API Leaked Memo Reveals Industry Staged Energy Rallies

Greenpeace has the leaked memo from the American Petroleum Institute instructing industry to propagandize their employees and contractors to attend industry coordinated fake energy rallies in 20 targeted states. I posted about these fake rallies just yesterday. One PR firm even forged letters to Congress.

Democracy Now has a video report.

“Astroturf Activism”: Leaked Memo Reveals Oil Industry Effort to Stage Rallies Against Climate Legislation

A leaked memo reveals the American Petroleum Institute is asking oil companies to recruit employees, retirees and contractors to take part in rallies against climate change legislation. We speak with Greenpeace USA research director Kert Davies. [includes rush transcript]

Don’t forget about this: The fossil fuel industry knew global warming could not be refuted yet they ignored their own scientists and led an aggressive lobbying and PR campaign against global warming.
Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

Update: 2000 people attended this Lobbyist Energy Rally

The lobbying effort opposes the Frack Act, legislation to tighten federal regulations on hydraulic fracturing, also called fracking. The controversial process stimulates well production by shooting millions of gallons of chemical solutions into the ground to fracture bedrock and release natural gas.

Some fake protesters wore t-shirts that said:

“Pass gas. It’s a movement.”

I suggest an edit:

Pass on gas. It’s a movement.