opposes her client.

Download the Korn/Ferry job description for ACCCE’s Vice President of Paid Digital Media here.

The Center for Public Integrity has found that “more than 770 companies and interest groups hired an estimated 2,340 lobbyists to influence federal policy on climate change in the past year,” estimating total expenditures of $90 million. Their comprehensive investigation of climate lobbying discovered that nearly 2,000 of the lobbyists represent corporate interests.

CPI found that the top climate lobbying shop was the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), a coal-industry front group that spent $10.5 million lobbying Congress:

No group exemplifies the sophistication of the current debate more than the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity — a new lobbying organization unveiled just weeks before the vote last June on the Warner-Lieberman bill. Representing 48 mining firms, coal-hauling railroads and coal-burning power companies, ACCCE spent $10.5 million lobbying Capitol Hill on climate in 2008 — more than any other organization solely dedicated to the issue. In addition to the group’s president, Steven Miller, a one-time aide to former Democratic Kentucky Gov. Brereton Jones, and vice president Joe Lucas, who was an aide to former Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary, ACCCE has at least 15 outside lobbyists, including former White House Counsel Quinn. The big effort is not surprising, since electricity is the largest single source of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and the most carbon-intensive fuel, coal, provides half the nation’s power. But ACCCE’s position is that it supports a mandatory federal program to curb the emissions its own members produce — as long as the policy meets ACCCE’s set of principles for keeping electricity affordable, domestically produced, and reliable. And that means encouraging, in ACCCE’s words, “robust utilization of coal.”

Check out the “The Climate Change Lobby” site, including a searchable database of lobbyists and a sampling of top players.

The coal-industry public relations group, American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, is crowing over the Senate’s insertion of billions of dollars of coal pork in the recovery plan. The Senate plan added $2.2 billion to the House’s generous allocation of $2.4 billion for the development of “carbon capture and sequestration technologies.” ACCCE is celebrating this “$4.6 billion in clean coal technology funding” in an email to its supporters, claiming the “funding is important because”:

• It contributes to energy independence, allowing us to use coal that is right here in America
• It stimulates the economy and could create almost 7 million job-years of employment and over $1 trillion in sales
• It will help fight climate change and aid other environmental goals by promoting technologies to reduce carbon dioxide and major air pollutants

Only by a gross distortion of industry-friendly estimates could $4.6 billion for coal technology really “create almost 7 million job-years of employment and over $1 trillion in sales.” The “7 million job-years” figure comes from “Employment and Other Economic Benefits from Advanced Coal Electric Generation with Carbon Capture and Storage,” a BBC Research report commissioned by ACCCE. In fact, the report says only that the construction of 100 gigawatts of advanced coal plants — about 200 plants over a fifteen-year span — would generate that much job activity. The construction expenditures for a single plant with CCS is estimated at “approximately $2.0 to $2.1 billion.” So the $4.6 billion in the Senate plan is enough for the construction of only two plants and about 6,000 construction and manufacturing jobs. Two hundred plants would cost a staggering $393 billion. The ACCCE email “is a bit confused,” Doug Jeavons, the author of the BBC report tells the Wonk Room:

The nearly 7 million job-years estimate is associated with full scale development of about 100 gigawatts of advanced coal CCS capacity, not just the proposed $4.6 billion in the stimulus plan.

Furthermore, the technology to build such plants does not yet exist. As NV Energy announced when they indefinitely postponed the construction of a coal-fired plant in Ely, Nevada:

The company will not move forward with construction of the coal plant until the technologies that will capture and store greenhouse gasses are commercially feasible, which is not likely before the end of the next decade.

To make CCS technology commercially viable, the federal government needs to do more than throw billions of dollars at the coal industry with lax provisions. As the Center for American Progress recommends, there should be a federal greenhouse emissions performance standard put in place for new plants, and a cap-and-trade system to make polluters pay for their emissions.

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.