Environmental Graffiti

Image by Rastafabi

Ah, coal. If you live in the United States you’ve been subjected to an advertising blitz in preparation for the upcoming elections assuring you that clean coal is the answer to all of our problems. The four dollar gasoline will go away (or if you sell oil you can switch to selling liquid coal!), we’ll be able to pull out of Iraq (or commit more resources and win!), and it’s all perfectly clean. Not a single, solitary dirty thing about it.

Wait, you may ask–how does coal get clean? Doesn’t it pump billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year? Why yes, yes it does. And the coal companies are planning to get rid of it all somehow. They’ll let you know. Seriously, carbon sequestration for coal won’t be ready until 2030, if there is such a thing. As you might imagine, this has raised the ire of the environmental community quite a bit, and led us to produce stuff like this:

That cartoon is really just the tip of the iceberg–an entire website, Coal-is-Dirty.com, has sprung up to combat the idea that clean coal is like anything other than “fat-free donuts.” They’ve got talent to burn–the cartoon was developed in conjunction with Mark Fiore, an award-winning political cartoonist, and we all know the coal industry isn’t going to stop giving them low-hanging fruit for subject matter.

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