Can you tell the difference between someone’s opinion, political beliefs or impassioned argument, and an industry advertisement posing as a regular ol’ op-ed from a concerned citizen?
Sometimes it can be hard to prove that someone’s simply regurgitating a line that a public relations firm spent thousands (millions?) of energy industry dollars developing. Sometimes it’s as easy as looking at the byline.
Such is the case for RealClear, the conservative news website that’s been turning Koch cash into media hits for various Koch-funded and energy-industry spokespeople for a year or two now, as we have noted repeatedly and at length.
They’ve published a bunch of nonsense this week, to the point where the “Recommended” box was exclusively filled with bad faith industry takes yesterday. For example, there was a “actually, solar is bad” piece denying the findings of the Department of Energy’s recently-released Solar Futures report co-authored by two totally unbiased and trustworthy, fact-based nuclear advocates, (one of whom got her start working for Michael “fund the police” Shellenberger, while the other quote tweets the American Petroleum Institute to praise gas).
Similarly reactionary in it’s “nuh uh” approach, was a piece in RealClearMarkets by the industry-funded CO2Coalition’s Vijay Jayaraj, taking aim at the Washington Post’s recent story on climate activists and anxiety with a bevy of pre-bunked Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Shellenberger citations and a focus on his home country on India.
But these are just baby shills, still in their larval activist/podcaster stage, subsisting off of second-hand industry funding. The rest of the content came from more seasoned professionals who have fully grown into their role as oil and gas spokespeople.
On Monday, RealClearEnergy ran a piece with a triple-byline of David Callahan, Charlie Burd, and Matthew Hammond. They argued that “any tax on clean, American natural gas is indeed a tax increase on working families,” which would mean President Biden would break his campaign pledge not to raise taxes on the working class.
Now, if unlike these three authors, you don’t subscribe to the belief that anything that’s bad for the (methane) gas industry is automatically bad for everyone in the country, you might not be persuaded by the strength of this argument.
But then again, the authors were probably more persuaded by their paychecks than the argument, as the byline helpfully notes that the trio are “leaders from Appalachia’s top natural gas and oil industry trade associations, the Marcellus Shale Coalition, Gas & Oil Association of West Virginia, and the Ohio Oil & Gas Association.”
Ah! Well that would explain it!
And that wasn’t even the only obvious oil propaganda RealClearEnergy ran this week. The next day, they ran a piece headlined “why Gulf of Mexico oil and natural gas are so critical” by Lori LeBlanc, “interim president of the Louisiana Mid-Continent OIl and Gas Association.”
Now, do oil and gas companies have a right to speak about their product? Probably, sure. But any media outlet that considers itself decent and legitimate probably should not publish industry “opinions,” given their decades of lying about it to dissuade the public from regulating its pollution. Thankfully, few, if any, do.
RealClear is obviously not a decent and legitimate media outlet, but to their credit, at least they are using bylines to disclose their writers’ obvious conflicts of interest. Sometimes, they may include too much information in what is supposed to be the brief description of an author.
Specifically, yesterday they published a piece claiming that framing climate change as a public health issue could backfire, because some activists in Norway are opposing new wind power projects on (flimsy) public health grounds. We didn’t recognize the author, Robert Hefner, so were thankful for a 270-word bio, nearly half as long as the op-ed, and lifted straight from Hefner’s website. It informs readers that Hefner is not only “a fifth-generation energy expert” – as though energy expertise is passed down in the genes! – among a LOT of other things, that he “privatized water technology patents out of publicly-held companies.”
Oh great, he steals technology from the public in order to exploit and profitize water, making access to something the public needs to survive a matter of payment, exactly the sort of person who should be trusted to provide advice on public health…
