API also bought the back page of the A section of the Washington Post with a Vote4Energy ad that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s about as genuine as a gas-station burrito.

If you want authentic insights on Big Oil’s scheming, start with our own mock Vote 4 Energy commercial:

Anticipating this new misinformation campaign, PolluterWatch created the commercial to show how API and it’s oil company members (Exxon, BP, Shell, Chevron and all the usual suspects) are generating this phony citizen support for Big Oil.

What’s really fueling this bogus outreach is API’s $200 million budget to push dirty energy incentives and tax handouts for oil companies — something the petrol pushers can’t do on their own. Hence the need to prop up a phony corps of pseudo-interested citizens. They’ve even gone so far as to stage faux-rallies for their Energy Citizens astroturf campaign, as revealed by Greenpeace in a confidential API memo to oil executives. The con-job is essential to their strategy because American’s overwhelmingly support clean energy over dirty oil development.

We decided to fight astroturf with astroturf — the real stuff this time, rolling out a carpet of fake green grass at today’s API press conference, flanked by oil company logos that reveal who the real sponsors of this supposed citizens’ movement actually are. The K Street lobbyists seemed confused when the reality of their oily tactics was exposed for all to see.

Of course, all of this points back to our own, honest Vote 4 Energy campaign, which we’ll put up against the fake API version any day of the week.

API CEO Jack Gerard not only heralded the launch of the campaign, he championed even more dirty energy development like the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline in his “State of American Energy” address — a proverbial plastic cherry on top of this petroleum-derived sundae of misinformation.

Media aren’t fooled. Outlets from the Financial Times to Fortune reinforce what we all know: that this is nothing more than a fossil-fuel-filled PR push. The Hill uses refreshing candor right from the headline, labeling the whole effort nothing more than an ad campaign, quoting Greenpeace reps who reveal the truth despite the API soot-screen.

Oddly enough, just after bragging about a DC metro station “dominated” by API’s new Vote 4 Energy ads to those attending the campaign launch on Wednesday, Gerard say “This is not an advertising campaign. Our expectation is that it will be a conversation with the American people.” Except the Vote 4 Energy website’s front page clearly says “Vote4Energy launches ad campaign.” Hmmm… I guess that’s what astroturf campaigns are about — creating both sides of your “conversation with the American people” so you can easily come to a consensus with yourself.

Americans are clearly too smart to be faked out by Big Oil’s phony grass roots strategies. Real citizens will continue to counter the fictional folks created by API. We’ll demand clean, renewable energy alternatives that mean genuine job growth, a healthier environment, and a sustainable future that puts our planet ahead of petroleum profit.

Vote 4 yourself, not oil executives.

These safeguards are not for show. They reflect a raft of highly credible research proving that mercury, along with other toxic metals including arsenic, chromium and nickel, is spewed in to the air as an insidious byproduct of fossil fuel burning. These metals contaminate waterways, where they infuse the bodies of commercial fish and seafood. It’s no surprise that women of childbearing age are urged not to eat salmon and shrimp. High accumulated mercury levels in these and other frequently consumed species can be devastating to the unborn and infants.

That reality gave this effort tremendous momentum — a record-breaking 500,000 Americans reached out to the EPA in support of the standard, reinforcing the notion that we’d rather have healthy moms and babies than antiquated power plants raining contaminants down on our communities. We salute President Obama and EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson for standing fast against the antiquated interests of Big Coal and Big Oil in order to make this ruling a reality.

Unsurprising, however, has been the utility industry’s prolonged, expensive campaign of misinformation — millions of dollars and countless lobbying hours spent trying to convince legislators, and thus the American public, that a little mercury mutating a developing human nervous system was no big deal.

Some utility companies, along with members of Congress swimming in their campaign contributions, made heel-dragging on this issue an art. Their lobbyists are understandably upset, but we’re happy to treat them to a seafood dinner if that assuages their grief.

The barrage of tiresome talking points from Republican and industry opposition about how this epitomizes big government’s job-killing intrusion on free enterprise is already underway, but let’s be as clear as the forthcoming air:

• This rule will save lives. According to EPA, the rule will prevent up to 11,000 premature deaths, 4,700 heart attacks, and 130,000 asthma attacks each year, as well as almost 3,000 cases of chronic bronchitis yearly. Emergency room visits will drop by almost 6,000!

• This rule will protect the environment. In 2008, nearly half of all U.S. river-miles and lake-acres were under water contamination advisories. The vast majority of this contamination was due to mercury, including 100% of the Great Lakes. Over time, just one gram of mercury per year will contaminate a 20-acre lake.

• This rule will create jobs and boost productivity. EPA estimates that this rule will lead to 46,000 short-term construction jobs and 8,000 long-term utility jobs. Currently only 17 states have established mercury emissions limits on coal plants. That’s far from adequate, especially since the states with the largest volume of mercury emissions do not have emissions limits. In addition, we’ll avoid 540,000 sick days each year, enhancing productivity while lowering health care costs.

The downside for fossil fuel facilities is negligible at best. A mere eight percent of our nation’s coal-generation capability will be taken offline in the years ahead — decrepit, 30-to-50-year-old power plants that even utility companies agree need to be modernized or shut down outright as they have become too costly to upgrade or maintain, let alone operate.

So, let’s take a well-deserved deep breath and celebrate the fact that regard for a nation’s health and well-being has won out over the interests of a few backward-thinking bribe recipients who don’t lose sleep over causing cancer and birth defects.

Today is a great day for the future of the IT sector.  

Over the past few years, we’ve campaigned hard against Facebook to get them to commit to clean energy – specifically, we wanted them to change their siting policy-the decisions that they make about how to power their massive football-stadium-sized data centers.

When you go onto Facebook or Twitter or iTunes, your stuff -photos and music, status updates and party invitations- has to be stored somewhere.  It’s not something we all spend a lot of time thinking about, but that’s how we use computers, and how we’re going to use them in the future. It’s called “the cloud”. It’s growing fast-right now if the cloud were a country, it would be the fifth largest country in the world in terms of global warming emissions.  

All that information is stored in massive data centers, which look like huge warehouses straight out of the Matrix.  And more often than not, those data centers are powered by coal.

Like anyone else, I love Facebook.  It’s changed the way we can talk to our supporters on the web-I can log in and see how people are engaging with our campaigns, what excites them and what motivates them, and what changes they want to see in the world.  

We’ve won historic victories by relying on the power of Facebook-victories against major brands that happened virtually overnight.  On our Facebook campaign, we set the Guinness Record for number of Facebook comments on a page in 24 hours.  When I, or any of our activists, use Facebook, we want to know that we’re not contributing to the very problems that we’re fighting.

What we’re asking of corporations like Facebook is actually pretty incredible-we want them to be ambitious.  We don’t just want them to “do no evil,” (as Google says) -we want them to do good.  In fact, with the failure of the recent negotiations in Durban and America’s inability to pass climate legislation, we’re asking companies like Facebook to look far into the future, think about what’s good for their business and what’s good for the planet.  

We’re asking them to be champions, and they’re stepping up and doing it.

Facebook has raised the bar for everyone, and we’re now looking for companies like Apple, Twitter and Microsoft to make their next move.  What’s even more incredible is now that Facebook is demanding clean energy, utilities, like Duke Energy, are going to have to supply it.  
This is the future of campaigning – big business isn’t going anywhere, so we want them on our side. We think corporations can be the good guys, if people demand it.  We’ve asked them to step up and they’ve done it.  

Since the beginning of our seafood supermarket campaign, along with other organizations, we’ve gotten 15 major supermarket chains around the country to improve their sustainable seafood policies. Just this year we’ve gotten two of the largest toy companies, Hasbro and Mattel, to stop sourcing their paper from Asia Pulp and Paper, a major contributor to Indonesian deforestation. And just this week, GE and Ben & Jerry’s were successful in pressuring the Environmental Protection Agency to make green refrigerants legal in the United States, a step that will make a huge difference for the climate.

There’s so much more to come in 2012-we’re working to get the major tuna brands to use better fishing methods. We’ve got even more planned for the IT sector because we want to be able to use our gadgets, tweet and live our 21st century lives knowing that the cloud is cleaner.

And, as we say at Greenpeace all the time-no permanent allies, no permanent enemies. We’re committed to standing up for the truth and pushing corporations to be their absolute best-not just dollar-driven profiteers, but true members of our global community. Sometimes that means flying an airship over their headquarters (yup, we did that with Facebook too!) and sometimes it means standing together to ask for better solutions together. So here’s to 21st century campaigning and unlikely allies.  And thank you Facebook for helping us make history!

Read the agreement between Greenpeace and Facebook here.

Here’s a quick video ad that I think gets right to point:

Late last week the President blocked reforms to the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to improve pollution measures to protect Americans against the harmful effects of toxic ozone smog. The President chose to side with big corporate polluters instead of with the 12,000 Americans that, according to the EPA, would have been saved by these proposed updates to pollution controls. Obama also chose to side with the big polluting industries instead of with the estimated 24 million men, women, and children suffering from asthma in this country who are forced to suffer even more because of heightened smog levels.

The decision outraged his biggest backers in the Democratic Party. Barbara Boxer, Chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said that environmentalists should sue the Obama administration over the decision: “I hope they’ll be sued in court and I hope the court can stand by the Clean Air Act.”

On Friday, when the Obama announcement was made, top Democrat Congressman Ed Markey who sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee said, “I am disappointed that the President chose to further delay important clean air protections that would have helped to prevent respiratory and cardiac disease in thousands of Americans.”

Obama needs to be reminded that come November, he will be counting on people who care about the environment and the health of their families and loved ones, not just for votes, but for volunteer hours and everything else that he needs from them to win his campaign.

This decision is all about politics, and that’s just sickening. There is still hope. The President just needs to do his job and start protecting us from ozone pollution — much of which comes from coal-fired power plants — and stop doing the dirty work of the big corporate polluters.

For many Americans, Obama’s promise to begin to move the United States away from its growing dependence on fossil fuels and address global warming was foremost among his promise of change. For many more, it was Obama’s assurance that his Presidency would change a political system dominated by lobbyists and their narrow interests, instead of the public interest. President Obama’s commitment on both of these promises – to the volunteers who knocked on doors, the young voters who elected him, and the country he leads – will be tested by his decision on the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

If approved, the pipeline construction would allow greater exploitation of the environmentally destructive tar sands, ripping up some of the world’s last, most intact rainforests and wildlife habitat that has taken 10,000 years to evolve. The pipeline also threatens communities along its route with toxic oil spills. And by opening a new source of highly polluting tar sands, it could cause even more global warming, as James Hansen and 19 other prominent climate scientists have warned. This is why Keystone XL is opposed by Nebraskan ranchers, communities near the dangerous refineries in Texas, the nation’s largest environmental organizations, and so many more.

The State Department on Friday showed the extraordinary influence that the fossil fuel industry still has in Washington, when it absurdly claimed that the environmental impacts of the pipeline would be ‘minimal.’ While these State Department reviews are “welcomed” by the American Petroleum Institute, the Environmental Protection Agency objected to earlier drafts as insufficient. For a glimpse of how the State Department’s Keystone XL reviews could release such an unrealistic conclusion, look no further than Transcanada’s lead lobbyist for the pipeline, a former top campaign aide for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This appears to be the kind of cronyism with the oil industry that Obama promised to end, but with several major oil companies involved in the project, it really is just a glimpse of the enormous lobbying pressure the oil industry has brought to bear.

Any hopes these oil lobbyists had for the closed door deal they are used to is now long gone. This week, we will stand with hundreds of Americans and our allies who take the world that we leave for our children seriously enough to risk arrest in hopes that President Obama will take the security of our country and the world we leave our children seriously enough to cancel the tar sands pipeline and fast track his work to get America off of oil, period.

We’ll see you at the White House.

Phil Radford, Executive Director, Greenpeace USA
Daryl Hannah, Actress/Activist

In 2010 Koch Industries and the billionaire brothers who run it were first exposed as a major funder of front groups spreading denial of global warming in a Greenpeace report, which sparked an expose in the New Yorker. Since then, the brothers have been further exposed as a key backer of efforts to roll back environmental, labor, and health protections at the state and federal levels. Through enormous campaign contributions, an army of lobbyists, and funding of think tanks and front groups, David and Charles Koch push their agenda of a world in which their company can operate without regard for the risks they pose to communities, workers, or our environment.

Today, in a new exposé, Greenpeace has shown how Koch Industries has quietly played a key role in blocking yet another effort to protect workers and vulnerable communities – comprehensive chemical security legislation. The Report is called “Toxic Koch: Keeping Americans at risk of a Poison Gas Disaster.”

Since before the September 11, 2001 attacks, security experts have warned of the catastrophic risk that nearly every major American city faces from the bulk storage of poison gasses at dangerous chemical facilities such as oil refineries, chemical manufacturing facilities, and water treatment plants. Nevertheless, ten years later, thousands of facilities still put more than 100 million Americans at risk of a chemical disaster. According to the company’s own reports to the EPA, Koch Industries and its subsidiaries Invista, Flint Hills, and Georgia Pacific operate 57 dangerous chemical facilities in the United States that together put 4.4 million people at risk.

A coalition of more than 100 labor, environmental, and health organizations has advocated for comprehensive chemical security legislation that would help remove the threat of a poison gas disaster by requiring the highest risk facilities to use safer processes where feasible. Koch Industries and other oil and chemical companies have lobbied against legislation that would prevent chemical disasters, despite repeated requests from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for disaster prevention. Instead Koch favors an extension of the current, weak Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) that exempt most facilities and actually prohibit the authority of DHS to require safer processes. As in other policy areas, Koch’s huge efforts have gone largely unnoticed.

Koch campaign contributions reveal the company’s influence over the chemical security debate in Washington DC. All of the key Senators and Representatives who have taken a lead role during the last year in pushing legislation that supports Koch’s chemical security agenda have received Koch campaign contributions. The House members who introduced two bills that would extend CFATS without improvements and block the DHS from requiring safer processes for seven years have all taken KochPAC contributions over the last three election cycles, including Representatives Tim Murphy (R-PA), Gene Green (D-TX), Peter King (R-NY) and Dan Lungren (R-CA). And all of the cosponsors of similar legislation in the Senate – Senators Susan Collins (R-ME), Rob Portman (R-OH), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Mark Pryor (R-AR), and before his retirement, George Voinovich (R-OH) – received KochPAC contributions during their most recent elections.

As Congress debates how to protect Americans from dangerous chemical facilities, Koch is once again opposing legislation that would make America safer, despite the enormous risk its facilities pose to communities, workers, and our environment.

Germany is sending a very important signal to the world: They are convinced and committed that renewable energies and efficiency technologies that will not only contribute to a more sustainable life on earth but also support a more sustainable economic future.

After some of the largest demonstrations on green energy in Germany’s history, and a the planet bearing witness to one of the worst nuclear disasters in history, the law on the nuclear phase out passed the German Parliament with an enormous majority of 513 votes in favor, 79 votes against and 8 abstentions, combined with related laws for the switch to renewables like:

• Acceleration of investments in new grids

• Revised energy efficiency Promotion of on-shore wind energy

• Revised feed-in-tariffs for renewable

The nuclear phase out comprises the following steps:

• 8 nuclear reactors, under a March 2011 moratorium, will not be reactivated and will be phased out.

• These are eight of the oldest reactors with the highest security risks. The other 9 nuclear reactors will be phased out by 2022.

Germany, Switzerland and Italy are all abandoning nuclear in favor of clean and safe renewable energy that don’t threaten our homes and communities with meltdowns and radioactive fallout. People from Vermont to California are coming together to demand the same change here at home, and it’s Obama and Congress that have the power to answer their call by shutting down nuclear here at home and investing in renewables like wind and solar.

For instance, unlike renewables, “natural” gas is an energy source we will exhaust — possibly sooner than previously thought. Let’s not forget that the recent rise of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) couldn’t have happened if we hadn’t nearly exhausted easily extracted gas supplies already. And now it turns out that this fracking boon may be partly a matter of industry hype.

The extraction of natural gas — especially via fracking — is incredibly harmful to the environment and people’s health. If you aren’t alarmed by increasing instances of flammable tapwater from methane leaks caused by drillers messing with geology, then maybe diesel and cancerous chemicals in the water will sound a few bells.

Unfortunately, Congress exempted the “natural” gas industry from practically every type of pollution law, and there are no plans to remove this special treatment. Now, the EPA and DOE want to study the damages of fracking, a little after the fact. But one thing they aren’t studying is whether fracked gas can legitimately be called a transition fuel from coal to renewables. Burning gas creates half the CO2 of coal combustion, but a recent study shows that fracked gas may release so much of a worse global warming pollutant (methane) into the air that it cancels out any benefit to the climate.

One thing is certain about the “natural” gas industry. They need no support from politicians.