Guardian: Who came up with the term “clean coal”? It is the most toxic phrase in the greenwash lexicon. George W Bush, by promising to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into the pursuit of advanced “clean” coal technologies, certainly popularised it. But I’d love to know where it came from. Any thoughts out there? It is, of course, oxymoronic. Coal is about acid rain and peasouper smogs, asthma and mercury contamination, radioactive waste emissions and ripping apart mountains, killing trees, …