Grist took a deeper look at a list of “local organizers” of the Astroturf ‘Energy Citizens’ rallies and discovered that most of them are actually oil industry lobbyists.  Go figure.  Since the American Petroleum Institute cooked up the idea for these ‘grassroots’ events to mimic the health care town hall rent-a-mobs, it makes sense that Big Oil’s lobbyists would do the ‘community organizing’ necessary to pull off this charade.

Grist found that registered oil industry lobbyists are behind 15 of the 21 planned rallies, which look more like ‘glorified company picnics’ than spontaneous grassroots gatherings of concerned citizens. 

Oil industry employees continued their ‘Energy Citizens’ tour today in conservative towns in New Mexico, after holding a “glorified company picnic” in Houston on Tuesday.  Local New Mexico blog FBIHOP reports that the API/NAM/Chamber of Commerce/FreedomWorks/Big Oil astroturf rallies will take place today in Roswell and tomorrow in Farmington - “they will hold their meetings before going out and claiming these were grassroots efforts.”

Operation Free, a coalition of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and national security organizations, today slammed the ‘Energy Citizens’ Astroturf campaign orchestrated by the American Petroleum Institute and other Big Oil interests as a detriment to America’s energy security.

“Veterans understand the connection between energy security, climate change and national security,” said Jon Powers, Chief Operating Officer of the Truman National Security Project and an Iraq war vet.

Describing climate change as a “threat multiplier” for the armed forces, Powers denounced the ‘Energy Citizens’ campaign, stating that Big Oil does not have America’s best interests at heart.  “Veterans do not want to see America’s national security in the hands of Big Oil,” said Powers during the press teleconference today.

Note: the times, dates and locations of all the upcoming American Petroleum Institute "Energy Citizen rallies" are at the end of this post.

As regular readers will recall, DeSmogBlog was the first blog to report on an API memo obtained by Greenpeace outlining a series of "energy citizens" rallies that would rely heavily on local oil companies bussing in their employees to create the appearance of a grassroots uprising against the Waxman-Markey clean energy bill.

Since then, I have received a lot of emails from oil company employees who know these fake rallies are wrong. Members of the Texas Public Citizen group attended the rally, and as they rightly report these were more like a company picnic than a spontaneous uprising of citizens.

If you've received an invitation to one of these energy citizen rallies, send me an email: desmogblog@gmail.com or call me at 778-240-6343 and let me know the details so we can continue to send folks out to report on these company picnics.

Here's a list of upcoming astrturf events: