The AAPS is a national organisation representing physicians in all specialities, founded in 1943 to preserve private medicine and the patient-physician relationship.

It said Obama’s administration was lumping together carbon dioxide – “the basic building block of all living things and also a weak greenhouse gas” – and soot.

On this premise, the AAPS also landed a blow on the American Lung Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, which have supported Obama’s coal stance.

The AAPS said the ALA also lumped “carbon pollution” with arsenic, lead and mercury, while the American Academy of Pediatrics echoed the Environmental Protection Agency's claim that Obama’s new rules would avert 2700-6600 “premature deaths” and 140,000-150,000 asthma attacks in children by 2030.

Yet, as APPS points out, “the EPA told Congress that it neither possesses nor can produce the data used in developing the rules”.

“The Obama administration's attack on coal-fired electricity, through draconian ‘carbon’ rules imposed by the EPA, makes bogus claims about lives to be saved,” the AAPS said.

In the spring 2014 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Heartland Institute and American Council on Science and Health policy advisor John Dale Dunn said claims of such harm from small particulates (dust or soot) were extrapolated from small associations reported in poorly designed and non-replicated epidemiological studies.

Dunn’s non-PC stance on climate change has been established with the “global warming denial industry” blog desmogblog.com quoting him as saying: “I assert that warm is good for human health and that global warming, even the most extreme estimates, will not create heat illness or death increases and certainly no changes that are more important than the basic public health measures of vector control, water, nutrition, sewage and water quality and housing quality.”

AAPS executive director Jane M Orient said: “The adverse health effects of Obama's promised skyrocketing of the costs of electricity, not to mention unemployment, are simply being ignored.

“Hillary Clinton, in a September 4 speech, also claimed that the war on coal would address both ‘climate change’ and children's respiratory illness.

“This 'two-for-one' also depends on conflating two entirely different forms of carbon and there is no actual evidence that shutting off all coal-fired electricity – 40% of the total – would either make the climate more benign or help asthmatics."