Perhaps the most valuable contribution George Orwell made to our understanding of propaganda was his coining of the term "doublethink," in his influential tale of totalitarianism, 1984. The idea "doublethink" expressed was so immediately familiar to readers that the word entered the English vocabulary soon after the book was first published half a century ago.

Webster’s Dictionary defines "doublethink" as meaning "to accept as true two inconsistent versions of a factual matter at the same time, consciously disciplining the mind to ignore the conflict between them." Orwell’s genius was to recognize double- thinking as a prevalent characteristic of bureaucracies, public and private, in the modern media age, and as one of the most effective propaganda techniques.

You would think that, more than fifty years after Orwell wrote his novel, a media- wise public would be more conscious of doublethinking when they see it. Yet this remains one of the most common devices used in advertising, public relations and politics today.

Here are some recent examples: a TV ad for a toxic lawn care product shows a toddler running carefree and barefoot across a weedless lawn. One of the official corporate sponsors of Earth Day this year was a biotechnology firm whose products threaten the balance of nature. A giant timber corporation’s slogan is "the tree growing company." A governor who mocks the victims of his state’s execution chamber—the nation’s busiest—advertises himself as a "compassionate conservative." Mountaintop removal coal mining is regularly described as "protecting the environment." I could go on.

One measure of the success of the environmental movement is that its most outspoken opponents want to be seen as environmentalists, too. This bit of double- thinking has obvious strategic value for those who want to continue plundering the Earth. If West Virginia Governor Cecil Underwood is an environmentalist, as he has claimed, it then becomes that much easier for him to describe anyone who disagrees with his environmental policies as an "extremist."

This strategy of identifying with environmentalists has been used for so long by corporate polluters that it has a name: "greenwashing." The business community in this country is acutely aware that, practically from the beginning of the modern environ- mental movement (which many observers trace to the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring), the overwhelming majority of Americans have identified the environment as a serious concern. And, to quote traditional business parlance, "the customer’s always right."

So to celebrate Earth Day last month, the US Chamber of Commerce published an ad in newspapers across the nation with the banner headline, "Who Wants to Be an Environmentalist?" It was a spoof on the ABC show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" The ad’s text asks, Regis Philbin-like, "Who has done more to clean the environment in the last 30 years?" with the possible answers being "A. Greenpeace; B. Leonardo DiCaprio; C. trade protestors; D. business."

A helpful hint is then offered: "US business has invested trillions of dollars to clean the environment." In case the reader hasn’t figured out the correct answer by this point, the ad concludes, "You don’t need a lifeline to answer this question. It’s D: business." Naturally, the Chamber’s Earth Day website address is listed at the bottom.

Given this tendency of business interests to greenwash the ecological down- side of the free enterprise system, it was probably inevitable that the embattled coal industry should also adopt this tactic.

Thanks to its overreaction to the federal court decision of Judge Charles Haden that mountaintop removal operations should conform to the Clean Water Act, the coal industry has been receiving a lot of adverse publicity lately. When the industry tried to make an end run around the judicial process by cashing in its political chips and seeking legislative and regulatory relief from its allies in the Clinton administration and Congress, many national environmental groups jumped in on the side of West Virginia environment- alists and coalfield residents.

This high-stakes political game caught the attention of the national media—notably the CBS program "60 Minutes," which featured a devastating segment on the mountaintop removal controversy, high- lighted by a stuttering Underwood trying to explain his suspiciously large campaign contributions from King Coal. In the wake of the unflattering media portrait drawn of an already polluting industry caught with its hand even deeper in the environmental cookie jar, it became obvious to coal industry insiders that their image needed some rehabilitation.

On April 20th, a small item from the Associated Press announced that "a new nonprofit group backed by coal companies, utilities that burn coal and railroads is launching a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign aimed at promoting electricity from coal." In the grand tradition of deceptively- named industry front groups posing as concerned citizens (an $800 million industry in the US where, as a leading public relations firm tells clients, "technology makes building volunteer organizations as simple as writing a check") the new group is called Americans for Balanced Energy Choices. Sponsors include such West Virginia powerhouses as A.T. Massey Coal, Consol Energy, Peabody Group, and Arch Coal, whose mountaintop removal operation at Pigeonroost Hollow was the subject of the Haden lawsuit.

The greenwashing of coal had begun even before this announcement in the press. Senator Robert Byrd, whose failed attempt to overturn the Haden decision via a congres- sional budget amendment helped turn mountaintop removal into a national issue, writes a weekly column, syndicated in many of the state’s local papers. In his column for the first week in April, titled "A Commitment to Clean Power," he wrote, "thanks to... research into clean coal technologies, and through the demonstration and deployment of these technologies at power plants and factories, coal can continue to be a viable ‘cleaner and greener’ fuel for power generation."

A week after the senator’s "clean coal" column, an opinion piece from United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts appeared in the Charleston Gazette. Roberts also jumped on the clean coal bandwagon, complaining that "many of our policies seem intent on removing coal from our energy mix, instead of removing emissions from the atmosphere." He credits reductions in sulfur dioxide emissions since 1970 (reductions that the coal industry fought tooth and nail, by the way) with creating a situation where "we are consuming more and polluting less." The ultimate goal of this born-again environmentalist is "zero emissions."

It would be nice if Senator Byrd’s and Mr. Roberts’ membership checks to the Highlands Conservancy were in the mail. But the more likely scenario is that this is just a case of singleminded doublethinking.