As Conservatives Discover Renewables, Fossil Fuel Lobby Spins Furiously March 19, 2015

As conservative ‘free market” Americans continue to discover that renewable energy actually fits their ideals and world view much more closely than the top-down, anti-competitive, monolithic and obsolete fossil fuel paradigm, they have begun to speak up and become active when traditional coal burning Utilities set up roadblocks to solar energy adoption.

Such a battle is now shaping up in Florida, where a new ballot initiative is aimed at making Solar Energy more widely available – as the Tampa Bay Times reports:

Conservative solar proponents on Saturday accused Americans For Prosperity (a Koch funded right wing group that shills for fossil fuels – Peter) of launching a “campaign of deception” against a ballot petition that would allow those in Florida who generate electricity from the sun to sell that power directly to others. In a news release Saturday, Conservatives for Energy Freedom, part of a bi-partisan coalition leading the ballot petition, said inaccurate statements have been circulating in e-mails from Americans For Prosperity. The e-mail criticizes the ballot initiative as an effort about “money, and using government and taxpayers to prop up the solar industry. The solar industry cannot survive without taxpayer funded subsidies and mandates.” In addition, the e-mail asserts that the coalition, Floridians for Solar Choice, is merely “a front group for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE)” and that the environmental group is funded by liberal, California-based activist Tom Steyer. Steve Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance, said his organization has never received money directly from Steyer and “there is no Tom Steyer money associated with this effort at this point.” Smith said the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy Action Fund is “providing some early support for this effort.” Tory Perfetti, Florida director of Conservatives for Energy Freedom and Floridians for Solar Choice, said statements about mandates for subsidies or purchases of solar over any other form of energy also are inaccurate. “This ballot initiative will open up the energy market in Florida to freedom of choice and allow commerce to be conducted through the free market,” said Perfetti, a conservative Republican. “This initiative will not mandate the purchase of solar nor will you find anywhere in the ballot language anything which says that solar will be subsidized, so to say otherwise is false.” The ballot initiative and the coalition, Floridians for Solar Choice, have forged a unique group that includes the tea party and Christian Coalition conservatives as well as Libertarians; liberal environmentalists such as the Southern Alliance, the Sierra Club and Greenpeace; Physicians for Social Responsibility; and the Florida Retail Federation. If the proposed ballot measure passes, solar proponents argue it would open up Florida’s solar energy market, which has largely stagnated for years. The measure would allow business or property owners to produce up to 2 megawatts of solar power and sell that power directly to others, such as tenants, without having to go through a utility.

The piece below from the right wing American Spectator, (use google, I’m not giving them a link), is a case study in motivated, paranoid reasoning, that we’re going to see a whole lot more of….

American Spectator:

Progressives have for years been laying the groundwork to co-opt conservatives on energy policy, paying existing right-of-center groups to help them communicate with the rest, creating new organizations and heading them with a conservative or two for appearances, and ultimately using the jargon of markets and freedom in the service of cronyism.

– And when some of those conservatives start wondering whose cash could have motivated SACE to take on this project, their top suspect is billionaire Tom Steyer. Steyer has a financial stake in solar power, and his money has flowed into organizations that have been preparing the political battlefield for these kinds of initiatives for years. Campaign donations, think tanks, foundation-funded advocacy—Steyer has found a way to spend tens of millions of dollars on each of them in the last six years. Indeed, Steyer’s TomKat Charitable Trust had already funneled more than $3 million to the Energy Foundation between 2009 and 2013, and the Energy Foundation in turn has passed through $2.6 million in grants to SACE. So it’s cold comfort when SACE tells reporters that it hasn’t accepted money directly from Steyer’s groups, and the lack of transparency in how money passes through layers of foundations means we only have their word that his fingerprints aren’t on it.

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These dots don’t all connect neatly, but together they raise questions about the reliance of these superficially conservative groups on progressive donors who just might not have conservatives’ best interests at heart. And it’s a story worth tracking moving forward