Coal Industry Launches New Ad Campaign Attacking President Obama

• Susan Phillips
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

Just ahead of the first presidential debate, the coal industry began airing new ads criticizing Obama. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity has produced three new spots that will run on both cable and network television. ACCCE says the EPA under Obama has an “anti-coal agenda.” The EPA has proposed new rules to reduce carbon emissions, as well as mercury. The House passed a package of bills last week called “Stop the War on Coal Act,” aimed at rolling back these rules.

The ads don’t mention either candidate by name. But to the backdrop of a federal government building and the Lincoln Memorial, the voiceover says:
“Heavy handed EPA regulations have taken us down a reckless path. A path limiting our most abundant and reliant domestic fuel to generate electricity, coal.”
The EPA’s carbon rules would make it impossible for any new coal-fired plants to come online unless they employ carbon capture technology, which researchers say is still decades away and very expensive. But some say recent closures at coal burning plants have more to do with economics, not EPA rules. The sudden abundance of cheap natural gas, which when burned emits less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than coal, has utilities looking to phase it out in favor of natural gas.
Clean coal can mean different things to different people. When the industry talks about clean coal, they refer to scrubbers and other technology that reduce harmful emissions like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and fine particulates. When others say clean coal, they mean carbon capture and sequestration, which would reduce greenhouse gas causing CO2 emissions. Environmentalists say there’s no such thing as “clean coal,” because no technology exists to reduce emissions to zero.

Editor's Picks