Coal: Not Just Clean*, But Green*

If you were granted an hour in which to make your policy proposals before more than 100 administration officials with no one there to take opposing positions, would you feel like you'd won the lottery?

Powerful lobbyists win this lottery every day. Last week brought a particularly bizarre scene: The policy director for biggest coal company in the world, Peabody Energy, made a 45-minute pitch at a policy briefing sponsored by the industry group the U.S. Energy Association. His talking points? Coal is not just "clean" but "green" and would help us reach zero emissions while also saving the world's poor.

It gets even weirder: The pitch for zero emissions came from the same man — notorious climate skeptic Fred Palmer — who once claimed that "“every time you turn your car on and you burn fossil fuels and you put CO2 into the air, you’re doing the work of the Lord.” (See for yourself!)

Palmer was also previously head of the Greening Earth Society, a front group of the Western Fuels Association that made the notoriously insane claim that carbon emissions were good for the environment.

Apparently he's gone from believing emissions are good and coal can provide them to recognizing that emissions are bad but that coal can erase them. (Well, believing might be putting it a little too strongly.)

Here's Palmer's closing PowerPoint slide from his bizarro presentation:

*Use of these words apparently trademarked by the coal lobby.

Photo credit: Stephen Codrington