Bush Implants a Dirty Coal Crony in Key DOE Slot

His name is Stanley Suboleski and he's been appointed to the position of assistant secretary for fossil energy for the Dept. of Energy. His job is to "oversee projects such as developing clean-coal technologies and carbon sequestration, and polices related to fossil fuels." And with that maneuver, the White House has turned the chicken coop over to the fox.

Who is Suboleski?

Suboleski, chief operating officer at Massey (an energy company) from 2001 to 2003, continues to work as an independent consultant with Massey. The company faces an estimated $2.4 billion in threatened federal fines for more than 4,000 alleged U.S. Clean Water Act violations within the past six years at its West Virginia and Kentucky coal operations.

And here's what Grist has to say about it:

Suboleski is a long-time executive for Massey Energy, serving there in some capacity since 1981. His main role has been to help Massey evade or shut down the dozens of investigations launched against it for repeated violations of environmental laws. His appointment could not send a clearer signal: The DOE is committed to coal and doesn't give a damn about environmental enforcement.

Massey -- one of the biggest practitioners of mountaintop-removal mining -- is as dirty as dirty energy gets, and there's no human being in the country that better represents dirty energy than Massey CEO Don Blankenship. Nobody can rival Blankenship for sheer sociopathic disregard for human life, disregard for the law, disregard for the mountains where he grew up, disregard for democracy ...

I could go on.

And David Roberts does. It's worth reading the whole grimy story, which includes this tidbit:

Every December, Massey funds a lavish Christmas Extravaganza in a small WV town. Blankenship arrives in a limo, dons a Santa hat, and moves among residents -- his own people, whose ancestral land he is destroying, whose families he is impoverishing, whose children he is sickening -- and passes out gifts.

Strange coincidence. Just today, in Washington DC, Santa Clauses were spotted handing out "clean coal." The coal-promoting Santas were on the dole of Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, an astroturf front group for coal, as Adam Siegel explains:

Santa Clauses, wearing white gloves, were at the Union Station and Capitol South Metro stations handing out coal. Handing out clean coal, that is, that didn’t leave a speck of dust on those beautiful white gloves. A Christmas gift to the Globe, a path for even more CO2 emissions for decades to come.

Wonder if one of them Santas was Suboleski, first day on the DOE payroll?

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