Are you curious about what various professional dirty energy defenders are up to? Well, look no further than RealClearEnergy, the longtime conservative and dirty energy propaganda site that publishes regular op-ed content from obviously corrupt sources.
Let's run through last week's offerings!
On May 3rd, a chemical industry consultant was basically cheerleading the dirty energy industry's profits (relative to "woke investing") during the period of time in which the industry was profiteering off of the war in Ukraine. So, if you too would like to exploit tragedy for profit, then yes, the dirty energy industry will take your money!
The same day it published this anti-woke piece, RealClearEnergy also ran a woke-washing piece from one of the first groups set up explicitly to woke-wash the energy industry's discriminatory practices and pollution. Since 1993, the National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC) has been lobbying on behalf of industry by claiming to speak for Black businesses, and indeed, they're still at it thirty years later. Oddly, this piece argues against deregulation but only, apparently, when it comes to letting people buy clean energy.
And appearing next to the anti-woke and the woke-wash is a rambling anti-EV piece by Trump EPA staffer Mandy Gunasekara, who casts doubt on the Biden administration's clean car policies. This article is part of her post-MAGA gig at the Independent Women's Forum, which, like the NBCC, is a right-wing identity politics-based group posing as one that speaks for women while really speaking for their big-money-backers.
But it's not like RealClearEnergy is above blatant shilling, as a pro-nuclear piece the next day, by a nuclear engineering company co-founder, demonstrated. It too took a shot at EVs, before pivoting to the argument for "energy gradualism," which is basically lifted directly from the discourse of climate delay.
Though it's not like RealClearEnergy is only running content consisting of people begging for more money for their funders! The outlet also ran something by an employee of Power the Future, a Koch-linked lobby shop that's denied its own lobbying status. Their communications director Larry Behrens apparently felt the need to stick up for gasoline-powered lawnmowers, because green groups are pointing out how dirty and polluting they are and encouraging people to choose better options.
Behrens doesn't even attempt to argue any of the facts about how "No Mow May" is meant to give bees and other pollinators a chance to do their thing; or even pretend loud, noxious, fickle gas mowers aren't in need of improvement. Instead he just opposes it on principle because "only by standing up to their lunacy will they back down."
… so wrote the man acting as the Lorax of fossil fuels, yelling at you to only use gas for your weekly ritualistic mowing of grass.