Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.
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The Energy and Policy Institute is a totally phony entity and it exists solely to project what it does onto others as a distraction.
Projection is “the externalization of blame, guilt, or responsibility as a defense,” according to Merriam-Webster. It’s what leftists do to distract from what their own activities; accuse their opponents of doing it. No better example exists than something called the Energy and Policy Institute, which is neither government nor a non-profit corporation.
It has an Executive Director and at least two lawyers as well as a bunch of staff, but swears to a Federal Court that it has “no parent companies, subsidiaries or affiliates.” Its address is a post office box in San Francisco. It’s about as dark as it gets, in other words. So, what does it do? It does an attack on RGGI opponents labeling them as a “tangled web of individuals and groups representing business interests and conservative think tanks.” Talk about projection! Talk about a phony outfit!
The post by the Energy and Policy Institute was, as a good friend notes, a “hit job on all opposition to Pennsylvania’s RGGI efforts.” Readers can evaluate the post for themselves. It consists of repeated ‘climate denier’ allegations combined with the anti-climatic news that gas industry folks are uniting to fight an incredibly stupid and autocratic decision by Tom Wolf to put Pennsylvanians into RGGI. The ‘climate denier’ thing is getting really old. Most of us long ago grasped the fact this puts the accusers in a class of ‘climate believers’ and science is not about beliefs but science, of course, which is ever evolving. Likewise, getting together to take positions is as American as it gets. So what if the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association is an ally of the Commonwealth Foundation? If that’s a crime, then we’re all in trouble.
The Energy and Policy Institute, of course, does precisely this, as we know from its affiliations (yeah, I know they swore they had none, but pay attention), which include a group known as the Center for Media and Democracy, with whom it says it collaborated to produce a very similar website called Utility Secrets.
Utility Secrets has the same sort of layout, complete with little hooks and tricks to make you think it might be about something else and a dearth of information about itself. It even uses the same post office box as an address but, curiously, warns folks contacting it as follows (emphasis added):
If you have information that you would like to share with us, please send it to P.O. Box 170399, San Francisco, CA 94117-0399 via the United States Postal Service in an envelope with no return address. Please use stamps (not a postage meter).
Do not use Federal Express or UPS. Do not include your name or any identifying information, such as your physical address, email address or telephone number in what you send.
Told you this was a dark outfit!
The site has a particular focus on rooftop solar energy and defending it from any reveals that it might all be green eggs and scam. Energy and Policy Institute’s partner in this endeavor, the Center for Media and Democracy, is funded by the following usual suspects:
We don’t know which, if any, of these foundations have specifically funded the Energy and Policy Institute because it’s a phony group with zero transparency as to funding. Nonetheless, given that it partners with the Center, one can reasonably suspect some of these entities very well might also be ultimate sources of the dark money used by the Institute. At a minimum, we know the Energy and Policy Institute was apparently disingenuous when it told a Federal court it had no affiliations. Utility Secrets is clearly a product of an affiliation.
Interestingly, one of the two lawyers who made that assertion, was someone named Allison Kole, who works for a group providing another clue as to Energy and Policy Institute funding, The name of that group is Essential Information, Inc., which it turns out, is a group founded by Ralph Nader, who also founded the notorious system of Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) that has largely served to make the heavens rain lawsuits for trail lawyers.
Moreover, one of the donors to Essential Information, Inc. (don’t you love the misleading names these people give to their groups?) is the Sustainable Markets Foundation. It is a Rockefeller creation run by Jay Hafon, the Fractivist Rasputin, who also ran the NY-PIRG and has had his fingers in 350.org, the Park Foundation, Earthworks and the New York State Trial Lawyers Association.
The Sustainable Markets Foundation also hires Tigercomm, LLC a PR firm that apparently represents the solar industry and whose name comes up several times in this expose of the Energy and Policy Institute. Tigercomm denies the affiliation, but here’s one of its client’s activities strangely intersecting with the Institute. We diid our own expose of Tigercomm here and found it had a close association with Tom Steyer, numerous solar outfits, DeSmog Blog (quoted in the RGGI hit piece) and the Rockefellers, these entities being connected in various ways and having relationship’s to Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf, the fellow mindlessly pushing RGGI.
So, once again, we see the dark shadow of the Rockefeller family and other filthy rich folks lurking in the background of whatever it is the Energy And Policy Institute constitutes. All we know is that it is a group of staffers paid by something or someone who refuses to identify itself or themselves, while those same staffers accuse RGGI opponents of collaborating in the light of day. This is the real story on the Energy And Policy Institute. It is simply another facade, another Potemkin Village, erected by solar hedge fund investor types, related special interests and their gentry class enablers to scam the commoners.
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