Ultra-conservative groups have hatched a media strategy to turn the public against wind farms and President Barack Obama’s energy agenda, according to a confidential memo obtained by the Guardian. 

Read the Guardian’s story here. You can view the memo – a fascinating read – here.

Some of the tactics: 

• Create catch phrases for wind energy, such as “puff power” and “breeze energy.”
• Implement youth programs in schools and colleges that discredit wind energy – this includes sponsoring science fairs and other school activities. 
• Sue zoning boards “to create a chilling effect.” Sue states with Renewable Energy Portfolio Standards. (Hawaii’s RPS is 40 percent renewable energy by 2030 and a 30 precent reduction in electricity use.) Sue state utility commissions who “don’t do their jobs.”  
• Create a science committee to “develop a highly respectable collection of scientific white papers and reports that are consistent in their approach to supporting the messages chosen as most likely to succeed.”
• “Cause subversion in message of industry so that it effectively becomes so bad no one wants to admit in public they are for it (much like wind has done to coal, by turning green to black and clean to dirty.”

From the Guardian: 

The strategy session is the latest evidence of a concerted attack on the clean energy industry by thinktanks and lobby groups connected to oil and coal interests and free-market ideologues.

ATI is part of a loose coalition of ultra-conservative thinktanks and networks united by their efforts to discredit climate science and their close connections to the oil and gas industry, including the Koch family. Those groups include the Heartland Institute, the John Locke Foundation, and Americans for Prosperity, the organising arm of the Tea Party movement.