On Tuesday, the Koch-y RealClearEnergy ran an op-ed by American Petroleum Institute CEO Mike Sommers that tried to spin the Koch-y Colonial Pipeline operator’s decision to protect its billing process by shutting down gas shipping as a justification for further support of “abundant homegrown energy.”
The piece is standard industry cheerleading, jumping on the “this is like the ‘70s” meme that conservative trolls in the GOP have been using well before this piece ran. Also, Sommers references comments made on May 11th as “last week” in a piece published June 1, suggesting either an incompetently sluggish PR team, or one that desperately tried, and failed, to get the piece published somewhere more legitimate.
It’d make sense that they wouldn’t start at RealClear’s safety-school for dirty energy propaganda op-eds, though. After all, their target audience these days isn’t the professional deniers that have fellowship positions at RealClear, but more mainstream audiences, as evidenced by their recent “Climate Action Framework” that pretends to embrace climate policy- as long as the cost comes from consumers, and not their profits.
And the organized denial crowd is definitely not happy about the change in strategy. In fact, aside from the Republican members of Congress who receive campaign contributions and support from the oil and gas industry to say whatever is convenient, deniers seem to be the only ones gullible enough to take API’s obvious greenwashing at face value.
For example, a blog post at CFACT headlines a piece on API’s framework as an “abject surrender and ignominious defeat,” which would be pretty sweet if it were true.
Collister Johnson, who’s made some laughable claims in the past, sounded pretty heated about API’s bad faith feint. Their climate policy framework is, per Johnson in all his my Yale roommate George W. Bush hooked me up with an OPIC Board seat wisdom, “an open display of craven defeatism and submission to the woke, liberal world view which holds that the residue of the combustion of fossil fuels are ‘emissions’ - pollutants - which are harmful to the planet and therefore must be harshly regulate and ultimately eliminated.”
Johnson goes on to try and grapple with the “impenetrable gobbledygook” that the Framework uses to disguise its pollution profiteering as climate heroics. In his view, the fact that API acknowledges “that the combustion of fossil fuels is a threat to civilization” and said that the industry needs to make some [public-funded, marginal] changes to “reach the ambitions of the Paris Climate Agreement”, means it “has adopted the most radical, least evidence-based, most extreme position held by climate change alarmists.”
Now, API has hardly embraced the idea that the fossil fuel industry should be nationalized and converted to actual clean energy. But Johnson is terrified by their use of the word “emissions,” which apparently signals that they’ve “laid down their arms and admitted defeat.”
Obviously we’re not quite so ready to believe that API has indeed adopted the “most extreme position held by climate change alarmists,” but we suppose it might be okay to take a slightly-less-jaded view of API’s newfound framework.
Any sort of distance between API and CFACT is progress, given that in 1998, in response to the Kyoto Protocol, API was working on a plan to funnel industry money to groups like CFACT to spread climate denial.
Maybe if Sommers wants us to believe API is sincere in its commitment to the Paris Agreement, it can provide some transparency on how it worked with groups like CFACT to undermine the Kyoto Protocol. After all, those same groups are still working against climate policy, so if API truly wants to “reach the ambitions of the Paris Climate Agreement,” wouldn’t it lay bare the playbook of those seeking to stymie said ambitions?