By Richard Martin, Contributing Editor

We got a glimpse inside the sausage-making factory of D.C. lobbying and lawmaking last week, and it wasn’t pretty. A Beltway lobbying group working for the coal industry admitted to sending forged letters, purportedly from non-profit organizations, including the NAACP, to Senators protesting against the proposed Senate version of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which was passed last June by the U.S. House.

The phony letters are the most egregious example to date of a program of misinformation and demagoguery that many have tagged “astroturfing” – Big Oil lobbying efforts disguised as “grassroots” protests. A group called Energy Citizens, essentially a front for the American Petroleum Institute, has organized a series of rallies attended mainly by oil-company employees bussed in for the events.

“Hard on the heels of the health care protests, another citizen movement seems to have sprung up, this one to oppose Washington’s attempts to tackle climate change,” The New York Times reported.  “But behind the scenes, an industry with much at stake — Big Oil — is pulling the strings.”

It’s interesting to note that not every major oil producer supports this campaign. The U.S. arm of Royal Dutch Shell, for example, has specifically declined to take part in the Energy Citizens rallies, while saying its employees are free to attend if they so choose.

In more than 20 years of covering the oil industry I’ve found it to be like the military, in some ways: a vast, monolithic organization with pockets of very smart and progressive thinkers. The more forward-thinking oil companies, such as Shell and BP, know that the industry’s current mode of operation cannot stand, while the big U.S. companies continue to operate as if it’s 1989, not 2009. Exxon Mobil has been particularly recalcitrant: “The world’s largest oil company is continuing to fund lobby groups that question the reality of global warming,” the U.K. newspaper The Guardian reported earlier this summer, “despite a public pledge to cut support for such climate change denial, a new analysis shows.”

Complicating matters for the Obama Administration is the fact that the Senate cannot be counted on to pass the climate-change bill, and its cap-and-trade provisions that restrict the amount of carbon companies can emit into the atmosphere, on strictly party lines. “Ten moderate Senate Democrats from states dependent on coal and manufacturing sent a letter to President Obama on Thursday saying they would not support any climate change bill that did not protect American industries from competition from countries that did not impose similar restraints,”the Times reported. 

Of the 10 Democrats who signed that letter of opposition, none are from the Rocky Mountain West, where the vast majority of growth in fossil-fuel production has occurred over the last five years. In Colorado, Gov. Bill Ritter has staked his political future on the opposite position: to not embrace climate-change legislation, and build an economy on renewable energy, is to risk falling behind other countries.

Making a similar point, the head of the U.S. delegation at U.N. climate talks, Jonathan Pershing, dismissed claims that signing onto the new global climate-change convention (due to be approved in Copenhagen later this year) will put the U.S. at an economic disadvantage. “One of the things I am struck by is that there is an increasingly large industrial sector that wins on these issues and frankly a somewhat decreasingly large sector that loses,” Pershing told Reuters.

The other industry that will be profoundly affected by whatever climate-change bill gets passed is natural gas production, and there’s an increasing realization that, unlike the coal and oil businesses, the gas industry has been relatively quiet on the matter. The House bill contains no incentives or support for natural gas, which is a far less carbon-intensive fuel than either coal or petroleum. Including provisions in the final bill that support greater use of natural gas is “important for the environment and our energy security,” former Colorado Sen. Tim Wirth told the Colorado Oil and Gas Association in a speech last month in Denver. The industry has formed a new lobbying group, the Natural Gas Alliance, to exert greater force on U.S. energy policy. That’s a much-needed strategy.

Let’s hope that sending phony letters to congressmen is not among the tactics the Alliance chooses to carry it out.

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