Oil and Coal PR

I've noticed a lot of PR coming from the oil and coal industries lately. Whether it's television advertisements or their sponsorship of the CNN debates (seriously), they've been putting a lot of money behind their effort to shape public opinion. In fact, Public Campaign Action Fund looked into this, and found "that the coal and oil industries spent an astounding $427.2 million over the first six months of 2008 to influence public opinion and public policy" (pdf). That works out to more than $2 million every day.