Shaun Slifer

“Coal Will Never Be Clean” The coal industry has a sordid and lengthy history of destroying the ecosystems in which coal is mined, the cities in which it is burned, and the people employed in getting it out of the ground as cheaply as possible. Recent industry advertising campaigns capitalize on historical amnesia and a lack of common knowledge about the reality of the extraction and burning process, hoping to lead public opinion to believe that the industry can be cleaned up through a series of largely fictionalized new emissions technologies. On interstates throughout the Appalachian region, dozens of billboards from industry front groups, mining equipment companies, and regional energy corporations implore passerby to trust in coal’s new “green” future. With these contrived campaigns in mind, I tried to keep it simple and direct: we’re never going to see any “clean coal.”