Astroturf Troopers

In the battle to shape public opinion on global warming, the big polluters are fighting dirty. In tandem with their air war of bogus advertising, the major carbon-emitting industries are mobilizing phony grassroots troops on the ground to lobby against the global Climate Change Treaty being negotiated this week in Kyoto, Japan. And some of those troops would be right at home in Tim McVeigh's militia unit.

The Global Climate Coalition (GCC), run by Washington P.R. firm Ruder Finn, represents the big oil, gas, coal, and auto corporations. And while its stated mission is to coordinate "the active involvement of U.S. business in the scientific and policy debates," a MoJo Wire investigation found that GCC is also coordinating a secret coalition of extreme right-wingers and astroturf groups -- fake grassroots lobbyists funded by conservative foundations and corporations -- including so-called "Wise Use" radicals, John Birchers, Lyndon LaRouchites, and anti-U.N. New World Order conspiracy kooks.

GCC chairman William O'Keefe, an executive with the American Petroleum Institute, kickstarted this secret coalition in 1996 when he hired former lobbyist Susan Moya to set up a national network of "grassroots" groups, a network that now includes dozens of industry-funded astroturf groups in several states.

Moya denied the existence of her astroturf network, but the MoJo Wire has obtained a memo that says otherwise, written by Moya herself. Moya and GCC refused to answer questions about their grassroots setup, but some of the corporate-funded astroturf groups named in her memo, including Texas Citizens for a Sound Economy and People for the West, confirmed that they were part of Moya's network of "state grassroots leaders," and that they received this memo. Moya's network also includes right-wing extremist groups, some of them downright wacky:

In November, GCC organized a "national conference" in Washington, D.C. opposing the Clinton administration's position on global warming. Invited speakers, representing groups like the United Mine Workers and the South Carolina Black Chamber of Commerce, complained that the Kyoto treaty "could raise taxes, drive up consumer prices and change American lifestyles." But while the guest list seemed pretty mainstream, GCC's conference was sponsored by radical anti-enviros and astroturfers, including Clean Water Act foes the American Farm Bureau Federation, mining front group People For the West, and the Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO), an anti-environmental umbrella group run by New World Order crank Henry Lamb. Founded and funded by land developers, ECO claims to network more than 300 Wise Use groups, most of them funded by the extractive industries. For an in-depth look at ECO and its ties to other right-wing and corporate astroturf groups fighting the Kyoto treaty, click here.