The Western Fuels Association is a $400 million consortium of coal suppliers and coal-fired utilities based in Westminster, Colorado. Western Fuels Association supplies coal and transportation services to consumer-owned electric utilities in the

Great Plains The Great Plains (french: Grandes Plaines), sometimes simply "the Plains", is a broad expanse of flatland in North America. It is located west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains, much of it covered in prairie, steppe, an ...

, Rocky Mountain and Southwest regions.

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 The Dry Fork mine is a coal mine located 8 miles north of Gillette, Wyoming in the United States in the coal-rich Powder River Basin. The mine is an open pit mine that utilizes truck and shovel mining method to mine a low-sulfur, sub-bitumino ...

located in Gillette, Wyoming, The Colowyo Mine in Northwest Colorado, and the New Horizons Mine located in Nucla, Colorado.

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. In May 1994

Richard Lindzen Richard Siegmund Lindzen (born February 8, 1940) is an American atmospheric physicist known for his work in the dynamics of the middle atmosphere, atmospheric tides, and ozone photochemistry. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and ...

Patrick Michaels Patrick J. Michaels (February 15, 1950 – July 15, 2022) 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 ...

, 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. Balling was mentioned as a fossil fuel industry – funded scientist in

Ross Gelbspan Ross Gelbspan was a journalist, writer and environmentalist. He has written two books relating to global warming: ''The Heat Is On'' (1997) and ''Boiling Point'' (2004). ''The Heat Is On'' received national attention when President Bill Clinton told ...

's 1997 book ''The Heat is On''. This led the Minnesota ''

Star Tribune The ''Star Tribune'' is the largest newspaper in Minnesota. It originated as the ''Minneapolis Tribune'' in 1867 and the competing ''Minneapolis Daily Star'' in 1920. During the 1930s and 1940s, Minneapolis's competing newspapers were consolida ...

'' to run an editorial speaking of a "disinformation campaign" by some climatologists. Balling and his colleague

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." 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)."Minnesota News Council, 16 April 1998
Determination 118: Patrick Michaels, Robert Balling v. Star Tribune
archived a

/ref> Between December 1998 and September 2001 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."

Controversy

The Western Fuels Association has played a controversial role in the debate over global warming. Their 2005

annual report An annual report is a comprehensive report on a company's activities throughout the preceding year. Annual reports are intended to give shareholders and other interested people information about the company's activities and financial performance. ...

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

Craig D. Idso 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. ...

and

Sherwood Idso Sherwood B. Idso (born June 12, 1942) 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 ...

. 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

of the Cato Institute. It was a non-profit organization created by the Western Fuels Association, with which it shared an office and many staff members. It has been called a "front group created by the coal industry" and an "industry front". Fred Palmer, a Society staffer, is a registered lobbyist for Peabody Energy, a coal company. Although the Greening Earth Society was generally skeptical of the 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".Greening Earth Society
/ref> Note that the actual increase in the global surface temperature during the 100 years ending in 2005 was 0.74 ± 0.18 °C.

References

{{reflist

External links

Western Fuels Association website
Climate change denial Coal companies of the United States Coal mining in the United States Cooperatives in the United States Organizations of environmentalism skeptics and critics Year of establishment missing