1979 American Electric Power advertisement.
QuitCoal.org has amassed quite a collection of misleading coal ads, misrepresenting coal’s safety, its abundance, its environmental impact, and how likely it is to save us from totalitarianism. Here we present samples of ads by coal companies and coal industry front groups from the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s — showing that the more things change, the more coal executives just keep lying like weasels.
1974 AEP advertisement.
Is this guy supposed to be a hippie? Is that what hippies looked like in 1974? Anyway, looks like the “green energy kills jobs” canard has a long pedigree. And look — bonus Scary Arabs TM, concerned about America’s abundant coal resources!
1982 Edison Electric Institute advertisement.
Large corporations have been inventing their own facts since well before they achieved personhood. Here, the Edison Electric Institute offers you its extremely fact-based pamphlet of facts describing how the facts about coal pollution causing acid rain are not factual. Also, we have always been at war with Oceania.
1991 Information Council on the Environment advertisement.
No comment.
2007 Kansans for Affordable Energy advertisement.
You may remember this 2007 push to convince people that using American-made coal will thwart dictatorships across the world. But once you’ve looked at QuitCoal’s ad collection, you’ll realize that it’s just a reboot of the same advertising scheme from 1974. So when you spot the above in a newspaper and say “what fresh hell is this,” remember: It’s a very stale hell indeed.
