Coal: Too Dirty for College?

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On Tuesday the Sierra Club released the first of three internet commercials to be aired this month on sites like Hulu and Facebook. The ads—you can see the first one below—paint coal as “too dirty for college,” a comical rebuke of the concept of “clean coal.” The commercials are part of the organization’s Campuses Beyond Coal Campaign, which aims to wean the 60 universities that still rely on coal-powered electricity off “last century’s dirty technology,” as Binghamton University student activist Lauren Hammond put it. The commercials will air through the end of the month, and will direct viewers to 2dirty4college.com, where students can send along a pre-drafted letter to their college or university president urging him or her to “move beyond coal and power our schools with 100 percent clean-energy solutions,” with a few quick clicks of a mouse.

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