Anyway…. I don’t want to be part of a flame war either, so I’m with you there.

Cheers.

I will not be drawn into some flame war so enough said!

Part of the U.S. opposition to coal has occurred under a “Green Jobs” rubric. I think that “Green Jobs” message has some noteworthy merits, and some important limits.

Anyway, here are some photos from a protest at the U.S. national capital — where anti-coal messages were linked up with those “Green Jobs” messages (and others) -
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/biotour/sets/72157615025581214/
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/fritzmyer/sets/72157614736820237/
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/powervote/sets/72157615112183490/
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/whateva/sets/72157614854150862/

Clearly environmental issues are your main concern, but how many people out there share those priorities?

Here are some statistics that suggest that global warming isn’t a major concern for pretty much everyone out there -
http://contexts.org/socimages/2009/04/28/concern-about-climate-change/
There are other polls out there.
Just imagine how much concern there would be about oil & gas depletion — as opposed to global warming, which has received a lot more mainstream media attention.
(Of course, those mainstream approaches to global warming are limited in various important ways though.)

Why not highlight all of the positive sides of the Transition approach?
If the Transition way of life is set against coal mining, it will look a lot more appealing — and rightfully so.

The Transition movement has a lot to offer — well beyond proactive responses to environemtal problems.

As important as those mounting ecological problems are, I expect that most people will be drawn into the Transition movement because of other messages
e.g. about saving money (by growing food, bicycling, etc)
e.g. about community ties
e.g. about enjoyable gardening

Anyway, the particular ‘PR’ video we’re commenting on is about workers; so responses to the video that don’t raise working condition issues are far from adequate. The video’s message about sexy, laid back miners strutting around (like Ben Stiller did in a mine in the movie Zoolander) would be left intact if points weren’t raised about what working in a coal mine is like. (It’s a lot darker, for instance.)

Here’s a piece in which I criticized drive-thru, fast food lobbying ‘PR,’ while highlighting environmental problems, working condition issues, and other concerns -
“Drive-Thru Truths”
http://tobanblack.net/blog/?p=251
(In Anglo North America, the Transition movement will have to grapple with more drive-thrus — and more strip malls, and more sprawl…… and I certainly could go on.)

Basically I think that people who mainly come to the Transition movement with concerns about environmental issues nevertheless can and should highlight other problems and opportunities around the Transition approach.

Toban
(in Canada)

There is much to be said for the work that has already taken place in the USA (and coal is a very powerful lobbying group there) and little needs doing to reuse much of the work.

One needs to be concious of cost and reuse is one of a number of ways to minimise it.

If funds can be raised then the Welsh mining and other experience could be used, but I do think conditions for miners is a pretty weak argument when there are stronger environmental messages to get across. (I have been down Big Pit and visited some sites in N Wales where I live).

As regards selling sustainability, the trick is to have a product to sell – after all, that seems to be what advertising is about. But that thought leads beyond the ‘frame’ of advertising to the context in which it takes place. The true message of advertising is not ‘buy this product’ but, ultimately, ‘the only way of representing anything is as a commodity’.
We need to decide how far down that track we want to go.
There’s probably room for more green ideas to be turned into products to sell to people (insulation, books about the decline of coal and oil etc) , but at some point the whole thing starts to undermine itself. It’s interesting how the ad for General Electric is re-framed as an embedded YouTube video inside a blog entry that offers a link to a new book for sale by Amazon. In this way the advert for clean coal becomes part of an advert for it’s supposed ideological opposite. But since Amazon and the Internet as a whole burns up a huge amount of energy, it’s not entirely clear that this really amounts to opposition.

As for coal mining, Gresford Colliery, where my grandfather and his brother worked, wasn’t exactly like the ad. My great uncle took a shift off on the night before his wedding and thus inadvertently saved himself from death, unlike 266 others.

Farewell, all our dear wives and our children
Farewell, all our comrades as well,
Don’t send your sons down the dark dreary mine
They’ll be doomed like the sinners in hell.

Having said that, the knowing looks the models give one another and the camera at the end of the ad, together with the use of the word ‘imagination’ in the final caption, strongly suggest the ad makers at least are fully aware that ‘clean coal’ is nothing more than a fantasy.

Those of you in the UK should take a tour of the Big Pit museum in Wales -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Pit
I was horrified during the underground tour;
and that experience only firmed up my resolve to reject coal proposals and projects.

Visiting that museum — and wider Wales — also left me with a sense of how mining can get entrenched in a society and in history (in culture, and so on).

Apparently the miners in Wales (if not elsewhere in the UK, or even elsewhere in the world), became very attached to mining because of an underground comraderie that they formed. Someone compared those bonds to connections between soldiers in combat. As hellish as the mining working conditions were, the miners apparently felt attached to their jobs — well beyond the paycheques.
The Big Pit museum is staffed by former miners, so they’d know more about all of this.

Some former miners might find the ad particularly appealing.

As for mining museums elsewhere in the world -
I don’t know what’s out there.

In Wales, former coal miners are remembered and (in some ways) honoured (even as they are belittled as well) in tourist industry products; here’s one photo of those -
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tobanblack/3518627474/

There also are miner statues in Wales; here are a couple of photos -
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/tobanblack/3492967396/
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/tobanblack/3492143433/
I expect that there are similar statues elsewhere in the UK;
but former coal miners seem to get more recognition in Wales — in part, because of the relative scale of the mining operations there.
Conversely, in the rest of the UK it seems like there wasn’t much awareness that Welshpeople were like mining workhorses.

The ad obviously doesn’t convey what coal mine work actually is like.