Forrest for the Trees

Sarah McDonald now has a longer video report posted on YouTube from Tuesday’s oil industry-sponsored rally against climate change. In the video, it’s interesting to hear actual conservative grassroots people, who showed up to protest greenhouse gas legislation, complaining that they were treated like “peons” and barred from entering the event.

Big Oil clearly wanted a tightly-controlled, choreographed event. Their employees know to be docile; right-wing activists, on the other hand, aren’t so easily controlled and, as we’ve seen in these townhall meetings, can be quite embarassing.

And so castles made of sand fall in the sea, eventually-Jimi Hendrix

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Earlier this year, Rep. Wayne Christian provoked a major outcry when it came to light that he had helped pass an amendment specifically exempting himself and his neighbors from the 50-year-old Texas Open Beaches Act. Christian’s beachside vacation home on Bolivar Peninsula had been destroyed by Hurricane Ike last September.

And the East Texas conservative wanted to make sure he could rebuild even if it was found to be on the public beach, where structures are prohibited.

General Land Office Commissioner Jerry Patterson blasted Christian for his self-serving act and vowed to ignore the exemption. The Observer gave him a “People’s Foe” award in part for his shameless erosion of a popular and progressive law.

As it turns out, Christian didn’t need his amendment after all. According to maps releasd this week by the General Land Office, most of Christian’s beachfront property is behind the new GLO-designated public beach.

“I do appreciate him doing the right thing,” Christian told the Houston Chronicle.

But open beach advocates don’t think Patterson did the right thing at all. After Hurricane Ike eroded beaches on the Upper Texas coast, Patterson pledged to wait one year for beaches to build back up – a natural process following a storm – before designating the public easement.

The Act defines the public beach as the “area extending from the line of mean low tide to the line of vegetation bordering on the Gulf of Mexico.” But the vegetation hasn’t grown back since Ike so Patterson has opted to define the public beach as 200 feet from the mean low-tide line.

The 200-foot designation “pukes on the spirit of the Texas Open Beaches Act and the members of the Legislature that signed that law,” said Ellis Pickett, the founder of several Texas SurfRider chapters and the Texas campaign organizer for the Gulf Recovery Network.

So, the Houston energy companies had their big company picnic yesterday in opposition to the climate change bill. The event was closed to everyone but energy company employees (or as the signs said, “Energy Citizens”). But Sarah McDonald, of Public Citizen, managed to sneak in and posted this report.

Another interloper was Matthew Tejada, of the Galveston-Houston Association for Smog Prevention (GHASP). He had this to say about the rally:

“Stall, block, delay and don’t change.”

“It’s a knee-jerk rejection that panders to people’s most common fears of losing jobs and costing more money,” Tejada said. “What’s happened in the past with new laws is we adjust, develop new technologies, absorb and lower the costs, and then move on.”

The rally’s message, he said, “will serve neither the future of this city nor the future of this country very well.”

One other thing: the Big Oil organizers wouldn’t even let in tea party types, according to McDonald. So, does that make this rally less or more astroturf?

Today is managing editor Brad Tyer’s last day at the Observer. He’s been selected as a Knight Wallace Journalism Fellow, a prestigious program for mid-career journalists. We’re happy for him but also a little sad. I’m especially sorry to see him go and not just because he did a kick-ass job editing the Arts & Culture section of the magazine.

Like me, Brad has a thing for rivers and we fast became canoeing and kayaking partners. It helps too that he’s got awesome gear and isn’t (too) wimpy about the Texas heat. Granted, we did more daydreaming than paddling but, hey, that’s half the fun. We did manage, despite this damn drought, to hit the Colorado, San Marcos, Neches and South Llano Rivers. We’re trying to get together a trip to the remote Devils River in West Texas.

On his first day at the Observer, Brad pulled up in front of the office with a canoe strapped to the top of his truck. He’d just returned to Texas after a long stint in Montana editing the Missoula Independent. And he looked the part of a Montanan – out-of-season flannel and outdoorsy get-up, the kind you find advertised in L.L. Bean catalogs. But Brad’s a Texan at heart. His passion for rivers may only be superseded by his obsession with Texas BBQ and jerky.

There are plenty of river enthusiasts in this state but not many who can write intelligently about the deeper meaning of carp or make a review of a fieldbook on Texas water sound like a must-read. In Brad’s last column, which will appear online and in print later this week, he brings it all back home, writing about the stretch of river, a patch of the Colorado near Columbus, he first fell for:

Naturalist Loren Eisley wrote, “If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water,” and it’s magic that claims me on a river.

I saw it again Sunday. I drove through periodically heavy rains to get to the river and put in under grumbling clouds. As so many times before on that looping stretch, those clouds left open a pocket of sunshine, rimmed by heavy blue, that followed me downstream. Only once, on a broad, windy stretch near the end, did I drift beneath a gray wisp, and it rained on me lightly in bright sunlight, drops hitting the water at an angle, backlit and glistening. It was as magical, in that moment, as anything on the mighty Yarlung Tsangpo, or John Graves’ history-soaked Brazos, or any river anywhere.

 Paddling in that rain, simple math began to seem like fuzzy abstraction, and magic—for the moment anyway—the natural state.

In the comments section, several readers took issue with my climate change post in which I assert that there is “simply no scientific debate” on the causes of global warming. Reader “Just Sayin” wrote:

The truth of the climate issue is that it is very complicated and there is hardly broad consensus among the scientific community on the binary questions that you mentioned above.

This blog would serve the environmental cause much better if you took time to consider the claims of the “marginalized naysayers” with a kind of respect as opposed to marginalizing their informed opinions out of the gate.

I strongly disagree and you can read my full response in the comments. However, this does point to the reality that there is a relatively small, but very vocal group of people in this country who are hell-bent on destroying greenhouse gas restraints. And, no, not all of them work for the oil industry.

Many in the conservative grassroots view climate change as a liberal conspiracy driven by Al Gore, godless scientists and radical environmentalists. I have no doubt their beliefs are sincere but many have fallen victim to a years-long, multimillion-dollar campaign orchestrated by oil companies and other carbon-intensive industries to distort the issue. Conservative groups eagerly joined the cause.

But with the end of the Bush administration, most of these players promised to stop and get onboard with cap-and-trade legislation.

At least that was the PR. It seems the “success” of the townhall tea partiers in the health care debate has proven too alluring for the anti-climate change organizers to pass up. Talking Points Memo is reporting today on a leaked memo from the American Petroleum Institute:

A leaked memo sent by an oil industry group reveals a plan to create astroturf rallies at which industry employees posing as “citizens” will urge Congress to oppose climate change legislation.

The memo — sent by the American Petroleum Institute and obtained by Greenpeace, which sent it to reporters — urges oil companies to recruit their employees for events that will “put a human face on the impacts of unsound energy policy,” and will urge senators to “avoid the mistakes embodied in the House climate bill.”

API tells TPMmuckraker that the campaign is being funded by a coalition of corporate and conservative groups that includes the anti-health-care-reform group 60 Plus, FreedomWorks, and Grover Norquist’s Americans For Tax Reform.

The parallels are undeniable. In both the case of health care reform and climate change legislation, corporate interests are deeply involved in creating a grassroots stirring against congressional action they believe will hurt their bottom-line.

These aren’t movements in the traditional sense. They are as much astroturf as they are grassroots.