December 5, 2009

No. 5: American Petroleum Institute (A.K.A. Energy Citizens)

Meet the 12 loudest members of the chorus claiming that global warming is a joke and that CO2 emissions are actually good for you.

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Meet “Bryan from Ohio” and “Judy from Alaska”—just a couple of the hardworking, freedom-loving Americans who’ve signed on to support the pro-oil advocacy group Energy Citizens. This August, the group held a rally a few blocks from Exxon HQ in downtown Houston “to give these energy citizens a voice in the climate bill debate.” Its blog described the 3,500 attendees as “truckers, farmers, homemakers, small business people, veterans, and the unemployed” who expressed their concerns about the Waxman-Markey climate bill.

Or their bosses’ concerns. Energy Citizens is a creation of the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s largest trade group. (In 2009, API has spent some $5.8 million on lobbying, much of it on the climate and energy bills.) A memo from API president Jack Gerard, leaked to Greenpeace, urged his group’s members to ensure “turnouts of several hundred attendees” at supposedly grassroots events like the ones Energy Citizens was sponsoring. He explained, “Our member company local leadership—including your facility manager’s commitment to provide significant attendance—is essential to achieving the participation level that Senators cannot ignore.” Kate Sheppard (then at Grist) obtained a list of the coordinators of 21 events Energy Citizens was planning; 15 out of the 21 were registered lobbyists, mostly for API and its affiliates.

Energy Citizens’ website is filled with first-person video testimonials from people identified only by their first names and home states. Plucky Guardian blogger Leo Hickman sussed out that “Shaka from Tennessee” was likely Shaka L.A. Mitchell, until recently the executive vice president of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, which hosts the denialist website Carnival of Climate Change. (Hickman’s hunch was borne out by this Wake Forest University alumni news profile). Mitchell was previously head of outreach for the Institute for Justice, a libertarian Beltway think tank partly bankrolled by right-wing petrobillionaires Charles G. and David Koch, who are among the largest funders of climate skeptics.

Click here for the next member of the dirty dozen.

Click here for the previous member.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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