How Many 'Bogus Coal Moments' Will There Be At Tonight's US Presidential Debate?
by Greg Haegele, Deputy Executive Director, Sierra Cl 
on 09.26.08
The coal industry wants to buy your love.
Having sponsored nearly every debate in the presidential primaries, the coal industry is stepping up its $40 million election advertising bombardment starting today with an ad blitz of the upcoming general election debates.
The Sierra Club's national coal campaign director, Bruce Nilles, just let me know that his team will be watching the debates like a hawk, keeping an eye out for "bogus coal moments" and ferreting out their attempts to spread misinformation.
That's where you come in. Sign up to receive a mobile alert when a "bogus coal moment" occurs during the debates. Get "real time" alerts via a mobile reality-check text message every time the coal industry tries to spread more lies. You can either use our online form to sign up or, heh, text DIRTY to 69866 using your mobile phone.
Coal corporate fat cats are desperate to stop our progress toward a clean energy economy. They will spend as much money as they can to convince us that coal is a more important investment than renewable energy.
That's why they've spent tens of millions of dollars on slick advertising to mask the facts about coal. The truth couldn't be simpler: coal is expensive, detrimental to our health and communities, and is a distraction from real comprehensive clean energy solutions that include wind, solar and greater efficiency practices.
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"text DIRTY to 69866"
Better be careful with that one. I doubt your significant other will believe that kind of text is about coal...
:-)
Living in one of the biggest coal producing and consuming (per capita) countries in the world, I would like to say well done on raising this issue. Fact is that both the coal industry in the short term, and the nuclear industry in the long-term are filthy industries.
THOSE ARE STEAM PIPES. NOT SMOKE PIPES. Coal plants don't put out that kind of pollution.
Your bias negates your credibility.
I work at a coal plant and it is not expensive compared to other available power producing technologies. Additionally we have active projects to reduce our emissions to only CO2 and steam. As far as I know these are "detrimental" to health in reasonable concentrations. And the result which is very cheap power so that you are able to carry on your lives blogging and doing other power intensive processes seems fairly reasonable. The last 60 years would not have been possible without the production of power using coal.
The 'corporate fat cats' are not desperate to stop our progress to clean energy. They are in-fact the ones enabling it by rapidly expanding their energy portfolios to include wind and solar. The money that they are pouring into these industries is what is trailblazing our path to clean energy. Without these industries the 'clean power' market would literally be collapsing. Would you then ask a group of concerned citizens to pony up the billions of dollars in order to build up the infrastructure?
Haven't you heard? Coal is green now, TV says so.
This is awesome, but does anyone have any more info about the text message service? Who's the third party running it, how much does it cost per text message, and where does the money go to from the service?
Haven't you heard? Coal is green now, TV says so.
QUESTION: How Many 'Bogus Coal Moments' Will There Be At Tonight's US Presidential Debate?
ANSWER: none - the word coal was not mentioned once during the entire debate.
-Lego
6 Billion a year ago, "developing and testing “clean coal technologies” in power plants and factories around the country. "
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/12/coal_our_nation.php
Sorry Lego, Obama mentioned clean coal in the 2nd or third debate question
I stand corrected. The transcript I searched was incomplete. Sorry.
-Lego
Germany has just unveiled a carbon capture coal plant for testing. They say progress is being made, but the technology will only be implemented in 20 years.
20 years.
It's a scam, nothing else.
The $6 billion referred to by John has unfortunately note been applied to carbon capture and storage.
The EU is about to vote on how to fund 12-15 such projects like the one in Germany, only much bigger. All of them still pilot plants.