When we launched Polluterharmony, we wanted to be sure that the new online dating service for polluters, lobbyists, and politicians reached those who need it most; all those lonely legislators looking for their very own match.  What better way to reach them than Politico.com?

As it turned out, Polluterharmony has been a hit, quickly becoming the #1 matchmaking site for polluters, industry lobbyists, and politicians! It's great that more public officials have had a chance to learn about this exciting new service, but we want to be sure that it's not just other Senators that know about Senator Murkowski's close relationship with polluter lobbyists.  Her constituents deserve to know too!  So to help get the word out, this week we launched ads on NBC affiliates in Alaska.

Polluterharmony, the new online dating service we launched this week dedicated to matching polluter lobbyists with politicians is making waves. Check out Dylan Ratigan's kudos on MSNBC;

And the video is also getting attention on Capitol Hill, as Anne Mulkerne reports in her NYTimes/Greenwire article:

Sen. Murkowski, Greenpeace Exchange Barbs Over EPA Regulations

Greenpeace and Sen. Lisa Murkowski's office are in a battle of words over her effort to block U.S. EPA from regulating greenhouse gases.

An aide to the Alaska Republican condemned Greenpeace yesterday after PolluterWatch, a project of the environmental group, launched a Web site called PolluterHarmony.com, a take-off on the matchmaking site eHarmony.com.

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"If she objects to the scrutiny her conduct has received, she should consider putting her constituents ahead of Washington lobbyists," Davies said. "Until then, we will continue to hold her accountable for her close ties to influence peddlers like Jeffrey Holmstead."

News reports earlier this year revealed that Holmstead, an industry lawyer who served in the George W. Bush administration, advised Murkowski's office on a failed amendment last year to block EPA regulations. Environmentalists have pointed to Holmstead's involvement as a signal that Murkowski is working on behalf of industry interests, but the Alaska senator has said her staff consulted a variety of outside experts, including environmentalists and Republican and Democratic lawmakers, when drafting that amendment.

It's great that more public officials and lobbyists for coal and oil companies might now get a chance to learn about Polluterharmony, so they too might find a match made in Washington. Happy Valentines Weekend!

Kert Davies, Greenpeace Research Director and the Director of our Polluterwatch project, sent a letter today calling on Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) to come clean about his post Senate plans.  Senator Dorgan announced earlier this month that he would be retiring from the Senate at the end of the year, and that afterward he would like to "work on energy policy in the private sector."

As Davies writes in the letter;

As a longtime member of Congress I am sure you are aware that, regardless of your actual intentions, this language is often code for legislators who have begun trolling for an influence peddling job after they leave Congress. And, the path from public servant to influence peddler is a sadly well-worn one: Rep. Bob Livingston, Senator John Breaux, Rep. Billy Tauzin, and Senator Trent Lott.

I recall seeing you as a speaker at the oil industry’s controversial, pay-to-play forum on December 1^st, just five weeks before you announced your retirement. As you will recall, this highly questionable exercise was one in which Newsweek was caught renting out its name, credibility and top pundit to big oil’s influence peddler, Jack Gerard. We were able to document Mr. Gerard’s unwillingness to answer basic questions about the purchase price of Newsweek’s credibility, and you can see the results at youtube.com/polluterwatch.

Indeed, Senator Dorgan was the lone senator appearing beside American Petroleum Institute CEO Jack Gerard at the API sponsored Newsweek "Energy Forum," as shown in the photo below from that event.  Greenpeace called on the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate the Big Oil sponsored panel held inside the US capitol.

Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) appears with American Petroleum Institute CEO Jack Gerard at the API sponsored Newsweek "Energy Forum"

Greenpeace is calling on Senator Dorgan to:

• List the dirty energy lobbyists and their respective clients with whom you have had contact about your next job.
• Release all details of phone calls, emails or meetings you have had with prospective employers from energy interests who have lobbied you or your office. Of particular interest are Washington-area lobbying and public relations firms.
• Pledge that you will wait until after an energy bill is passed this year to engage in any further discussions about future employment with interests that lobby you.

You can read the full text of the letter to Senator Dorgan here.

Though shell has been punished twice in recent years for greenwashing in the British media (here and here), the company seems to have little concern about greenwashing in American media. Check out the ad it has been running frequently in all the most influential papers and magazines, including the Economist and Washington Post on a regular basis.

You would think that Shell would learn from mistakes in the past. Last year, Shell was told to stop using the ad to the right in the UK. The text says:

 

“... we need to find new ways of managing carbon emissions to limit climate change. Continued investment in technology is one of the key ways we are able to address this challenge, and continue to secure a profitable and sustainable future.

“The challenge of the 21st century is to meet the growing need for energy in ways that are not only profitable but sustainable... In Canada we're harnessing our global network of technical and financial expertise to unlock the potential of the vast Canadian oil sands deposit. In the USA we're helping to build what will be the nation's largest refinery.”

The UK Advertising Standards Authority disapproved of the ad:

“We noted that the large scale of the oil sands developments had considerable social and environmental impacts, including those on water conservation, greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), land disturbance and waste management.

"Because we had not seen data that showed how Shell was effectively managing carbon emissions from its oil sands projects in order to limit climate change, we concluded that on this point the ad was misleading.”

The ASA concluded that the ad must not appear again in its current form.

But despite this lesson, Shell apparently has no qualms about making similar misleading claims in the US, for example the “less CO2” claim depicted above.

Shell also has no problem contributing funding to a large-scale anti-climate legislation campaign being run by the American Petroleum Institute.  That campaign was not only caught astroturfing, but also uses scare tactics and misleading, biased information to make the public and policy makers believe that climate legislation would kill jobs or drastically rise gas prices. For example, the API ad below is featured in many of the same media outlets as Shell greenwash ads. 

 

As you might have noticed, Newsweek ran a special issue this week with the cover story, "The Greenest Big Companies in America." The feature ranks the S&P 500 according to each company's environmental impact, policies and reputation. Dirt Diggers Digest points out that the list "has more validity than the usual exercises of this sort, which tend to take much of corporate greenwash at face value." But also notes "the magazine could have easily turned the list upside down and headlined its feature 'The Biggest Environmental Culprits of Corporate America'."

The web version of the Newsweek issue has a nice sidebar dedicated specifically to greenwash, which includes these snipits: 

"Many corporations ... don't do much of anything to change the way they do business, but make a big show of their dedication to Mother Earth. It's usually easy to spot these companies: They make their customers do the work, and then take the credit. In the name of saving the planet, my cable TV operator keeps asking for permission to stop sending paper statements in the mail each month. Instead, I'm supposed to check my statement online. The real reason, of course, is that doing so would save them paper, printing and postage. This is a perfectly legitimate reason for them to want me to switch. But when they pretend that it's all about the environment, it just makes me hate my cable company even more than I already do. Despite this, I would still consider switching to online statements if they would agree to use the money they save to hire cable TV repairmen who know how to repair cable TV."

"Sometimes a good ad campaign does a better job of enhancing a company's green reputation than going through the expense and hassle of adopting actual environmentally sound practices. Billboards in Washington implore me to join the cause. "I will unplug stuff more," reads one. Another says, "I will at least consider buying a hybrid." These ads are the work of Chevron, the giant oil company, whose "Will You Join Us?" ads try to convince people that saving the planet is at the top of their list. You might think that if Chevron was really worried about problems like global warming, they would spend some of those p.r. dollars lobbying Congress to adopt stricter gas mileage requirements for automobiles. They do not do this. Instead, I'm apparently supposed to praise them as environmental heroes because they tell me to unplug my toaster and think about getting a Prius. Yet ad campaigns like these work. Chevron lands at No. 371 out of 500 companies on Newsweek's green rankings."

 

 Read the full article and sidebar.

Sorry, folks, the Supreme Court must have been wrong about CO2 being an air pollutant.  I stumbled upon the Truth in the form of this half-page ad in Monday’s Washington Post:

Not only is there no scientific evidence that CO2 is a pollutant, higher CO2 concentrations actually help ecosystems support more plant and animal life… Higher levels of CO2 result in more plant growth as well as less water being required for plants to grow faster and larger.  In fact, we all exhale CO2 and enjoy it in our carbonated beverages.

This blows my mind.  I don’t even know how to categorize this latest piece of big-oil-funded misdirection. Junk science? Botany for third graders? Blatant untruthiness? 

CO2isgreen, Inc., the non-profit “with questionable parentage” that funded the ad, has already been called out twice in the blogosphere - once by Grist.org and again by Scienceblogs.com.  Miles Grant correctly points out H. Leighton Steward’s position as an honorary director at the American Petroleum Institute, recently in the news for staging astroturf campaigns, as well as his connection to numerous big oil companies:

He’s also a director at EOG Resources, an oil and gas company, a position in which he earned a whopping $617,151 last year. Steward is formerly head of Burlington Resources, now a part of ConocoPhillips) and former Chairman of the U.S. Oil and Gas Association and the Natural Gas Supply Association. Not a word about any of that in his bio on the site.

The one connection that Grant missed is that Steward is currently Chairman of the Board of The Institute for the Study of Earth and Man at SMU, which has received $76,500 since 1998 from everybody’s favorite greenhouse gangster, ExxonMobil.

James Hrynyshyn paints a softer picture of Steward after talking to him on the phone, describing him as “earnest,” and insisting:

…he's not a dupe of Big Oil trying to pull the wool over our eyes. At least, not consciously… He simply doesn’t doesn't accept the mountains of evidence that carbon dioxide is a significant greenhouse gas, and that small changes in its atmospheric concentration can have a big impact on climate.

Forgive my cynicism, but if it looks like big oil, works for big oil and gets paid by big oil, then it must be an earnest Joe with a penchant for taking out half-page ads in major news publications.

If we are going to base our science on experiments carried out by 8-year-olds, let us discuss these carbonated beverages that we so much enjoy.  It has long been known that carbonated beverages rot your teeth, due primarily to the carbonic acid, which forms when CO2 is dissolved in water. More CO2 in the air means more CO2 in the water.  The resulting acidification is rotting our oceans:

Almost half of all the carbon dioxide emitted since industrialization has been absorbed by the ocean. [Acidification] deprives animals like hard corals and certain mollusks and plankton of the raw material for their calcium carbonate shells and skeletons. This may ultimately cause the world’s oceans to become corrosive to such animals, and coral reefs to dissolve.

The science of our carbon burden is clear.  What is unclear is whether world leaders gathered in New York for a UN summit on climate change can be convinced to act in the interest of the many and the future rather than the few and the now.

This week, Planet Green's Focus Earth program airs an episode on greenwash. In the episode Bob Woodruff interviews environmental and corporate watchdog expert Kenny Bruno, author of Greenwash and Corporate Environmentalism, and myself from Greenpeace, to answer the question: are corporate green efforts for show only, or can they actually make amends for decades of un-sustainable, even downright harmful, business choices? Woodfuff also gets up close with leaders from Royal Dutch Shell, Ford Motor Company and Duke Energy to examine their environmental statements and actions. 

Watch clips from the show and find airtimes here.

A new Guardian arcticle today confirms what we wrote back in may: Exxon is still secretly funding global warming junk scientists.

According to the Guardian report:

Records show ExxonMobil gave hundreds of thousands of pounds to lobby groups that have published 'misleading and inaccurate information' about climate change. These include the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) in Dallas, Texas, which received $75,000 (£45,500), and the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, which received $50,000.

According to Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, at the London School of Economics, both the NCPA and the Heritage Foundation have published "misleading and inaccurate information about climate change."

On its website, the NCPA says: "NCPA scholars believe that while the causes and consequences of the earth's current warming trend is [sic] still unknown, the cost of actions to substantially reduce CO2 emissions would be quite high and result in economic decline, accelerated environmental destruction, and do little or nothing to prevent global warming regardless of its cause."

The Heritage Foundation published a "web memo" in December that said: "Growing scientific evidence casts doubt on whether global warming constitutes a threat, including the fact that 2008 is about to go into the books as a cooler year than 2007". Scientists, including those at the UK Met Office say that the apparent cooling is down to natural changes and does not alter the long-term warming trend.

Ward said, "ExxonMobil has been briefing journalists for three years that they were going to stop funding these groups. The reality is that they are still doing it. If the world's largest oil company wants to fund climate change denial then it should be upfront about it, and not tell people it has stopped."

We've been skeptical of BP's green marketing claims all along, but reports out of London today confirm that BP's new motto should be "Back to Petroleum".

The Guardian reports:

 

BP  has shut down its alternative energy headquarters in London, accepted the resignation of its clean energy boss and imposed budget cuts...

....BP Alternative Energy was given its own headquarters in County Hall opposite the Houses of Parliament two years ago and its managing director, Vivienne Cox, oversaw a small division of 80 staff concentrating on wind and solar power. But [Cox] – BP's most senior female executive, who previously ran renewables as part of a larger gas and power division now dismantled by Hayward – is standing down tomorrow.

This comes alongside huge cuts in the alternative energy budget – from $1.4bn (£850m) last year to between $500m and $1bn this year, although spending is still roughly in line with original plans to invest $8bn by 2015.

Earlier this year the company shut down solar operations in the US and Spain.

Meanwhile, BP is still moving into more destructive oil operations, such as Canada's tar sands.

 

 

Yesterday, Climate Progress called out the New York Times for running a front page ExxonMobil advertisement.

As Climate Progress points out:

"Needless to say — or, rather, in this case, needful to say — while today’s car has lower emissions of urban air pollutants thanks to government regulation, today’s car has, if anything, higher emissions of greenhouse gases, which threaten the health and well-being of the next 50 generations.  And needful to say, ExxonMobil has done more than just about any other company to undermine efforts to achieve the greenhouse gas regulations that could lower those emissions."

"ExxonSecrets details the millions of dollars that the company has shoveled to fund the disinformation campaigns of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, all of which continue to advance unfactual anti-scientific attacks as I have detailed recently (see posts on Heritage and CEI and AEI). Chris Mooney wrote an excellent piece on ExxonMobil’s two-decade anti-scientific campaign. A 2007 Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) report looked at ExxonMobil’s tobacco industry-like tactics in pushing global warming denial (see “Today We Have a Planet That’s Smoking!”). So it is especially egregious that the New York Times would take money to publish this disinformation on their front page."

Please email the NYT at nytnews@nytimes.com about this egregious ad and/or email its public editor at ublic@nytimes.com">public@nytimes.com to explain you are “concerned about the paper’s journalistic integrity.”