Obama, Clinton woo coal vote in upcoming primaries

Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are walking a delicate line as they promise to aggressively tackle global warming while trying to assure voters that they continue to believe in the future of coal.

“They keep using the term ‘clean coal.’ That’s really an oxymoron,” snaps Brent Blackwelder, president of the environmental group Friends of the Earth. “They absolutely are pandering the coal industry’s propaganda that clean coal is the hope of the future. There’s no such animal as clean coal.”
Not all environmentalists are as critical, acknowledging that coal will remain an integral part of the country’s energy picture. The two Democratic presidential aspirants’ support for coal is outweighed by their strong push for renewable fuels and — unlike President Bush — their call for mandatory, economy-wide action on climate change.

“How they finesse things on the margin is up to them,” said Cathy Duvall, the Sierra Club’s national political director, as long as they also “talk about moving away from conventional coal … and putting money into and investing in a renewable energy economy that will provide jobs.”

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