by Donald Brown via Climate Ethics

For over a decade the coal industry has funded campaigns designed to convince Americans that coal can be burned without adverse environmental impacts. These campaigns raise troubling ethical issues. In fact, as we shall see, these campaigns have often been misleading and deceptive in several different ways.

This deception is classic propaganda because propaganda presents facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis, or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information presented. Although many entities on both sides of an issue who are trying to persuade the general public to think a certain way will frequently resort to the use of propaganda, as we shall see, deceptive propaganda is particularly morally odious when it engages in lying or lying by omission. A lie by omission occurs when an important fact is left out in order to foster a misconception. The clean coal propaganda has frequently engaged in propaganda that must be understood as lying by omission, if not outright lying. It is also lying by omission about something which is potentially very harmful, making the lies even more morally abhorrent

Given that academies of science around the world have concluded that climate change is a huge threat to millions of people around the world, that coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels currently used for electricity generation in regard to climate change, that there are no commercial scale coal-fired power plants in the United States now nor likely to be in wide-spread commercial operation for decades capable of actually removing heat trapping gases, a fact not revealed in TV commercials funded by the clean coal campaign, this campaign which implies that coal is “clean” is deeply misleading about likely harmful and dangerous human activities. In other words, this is deception with huge potential adverse consequences for life on earth and ecological systems on which life depends.

Some TV commercials funded through clean coal campaigns visually or verbally reference clean coal without acknowledgment that coal combustion could be considered clean only if new unproven technologies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from coal combustion are widely deployed. Other commercials contain often vague references to clean coal technologies that could in theory reduce greenhouse gas emissions if commercial scale of these technologies is determined through future research to be environmentally benign and economically feasible. None of these commercials, however, reveal that there are serious open questions about whether geologic carbon sequestration or other unproven greenhouse gas emission reduction technologies for use with coal combustion will be proven to be environmentally acceptable and economically viable at commercial scale. The New York Times reported this month that there is new evidence that carbon capture and storage, the technology most frequently considered to be the best hope for reducing greenhouse gases from coal combustion, may not be economically viable because of cheaper and abundant amounts of natural gas. (Wald, 2012)

Claiming that coal is clean because it could be clean if a new technically unproven and economically dubious technology might be adopted is like someone claiming that belladonna is not poisonous because there is a new unproven safe pill under development that sometime in the future might be economically affordable and that may be taken with belladonna to neutralize belladonna’s toxic effects.

Who has been behind this campaign? According to Source Watch, these campaigns were initially created by the Center for Energy and Economic Development (CEED) in 2000. CEED also created Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC), a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign aimed at emphasizing the importance and downplaying the environmental impacts of coal-fired power production. CEED was founded by Peabody Energy, Arch Coal, Southern Company, and DTE Energy (Source Watch, 2012a). ABEC’s members also have included mining companies, electric utilities, and railroad companies. The CEED was merged with Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC) to form a new coal industry front group, American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, on April 17, 2008 (Source Watch, 2012a).

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Billionaire ‘philanthropist’ Warren Buffett Owns the Railroad Behind the Scheme to Ship Massive Amounts of Montana Coal to the Biggest Greenhouse-Gas Emitter on the Planet

Photo by Chad Harder

This remarkable story was originally published in the Missoula Independent and was re-printed with permission from the author.

by Matthew Frank, the Missoula Independent

With the heavy spring rains, the Otter Creek Valley, in southeastern Montana, glows green in early July, dotted with sage and bright patches of yellow clover and wild mustard. Ranchland rises gently toward rugged hills and buttes. Otter Creek twists a narrow channel through the middle, reflecting clouds. Otter Creek Road follows the creek. Few pickups pass between the unincorporated community of Otter to the south and the one-gas-station town of Ashland to the north.

A month before and about 6,000 miles away, in Beijing, a city of 20 million, where enveloping smog obscures the surrounding mountains, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer spoke of this Montana valley—or, rather, what’s beneath it. The governor of the state with the greatest coal reserves keynoted a coal conference sponsored by Peabody Energy, the largest private coal company in the world, with massive operations in northeast Wyoming, just south of Otter. Schweitzer and coal companies such as Peabody see economic opportunity in exporting coal to China and other energy-hungry Asian markets. More than a billion tons of coal beneath the Otter Creek Valley could be shipped and burned there.

Schweitzer addressed a crowd of researchers and coal company reps at the coal gasification conference at the Great Wall Sheraton Hotel. “I talked a little bit about energy security in the U.S. and most of the countries that were represented there, and how we share a concern,” Schweitzer told me, speaking recently in his office in Helena. “We’ve become so dependent on oil from just a few unstable regimes, and the sooner we get to a new energy source that’s cleaner, greener, more sustainable, it’s better for everybody. Coal can have a future if we have a solution to CO2″—that is, a way to burn coal and contain the greenhouse gas—”or it doesn’t have a future if we don’t.”

But Arch Coal—and every other coal company in the business of making money—isn’t waiting for a solution. Arch, the second-largest U.S. coal producer, has paid about $160 million to lease 18,000 Otter Creek acres containing 1.4 billion tons of coal from the state of Montana and Great Northern Properties.

Meanwhile, Arch is arranging a way to ship the coal to Asia. On July 1, Arch, Warren Buffet’s BNSF Railway, and billionaire Forrest E. Mars Jr. purchased the Tongue River Railroad Company, which holds a valuable federal permit to build a 121-mile rail link between Miles City and Decker, with a spur connecting to the Otter Creek tracts, at an estimated cost of $550 million.

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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.