Coal Cares™ is a brand-new initiative from Peabody Energy says the website where you can find the Puff-Puff™ designer inhalers. Want Justin Bieber on yours? You got it - and if you order now you get a free pencil! The site also sports fun facts, like wind energy kills the poor little birdies. "Wind turbines can kill up to 70,000 birds per year, or 4.27 birds per turbine per year. Coal particulate pollution, on the other hand, kills fewer than 13,000 people per year.". Remember kids, coal kills people, not birds. Of course, this is a parody website, brought on by The Yes Men, but Peabody energy doesn't think it's all that funny and press released that it wasn't their site. They write this, with a straight face:
Peabody is proud to help hundreds of millions of people live longer and better through coal-fueled electricity. A growing collection of studies demonstrate the correlation between electricity fueled by low-cost coal and improvement in health, longevity and quality of life. The United Nations has linked life expectancy, educational attainment and income with per-capita electricity use, and the World Resources Institute found that for every 10-fold increase in per-capita energy use, individuals live 10 years longer.
Ten years longer you say? Not so fast says the World Resources Institute :and issued a release rebutting Peabody:
“The press statement asserts that “the World Resources Institute found that for every 10-fold increase in per-capita energy use, individuals live 10 years longer.” First, WRI has never made such an assertion and has never done analysis to that effect. Second, this conclusion ignores critical factors related to energy production and human health.
Looking forward to the press release tango after this.