January 4, 2012 
The American Petroleum Institute (API) is launching yet another astroturf organization and campaign that misinforms the public about taxes on the fossil fuel industry and seeks to create a false sense of threat to jobs and access to energy. It’s a casebook example of a vested interest trying to frame the discourse — but that’s not all it does. It’s blatantly misleading.
Purporting to be the website of a grassroots movement of tens of thousands of “energy citizens” who are up in arms about the plans of those nasty anti-freedom un-American types to tax oil and GAS AND DESTROY JOBS OMGWTF!!!11 it’s nothing more than an attempt to protect its tax breaks by creating a false sense of threat to fossil fuel industry jobs.
It’s so crass and blatantly misleading that I’m disgusted and disheartened to think that anyone in his or her right mind would believe it.
Pure bunk.
Mother Jones covers the story here:
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Have you heard about the massive public uprising to protect Big Oil’s tax breaks? No? Oh, probably because it doesn’t exist. But that doesn’t mean the American Petroleum Institute won’t try to convince you it does!
API has launched a “new” Energy Citizens campaign to convince you, the average American, to help the oil industry trade group protect the lavish tax loopholes they currently enjoy. With that whole oil disaster in the Gulf, it looks like Congress might cut off the gravy train for oil companies when it comes to billions of dollars in tax breaks and direct subsidies every year. Now API has launched a new ad campaign to protect the handouts, as well as a new “grassroots” campaign to protect them. One big problem: Their latest astroturf effort looks a whole lot like their last astroturf effort.
In an attempt to counter this bunk Greenpeace through Polluter Watch has launched its own bunk-countering campaign, Vote 4 Energy.
Seriously, I don’t know how these people in the API and Fossil Fuel Industry / Denialists can live with themselves. But, as I read recently in the online version of the newspaper The Independent, the heads of many big corporations are likely morally deficient Corporate Psychopaths who have no moral conscience.
You’d have to be to so blatantly misinform.
Here’s an excerpt from that article:
My companion, a senior UK investment banker and I, are discussing the most successful banking types we know and what makes them tick. I argue that they often conform to the characteristics displayed by social psychopaths. To my surprise, my friend agrees.
He then makes an astonishing confession: “At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles.”
Here was one of the biggest investment banks in the world seeking psychopaths as recruits.
You can watch the Polluter Watch video Vote 4 Energy here:
The Policy Lass 
Who’s the PR company trying to whip a volunteer echo chamber?
Where’s their talking points list?
I’d been thinking it’d be fun to check timestamps and repetitions during the spread of talking points — from some known start, by watIf they gin up a copypaste flurry or two it’d be easy to track as they spread.
So, they got any catchy phrases going?
For those unclear about astroturfing, here are few examples used by the fossil fuel industry denier groups.
They set up organizations like Policy Communications, The Western Business Roundtable, Partnership for America, and Americans for American Energy, to make it seem like there is this groundswell of grassroots organizations opposing the scientific theory of man made climate change and opposing the move to sustainable energy. These are actually all the same people from the fossil fuel industry and mining industry. They are all staffed by the same executives.
Another example of “wiping the oil’ off the money is how the inaptly named Friends of Science(FOS), had money funneled to what they called the Science Education Fund. The money came from the Alberta oil and gas industry through the Calgary Foundation, who funneled it through the University of Calgary and ultimately ending up at FOS.
FOS has funded Fred Singer, Sherwood Idso, Robert Balling and Pat Michaels.
Want funny? Check the petitions here:
https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petition-tool/how-why/introduction
Look at the coal industry fronts like “Citizens for Recycling First” — with a petition directed against the EPA, though not explicitly.
See what other astroturf you can find there.
Any Search of politicizing climate ‘debate’ is dominated by Talking Points misrepresenting alternative analysis as ‘denying’ climate change. There’s the lie about honest reporting.
http://opitslinkfest.blogspot.com/2012/01/17-january-reason-is-not-quorum-or.html