Big Coal Spews Big Lies

Big Coal forked over some heavy dough for a coveted ad spot in the NYT as part of its huge new PR effort to change the perception of US coal. Its name? America’s Power. Its website is full of what it calls “factoids." I could have sworn that a factoid was, in fact, the opposite of a fact. More like a bold-faced, manufactured lie. Wikipedia confirmed my hunch:

A factoid is a spurious (unverified, incorrect, or invented) "fact" intended to create or prolong public exposure or to manipulate public opinion. It appears in the Oxford English Dictionary[1] as "something which becomes accepted as fact, although it may not be true", namely a speculation or an assumption. The term was coined by Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe.[2] Mailer described a factoid as "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper", and created the word by combining the word fact and the ending -oid to mean "like a fact".[3][4]

There are strong connections between factoids and urban legends.

Oops. Nothing like wearing your bad intentions (and horrible PR) on your sleeve. Guess it’s more convenient for Big Coal to push factoids rather than facts at a time when the backlash against coal is picking up steam.

Take this "like a fact" from America's Power: "Since 1970, the use of coal to generate electricity in the U.S. has nearly tripled in response to growing electricity demand." Yes, coal production has increased in response to demand -- demand from Big Coal.

It's no secret that the industry's unfettered demand for profits, and Washington's acquiescence of anything Big (Coal, Oil, Nuclear, Corn, etc), has been driving the demand. Just because coal is there, doesn't mean we have to mine it from the Earth. There are other energy options, clean and economical ones that would benefit many more Americans. Left that piece out. Big surprise.

More facts:

As coal production has increased, so has the death toll of miners. In January, the AFL-CIO reported that American mine deaths in 2006 jumped 210 percent over 2005. The Mine Workers (UMWA) union expects the trend to continue. And that doesn't include the thousand or so miners and ex-miners who die each year from black lung disease, which is also on the rise.

And of course there's climate. Coal is global warming, as we explain here in detail. It's simple. If you build and continue to grow an economy based on traditional dirty coal, you destroy the climate. That's why America's Power will tell you that it's all for clean coal. I mean, who isn't these days? But clean coal doesn't yet exist, and there are no guarantees that it ever will. It's the most widespread and dangerous factoid of them all.

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