Clean Coal: Caroling at a Home Near You

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Everyone seems to be getting into the holiday spirit, even…lumps of coal? A coal trade group called American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) has sponsored a holiday campaign called “The Clean Coal Carolers” which features lumps of cartoon coal singing songs like “Frosty the Coalman” and “Abundant, Affordable.” The website allows you to choose which hats and scarfs to dress the coal in. But all the scarves in the world can’t hide the fact that “clean coal” is more a buzz word than an actual technology.

Last month Casey Miner reported for Mother Jones that:

The types of technology the industry says it will use are expensive and ineffective at best, and potentially catastrophic at worst—in other words, even if we were able to get our technology up to speed and somehow capture the carbon leaving every coal plant in the country, we wouldn’t have anywhere safe to put it.

The Clean Coal Carolers also have a Facebook page with 22 fans, including one named “Asthma” and another “Black,” short for Black Lung. Those are either parts of ACCCE’s elaborate ruse or they are smart-ass kids who have studied Al Gore’s “Reality” ad campaign, launched last week to “debunk the clean coal myth,” and Mother Jones’ past coverage of clean coal like “Follow The Money Deep Under Ground” by Shadi Rahimi and “Scrubbing King Coal” by James Ridgeway.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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