Salon has a damning piece entitled, Big Oil and Canada Thwarted US Carbon Standards with hundreds of emails to back up their claims, emails obtained by the same kind of law we have here, freedom of in formation. It shows how there was a concerted effort to interfere with State and National carbon standards by pouring millions of dollars of money into a supposed "grassroots" organization called the Consumer Energy Alliance to lobby against these new standards as the usual job killers. They push for, "Balanced Energy for America" and it has nothing at all to do with America but with Canada's burgeoning tar sands industry.
I know many, including myself have been disappointed with the progress President Obama has made regarding Climate Change and how we talk about it. And even though the Durban Climate talks were supposedly being held up by the US, in the end it was Canada that pulled out of the final agreement. It is now all making sense.
Even though President Obama delayed the final decision on the Keystone pipeline, Republicans are continuing to draw a line in the sand refusing to pass the payroll tax extension.
But behind activists’ jubilation lurked a somber reality, an untold story with much wider implications. The broader fight to reform Alberta’s tar sands, the one which actually stood a chance of breaking America’s addiction to the continent’s most polluting road fuel, has been quietly abandoned over the past several years. For that we can thank the planet’s richest oil companies and their Canadian government allies, who’ve together waged a stealthy war against President Obama’s climate change ambitions.
Their battle-plan is revealed in more 300 pages of personal emails obtained through a Freedom of Information request to the Alberta government. The story in the emails, reported for the first time here in Salon and The Tyee, Canada’s leading independent online news site, traces a year in the relationship of Michael Whatley, a GOP-connected oil industry lobbyist and his friend, Gary Mar, a smooth-talking and ambitious diplomat at the Canadian embassy in the Washington, DC.
The messages lay bare a sophisticated and stealthy public relations offensive, one designed to manipulate the U.S. political system; to deluge the media with messages favorable to the tar-sands industry; to sway key legislators at state and federal levels; and most importantly, to defeat any attempt to make the gasoline and diesel pumped everyday into U.S. vehicles less damaging to the climate. The goal of it all? “Defeat” Obama’s effort to reduce carbon consumption and keep America hooked on Canada’s $441 billion tar sands industry, no matter what the cost to our planet’s future.
Salon
Starting in 2009 there has been a concerted effort by the Canadian Government to influence fuel standards in the US.
Let that sink in.
So Whatley wasn’t taking any chances. With the support of the Alberta government, he said he would “defeat efforts” to develop fuel standards in “Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states” and fight anything similar at the national level. He pledged as well to “address potential efforts” to develop clean fuel legislation in “Washington, Oregon, Michigan, Minnesota and other states.” Whatley also mused about “conducting a grassroots operation” in “target states” that would “generate significant opposition to discriminatory low carbon fuels standards.”
"Discriminatory low carbon fuel standards"
And so now we understand why Canada has pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol and why there is so much political pressure from Republicans to approve the Keystone pipeline. This has nothing to do with job and nothing to do with ending our dependency on foreign oil.
Perhaps the reason Whatley was so confident in his ability to influence America’s political process, is that he was once deep inside it. Years earlier, Whatley served as attorney and senior policy advisor on George W. Bush’s first presidential campaign and transition team. And Whatley was later appointed chief of staff to Senator Elizabeth Dole, a former cabinet secretary and the wife of GOP elder statesman Bob Dole.
Then in the late 2000’s, Whatley’s firm created the Consumer Energy Alliance, a “grassroots” organization supported by such prominent tar sands producers as BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Marathon, Shell and Norway’s Statoil. The group claims to be providing “a voice for consumers interested in vital public issues.”
Climate Change is the issue we face as a species that we must take most seriously. Some believe it is too little too late.
Countries around the globe agreed on Sunday to forge a new deal forcing all the biggest polluters for the first time to limit greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. But critics said the plan was too timid to slow global warming.
For a reduction plan to have a major impact, analysts say, the world's largest emitter, China, needs to be weaned from coal-intensive power sources that are choking the planet with carbon dioxide (CO2) and developed countries must spend heavily to change the mix of sources from which they draw their energy.
But they see little political will to implement these costly plans and argue that the UN process showed, in two weeks of talks in Durban, that it is bloated, broken and largely incapable of effecting sweeping change.
and corrupt, they forget immoral, corrupt and evil, putting billions of dollars of profit before human lives, the lives of their children, grandchildren and generations to come. And the famine to come, the loss of biodiversity, etc, amounts to genocide because this was knowingly done to prevent progress.
There are not enough words to express my anger and disgust.
Here is a link to the emails, if you can stomach them. The first one has to do with carbon standards in the US.
Whatley’s pledge “to keep Lamar Alexander from offering an LCFS amendment” refers to the Tennessee Senator’s support at the time for low carbon fuel standard policies. Without a Republican sponsor, the measure will “die an ugly partisan death in the Senate,” he predicted.
What Whatley doesn’t mention here is that his “grassroots” organization, the Consumer Energy Alliance, had launched an anti-fuel standard ad campaign in Alexander’s home state that August. The Alliance would later make a big deal of the Senator’s announcement, two weeks after this email, that he’d become undecided on the policy he once favored.
