Western Fuels Association

Last updated

The Western Fuels Association is a $400 million consortium of coal suppliers and coal-fired utilities [1] based in Westminster, Colorado. Western Fuels Association supplies coal and transportation services to consumer-owned electric utilities in the Great Plains, Rocky Mountain and Southwest regions.

Contents

Mining operations

In 2011 Western Fuels Association supplied approximately 19.4 million tons of coal to its members through its three mining operations; the Dry Fork Mine located in Gillette, Wyoming, The Colowyo Mine in Northwest Colorado, and the New Horizons Mine located in Nucla, Colorado. [2] [3]

Advocacy

Western Fuels Western Fuels Association uses collective advocacy to represent industry interests including membership in Western Coal Traffic League, National Coal Transportation Association, CURE and the National Mining Association. [2] In May 1994 Richard Lindzen, Patrick Michaels, and Robert Balling served as expert witnesses on behalf of Western Fuels Association in St. Paul, Minnesota to determine the environmental cost of coal burning by state power plants. [1]

Balling was mentioned as a fossil fuel industry – funded scientist in Ross Gelbspan's 1997 book The Heat is On. This led the Minnesota Star Tribune to run an editorial speaking of a "disinformation campaign" by some climatologists. Balling and his colleague Patrick Michaels took a complaint against the Star Tribune to the Minnesota News Council. By a 9–4 decision the council "voted to sustain the complaint that the Star Tribune editorial unfairly characterized the scientific reputations of Patrick Michaels and Robert Balling." [4] At the 1998 hearing, Balling "acknowledged that he had received $408,000 in research funding from the fossil fuel industry over the last decade (of which his University takes 50% for overhead)." [4]

Between December 1998 [5] and September 2001 [6] Balling was listed as a "Scientific Adviser" to the Greening Earth Society, a group that was funded and controlled by the Western Fuels Association (WFA), an association of coal-burning utility companies. WFA founded the group in 1997, according to an archived version of its website, "as a vehicle for advocacy on climate change, the environmental impact of CO2, and fossil fuel use." [7]

Controversy

The Western Fuels Association has played a controversial role in the debate over global warming. Their 2005 annual report [8] refers only to 'environmental and regulatory uncertainty', but they have been more outspoken in past annual reports. They have established groups such as the Greening Earth Society which promote various forms of climate change denial and have funded individual deniers, such as Patrick Michaels, [1] Craig D. Idso and Sherwood Idso. Groups established by industry bodies like the Western Fuels Association have been criticized as Astroturf organizations, since they appear superficially to be grassroots initiatives.

Greening Earth Society and Patrick Michaels' World Climate Report

The Greening Earth Society, now defunct, was a public relations organization which promoted the idea that there is considerable scientific doubt about the effects of climate change and increased levels of carbon dioxide. The Society published the World Climate Report, a newsletter edited by Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute.[ citation needed ]

It was a non-profit organization created by the Western Fuels Association, [9] with which it shared an office and many staff members. [10] [11] [12] [ unreliable source? ] It has been called a "front group created by the coal industry" [13] [ full citation needed ] and an "industry front". [14] [ full citation needed ] Fred Palmer, a Society staffer, is a registered lobbyist for Peabody Energy, a coal company. [15]

Although the Greening Earth Society generally denies the true impact of climate change, it acknowledged some degree of global warming as real: "Fact #1. The rate of global warming during the past several decades has been about 0.18°C per decade". [16] Note that the actual increase in the global surface temperature during the 100 years ending in 2005 was 0.74 ± 0.18 °C. [17]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Global Climate Coalition</span> Lobbyist group against reduction of greenhouse gas emissions

The Global Climate Coalition (GCC) (1989–2001) was an international lobbyist group of businesses that opposed action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and engaged in climate change denial, publicly challenging the science behind global warming. The GCC was the largest industry group active in climate policy and the most prominent industry advocate in international climate negotiations. The GCC was involved in opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, and played a role in blocking ratification by the United States. The coalition knew it could not deny the scientific consensus, but sought to sow doubt over the scientific consensus on climate change and create manufactured controversy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fossil fuel</span> Fuel formed over millions of years from dead plants and animals

A fossil fuel is a hydrocarbon-containing material such as coal, oil, and natural gas, formed naturally in the Earth's crust from the remains of dead plants and animals that is extracted and burned as a fuel. Fossil fuels may be burned to provide heat for use directly, to power engines, or to generate electricity. Some fossil fuels are refined into derivatives such as kerosene, gasoline and propane before burning. The origin of fossil fuels is the anaerobic decomposition of buried dead organisms, containing organic molecules created by photosynthesis. The conversion from these materials to high-carbon fossil fuels typically require a geological process of millions of years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Watson (chemist)</span> British chemist and atmospheric scientist (born 1948)

Sir Robert Tony Watson CMG FRS is a British chemist who has worked on atmospheric science issues including ozone depletion, global warming and paleoclimatology since the 1980s. Most recently, he is lead author of the February 2021 U.N. report Making Peace with Nature.

The Greening Earth Society, now defunct, was a public relations organization which denied the effects of climate change and the impacts of increased levels of carbon dioxide. The Society published the World Climate Report, a newsletter edited by Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Patrick Michaels</span> American climatologist (1950–2022)

Patrick J. Michaels was an American agricultural climatologist. Michaels was a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute until 2019. Until 2007, he was research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, where he had worked from 1980.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Information Council for the Environment</span>

The Information Council for the Environment (ICE) was an American climate change denial organization created by the National Coal Association, the Western Fuels Association, and Edison Electrical Institute.

World Climate Report, a newsletter edited by Patrick Michaels, was produced by the Greening Earth Society, a non-profit organization created by the Western Fuels Association.

Robert C. Balling, Jr. is a professor of geography at Arizona State University, and the former director of its Office of Climatology. His research interests include climatology, global climate change, and geographic information systems. Balling has declared himself one of the scientists who oppose the consensus on global warming, arguing in a 2009 book that anthropogenic global warming "is indeed real, but relatively modest", and maintaining that there is a publication bias in the scientific literature.

The Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in Tempe, Arizona. It is seen as a front group for the fossil fuel industry, and as promoting climate change denial. The Center produces a weekly online newsletter called CO2Science.

Craig D. Idso is the founder, president and current chairman of the board of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, a group which receives funding from ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy and which promotes climate change denial. He is the brother of Keith E. Idso and son of Sherwood B. Idso.

Sherwood B. Idso is the president of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, which rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. Previously he was a Research Physicist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service at the U.S. Water Conservation Laboratory in Phoenix, Arizona, where he worked since June 1967. He was also closely associated with Arizona State University over most of this period, serving as an adjunct professor in the Departments of Geology, Geography, and Botany and Microbiology. His two sons, Craig and Keith, are, respectively, the founder and vice president of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.

Ross Gelbspan was a reporter and editor for 31 years at The Philadelphia Bulletin, The Washington Post, the Village Voice and The Boston Globe. At the Globe, he conceived, directed and edited a series of articles that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984. He covered the first UN Conference on the Environment in Stockholm in 1972 and co-authored a four-part front page series on the global environment on the occasion of the Rio Conference for the Boston Globe in 1992.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Business action on climate change</span> Range of activities by businesses relating to climate change

Business action on climate change includes a range of activities relating to climate change, and to influencing political decisions on climate change-related regulation, such as the Kyoto Protocol. Major multinationals have played and to some extent continue to play a significant role in the politics of climate change, especially in the United States, through lobbying of government and funding of climate change deniers. Business also plays a key role in the mitigation of climate change, through decisions to invest in researching and implementing new energy technologies and energy efficiency measures.

Friends of Science(FoS) is a non-profit advocacy organization based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The organization rejects the established scientific consensus that humans are largely responsible for the currently observed global warming. Rather, they propose that "the Sun is the main direct and indirect driver of climate change," not human activity. They argued against the Kyoto Protocol. The society was founded in 2002 and launched its website in October of that year. They are largely funded by the fossil fuel industry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Climate change denial</span> Denial of the scientific consensus on climate change

Climate change denial is the pseudoscientific dismissal or unwarranted doubt that contradicts the scientific consensus on climate change. Those promoting denial commonly use rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of a scientific controversy where there is none. Climate change denial includes doubts to the extent of how much climate change is caused by humans, its effects on nature and human society, and the potential of adaptation to global warming by human actions. To a lesser extent, climate change denial can also be implicit when people accept the science but fail to reconcile it with their belief or action. Several social science studies have analyzed these positions as forms of denialism, pseudoscience, or propaganda.

The Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) is a United States public policy organization which promotes climate change denial.

<i>Straight Up</i> (book)

Straight Up: America's Fiercest Climate Blogger Takes on the Status Quo Media, Politicians, and Clean Energy Solutions is a book by author, blogger, physicist and climate expert Joseph J. Romm. A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and former Acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, Romm writes about methods of reducing global warming and increasing energy security through energy efficiency, green energy technologies and green transportation technologies.

Timothy Francis Ball was a British-born Canadian public speaker and writer who was a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Winnipeg from 1971 until his retirement in 1996. Subsequently Ball became active in promoting rejection of the scientific consensus on global warming, giving public talks and writing opinion pieces and letters to the editor for Canadian newspapers.

The Greening of Planet Earth is a half-hour-long documentary. It was produced by the coal industry, which argues that rising CO2 levels will be beneficial to agriculture, that the scientific consensus on climate change is wrong, and that policies intending to reduce CO2 levels are therefore misguided. The video argues that rising CO2 levels both directly stimulate plant growth and, as a result of their warming properties, cause winter temperatures to rise, thereby indirectly stimulating plant growth. It was produced in 1991 and released the following year. A sequel, entitled, The Greening of Planet Earth Continues, was released in 1998. The video was narrated by Sherwood Idso. After the video was made, it was distributed to thousands of journalists by a coal industry group. The video became very popular viewing in the George H. W. Bush White House and elsewhere in Washington, where it was promoted before the 1992 Earth Summit, and, according to some reports, became especially popular with then-chief of staff John H. Sununu.

The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) is a climate change denial advocacy organisation set up by S. Fred Singer's Science & Environmental Policy Project, and later supported by the Heartland Institute lobbying group, in opposition to the assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the issue of global warming.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Gelbspan, Ross (December 1995). "The Heat is On:The warming of the world's climate sparks a blaze of denial". Harper's Magazine.
  2. 1 2 "What we do". Western Fuels Association.
  3. ↑ "Our Operations". Western Fuels website. Western Fuels. Archived from the original on September 1, 2009. Retrieved 2010-07-03.
  4. 1 2 Minnesota News Council, 16 April 1998, Determination 118: Patrick Michaels, Robert Balling v. Star Tribune archived at archive.org
  5. ↑ "Scientific Advisers", Greening Earth Society, website archived from December 1998.
  6. ↑ Greening Earth Society, "Scientific Advisers", Greening Earth Society, website archived from September 2001.
  7. ↑ "Join GES", Greening Earth Society website, archived from March 2005.
  8. ↑ "2005 Annual Report" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on October 9, 2006.
  9. ↑ San Francisco Chronicle
  10. ↑ "Contact Us". Greening Earth Society. 1999-02-20. Archived from the original on 1999-02-20. Retrieved 2019-10-15.
  11. ↑ "Global Warming Skeptic Organizations (2013)". Union of Concerned Scientists. Aug 16, 2013. Retrieved 2019-10-15.
  12. ↑ "Exxonsecrets: Greening Earth Society". Archived from the original on 2017-10-03. Retrieved 2013-04-14.
  13. ↑ PRWatch.org
  14. ↑ Salon.com Archived 2009-04-22 at the Wayback Machine
  15. ↑ U.S. Lobby Registration and Disclosure Page
  16. ↑ Greening Earth Society
  17. ↑ "Summary for Policymakers" (PDF). Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 2007-02-05. Retrieved 2007-02-02. The updated hundred-year linear trend (1906 to 2005) of 0.74 °C [0.56 °C to 0.92 °C] is therefore larger than the corresponding trend for 1901 to 2000 given in the TAR of 0.6 °C [0.4 °C to 0.8 °C].
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.