by Stephen Lacey |
There has been a noticeable shift within the clean energy industry over the last few months as the election season brings a fresh round of attacks.
From 2005 to 2008, advocates racked up an impressive array of policy support on the local and state levels due to strong bipartisan support. Many people believed that local momentum would carry forward on the national level and provide the catalyst for a comprehensive climate and clean energy bill after President Obama came into office in 2009.
Of course, it wasn’t enough. And the defeat of the climate bill in 2010 marked the beginning of an intensifying campaign against renewable energy. Now, with the Republican party using Solyndra as the center of its messaging strategy, that campaign has become a central theme of the 2012 election.
Renewable energy groups have come to grips with this reality and are adapting their messaging strategies accordingly. Consider this recent email, sent by Adam Browning of the Vote Solar Initiative, on the industry’s need to counter disinformation:
When people ask: What keeps you up at night? I tell them this: There’s an unholy amount of money being spent to attack renewables right now — an unprecedented blitz of solar slander, renewable-mongering and clean energy kvetching that could set policy efforts back decades.Consider: Of the negative advertising in April of this this election cycle, 81% have targeted renewable energy for attack. And when you factor that this presidential election is shaping up to be the most expensive in history, with experts estimating spending in the range of $6 billion dollars, well, we got trouble.
Since its founding, The Vote Solar Initiative has been all about helping states and municipalities understand the value of solar. They’ve had to deal with their fair share of misinformation over the years, but they’ve made extraordinarily impressive bipartisan progress on getting better regulatory standards and support mechanisms for solar in place.
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