An Obama aide said that an audio clip that seemed to show Obama threatening to bankrupt the coal industry is "wildly edited to take it out of context."
As both sides release the last shreds of possibly damaging information, the conservative site Newsbusters quoted Obama saying:
"So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It's just that it will bankrupt them."
Obama and McCain support similar cap-and-trade systems, which would make it prohibitively expensive to build new coal plants with existing, high-emissions technology. Obama's campaign said he was only referring old-fashioned, high-emissions coal plants, though he didn't specify that in the quote.
Obama was criticized in the primary for supporting "clean coal" as a senator and on the campaign trail, against the wishes of environmental groups, which consider it a fantasy.
The aide noted that in the same interview Obama said that "this notion of no coal, I think, is an illusion."
"The only thing that Ive said with respect to I havent been some coal booster," he said, speaking to an environmentalist-leaning editorial board in the primary. "What I have said is that for us to take coal off the table as a ideological matter, as opposed to saying if technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, we should pursue it. That, I think, is the right approach. The same with respect to nuclear."
