Industry’s new push: Rethink and embrace coal

By Phoebe Sweet

Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2007 | 7:17 a.m.

Despite providing half the nation's electricity, coal has a tarnished image these days. In Nevada, which is fast becoming the battleground state over the future of the fuel, burnishing that image will not be easy. Or cheap.

But if the coal industry has its way, everyone will want the stuff in his stocking this Christmas.

And it is ready to spend nearly four times what it spent in the past to convince people they want it.

An industry front group called Americans for Balanced Energy Choices last month began soliciting proposals from Nevada public relations firms interested in providing services such as public education, media relations and outreach to presidential candidates in the state. The group is funded by the coal, railroad and utility industries.

The National Journal recently reported that the organization's budget will go from $8 million in 2007 to about $30 million in 2008, most of which will pay for outreach and advertising campaigns nationally, and in Nevada and Pennsylvania in particular.

Joe Lucas, executive director of the organization, downplayed the spending. He said the group's national budget will increase to $30 million to $40 million in 2008 because it "recognizes the job (of selling coal) is harder to do," but he declined to say how much it will spend in Nevada. He also said that the group hasn't decided whether to hire a PR firm here, and that it received few responses to the request for proposals.

Diane Farsetta, senior researcher for the Center for Media and Democracy, a non profit watchdog organization, said that, in its appeal to public relations firms, the industry-funded organization cited Nevada as "perhaps one of the most volatile states in the west region for ABEC's industry," language it would not have used if it didn't consider the state important to the future of the coal industry.

Given the bad press coal has gotten in recent months, it's not surprising that the industry is trying to get the fuel some respect.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., this summer took aim at three large, controversial coal-fired power plants proposed in Nevada, citing concern about climate change.

Presidential candidates have been trooping through town like ants to an early caucus state picnic, touting plans, supported heavily by environmental groups, to drastically reduce green house gas emissions and ban dirty coal plants.

And all this comes in the wake of the Crandall Canyon coal mine disaster in August, which culminated with co-owner Robert Murray's rantings against critics of coal that were televised after the deaths of six men in his Utah mine.

Enter Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, intent on influencing decision makers at the state and national level in coal's favor.

Farsetta thinks the group will try to use a Nevada campaign as a springboard to gain momentum in the national debate on coal, and the strategy could be effective "unless people really ask questions and think about who's funding it."

And because the organization's request for proposals includes "grass - roots assistance," it is likely, she said, to establish a local chapter to make itself sound more like a Nevada citizens group.

Steve Gates, senior communications director for the organization, said outreach campaigns are about educating Americans who don't know where their electricity comes from.

"You flick a switch in this country and there's a 50 percent chance that light is being powered by coal," he said. "People don't put a lot of thought into it, and that makes it easy for them to say, 'Get rid of it.' "

Lucas, the group's executive director, said the campaign would emphasize that coal is a domestically abundant, cheap fuel used to provide half of the country's electricity.

Collectively, U.S. coal plants today are 70 percent cleaner than they were 30 years ago, he said, and technology advances will continue to make the plants cleaner. And, he said, coal is an important part of a balanced energy portfolio that includes nuclear, natural gas and renewable energy.

But coal produces 80 percent of all emissions from electricity production in the United States, and about a third of America's emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, according to the U.S. government's Energy Information Administration.

Bruce Nilles, who oversees the Midwest Clean Energy Campaign for the Sierra Club, said the group is merely trying to "greenwash" a dirty fuel source when power in Congress has shifted against the industry, financial markets long supportive of coal have lowered its investment grade and plans for coal plants are falling to pressure from environmentalists.

Nilles said environmental groups would continue to hit back against the "disinformation" the organization peddles.

In any event, Nevadans are unlikely to buy into an advertising campaign from a national interest group, said Jon Summers, a spokesman for Reid.

"This front group only has one interest at heart and that's coal," Summers said. "They see their future slipping through their hands."