WASHINGTON DC – The message was plain to all on riding the Metro through one of Washington's busiest subway stations, "Clean Coal" is a fantasy.
The Reality Coalition, made up of the League of Conservation Voters, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the National Wildlife Federation and the Sierra Club (
www.thisisreality.org), bought all the display ads at Metro Center, one of the Metro's main stations for a full-fledged assault on the coal industry and also took to the airwaves buying ads during inaugural coverage.
The main signs in the subway read: "In Reality, there's no such thing as Clean Coal. The coal industry is spending millions advertising clean coal, but not a single clean coal power plant exists in the US today."
While coal companies are running ads of their own featuring the newly sworn-in president Barack Obama talking about clean coal on the campaign trail, Kentucky officials said they're not concerned about this push endangering one of the state's key industries.
"I think it can be (cleaner), carbon sequestration works and we can't afford to just walk away from 200 years' supply of domestic coal that we won't have to depend on anybody else to burn, so the key is to learn to burn it more cleanly," said Kentucky Senator and Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell at Monday night's the Bluegrass Ball.
"The new president said during the campaign that he thought we needed to continue to use coal and we're going to hold him to it. I'm going to assume until I learn otherwise that he does believe that there is such a thing as clean coal. We've spent a lot of money on clean coal technology over the years. 50 percent of our electricity comes from coal. It is nonsense to suggest that we can just walk away from coal and still have energy for America," McConnell said about the ad campaign.
"What we have done in Kentucky by passing good energy policy that is being looked at nationally as being comprehensive, as being looked at as balanced, being looked at as being an energy portfolio for other states to follow, I think we're really uniquely positioned in Kentucky to take advantage of the very policies, of the very vision that the Obama Administration has as far as clean coal and other energy portfolios that can come forward with renewables and energy efficiencies as well," said Kentucky House Majority Leader Rocky Adkins (D-Sandy Hook), who is employed as director of public affairs by a coal company.
"Without question President Obama has continued to talk about clean coal and he thinks it has to be part of the mix," Adkins said. "There is a such thing as clean coal. As a matter of fact, the Center for Applied Energy Research at the University of Kentucky is doing some of the most advanced research in the country on clean coal," Adkins said. "Yes there is such a thing as clean coal, it is here today, and it will get cleaner tomorrow."
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