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OPINION: Effort to clean coal's image won't work MCT REGIONAL NEWS By Dan Radmacher The Roanoke Times, Va. Date published: 12/30/2008
ROANOKE --Maybe it's a consequence of spending so much time around heavy machinery, but people in the coal industry seem incapable of bringing a light touch to their marketing efforts.Take "The Clean Coal Carolers." Well, you could take them, if the group that came up with the idea, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, hadn't pulled down the singing lumps of coal in the face of widespread ridicule and scorn. Before they were mothballed, you could go to a Web site and dress up the animated lumps of coal in scarves, hats, and ear muffs and pick which songs you wanted to be serenaded with: "Frosty the Coalman," "Deck the Halls (with Clean Coal!)," and other surefire soon-to-be classics. Even before ACCCE pulled down the site, the group decided it had perhaps gone too far with the remake of "Silent Night," which changed the refrain "Christ the Savior is born" to "Plenty of coal for years to come." That song got taken down early. The original site has been pulled down, but you can still catch the Clean Coal Carolers on YouTube: tinyurl.com/6s2z54. This is not the only example of heavy-handed marketing efforts on behalf of the coal industry. I saw one of my favorites on the way back to visit friends in Charleston, W.Va., recently. Billboards along Interstate 77 hit drivers with this message: "Yes, coal. Clean, carbon neutral coal." Walker Machinery, which produces the heavy equipment needed to mine coal, sponsors the billboards. The company should be charged with false advertising. Coal is not, of course, carbon neutral. In fact, coal-fired electric plants are the largest source of carbon emissions in the world. Coal is also not, in any traditional sense of the word, "clean." Did you watch "Charlie Brown's Christmas" this year? Coal is clean like Pig-Pen is clean. Extracting coal from the ground, especially using the increasingly popular mountaintop removal method, is an environmental disaster. And even with billions of dollars spent on pollution controls, emissions from coal-fired power plants are massive contributors to dirty air, causing widespread health problems among those unfortunate enough to live nearby and negative environmental consequences hundreds of miles away. Coal is as cheap and plentiful as its admirers contend. Extracting it and burning it for fuel, however, carry extremely high costs--most of which are not borne by those who buy the cheap electricity generated by coal.
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