Kidz Koal Korner

What's funny about the Coal Cares spoof website is how well it emulates the real highest-quality BS coming out of so-called "free market" think tanks and fossil fuel lobbying groups.
Anyone who could come up with this sort of billboard...


...might be expected to come up with statements just like this:

Some environmentalists have suggested that coal companies should install an untested technology called "scrubbers" atop coal plants to make them burn more cleanly, reducing coal particulate exposure as one cause of childhood asthma. There are two problems with this idea. For one thing, these "scrubbers" will by no means remove enough of the coal particulates to avoid causing asthma. More importantly, the "scrubbers" are very expensive, and would inevitably result in a rise in the price of energy—hammering already hammered American household budgets. Locating the filtering mechanism at the point of consumption (i.e., your child's mouth) is dramatically more cost-effective than locating it at the point of emission (smokestacks), and in turn means less need for intrusive and costly regulation. You and your child can choose how, when, and if to apply treatment—and, thanks to the Puff-Puff™ line of inhalers, what that treatment will look like!

If you wouldn't know it's a spoof, you'd be fooled into believing it's true.

Case in point, Peabody Coal responds to the spoof thusly:

Peabody is proud to help hundreds of millions of people live longer and better through coal-fueled electricity. A growing collection of studies demonstrate the correlation between electricity fueled by low-cost coal and improvement in health, longevity and quality of life. The United Nations has linked life expectancy, educational attainment and income with per-capita electricity use, and the World Resources Institute found that for every 10-fold increase in per-capita energy use, individuals live 10 years longer.

And no, even though it sounds like it, it's not a spoof [via David Roberts].