Americans for Balanced Energy Choices: it sounds sensible enough, balancing the different kinds of energy with the need to massively reduce the amount of energy consumed. Except that ABEC is doing nothing of the sort. Like the Oregon Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Heartland Institute (notice that they are all “institutes”, a nice homely monicker, but also rather close to “institution”) before it, Americans for Balanced Energy Choices is a very public front for the coal industry.

The idea of such setups is to provide a friendly face for something that is inherently unfriendly: the coal industry in the USA is responsible for 36 percent of all national carbon emissions. This has been the same since 1990, despite the headline claims that the coal industry is getting cleaner – and that is precisely why I have changed the image above from the ABEC website to read 0.0% CLEANER rather than the absurd 70% CLEANER on the original front page. You can find out more about their claim here.

Except you can’t, because they don’t justify the “70% cleaner” claim in any way: maybe it’s sulphur dioxide, maybe it’s sooty ash, maybe it’s something else – it most certainly isn’t carbon dioxide, the pollutant that really matters!

So, who are these Americans who want “balanced energy choices”.

[Read the rest at The Unsuitablog]