The revelation is unsettling, but the coal industry was not surprised. It has been dealing with the NGO and fierce competition for many years. “Chesapeake surreptitiously financed opposition to a competing fuel that it couldn’t beat in the marketplace, and the club took dictation and money from the nation’s largest hydraulic fracker,” said Luke Popovich, vice president of communications, National Mining Association (NMA). An NMA report last year estimated the Sierra Club, which takes pride in the fact it has halted the construction of 160 new coal-based power plants, has destroyed 116,872 permanent jobs and an additional 1.12 million construction jobs throughout the country by blocking power plant construction.

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