It seems that legitimate journalists may finally be wising up to the campaign to make Republicans look appealing to voters on climate despite the fact that the GOP is actually using the new talking points as cover to, in their own words, "double down" on the unpopular, fossil-fueled MAGA energy agenda. A year ago the GOP greenwashers tricked a Bloomberg reporter, and last fall they got into the Houston Chronicle. More recently, however, they've only been landing in disinfo outlets like the Washington Examiner with the argument that to lock in young voters, Republicans should describe fossil fuels as a climate solution, even though that's entirely false.
With Earth Day coming, there’s no doubt they tried to place their GOP greenwashing into a legitimate outlet to reach normal Americans who haven't already seen their op-eds in conservative media.
Instead, it looks like they had to resort to paying The Washington Times to run their op-eds as a huge sponsored content advertising section, which is a beefed up version of the 'op-ads' disinformation tactic Exxon used for decades. The American Conservation Coalition (Jay Faison's neo-nazi dog whistling fake youth-aimed coalition), assembled a quadruple-bylined piece making the "all-of-the-above" energy pitch that they apparently have to pay people to believe is a change from GOP precedent and not keeping with the party's 2016 platform, or the Koch network in 2015, the GOP in 2011, or the GOP in 2009, or both Presidential candidates in 2008, or or basically every president since 1973. But hey, who needs history when you have a slogan to push, and the money to buy an advertising supplement!
And keeping with the GOP tradition they pretend to cast off, the article is packed full of disinformation. "Realistic environmentalists know that fossil fuels aren’t going away tomorrow," they write, creating a strawman to knock down, as though anyone anywhere were literally calling for an immediate eradication of fossil fuels. But apparently fossil fuels are needed "to fuel economic vibrancy," a made-up phrase with no meaning, "and a better quality of life," which is simply false. As explained in Amy Westervelt's debunking of pro-fossil fuel propaganda, IPCC lead author Dr. Julia Steinberger has said plainly, "We do not rely on fossil fuels for improvements in our living standards.”
As part of the same promotional package, Heather Reams of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions gave the same exact pitch for conservatives to pretend to take climate action, with a sponsored op-ed also touting an "all-of-the-above energy portfolio" that pays lip service to renewables while actually propping up the fossil fuel industry.
But wait, there's more! Completing the Faison-trifecta, a ClearPath op-ad makes…basically all the same points. Why bother funding different groups to all say the same thing, if not to give the illusion of a broad network of independent support?
Then there's the industry voices in the sponsored section, which confirms that these groups claiming to want to stop climate change are actively working with the industry profiting off of continuing to cause climate change, and have spent decades spreading disinformation to hide that fact. Anne Bradbury, CEO of the American Exploration and Production Council, an oil and methane gas industry lobby group, also promotes H.R. 1, like Reams and the ACC. She endorses the permitting reform effort, which guts environmental safeguards in exactly the way an op-ad from API's Mike Sommers asks for in his op-ad entry, and also uses the "all-of-the-above" catchphrase. Unlike the other two articles, though, Bradbury also mentions hydrogen and carbon capture, two climate action delay strategies the industry loves.
And sure enough, a fourth sponsored op-ed to run on Tuesday, by Newton Jones, president of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, also touts hydrogen and carbon capture, use, and storage, which are necessary for the fossil fuel industry's "license to continue to operate;" polluting now while claiming they'll clean up the carbon pollution later. And having a union president deliver the message is an obvious giveaway that this coordinated campaign is really trying to reach moderate/Democratic audiences (and failing to do so, since it had to pay The Washington Times to run these pieces.)
Most importantly, what are elected Republicans actually doing about climate change? Well, they’re hiding behind China as an excuse not to regulate the industry that funds their political careers. That was the throughline across three more op-eds that The Washington Times also ran on Tuesday, bylined by Senators Bill Cassidy (R-LA, who has received $2.3m from the energy and natural resources industry), John Barrasso (R-WO, who has raked in $2.7mil from that same industry), and Marco Rubio (R-FL, who has also gotten $2.7mil from the energy and natural resources industry).
We could go on, as the special (false) advertisement section does, with a laundry list of interchangeable op-ads we might believe were written by AI, and not another senator, or the staffers for an impressively dull and redundant dozen op-ads by various House Republicans touting H.R. 1, their fossil-fuel-booster bill that's dead on arrival in the Senate. All this is to support a bill with no chance of becoming law — a totally symbolic exercise in propaganda-as-policy.
At the same time, the GOP is actively trying to undo the clean energy support in the Inflation Reduction Act, including provisions for ccs, nuclear and hydrogen tax credits these groups champion, meaning Republicans couldn’t even wait more than a day before confirming that this repeated “all of the above” slogan is an absolute lie, and all they’re interested in doing is boosting fossil fuel profits.
So, while we certainly appreciate the idea of making climate concern acceptable in conservative circles, if it's just greenwashing Republican commitment to the fossil fuels causing climate change, then it's not actually helping. In fact, it just makes the problem worse by giving cover to those funded by the industry to prevent meaningful regulations of their products.
