I wrote about one of the several climate change six-hundred pound gorillas at King Coal in November. There was a hard-hitting piece in yesterday’s “Progress Report” called Bad News For Big Coal. (Fair warning: “Progress Report” is a newsletter of the avowedly partisan Center for American Progress, which I’ve noted before, along with the fact that I find their work to be thorough and well-documented.) The article talks about the fact that the federal government recently withdrew from the flagship CCS development, FutureGen.
It also talks about the counterattack launched by Sunflower Electric in Kansas against that state’s huge decision in October to deny permits for two 700 MW coal plants. Go here for my post on that, including Health and Environment Secretary Roderick Bremby’s extremely lucid video announcing the decision. He said then “I believe it would be irresponsible to ignore emerging information about the contribution of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to climate change and the potential harm to our environment and health if we do nothing.”
Sunflower Electric and the nation’s biggest coal company, Peabody, have launched “Kansans for Affordable Energy,” an exceedingly thinly disguised public relations campaign in the guise of a citizen’s initiative. This brings to mind a bald-faced ploy in the 1980’s against federal acid rain legislation: “Citizens for Sensible Control of Acid Rain” (CSCAR). Peabody then was among the coal companies and utilities behind this “citizens'” group. See this excellent item, among several, from the excellent “DeSmogBlog,” on the brawl in Kansas.
Taking a decidedly more vicious tack, check this out, from a series of their newspaper ads:
The Kansas legislature is being bribed and bludgeoned into attempting to reverse the state’s denial of the permits, but Sebelius has already said she’ll veto any such legislation. For a good look at what the folks at Sunflower and Peabody would really like to say, see this video spoof from the “Wichita Eagle.”
Even more significantly, getting back to the big picture on coal, three of the world’s biggest investment banks, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, and Citi, have, by signing the Carbon Principles, admitted the riskiness of putting money into coal-fired plants.
