Scrubbing King Coal

[RedEarth]

BP may be the most audacious practitioner of fossil greenwashing, but it is hardly the only one. Shell has invested big in such environmentally devastating ventures as the Canadian tar sands and liquefied natural gas while making only modest forays into wind energy, solar, and hydrogen fuel cells—a total investment of about $1 billion as of 2006. Meanwhile, Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, an industry-funded coal advocacy group, has been running ads with slogans like "Our commitment goes beyond clean." And in 2005, GE announced its "ecomagination" campaign, which included a TV commercial featuring buff, sweaty models posing as coal miners and the voice-over, "Harnessing the power of coal is looking more beautiful every day."

Across the board, the companies that control fossil fuels have begun to respond to rising concern about global warming with what amounts to a three-point strategy: First, make small overtures toward developing renewable energy, and milk them for maximum PR value. Second, invest more generously in carbon-based "alternative energy" that gets passed off as green. Third, invoke the goal of energy independence to pump, mine, transport, and sell more and more of the same old fuels to an ever-hungrier market.

One of the slipperiest tactics involves redefining what constitutes clean energy. In a 2006 report, the oil-industry-friendly Institute for Energy Research said that U.S. oil and gas companies had invested $98 billion in "emerging energy technologies" in North America from 2000 to 2005. But the vast majority of this funding went to develop "frontier hydrocarbons"—new, often filthy methods of producing more oil and gas. In fact, a report from the Center for American Progress found that between 2001 and 2007, a period of unprecedented profits, the top five private oil companies spent an average of just one-half of one percent of total profits on renewable fuels. (BP and Shell topped the list at 1.2 percent; ExxonMobil occupied the bottom at 0.)

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And the push is likely to continue—at the state level, as well as in Washington. Last year in Kentucky, the governor signed a bill to provide a subsidiary of Peabody Energy, the world's largest coal company, with $250 million in tax breaks and other incentives to build a coal-gasification plant. In Wyoming, the legislature put through an exemption on the sales tax for synthetic fuel made from coal and has pursued a public-private partnership to develop it. Legislators are also looking at a new category of below-ground rights, which could provide a free, publicly controlled zone for storing sequestered carbon. Says Bill Bensel, an organizer with Wyoming's Powder River Basin Resource Council, "We're just trying to show we can be as green as we can, so we can sell more coal."

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/05/scrubbing-king-coal.html