Pro-Coal Group Pays People to Wear Its Shirts at EPA Hearing

While watching all the tweets about today's Environmental Protection Agency public hearings in DC and Chicago on the agency's proposed carbon-pollution safeguards, we saw this tweet from the Environmental Law & Policy Center in Chicago:

Hmm, is the coal industry astro-turfing again? The coal industry has to pay people to say they support coal?

A little Internet digging turned up the ad on Craigslist, only it had already been deleted. The best we could find for awhile was just this Google search showing part of the text (this is a screenshot -- click to enlarge it):

Here's the ad on Craigslist -- it's been deleted. Using some Google search skills (thanks, Dave Stroup!) with those words, we were able to piece together this much of the ad:

People needed to attend a public meeting (Tinley Park /Chicago) 

Reply to: [email protected] (email address no longer valid)

Looking for people THIS THURSDAY, MAY 24 who want to make a couple of dollars for a few hours of your time.

All you need to do is wear a t-shirt in support of an energy project for two hours during the public meeting. We will be departing the Tinely Park convention center at 8:15 am for the meeting and we will be back by 1:30 pm. For your time we will pay you $50 cash and provide you lunch once we return to the convention center.

UPDATE -- Here are two photos of the pro-coal t-shirts at the Chicago hearing. Thanks to Lauren Kastner of Indiana University's Campus Beyond Coal group for these photos.

Here's one of our folks talking to a person in a pro-coal t-shirt at the Chicago rally:

-- Heather Moyer, Sierra Club