As the Republican presidential candidates tour Iowa hoping to lock up the 2012 nomination, they will hear an assortment of questions on energy policy. Some of them, ThinkProgress has learned, will be planted by the oil and natural gas lobby to steer the candidates toward pro-Big Oil policies.

A recent campaign stop by Rick Santorum reveals at least part of the strategy. During the question and answer period of an event last Monday at the Pizza Ranch in Ames, Iowa, Santorum was asked by a man if he would pledge to support the Keystone XL, an oil pipeline currently under construction to bring crude oil from Canada through several states to refineries in Texas. Santorum disregarded the question, and spoke for a few minutes about problems encountered by the fracking industry in his home state of Pennsylvania. The man interjected and again asked whether Santorum would say definitively if he supports the pipeline. Santorum, looking slightly annoyed, relented and said yes.

During the event, two young people in the back of the room handed out cards and pamphlets from a new organization called the Iowa Energy Forum. “We’re a grassroots group,” said Connor Reed, one of people sporting Iowa Energy Forum t-shirts. The website for the forum says it is simply “a growing community of concerned citizens committed to two goals – achieving energy security for our country and holding our elected officials accountable for shaping energy policies.” The website highlights Canadian tar sands and the importance of the Keystone XL pipeline, as well as the need for more domestic drilling.

Rather than being a grassroots organization, the Iowa Energy Forum is a slick, new creation of the oil and gas industry. The group is financed by the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association representing Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Transcanada, Shell Oil, and other oil industry heavyweights.

After witnessing the spectacle at the Santorum event, ThinkProgress observed Iowa Energy Forum staffers attending various Iowa Tea Party events and Herman Cain campaign stops. Iowa Energy Forum trackers have pressed their issue to Mitt Romney and other 2012 candidates.

Daniel Weiser, a partner at the Iowa lobbying firm Capitol Strategies, told ThinkProgress that his company helped set up the Iowa Energy Forum. “We’re lobbying for them down in the capitol, got the legislative task forced signed up,” Weiser said. Weiser’s firm helped recruit about 40 people so “theoretically when a presidential candidate comes, we have people to speak to them.” The goal, Weiser said, was to press the candidates on supporting domestic energy production, including renewables. However, Weiser admitted that fossil fuels are the priority. “Drilling for oil and natural gas, those are the biggies.”

However, the main drivers of the front group appear to be linked to LS2g, a corporate public relations and lobbying firm based in Des Moines. Chuck Larson and Karen Slifka, former Republican Party operatives, manage the Iowa Energy Forum and the LS2g office serves as the group’s headquarters.

In addition to astroturfing candidate events, the Iowa Energy Forum has pushed to defend billions in targeted subsidies to the oil and gas industry. The group recently hosted American Petroleum Institute economist John Felmy, who blasted attempts by Congress to repeal such giveaways. The group has managed to snag notable politicians, including Gov. Terry Branstad (R-IA), to appear at their press conferences.

A new profile of American Petroleum Institute head Jack Gerard sheds light on the purpose of groups like the Iowa Energy Forum. Gerard’s lobbying strategy has focused on boosting the public perception of big oil. Gerard has dedicated millions of dollars worth of ads promoting his industry, but he has also organized fly-ins of African American and Hispanic oil workers, bused in workers to hold large public rallies in pivotal states, and recruited unlikely allies to press his case, including labor unions. He even hired one of the Nature Conservancy’s top officials to help build his pro-oil army.

The oil industry’s brazen attempt to manipulate the Republican primary isn’t necessarily a new strategy, however. In 2008, the coal industry sent staffers posing as grassroots activists to campaign events for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to hawk “clean coal.” The fake activists would press the candidates to support coal industry priorities, and then once they went on record, the video would be used in coal industry advertisements.

From Business Week’s December 25, 1978 Special Report “Nuclear Dilemma: The Atom’s Fizzle in an Energy-Short World” (h/t Amory Lovins)

In April, I debunked a piece by journalist Mark Lynas (see “Lynas pens error-riddled, cost-less nuke op-ed“).  I also said I’d do a longer post about one particular myth he repeated:

In the 1970s it looked as if nuclear power was going to play a much bigger role than eventually turned out to be the case. What happened was Three Mile Island, and the birth of an anti-nuclear movement that stopped dozens of half-built or proposed reactors….

Just as the U.S. nuclear renaissance was mostly dead before Fukushima, so too was the original cycle of nuclear plant orders dead before TMI — killed by rising prices for plants and cost over-runs.  As a December 1978 Business Week’s Special Report “Nuclear Dilemma: The Atom’s Fizzle in an Energy-Short World” explained:

One by one, the lights are going out for the U.S. nuclear power industry. Reactor orders have plummeted from a high of 41 in 1973 to zero this year. Nuclear power stations are taking longer to build, and the delays are tacking hundreds of millions of dollars onto their costs. Waste disposal, which was supposed to be solved by now, is not. The export market is already glutted and shrinking fast. And the cumulative effect of these and other troubles has been a severe erosion of both public and political support for nuclear power.

Furthermore, domestic utilities are facing such shrunken growth projections for electricity demand that even if the nuclear industry’s political, social, economic, and regulatory difficulties could be solved, there may not be an adequate market left for their product. Not soon, but within 10 years, the U.S. nuclear industry is apt to contract dramatically, and it may collapse altogether. Says a senior, nonnuclear executive at General Electric Co., one of the four remaining reactor makers: ‘The existing nuclear industry can’t survive. Period.”

His is not a radical view.

Actually there appear to have been two orders in 1978.  But the point is the same –  the industry had collapsed long before TMI.  Indeed, nuclear power appeared to have a negative learning curve even back then.

I asked energy expert Dr. Jon Koomey, a consulting professor at Stanford, if he would do a more detailed study of this question.   His excellent graph-filled analysis is below, done with the input of other leading energy experts, and co-authored by Nate Hultman, Associate Director of Univ. of MD’s Joint Global Change Research Institute.  They conclude:

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– William S. Becker

During one of his high-energy speeches earlier this month, Van Jones was back in fighting form.

He told his audience at Netroots Nation that figuratively speaking, a fight is brewing in America. The pushback will come from kids facing a future of climate disruption, unions being dismantled by conservative governors, college grads who can’t find jobs, veterans being dumped back into a disabled economy, people who can’t find work, and families having their homes taken away by some of the same banks that depended on the American people to bail them out.

Jones didn’t use the term “American Spring,” but he might have. He said he has no doubt we’re on the verge of a Popeye moment when Americans of all generations decide: “I’ve had all I can stand; I can’t stand no more.”

“This is guaranteed,” Jones said. “The only question is whether we fight together, or fight alone.”

Earlier this week, two groups of kids presented an opportunity to fight together. Kids vs. Global Warming and Youth for Climate Truth sent out an appeal for support in a legal case before the courts right now.

Both groups have some experience with the legal system. Kids vs Global Warming is the group that organized youth marches earlier this year in 160 cities in 45 countries and filed lawsuits against the US government to compel it to protect the atmosphere for their generation.

Youth for Climate Truth says it was taken to court for issuing a fake news release and web site that “called attention to the fact that Koch Industries has spent tens of millions of dollars through corporate front groups to deliberately confuse the public about the dangers of climate change.”

Koch Industries sued the kids for $100,000. “Koch lost the suit,” the youth group reports, “because whether the Koch Brothers like it or not, political dissent is protected by the First Amendment.”

Now the two organizations are appealing for help in another legal case. Tim DeChristopher is scheduled to be sentenced to prison next month for an act of civil disobedience when he was a college student in 2008. DeChristopher, now 29, posed as a bidder in a federal auction held by the outgoing Bush Administration to drill oil and gas on public lands in Utah. He was prosecuted and convicted of obstructing a government auction. Here’s how the kids describe it:

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Mindy Lubber, the president of Ceres, works with a variety of progressive investors and corporations.  The groups she works with understand that sound environmental policy is good for business and good for the economy. By encouraging retrofits of environmental equipment and spurring the development of cleaner generation — all with limited ratepayer impact — tens of thousands of new jobs can be created through new standards on power plant emissions.