Youth activists interrupted the State of the Energy Industry earlier this week to deliver the 99 percent’s message to polluters’ biggest lobbies, who were all gathered for a conference.

The annual event included addresses by American Petroleum Institute, American Gas Association, and the National Mining Association. During API President Jack Gerard’s speech, the activists yelled “mic check” and fact-checked the oil lobby. “Big Oil’s lies are hurting Americans, our economy, and our environment,” the group shouted. “API spends hundreds of millions of dollars corrupting our democracy. … Big Oil is raking in record profits at the expense of the American people.”

One of the protesters described her experience:

We all stood up. Our voices combined were deafening in that small room. I could see Gerard fuming under his smug grin. We were hurried out by Suits with nervous demeanor, but not before we were able to get a few powerful last words in. This was Big Oil’s crown-jewel forum – they’d been advertising this forum on NPR and even their top PR officials were talking it up online. It was clear they were embarrassed and totally caught off guard.

But this will not be the last one Big Oil hears from us. Oh no. We’ll be visiting them again and again, speaking truth to the lies, corruption, and corporate greed of dirty energy, and replacing it with a vision of transparent democracy and a just, clean energy future.

Watch it:

While the protesters promise to return, API is deploying an election-year “Vote 4 Energy” campaign to promote “drill, baby, drill” and deliver on its threat that rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline has “huge political consequences” for the president.

And yet, youth activists have spread the 99 percent’s environmental message across the world, recently. Thousands of protesters fought successfully against the Keystone XL pipeline, and youth voices grabbed attention at the Durban climate conference last month. Now, the 99 percent are taking that message directly to the doorstep of the oil industry.

Obama rejects Keystone XL – but we can’t stop here.

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America’s television meteorologists are the primary source of climate information for most Americans, and are second only to scientists — who have much less access to the general public — in the level of trust they are given. Yet more than half of TV weather reporters don’t believe in human-induced climate change, even as our poisoned weather grows more extreme.

Forecast the Facts, a new campaign of 350.org, the League of Conservation Voters, and the new Citizen Engagement Lab, aims to turn the tide. The first call to action challenges the American Meteorological Society to vote next week for a strong climate change statement that rejects science denial:

It’s a big problem: weather reporters reach millions of people every night, and right now they’re not telling their viewers the full story. We can change that. Meteorologists are meeting this month at the annual conference of the American Meteorological Society, where the AMS Council will vote on a new official statement on climate change. Denier meteorologists don’t want the statement to pass, and are doing everything they can to derail the process. We can’t let that happen.

In 2009, ThinkProgress Green exposed weathermen James Spann and Joe D’Aleo as Marc Morano’s go-to climate deniers. Forecast the Facts has identified dozens more zombie weathermen (yes, they’re all male) from around the country. These climate denier meteorologists are betraying the public’s trust and distorting America’s airwaves with ideological science denial:
Read more

The headlines of 2011 were driven by global warming disasters and the popular uprising against the powers-that-be who have accumulated profit at the expense of the future of humanity. The United States faced the most billion-dollar climate disasters ever, with 14 distinct disasters costing at least $53 billion to the U.S. economy. Stymied by the election of the science-denying Tea Party Congress, the Obama administration failed to pass climate pollution or oil and coal safety legislation in response to the disasters of 2010. The administration fought back attacks on investment in renewable energy and stopped the rush to build the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, spurred by mass protests.

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Coal activists around the country have stepped up their efforts in recent years to fight the destructive mining process known as mountaintop removal, targeting politicians, coal companies, and banks that support and finance such projects. Activists in Charlotte were arrested earlier this year protesting Bank of America’s ties to mountaintop removal, while others staged a tree sit-in near Coal River Mountain in West Virginia to prevent a mountaintop removal project there.

In Kentucky, a state where mountaintop removal has destroyed more mountains than in any other state, protesters have staged sit-ins at the governor’s office and the statehouse throughout the year. Those activists visited the office of Gov. Steve Beshear (D) again yesterday, this time hoping to deliver a little holiday cheer and a few gifts for the governor who trumpeted his support for mountaintop removal and opposition to the Environmental Protection Agency during his re-election campaign in 2011, public radio station WFPL reports:

Governor Steve Beshear got an early Christmas gift from anti-mountaintop removal activists today. Protesters spent several hours in the governor’s office waiting for a chance to present him with lumps of coal.

The protest was an extension of a weekly event that’s been going on since February, but this time it had a holiday twist. Lexington teacher Martin Mudd dressed up as Santa Claus, and says he brought gifts for the governor.

“Santa brought the governor some lumps of coal and switches because he’s been a naughty boy in not doing everything that he can to protect the people of eastern Kentucky and our mountains and water,” he said.

Beshear’s support for the coal industry, and mountaintop removal in particular, has often placed him at odds with coal activists. In 2009, he angered activists by firing Ron Mills, the head of Kentucky’s mining permit division, after Mills refused multiple permits for Alliance Resource Partners, a Tulsa-based company with multiple mining sites in Kentucky. Beshear signed the permits over Mills’ objections, and Mills told the Lexington Herald-Leader that Alliance executives had lobbied for his firing.

But his support for mountaintop removal has drawn the most ire, and while yesterday’s protesters weren’t able to reach Beshear — both he and Lieutenant Gov. Jerry Abramson (D) were out of the office — they left a list of demands with their gifts. Among them: end mountaintop removal, employ workers left jobless by the coal industry through environmental reclamation projects, and help Eastern Kentucky build a sustainable economy that isn’t built on a destructive mining process clearly linked to cancer, birth defects, and numerous other chronic illnesses.

After 20 months of mobilizing, agitating and negotiating by Greenpeace activists to green Facebook, the Internet behemoth announced today its goal to run on clean, renewable energy:

Facebook is committed to supporting the development of clean and renewable sources of energy, and our goal is to power all of our operations with clean and renewable energy. Building on our leadership in energy efficiency (through the Open Compute Project), we are working in partnership with Greenpeace and others to create a world that is highly efficient and powered by clean and renewable energy.

Facebook’s 2010 data center is primarily powered by coal, spurring the worldwide campaign.

Greenpeace mobilized Facebook users across the world, including Israel, Sweden, Italy, India, and Senegal. In one day, supporters posted over 80,000 comments in at least eleven languages on the Facebook Unfriend Coal page.

Greenpeace is looking to Apple, Microsoft, and Twitter as the next tech companies to commit to renewable energy.

A group of Massachusetts voters are giving Senator Scott Brown (R-MA) until this Thursday at noon to publicly announce his intention to vote against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline poison-pill provision attached to the payroll tax cut bill currently working its way through Congress. If he does not do so, they will hold a march from Senator Brown’s office to the nearby National Guard Recruiting Office, led by a former National Guardsman in uniform, to highlight the need for the National Guard to accelerate its recruitment efforts in anticipation of climate disasters in the years ahead. Craig S. Altemose, one of the climate activists and a state appointee to the Massachusetts Climate Protection and Green Economy Advisory Committee, wants Brown to choose a clean energy future:

At this very moment, we have the technology and knowledge we need to rapidly and responsibly transition our economy away from the fossil fuels which are threatening our very lives. Rather than playing around with outdated 20th century pipelines like other Republicans, we hope Senator Brown will support the tax cut without the pipeline, and further support investments in 21st century renewable energy like wind, solar, and geothermal that will make our people safer, healthier, and happier.

Brown has avoided taking a stance on the tar sands pipeline, and has explained away global warming as an “ebb and flow.” Most notably, perhaps, Brown is one of the Koch brothers’ favorite politicians, receiving massive donations in return for his allegiance to their polluter politics:

The American Petroleum Institute likes to share what average Americans think about Big Oil, except when they express real opinions. Unsurprisingly, despite API’s claims to feature Americans in favor of oil, their “authentic” commercials are entirely scripted, with casters feeding participants’ every word.

An e-mail from API advertised an open casting call for “all ages and races to express their views” in a commercial spot. The basic qualifications read: “You are willing to go on camera and state your beliefs” and “You are comfortable portraying YOURSELF! They want REAL PEOPLE not Actors!”

But when Gabe Elsner of the watchdog Checks and Balances Project attended the commercial’s open casting, he wasn’t even allowed to finish his sentence about clean energy jobs:

Elsner is escorted to the sound stage and asked to repeat the following lines:
“I vote,” he is prompted.
“I vote,” he repeats.
“I vote!” more emphatically this time.
“I vote!” Elsner repeats.
“For American Jobs,” he is told.
“For American Clean Energy Jobs,” he responds.
“Just, ‘For American Jobs,’” the staffer says.
“For American Clean Energy Jobs,” Elsner repeats. “I’d like to add that…”
“Just deliver the line. That we have. Just, because, just cut for a second,” the staffer says. “Are you…I want to make sure that you are okay with what we are doing as far as the script goes.”
Elsner says, “Well I didn’t see the script. I was told that I was going to be able to deliver my views on camera.”

Elsner never finished his thoughts on camera; he was simply escorted away from the set. API tells an altered version, where it claimed in a followup blog post that “some activists” decided “not to spend their Saturday hanging around a bunch of other people who do support oil and natural gas.” But it is more likely API spoon-fed those supporters with favorable “views” just as they treated Elsner.

There is an inevitability that a Big Oil commercial must resort to insincerity and imaginary people’s opinions. The industry is sitting on enormous profits, even as 74 percent of Americans want to end the industry’s subsidies.

This isn’t the first time API has misled on its commercials. In 2009, API doctored the race of two iStock models in a promotional pamphlet. And while the newest API ad won’t be released until January, here is an older commercial with equally under-enthused, overly scripted Americans talking about oil: