Jan 18 - Charleston Daily Mail

A group backed by the coal industry and its utility allies is waging a $35 million campaign in primary and caucus states to rally public support for coal-fired electricity and to fuel opposition to legislation that Congress is crafting to slow climate change.

The group, called Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, has already spent $1.3 million on billboard, newspaper, television and radio ads in Iowa, Nevada and South Carolina.

One its television ads shows a power cord being plugged into a lump of coal, which it calls "an American resource that will help us with vital energy security" and "the fuel that powers our way of life." The ads note that half of U.S. electricity currently comes from coal-fired plants.

The group has also deployed teams on the campaign trail; about 50 people, many of them paid, walked around as human billboards and handed out leaflets outside Tuesday's Democratic debate in Nevada with questions for voters to pose to the candidates.

"In Iowa, there is a saying that you don't get to be president unless you go through Iowa. We'd like to say that you don't get to be president unless you understand how complicated this issue is," Joe Lucas, the group's executive director, said Wednesday night during a stopover en route from Nevada to South Carolina.

The group's message - that coal-fired power plants can be clean and that more of them are needed to meet the nation's growing demand for electricity - comes at a time when opposition to new coal plants is mounting because they generate greenhouse gases. In Kansas, where a state agency rejected an air permit for two proposed coal plants, opinion polls show that roughly two out of three people opposed the plants. That sentiment, plus soaring constructions costs and uncertainty about federal climate change legislation, last year prompted U.S. companies to abandon or postpone plans to build dozens of new coal plants.

Originally published by THE WASHINGTON POST.

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