Since December, the Reality Coalition, a group of environmental interests led by former Vice President Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, has run television ads of its own and plastered billboards in the nation’s capital with the message: “In reality, there’s no such thing as clean coal.” The coalition also has Oscar-winning filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen directing ads spoofing ACCCE as a pitchman peddling room-blackening air spray that “harnesses the awesome power of the word clean.”
The latest ad from the Reality Coalition, an environmental group led by former Vice President Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, was directed by the Academy Award-winning Coen brothers. David Hawkins, director of climate programs for the Natural Resources Defense Council, supports carbon capture research but says ACCCE’s approach won’t spur needed private investment. “They’re going to argue any climate program should be so slow-acting that essentially it doesn’t change business practices in the next 20 years or so, and that is simply incompatible with the needs of climate protection,” he says. “They have concluded it’s not politically viable to maintain a ‘just say no’ position, so now it’s ‘just say mañana.’”
Brian Hardwick, a spokesman for the Reality Coalition, won’t say how much his group is spending on advertising, but says it aims to continue to counter coal’s messaging. “They’ve made a business decision, that it’s cheaper to spend $40 million on lobbying and advertising than hundreds of billions needed to make coal clean,” he says. “They’ve made a calculation that if they can stall, delay progress and mislead, they can avoid that investment.”
