Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Peabody Energy victim of widespread hoax

The No. 1 U.S. coal company, Peabody Energy, fell victim this week to an Internet hoax staged by the activist group Coal is Killing Kids. The group, which says it is "an environmental and public health group that aims to challenge Big Coal's expensive lobbying against sensible updates to the Clean Air Act," announced a "Coal Cares" initiative and website through a fake news release supposedly from Peabody. The release offered help for asthma sufferers living near coal-fired power plants.

Coal is Killing Kids said in a separate release, responding to the hoax, "that it worked with the Yes Lab, a project of The Yes Men" who aim to publicly humiliate "big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else" by impersonating them, Ashley Haynes of CNN reports.

"Peabody is proud to help hundreds of millions of people live longer and better through coal-fueled electricity," the company said. "A growing collection of studies demonstrate the correlation between electricity fueled by low-cost coal and improvement in health, longevity and quality of life." (Read more)


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ha! I saw mention of that recently and ignored it because I figured it was just more greenwashing from Big Coal! So hard to write satire these days...

FlueCube said...

If these environmental drones that suck up the inflated health-scare propaganda promoting Gas. Every American should read about Edward Bernays and the media psycho babble that still seems to work so well over there. Health products are sold in health scare campaigns. Those not educated in marketing techniques hear 'science' or some statistic and think it's coming from an expert. Advertising is perverting science. Nuclear energy is not clean energy. The EPA is still the corrupt organisation it has been ever since it was formed. Yes the Clean Air Act is good. The EPA are not. They are spinners for corporations just as Edward Bernays public relations office was. They have the wood stove science wrong. It's been proven with a product here in New Zealand that the appliance has little to do with smoky chimneys. Its the cold air on chimneys, which can be directed to form a vacuum nad voilla clean fire, no smoke. Does anyone at the EPA know what Thermodynamics is? Environmental sciences are very basic and those graduated with it are not even close to mechanical engineers or physicists. Eliminating coal, wood and biomass from the energy industry is a hilarious notion that only serves the corporations who sponsor the media publications. Also read about the UNFCCC and their 'green fund'.