ConocoPhillips is now actively campaigning against the House climate and energy bill -- even though it's a member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, an influential enviro-business coalition that played a key role in shaping the legislation.

The company changed its tune shortly after the House passed the bill. On the ConocoPhillips website, visitors are urged to "Act now for energy. Make your voice heard!" An action page tells people to contact their senators and express opposition to the bill, arguing, "Federal climate change legislation is needed; however, Waxman-Markey fell short."

The shift is notable since ConocoPhillips is a marquee member of USCAP, which brought together green groups like the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council and major companies like Duke Energy, BP, and General Electric around a climate-bill blueprint. Red Cavaney, senior vice president for government and public affairs for ConocoPhillips, even testified before the Energy and Commerce Committee in support of climate action in April.

But ConocoPhillips is also a member of the American Petroleum Institute, which has been orchestrating astroturfing against the climate bill. While Shell, another company that belongs to both USCAP and API, has announced that it will not support the astroturf efforts, ConocoPhillips has remained silent on the matter.

On its action page, ConocoPhillips repeats familiar criticisms of climate legislation:

ConocoPhillips claims that the bill does not do enough to protect domestic oil refiners, despite the fact that it gives them 2 percent of pollution-permit value under a cap-and-trade system. And, predictably, the company argues that the bill should do more to keep the price of oil low for consumers. It also wants the bill to do more to encourage the development of natural gas in the United States, "which is nature's cleanest fossil fuel." ConocoPhillips just happens to be one of the country's largest producers of natural gas.

"Don't attempt to pick winners or losers among energy technologies," the company argues. "Legislative proposals have a tendency to pick 'winning' energy technologies too early, before they are fully proven at scale. We should allow technological innovation and the market an opportunity to perfect and select the best energy sources."

Looks like membership in USCAP doesn't mean much anymore.

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News broke on Friday that the American Petroleum Institute is urging member companies to recruit their employees, retirees, vendors, and contractors to attend "Energy Citizen" events across the country over the August congressional recess. Today, we have some updates to the story:

It's not just energy interests backing the astroturf efforts; major conservative and anti-tax groups are jumping in. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers are both part of the coalition, and API tells TPMMuckraker that its campaign is funded by a variety of corporate and conservative groups -- including 60 Plus, FreedomWorks, the American Conservative Union, National Taxpayers Union, and Americans for Tax Reform.

The groups' astroturf campaign focuses on 21 states that have "a significant industry presence" or "assets on the ground." American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard wrote in a memo [PDF] that the intent is to put a "human face on the impacts of unsound energy policy" and urge senators to "avoid the mistakes embodied in the House climate bill" that was passed in June.

The memo was supposed to be kept on the down low; Gerard urged recipients to "Please treat this information as sensitive ... we don't want critics to know our game plan." But now that the memo has leaked, API spokesperson Bill Bush wants to make it seem like no big deal, telling TPMMuckraker, "I don't think anyone's hiding the ball about this .... I don't think anyone's trying to suggest that this doesn't have anything to do with the oil and gas industry."

No one's surprised to hear that oil giants are trying to gin up the appearance of "grassroots" opposition. API is not the first industry group caught astroturfing this summer. But the leaked document should be of concern to some big energy companies that are members of both API and the United States Climate Action Partnership, the industry-enviro partnership that played a significant role in shaping the House climate and energy bill. BP, ConocoPhillips, General Electric, and Shell are members of both organizations.

The Washington Post reports that spokespeople for BP and Shell said their companies don't plan to participate in the "Energy Citizen" rallies. And TPM got this statement from Shell on its involvement with API:

Greenpeace issued a letter to Gerard, asking API to reveal which of its member groups are funding the rallies. Thus far, API has not responded.

The memo lists "tentative venues" for "Energy Citizens" rallies:

Houston, Texas
Perry, Ga.
Detroit, Mich.
Roswell, N.M.
Greensboro, N.C.
Farmington, N.M.
Ohio (venue being finalized)
Greeley, Colo.
Nashville, Tenn.
Indiana (venue being finalized)
Bismarck, N.D.
Tampa, Fla.
Sioux Falls, S.D.
Greenville, S.C.
Anchorage, Alaska
Joliet, Ill.
Charleston, W.Va.
Fairfax, Va.
Philadelphia, Pa.
Lincoln, Neb.
Missouri TBD
Arkansas TBD

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How much smaller can the climate denial tent get? We’re about to find out.

With companies as diverse as Nike, Johnson & Johnson and Ford Motor Company having joined the call for comprehensive clean energy & climate legislation, the Republican Party has come up with its counter-strategy: “To fight bill, GOP turns on business,” declares the headline in today’s Politico, citing a Double-Secret Probation Leaked Memo from Republican staffers for the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. (The lesson: If you want people to read your memo, pretend it’s secret, then “leak” it to anyone who’ll take it.)

Earlier this week, ClimateWire reported, “The GOP also may try to eliminate tax benefits for companies that belong to the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, including Alcoa, BP, Duke Energy Corp., Rio Tinto and Shell Oil Co., and tinker with the nonprofit tax status for the Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, Nature Conservancy, World Resources Institute and Pew Center on Global Climate Change.” That’ll show ‘em!

Who’s left in the denial tent these days? You can’t just say “Big Oil” – ConocoPhillips and Shell are part of US CAP. You can’t just say “Big Coal” – Duke Energy recently dropped out of the National Association of Manufacturers over Duke’s support for climate legislation. How about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, purportedly the voice of small business? Last, week, 10,000 small business leaders asked the U.S. chamber to shut up and get out of the way on clean energy and climate action.

Even as the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 moves through the House Energy & Commerce Committee, Republican leadership still has no viable alternative to offer. All Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) could do last week was dust off the Cheney energy plan, little more than a big polluter bailout bill.

Since denial has failed, Republican leadership is moving to anger, lashing out at businesses who’ve been allies for generations. And without the claim that they’re protecting business by blocking clean energy legislation, what’s left for the Grand Old Party’s leaders to claim? That they’re protecting polluters? Or that, science and jobs be damned, we’re the captains of this here denial ship and we’re going down with it?

The GOP Tent is starting to look more like a bunker. Will any of the rank-and-file question that mentality? Looks like we're about to find out.

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As an upstart state rep from Malden, Mass, Ed Markey had the temerity to support rules reform, which got him kicked him out of his office by Speaker Tom McGee. Markey set up desk, chair and phone in the statehouse hallway and burnished an image of integrity which vaulted him to the top of a crowded Congressional primary field – running under the slogan, “They can tell Ed Markey where to sit, but no one tells him where to stand” – to capture the Congressional seat he still holds.

When he hit DC in 1976, his patron, House Speaker Tip O’Neil, told him something to the effect of “sit down, you’ll get your chance.” Well, now is the chance for the brash truth-teller whose character still comes through on occasion, as in his rousing speech at Powershift 2009. But to paraphrase Cromwell, Markey seems to have sat too long.

The bellwether for measuring climate policy is whether it guarantees a near-immediate halt to coal emissions (without further ramp-up of oil) through effective domestic measures and a global strategy under US leadership.

This can be done by three means:

The Markey/Waxman American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 discussion draft (ACESA) promises to do all three, but does nothing of the sort. In fact, Ed Markey has presented us with a clever roadmap for maintenance of coal.

To check this assessment I went for a second opinion to the most reliable source for sharp political analysis on US climate policy, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCE), which observed ...

It is an iron-bound rule of Congressional action that no regulatory measure shall move unless there is something scarier out there. To the coal industry, that “something scarier” is apparently the threatened US EPA regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.

Two years ago, the Supreme Court tactfully ruled in a suit brought by NRDC that the EPA had failed to provide an adequate rationale for declining to regulate greenhouse gases, but didn’t insist that they do anything in particular about it, so the Bush administration simply ignored the ruling.

Obama EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, responding to a Sierra Club petition, recently issued a “declaration of intent to regulate” greenhouse gases. The move is both a genuine effort by EPA staffers to address the unfolding crisis and a calculated move by the Obama administration, as New York Times analysts Kate Galbraith and Felicity Barringer put it, to “pressure Congress to pass federal legislation that could supplant the agency’s plan or guide how it was carried out.”

The decision provoked apoplectic responses from industry. US Chamber of Commerce front man on climate, Bill Kovacs railed that regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act “will require a huge cascade of permits and halt a wide array of projects, from building coal plants to highway construction.”

That sounds pretty good to me, but it has the tinny quality of “protest too much.” In the ordinary course of things, it is worries over aggressive and varied state action that drives an industry to seek protection under federal regulation, not the threat of federal regulation under existing law. Anyone with experience implementing federal environmental law knows that even moderately determined and resourceful interests have a variety of creative and effective means to bollix up environmental regulation. The coal industry must be accounted a master at the game and should have no reason to fear EPA regulation more draconian than Congress is likely to mete out, so why not stick with the so far successful tobacco industry strategy and stiff arm every effort to regulate or legislate?

Granted, cap and trade opens new loopholes and room for creative shenanigans, as EPA enforcement officers Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel note:

Even so, the inherent risks of allowing any legislation to move in Congress are high, so by what calculus does the coal industry conclude that Markey/Waxman is a good, or at least interesting bet? I count five factors in a quick read.

I’m sure there are perfectly satisfactory rationales on each point; the sort of policy minutia which enables US environmentalists to look at every forest as a collection of trees, but there can be no mistaking the overall thrust. As the ACCE cheerfully put it, Markey/Waxman establishes “the key role that coal plays in meeting growing U.S. electricity needs,” and that is more than enough basis to declare the thing a disaster.

Joe Romm gives the thing a B+, casually brushing aside the sections clearly designed for coal maintenance, commenting that "if the bill is written well, rather then seeing new coal plants, we will see a drop in coal consumption as coal is backed out by renewables." I respectfully suggest that this is an expression of hope, not a realistic assessment of Markey/Waxman. No measure is ever strengthened in Congressional deliberation. What we have now in hand is the high water mark of 20 years of moderate US environmentalist advocacy – the US Climate Action Partnership is credited directly in the bill – and it has failed.

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• Scientists now say that even stabilizing at a global average temperature level of 2C above pre-industrial -- a commonly agreed upon goal that looks increasingly remote -- will give us only a 50/50 chance of avoiding catastrophe. Awesome!

• Let me officially become the last person on the internet to link to the excellent new report from the Center For Public Integrity on the profusion of climate lobbyists in D.C. Does this really come as a surprise to anyone? If only we could pass a tax instead of cap-and-trade -- all those lobbyists would go right back home!

• Elizabeth Kolbert notes that several members of USCAP are donating large sums of money to climate deniers in Congress that are battling against climate action. Why, that almost seems like ... hypocrisy! 

• USA Today notices that companies are "rethinking" new coal plants. Even though coal is so cheap and clean! Weird! Also, have you seen Earth2Tech's Coal Deathwatch Map? It's awesome:

View Larger Map

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