No. 5: American Petroleum Institute (A.K.A. Energy Citizens)

Meet the 12 loudest members of the chorus claiming that global warming is a joke and that CO2 emissions are actually good for you.

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Meet “Bryan from Ohio” and “Judy from Alaska”—just a couple of the hardworking, freedom-loving Americans who’ve signed on to support the pro-oil advocacy group Energy Citizens. This August, the group held a rally a few blocks from Exxon HQ in downtown Houston “to give these energy citizens a voice in the climate bill debate.” Its blog described the 3,500 attendees as “truckers, farmers, homemakers, small business people, veterans, and the unemployed” who expressed their concerns about the Waxman-Markey climate bill.

Or their bosses’ concerns. Energy Citizens is a creation of the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s largest trade group. (In 2009, API has spent some $5.8 million on lobbying, much of it on the climate and energy bills.) A memo from API president Jack Gerard, leaked to Greenpeace, urged his group’s members to ensure “turnouts of several hundred attendees” at supposedly grassroots events like the ones Energy Citizens was sponsoring. He explained, “Our member company local leadership—including your facility manager’s commitment to provide significant attendance—is essential to achieving the participation level that Senators cannot ignore.” Kate Sheppard (then at Grist) obtained a list of the coordinators of 21 events Energy Citizens was planning; 15 out of the 21 were registered lobbyists, mostly for API and its affiliates.

Energy Citizens’ website is filled with first-person video testimonials from people identified only by their first names and home states. Plucky Guardian blogger Leo Hickman sussed out that “Shaka from Tennessee” was likely Shaka L.A. Mitchell, until recently the executive vice president of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, which hosts the denialist website Carnival of Climate Change. (Hickman’s hunch was borne out by this Wake Forest University alumni news profile). Mitchell was previously head of outreach for the Institute for Justice, a libertarian Beltway think tank partly bankrolled by right-wing petrobillionaires Charles G. and David Koch, who are among the largest funders of climate skeptics.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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