I was struck with confusion, convinced I had misunderstood. But there is was:
Hi, JuliaBovey
AmericasPower (AmericasPower) is now following your updates on Twitter.
AmericasPower! I'm so flattered. It's only the most deceptive, sneakiest, best-funded front for the coal industry ever conceived! They sponsored half the presidential debates, have an ad on every five minutes.
These are the guys who brought us the Coal Christmas Carols -- which was so stupid everyone thought their site had been hacked by The Onion.
Frosty the coal man is a jolly happy soul...
There must be magic in clean coal technology
For when they looked for pollutants
There was nearly none to see
But unfortunately, they're not usually that stupid. On the contrary, they're blindingly deceitful, charmingly insidious. Their ads feature beautiful scientists in white coats in sparkling labs swirling colored liquids in beakers -- all part of the dirtiest myth alive today, "clean coal."
And these are the guys who are now following me on Twitter!
NRDC is proud to be part of Reality, a campaign designed to tell the truth about coal. The reality is that burning coal is the dirtiest way to make electricity and the leading cause of global warming pollution.
It is true that someday, coal-fired electricity plants will likely be able to capture and store their global warming pollution, and that's something that NRDC encourages, as long as it's done well and done honestly.
But even when coal captures and stores it's pollution -- will that make coal clean? Absolutely not! Just take a look at the video I shot in Kentucky. Or meet someone with black lung. Or look at what happened to the community in Tennessee where the dammed-up swamp of filthy coal ash -- what's left over when you burn it - spilled into people's homes and polluted their water. (Read Frances Beinecke's post on that.) Clean Coal? Just plain impossible.
This post originally appeared on NRDC's Switchboard blog.