Bye-bye, Miss American Pie.
Drove my Chevy to the levee,
But the levee was under a half mile of rubble from a mountaintop that had been decapitated …
OK, I’m no Don McClean, but then neither is the ACCCE (American Coalition for Clean Coal Euphemisms?). We’re still two weeks from Christmas, but the coal industry front group has yanked its offensive “lumps of coal sing bastardized Christmas carols” video. The explanation offered:
We had fun this week with the Clean Coal Carolers and hope you enjoyed them. Now it’s time for them to head home for the holidays. Season’s greetings from America’s Power!
Treehugger still has the videos here along with a blogosphere round-up of snarkiness and some great NRDC parodies of the parodies. ThinkProgress notes that even while removing the videos, the industry flacks still defended them:
ACCCE did not find the mockery of its holiday campaign amusing. In fact, yesterday it published a touchy blog post defending its use of “Silent Night” — a song about the birth of Jesus Christ — to sell dirty energy. “I’ll put my years as a Sunday school teacher, church deacon and church musician up against just about anybody else when it comes to understanding hymnology and respect for religious traditions,” wrote ACCCE’s VP for Communications Joe Lucas. Nonetheless, it took down the “Silent Night” song.
If it’s true that ACCCE had intended this to be a short-lived campaign, it’s odd that they never previously mentioned that fact — and even odder that the entire campaign would have to be scrubbed from the website …
FLASHBACK: Americans for Balanced Energy Choices — which became ACCCE — was forced to take down a promotional campaign last February, after ThinkProgress documented physicians’ objections to using children as spokesmen for dirty coal.
And in the streets: the children screamed,
The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed.
But not a word was spoken;
The church bells all were broken.
And the three men I admire most:
The father, son, and the holy ghost,
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died.
This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
