Connecting the Anti-Oil and Gas Dots: Social Network Diagram

Energy Killers Top Strategy: Demonize oil, gas, coal and nuclear power so people won’t use them.

Top Rationale: Force energy starvation on America by reducing energy supply and raising energy prices as a means of obtaining social, economic and political power for green elites under the banner of conservation.

Top Tactic: Make people stop using energy by making them feel guilty, convincing them that global warming is caused only by humans. Then blame anything bad that happens - heat, cold, wet, dry, storms, disease, famine, whatever - on global warming and therefore on humans. Thus no one can escape blame and everyone must seek forgiveness by making a show of complying with climate dogma, such as repeating apocalyptic beliefs, gladly suffering privation, rage against industry, paying green elites for carbon offsets, and persecuting or attacking non-believers. 

It was formulated by a number of foundations in the Environmental Grantmakers Association, particularly by the Brainerd Foundation, the private exempt corporation of Seattle software multimillionaire Paul Brainerd. Brainerd approved a series of coordinated grants designed to merge existing groups into more effective anti-industry fighters and to network independent groups with the newly merged groups.

Brainerd's first step was to connect anti-oil and gas groups from Canada and the United States, funding two small grants:

With these instructions from Brainerd, the Dogwood Initiative and the Oil and Gas Accountability Project (OGAP) held the workshop in Denver in September, 2004, titled, Corporate Energy Campaigning: Using financial pressure for conservation (Page 9 of a 12-page newsletter).

The corporate campaign was a tactic invented in 1974 by labor organizer Raymond F. Rogers, Jr. and well known among environmentalists by the 1980s.

OGAP and the Dogwood Initiative brought 40 activists to the Denver workshop from the Yukon,  Alberta, BC, Ontario, Alaska, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Maine, 28 shown in the photo below:

Brainerd had prepared activists to deal with corporate campaigns earlier in the year:

Brainerd simultaneously gave a "challenge grant" to the Washington, D.C.-based Mineral Policy Center (founded 1988), which had adapted the corporate campaign from a labor union tactic into an anti-mining tactic with its "No Dirty Gold" campaign. Brainerd directed the Mineral Policy Center to change its name to Earthworks and to merge with the Oil and Gas Accountability Project (see Brainerd's profile of the merger). The challenge grant stated:

The challenge grant did not state that the "markets campaign" was to transfer the "leverage" that had been used against the mining industry to be used against the oil and gas industry through the new partnership with OGAP.

The merger was completed in 2004 when two members of OGAP's board of directors, Gloria Flora (renegade U.S. Forest Service employee) and Wilma Subra (leader of Louisiana Environmental Action Network), joined the board of the new Earthworks. OGAP's last IRS Form 990 was filed in 2004, when Mineral Policy Center's Form 990 first used the name Earthworks.

One Earthworks board member, Vermont Law School Professor Karin P. Sheldon, had served on both Mineral Policy Center and OGAP boards since 2001. She remains Chairman of the Board of Earthworks.

Brainerd further reinforced the anti-oil and gas network by requiring Earthworks to partner with the Montana-based Center for Science in Public Participation (CSPP). Steven D'Esposito, executive director of Earthworks, has been chairman of the board of SCPP since 2001. SCPP is D'Esposito's "science-on-demand" campaigning tool, which he makes available to a circle of allies.

Oil and gas soon joined hardrock mining in CSPP's attack portfolio.

Finally, Brainerd laid the groundwork for expansion of the attack on oil and gas development with grants to three allied groups already at work on various approaches and tactics to destroy oil and gas production in America.

In September 2005, these green groups coalesced around provisions of the FY2006 Budget Reconciliation Bill that provided for producing more American energy from American soil. Staffers at Earthworks, the Wilderness Society, Trout Unlimited, and the National Wildlife Federation came together to kill the energy provisions.  Trout Unlimited emailed its roughly 100,000 members to spotlight the fight. A petition signed by 758 sportsmen's clubs affiliated with National Wildlife Federation, helped kill the American energy industry.

This story is told by Christina Larson, managing editor of The Washington Monthly, in The Emerging Environmental Majority, of May 2006. Read it in The Green Tracking Library backup file.

In late 2006, an anonymous person sent a warning memo to an oil and gas association, spelling out the details of a planned 6-year "No Dirty Oil and Gas" campaign to destroy the oil and gas industry in the Western United States, 2006-2012. The predictions for 2007 and 2008 have so far all proven correct. The "NoDOG MEMO" became a cause célèbre in mid 2007 when it was spread to many analysts and petroleum industry people. Read The NoDOG Memo here. The Oil and Gas Accountability Project has claimed the memo is a fraud written by an oil company lobbyist, which begs the question of how an industry lobbyist would have such accurate detail on green group events months before they happened.

By 2008, the anti-oil and gas campaign had grown far beyond the original scope of the NoDOG concept, and became a cluster of related anti-fossil fuel campaigns attacking American industry on many fronts.

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