MORE ON THE ‘CLEAN’ COAL LOBBY’S ASSAULT ON D.C.

The ‘Clean Coal’ Lobbying Blitz
Marianne Lavelle (w/Te-Ping Chen), April 20, 2009 (Center for Public Integrity)

SUMMARY
Listening earlier this week to Michael Brune of Rainforest Action Network (RAN) trying to talk truth to the dishonest, cynical face of power in the person of Michael Morris, the CEO of AEP (the biggest U.S. coal-burning utility), brought some Yeats lines to mind.

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RAN's Mr. Brune did yeomanly work exposing Morris, who claims to be concerned about the dreadful impacts of coal on climate change, environmental devastation and human health while the company he runs continues to destroy mountains, make the air unbreathable and severely add to greenhouse gas accumulation. Next time he engages someone like Morris, however, Mr. Brune must be prepared to also expose the lies coal tells about how cheap it is. It is not cheap but it defers its real costs to the taxpaying public. "Clean" coal - if it ever becomes possible - will never be financially practical because it will make electricity generated from coal prohibitively expensive.

Reading Marianne Lavelle’s The ‘Clean Coal’ Lobbying Blitz reveals that Morris and the coal industry both lie and don’t care who knows. Lavelle's work helps expose some of coal's lies about "clean" coal.

In a follow-up to The Climate Change Lobby… (see THE CLIMATE CHANGE BUSINESS), Lavelle examines the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), a front for 48 heavy coal-burning, emissions-generating mining, rail, manufacturing, and power-generating companies. The ACCCE yearly budget is $45+ million. After a year of work, ACCCE has become a hard-to-resist shaper of the debate about climate change and what the federal policy response should be, despite the best efforts of a coalition of environmentalists to show how false and empty ACCCE’s claims are.

An indication of ACCCE’s clout is the shift in the climate and energy bill proposed by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Henry Waxman (D-Calif) and House Energy and Environment Subcommittee Chair Edward Markey (D-Mass) and now undergoing examination in Congressional hearings. Waxman and Markey last year called for a moratorium on new coal plants but the current bill allows new plant construction through 2015 if the plants are retrofitted to cut greenhouse gas emissions (GhGs) 40-to-60% by 2025. Yet there is no technology proven capable of capturing GhGs on that scale and no place proven safe to sequester what is captured if it could be captured.

ACCCE began with a concept developed by Steve Miller, former campaign manager to Democratic Kentucky Governor Brereton Jones, and Joe Lucas, former coal-related communications director to Clinton Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary. Miller and Lucas also had extensive experience in coal industry PR.

Anticipating the climate change-related resistance to coal, Miller proposed the industry put its emphasis on “clean” coal instead of going "negative" and resisting climate change legislation entirely.

This is the American Coalition for Clean Coal Energy’s faith-based energy policy. It takes strong faith to believe in something that doesn’t exist and be willing to risk the fate of the entire earth on that faith. From balancedenergy via YouTube.

Selling “clean” coal is how Lucas justified much higher levels of spending on coal industry self-justifications.

Miller and Lucas launched ACCCE in 2008 with a big budget and a strategy to argue for emissions controls if legislation allowed for the use of coal. It has used media to assert that “clean” coal is the answer to anything and everything, from dependence on foreign oil to the need for new jobs, despite a distinct absence of any substantive proof.

The “clean” coal ads were made by R&R Partners, creators of the “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” campaign.

All aspects of “clean” coal technology (GhG capture, compression, transportation, injection and sequestration) have been done, some by the chemical industry and some by the oil and natural gas industries. But coal plant carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) has never been done as a complete sequence, at utility scale in a controlled, well-studied context.

The Reality Coalition, an alliance of environmental groups led by former Vice President Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection is running a PR campaign to discredit the meme (accepted truth) of “clean” coal.

ACCCE opponents believe the coal industry’s present objective is simply to slow the turn away from coal. They believe the lobbyists will use any argument to impede the public’s realization of what climate change really means and how much coal is responsible for it.

In 2008, the top five U.S. coal mining companies doubled their previous year’s profits to $1.9 billion and spent $9.95 million lobbying in Washington. The coal industry donated $15.6 million to 2008 federal election campaigns, including 87% of Congress and power brokers on both sides of the aisle. The top recipient ($302,474) was John McCain. Number 2 ($241,870) was Barack Obama.

From Lavelle's piece. (click to enlarge)

A shining example of ACCCE’s reach are the carefully modulated statements from the Obama administration. The President, Vice President and Secretary of Energy are all on record with remarks showing they know there is really no such thing as “clean” coal but they are careful these days to design their public statements so as not to alienate the industry or discredit the ACCCE campaign.

Veteran energy lobbyist Paul Bailey, a nuclear engineer who has worked for Big Oil and the electric power industry, leads ACCCE’s lobbying team in its assault on the Waxman-Markey energy and climate bill this week.

From thisisreality via YouTube

COMMENTARY
The measure of ACCCE’s effectiveness as a lobby is that experienced political leaders in the White House as well as the Democrat-dominated Congress are convinced the energy and climate legislation can’t move forward unless it demonstrates deference to “clean” coal, a technology that does not exist as a whole except as a theory and an experiment. The bill allows for construction of plants that will incorporate “clean” coal. This means the plants will be built and will go on burning coal and spewing greenhouse gases on the assumption of some future something ACCCE is hustling like riches from a pyramid scheme.

The bogus nature of the “clean” coal claim is most obvious when the history of the idea’s emergence is clear. It did not really emerge by proving itself as a technology. It emerged as something “positive” the coal industry could sell instead of revealing its climate change-denying intent to go on burning coal as long as it could.

Perhaps the most audaciously cynical aspect of the Miller-Lucas ACCCE strategy is that they saw the international concern with the coal industry’s role in climate change and the agreement of all the major candidates in the 2008 presidential campaign that something must be done about climate change not as a signal to change but as a signal to come up with a bigger, more dishonest, more expensive campaign on behalf of coal.

On Election Day 2008, an ACCCE poll of “opinion elites” (educated, politically involved professionals) showed 72% believed technology will create “clean” coal within 20 years. Such success by R&R Partners, the Las Vegas PR firm behind ACCCE, is not surprising. For 35 years it has successfully lobbied to protect Nevada’s gold and minerals mining industries from shouldering their appropriate federal tax burden.

Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy and Nobel laureate in physics Steven Chu recently testified to Congress that proof of “clean” coal technology is at least a decade away. Other experts say commercial scale use will take even longer. Carbon Capture & Storage: Assessing the Economics from research authority McKinsey & Co. says “clean” coal won’t be commercially deployed before 2030.

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QUOTES
- ACCCE, on inclusion of funding for “clean” coal in the energy and climate legislation: “[ACCCE is] encouraged that the… draft focuses on the key role that coal plays in meeting growing U.S. electricity needs.”
- Greenpeace, on inclusion of funding for “clean” coal in the energy and climate legislation: “[Greenpeace objects to] the untold billions of dollars in handouts [to the coal industry] for the false promise of carbon capture and sequestration.”
- Steve Miller, 2004 memo to Irl Engelhardt of Peabody Energy: “Our belief is that, on climate change like other issues, you must be for something rather than against everything.”
- Joe Lucas, on his decision to take on the rising tide against coal’s GhG spew with the “clean” coal strategy: “It was clear that a much larger budget was necessary.”
Lucas, on ACCCE’s public “clean” coal advertising campaign: “Public opinion shapes public policy.”
- David Hawkins, director of climate programs, Natural Resources Defense Council: “They’re going to argue any climate program should be so slow-acting that essentially it doesn’t change business practices in the next 20 years or so, and that is simply incompatible with the needs of climate protection…They have concluded it’s not politically viable to maintain a ‘just say no’ position, so now it’s ‘just say mañana.’”

From thisisreality via YouTube.

- Brian Hardwick, spokesman, Reality Coalition: “They’ve made a business decision, that it’s cheaper to spend $40 million on lobbying and advertising than hundreds of billions needed to make coal clean…They’ve made a calculation that if they can stall, delay progress and mislead, they can avoid that investment.”
- President Obama: “We figured out how to put a man on the moon in 10 years; you can’t tell me we can’t figure out how to burn coal that we mine right here in the United States of America and make it work…”
- President Obama: “…coal is really dirty…[cleaning it up is] going to take a major investment … because we don’t have the technology to do it right now.”
Lucas: “If you don’t understand how important coal is to America’s energy future, and as a driver of low-cost energy in this country, then it is somewhat simple to come up with a climate policy — just regulate coal plants…If you understand those drivers, then policy gets more complex.”
- Lucas, on the Reality Coalition’s “there is no such thing as ‘clean’ coal campaign: “It has not had the desired effect with regard to policy discussions…Not so long ago, people questioned whether coal was going to be a fuel for the future. Clearly there are fewer and fewer people who don’t think it will be.”