BO and BP

Daniel Foster at The Corner:

Dr. Steven E. Koonin, Undersecretary of Energy for Science, worked as BP's chief egghead from 2004 to 2008, and was in charge of

"the long-range technology strategy of going 'beyond petroleum' to alternative and renewable energy sources, providing technical advice to senior executives, and managing in the firm's university-based research programs. Koonin played a central role in BP's establishing the Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of California Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign."

BP's "beyond petroleum" initiatives were pure dissimulation, and a top Obama official was in charge of the charade:

In 1999, Browne’s BP acquired the 50 percent stake it did not already own in the solar company Solarex (it had previously operated the company in partnership with an obscure energy trader called Enron). For a paltry $45 million, BP glommed on to Solarex’s 30 years of experience in the sector and styled itself the largest solar company in the world. The move would prove prologue to a massive corporate re-branding effort the next year, a $200 million blitz spearheaded by the Mad Men–inspiring ad wizards at Ogilvy & Mather and underwritten by the social-scientific spinners at Stanley Greenberg’s consultancy, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner (GQR).

With questions mounting about both the Obama administration’s response to the Gulf spill and the cozy regulatory conditions that led up to it, Greenberg’s name and BP connection have become a topic of interest in the blogosphere, as he and wife Rep. Rose DeLauro (D., Conn.) let Obama chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel live rent-free, for five years, in a D.C. apartment they owned.

But Greenberg’s ties to the political Left go much deeper than that. GQR’s client list was and is an almanac of left-leaning organizations and politicos both in the United States and abroad — Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and half the congressional Democratic caucus; the AFL-CIO and AFSCME; British Labour and democratic-socialist parties from Albania to Pakistan. And thanks in large part to the success of its BP efforts, GQR now represents a good number of energy companies (Alleghany Power, Nevada Power, Pacific Gas and Electric) and other beleaguered corporations facing uphill PR climbs (General Motors, anyone?). Greenberg was also the man who advised congressional Democrats to sell a carbon cap-and-trade system, of the kind championed by Browne and BP (and Enron!), as a “green jobs” bill — an inconvenient truth for an Obama administration keen on casting BP as a villain in its push for a carbon-tax regime.

I like that word "dissimulation." Polite insults are much more fun than simply shouting, "You Lie!"