Staunton Green 2020

The 2005 film Thank You For Smoking pulled back the veil on spinmeister marketing, exposing the evil genius behind big industry campaigns to hoodwink the American public into believing patent untruths about certain products. In that case it was about making cigarettes appear harmless, even sexy.

The attitude behind this approach is a belief that the American people will willingly buy into any line of bunk that an industry wants to sell if it sells it hard enough. It’s the old “repeat a lie often enough and it becomes a truth…” tactic. And that’s the very method the coal industry relies on in its grossly misleading campaign hawking so-called “clean coal.”

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Sometimes online advocacy is such an inspired execution of such a perfectly bad idea that it becomes its own satire.

If you found a website showing little lumps of coal as cute as the kids in South Park singing songs about clean coal technology to the tunes of Christmas Carols you might think they came from the MacBook of some wickedly wry anti-coal activist.

But oh, my friend, you would be wrong. Very wrong.

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Wherever you stand on the Santa Claus issue this holiday season — whether you blame ol’ St. Nick or dear ol’ dad for that lump of coal in your stocking — when it comes to clean coal, in reality, there’s no such thing. (more…)