Isramart : US rightwing activists curb efforts to cut CO2 emissions

Isramart news:
A 70-foot-tall hot air balloon rose above South Carolina, on three days last week to “expose the ballooning costs of global warming hysteria” in the latest “grassroots” event organised by Americans for Prosperity, the rightwing group that inflamed the healthcare debate over the summer and is set to do the same on climate change.

AFP took its “hot air campaign” – against the Obama administration’s efforts to cut carbon emissions – to South Carolina in a direct attack on Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator.

Why target Mr Graham? Because he recently wrote an opinion piece with John Kerry, the liberal Democrat from Massachusetts, in which they called for “honest give-and-take and genuine bipartisanship” to pass climate legislation that would become a “blueprint for a clean-energy future”.

The conservative organisation is hitting back, encouraging Americans across the country to sign their “No climate tax” petition, the latest in campaigns that include “No stimulus” and “Hands off my healthcare”.

AFP has become a formidable populist force on the political scene this year, opposing almost every Obama administration idea by appealing to and mobilising the conservative base in the American heartland.

The group was instrumental in organising the febrile opposition to healthcare reform that dominated many town halls this summer and is the force behind the “patriot tea parties” against the Obama administration’s spending plans. These gatherings have gained notoriety because of the placards showing President Barack Obama with a Hitler-style moustache, labelling him a “Muslim Marxist” and claiming he is not even American.

More tea-parties are scheduled. for the coming months and one took place in Missouri last weekend.

AFP aims “to build troops, to build activism, to get Americans to become active and to work for our freedoms”, says Tim Phillips, the mercurial president of AFP.

“Our goal is to fight for basic free-market principles – limited government, lower taxation, the ability of entrepreneurs to go out and create. It’s to build grassroots,” Mr Phillips told the Financial Times.

Although it has only 8,000 registered members, the organisation is a force to be reckoned with as it tours the country whipping up support for its campaigns and teaching people how to use Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to get their anti-government message out.

But detractors – and there are many among liberals in particular – accuse it of “Astroturfing”, or faking its grassroots, saying it is a front for big business opposed to Obama administration reforms.

AFP is partly funded by the Koch Family Foundations, an offshoot of Koch Industries, the largest privately-owned US energy company, and receives other corporate funding, including from ExxonMobil in the past.

Mr Phillips declined to give details of current funders and insisted the group also had many individual donors.

As Democrats on the Senate environment committee this week press ahead with their climate change bill, the healthcare debate gives environmentalists reason to fear the influence of AFP.

But it is also alarming some Republicans, who are concerned that the fringe is becoming the voice of the right. “Our party’s challenge has been that we need to be more inclusive,” said Eric Cantor of Virginia, the minority whip in the House of Representatives. “We need to attract the middle again . . . to the common-sense conservative views that we have been about as a party,” Mr Cantor told the Politico website.

But Mr Phillips says AFP is merely a group of “frustrated” Americans promoting smaller government.

On climate change, the group says the Democrats’ carbon-curbing plans mean lost jobs, less freedom and higher taxes.

“Any time you ration energy, prices for that commodity go up, and at a time when our economy is struggling, you need cheap abundant energy,” Mr Phillips said, adding that there was still significant debate about whether climate change was man-made.