From The S.F. Chronicle
By Mark Morford

The devil isn’t evil, he just has lousy PR.

Examples? They are legion. Here’s one the Powers That Be desperately hope you’ll swallow, a nasty piece of marketing gall meant to stab at your intelligence and bitch-slap your intuition, but which is nevertheless being force-fed to you as happy environmental manna, a viciously deformed version of something called “progress.”

Here is “clean coal.” Isn’t it beautiful? Truly, the hell-bound ad agency that coughed up that one even had the nerve to film a commercial featuring Kool and the Gang’s “Celebrate” playing over perky scenes of manic Americans sucking down electricity like John McCain sucks down extra oxygen, claiming that coal is America’s namesake resource and we should therefore kneel before it and worship it like apple pie and horrible sex-ed and Lindsay Lohan’s nipples. Did I mention the coal industry’s PR people are going to hell for this? Count on it.

There is, of course, no such thing as “clean coal.” It’s as impossible as a humanitarian Republican, as insulting as Homeland Security. Even Obama gets it wrong in his support of this lethal oxymoron. There are only two options: Brutally pollutive coal extraction and burning techniques, rapacious strip mining and millions of acres of destroyed forest and contaminated water tables and toxified air and one of the most environmentally destructive energy sources on the planet; or new and slightly less horribly pollutive coal extraction/burn techniques that attempt to rein in a few of the more toxic pollutants, but not including carbon dioxide or, you know, cancer and death. That’s about it.

Translation: “clean coal” is not only one of the most insidious, repugnant oxymorons — right up there with “friendly fire” and “conservative think tank” and “Alaskan teen virgin” — it’s also one of the deadliest.

Not good enough? Don’t you worry.

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