For several years, this column has sometimes been a lone voice in recommending a more aggressive approach against coal’s critics because fighting fire with fire has always seemed so totally logical.

Unfortunately, the more cautious types who speak officially for coal and the wider mining industry thought a more cautious approach was the way ahead to avoid offending anyone.

The net result of the softly-softly method is that the Green movement and its friends have been allowed a free hand to say and do what they like without a meaningful industry response to tear a few holes in their claims.

Hopefully, that gap in coal’s survival strategy will be plugged by the higher-profile recommended by the Mining Council of Australia and backed financially by the country’s biggest coal-mining companies.

Time will tell whether the launching of a website will achieve much without the backing of a large-scale advertising campaign of the sort that killed the first version of the controversial mining tax.

However, so far the coal sector’s fight-back is showing promise as a way of countering the false claims made by coal’s critics.

Slickly designed, the Australians-for-coal website (http://www.australiansforcoal.com.au) lays down the basics of what coal does for Australia in terms of job creation and the provision of affordable electricity to power most Australian homes and factories.

The structure of the site is impressive, addressing in simple form the key attributes of coal including the facts that:

• coal is the world’s “go to” fuel source for electricity production, accounting for 41% of all generation
• the coal industry in Australia directly employs 50,000 people and pays wages and salaries totalling $6 billion a year
• it indirectly employs another 150,000 Australians
• as a contributor to the national economy coal it accounts for 4.2% of gross domestic product, or almost $60 billion a year
• governments reap billions of dollars in taxes from coal, $10 billion to the Commonwealth and $18 billion to the States.

Only a person with blinkered vision would deny that these are impressive statistics, and only a person who does not have Australia’s best interests at heart would believe that killing the coal industry would be a good thing.

Unfortunately, and this is where things get a little messy, the most strident of coal’s critics suffer from blinkered vision and almost certainly do not have Australia’s best interests at heart.

The Dark Greens march to a different drum. They are absolute believers in man-made climate change and the imperative of shutting down all forms of fossil fuel production, including coal, oil and gas.

Holding a belief is one thing, blindly trying to apply it without thinking through the consequences is another.

And therein lies the problem. Factual arguments and logical explanations will never win over people who are philosophically opposed to coal – just as they are philosophically opposed to the nuclear fuel cycle.

The reason nuclear deserves a mention is that a few years ago it was the number one enemy of the environmental lobby, a position adopted after the Chernobyl melt-down and reinforced by the Fukushima meltdown.

What is so interesting about nuclear is that its vilification and resulting stagnation led directly to the return of coal as the world’s preferred source of electricity.

If nuclear had been allowed to blossom, coal today would not speak for as much of the global electricity market as it does.

In a way, and this is guaranteed to infuriate the Dark Greens, their campaign against nuclear has been one of the major reasons for the rise of coal.

A few more unpleasant facts need to be rammed down the throats of the Greens, including the fact that closing Australia’s coal industry would (a) devastate the country’s economy and (b) do nothing to change the rate of global coal consumption because other suppliers would simply fill the gap.

The net result of killing coal in Australia would be eventually be recognised as one of the world’s most spectacular own goals in the form of countless job losses and a weakened Australian economy.

The Minerals Council website is a solid start to taking the fight to the anti-coal campaigners but it does not, yet, go far enough.

The next step is to paint the anti-coal crusaders as the thoughtless, economic vandals they really are, hell-bent on forcing change without caring how much damage they cause in the process – and without achieving a single one of their goals.