Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin meets with Arctic Power, described by the Anchorage Daily News as a controversial energy-backed astroturf group also funded with tax dollars like Americans for American Energy, and others on July 17, 2008 about opening ANWR to oil and gas drilling. (Photo/State of Alaska)

Environmentalists and conservation-minded politicians who have been compared to terrorists by Americans for American Energy, a Golden-based pro-domestic-energy front group, can in part thank Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, fresh off her night winking and talking about drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, for launching the group in Colorado.

In May 2007, Alaska Gov. Palin apparently became squeamish about a $3 million no-bid contract that state’s Legislature had just voted to extend and expand for a conservative, Oregon-based public relations firm called Pac/West Communications.

Pac/West was hired by the Alaska Legislature in 2006 to put together a national lobbying campaign to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil drilling, and in turn Pac/West subcontracted Americans for American Energy, a 501(c)4 nonprofit now based in Golden, Colo.

Pac/West, with the help of AAE, reportedly spent about $1.3 million of Alaskan taxpayer money to unsuccessfully convince residents in four other states to support drill-here, drill-now candidates who would help turn the tide on ANWR in Washington.

When questions were raised about the sole-source, no-bid nature of the Pac/West, AAE contract, Palin, according to the Anchorage Daily News, reluctantly pulled the plug.

The Alaska newspaper reported Palin first supported the Legislature’s vote to re-up and broaden Pac/West’s efforts beyond ANWR, which seemed dead in the water with a Democratic Congress, but then had a change of heart.

According to a Palin spokeswoman quoted by the ADN, Palin’s problem “was not with the campaign itself but with the hurried $3 million contract, which ‘was not part of an open and transparent process.’”

A little less than a year later, Palin had no such qualms about a similar no-bid deal, albeit for a much more modest $50,000, that she doled out to a Massachusetts public relations company called MCB Communications — this time to make a national case for a $500 million state subsidy to a firm trying to build a $40 billion pipeline from the state’s oil-rich North Slope through Canada.

Palin proudly mentioned that pipeline during Thursday night’s debate with Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden and also echoed many of the themes of Americans for American Energy, insisting on more drilling for the sake of national security and questioning the causes of global warming. And she reiterated he support for drilling in ANWR despite Sen. John McCain’s opposition.

“A team of mavericks, of course we’re not going to agree on 100 percent of everything,” she said with a wink. “As we discuss ANWR there, at least we can agree to disagree on that one. I will keep pushing him on ANWR.”

Regardless of her motivations, the effect of Palin shutting down the Pac/West and AAE deal for ongoing “education” on the benefits of developing more energy sources in Alaska was to send AAE south to begin lobbying hard to open up Colorado’s Roan Plateau to natural-gas drilling, as well as lift a moratorium on commercial oil-shale leasing in the state — a ban that expired Wednesday.

“When I got involved,” said current Americans for American Energy chairman of the board Bill Vasey, a Wyoming state senator, “I looked at some Web pages and of course there were some that were stridently against (AAE), and one of them was this ANWR connection.

Vasey, a Democrat, said he asked AAE President and CEO Greg Schnacke and the organization’s Policy Communications President and CEO Jim Sims to explain. “They said they’d started that way [in Alaska] and things just went sour, so they decided they’d come down [to Colorado] and go a little different direction,” Vasey said.

Sims, whose Golden-based firm “provides guidance to state legislators who run Americans for American Energy,” is the former communications director for Vice President Dick Cheney’s controversial energy task force.

Sims did not return calls and e-mails, but Schnacke, former executive vice president for 13 years of the Colorado Oil & Gas Association, said in a phone interview Wednesday that, while the ANWR project was before his time at AAE, it remains on their radar.

“The state of Alaska funded through a vote of the Legislature a fund to promote the development of ANWR, and they did hire Pac/West, who in turn hired other subcontractors, including Americans for American Energy, to help with that effort,” said Schnacke, who added he did not know the details surrounding the contract’s termination.

He did say, though, that the group remains very active on the Alaska front.

“We’ve been involved with polar bears and other types of issues that have been taken into the netherworld of politics as opposed to science, and so we’ve commented on those issues, and we’ve discussed what’s available in terms of possible energy reserves that are supported by the state of Alaska,” Schnacke said.

“There’s a lot of support for energy development up there. We support ANWR. We’ve supported a couple of pieces of legislation that were introduced in Congress this year, and one of them included ANWR, and we support the development of oil there.”

Mainstream environmental groups say AAE’s “Strike back at terrorists” and “Stop the war on the poor campaigns” are both thinly veiled attempts to pad the already enormous profits of oil and gas companies by pandering to base-level fears and blaming runaway energy prices on conservationists and politicians instead of the industry itself.

“I’ve seen some of the scurrilous stuff that (AAE’s) put out,” said Dave Alberswerth of the Wilderness Society. “I assume that they’re funded by oil and gas industry interests, but beyond that don’t know too much about them and quite frankly don’t pay too much attention to them. I’ve seen their name-calling, and they really sound like crackpots to me.”

(Image, Americans for American Energy.org)

Fresh off declaring a “total win” in the wake of the U.S. House allowing offshore drilling and oil-shale leasing bans to lapse, the conservative pro-domestic-energy group Americans for American Energy wasted no time pouncing on two prominent environmental groups.

Last week AAE, a nonprofit social welfare organization based in Golden, crowed that its efforts over the past year-and-a-half led to the House moving to drop the nearly three-decade-old ban on offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and lift the commercial oil-shale leasing ban in Colorado and the interior West.

“It is a total win,” AAE President and CEO Greg Schnacke said in a press release. “Congress had to feel the heat to see the light. They listened to the public and to voters on this one.”

The same day the group, which is not required to disclose its donors but which critics say is funded by the oil and gas industry, issued another press release demanding a congressional investigation of what it alleges were improper contacts between environmental groups and U.S. Interior Department officials.

AAE’s allegations, stemming from an inspector general’s probe of the matter, comes just weeks after a report detailing inappropriate contact between Interior Department officials and oil and gas industry workers in Colorado two years ago that involved parties with sex and drugs.

A spokesman for the Wilderness Society, one of the groups fingered by AAE last week for too closely coordinating legislative actions with the National Landscape Conservation System [no mention of hookers and blow], called everything AAE does “political theatrics.”

“Americans for American Energy is an industry-funded disinformation clearinghouse pretty much bent on painting anyone pushing commonsense environmental policy as radicals, when the reality is we’re trying to keep oil and gas development from ruining the wild open spaces, public health, quality of life and well-being,” said Bobby Magill, communications manager for the BLM action center of the Wilderness Society.

Particularly galling to some in Colorado, including 10 small-town mayors who fired off a letter to AAE late last year during the BLM’s approval process for drilling on the Roan Plateau, is the group’s ongoing insistence that if you’re not with them on the “drill, baby, drill” bandwagon, you’re chumming up to Osama Bin Laden and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“We object in the strongest terms possible your repeated attempts to equate any questioning of your industry’s agenda to abetting terrorists,” the group of mountain mayors wrote. “This is a scurrilous and irresponsible effort to muddy the waters and avoid discussion of the real issues and real values at stake.”

AAE’s vice chairman, Republican Utah state Rep. Aaron Tilton, contradicted Schnacke’s “total win” on the House energy bill Monday, calling it “a complete political farce” that didn’t have “any chance of passing” in the Senate. But he did stand by AAE’s blasting of environmental groups for being in bed with terrorists.

“Your intentions may be good, but the net effect is the support of those organizations indirectly,” Tilton said, “the reason being that if you cut off production here and our economic security, and we end up shipping these resources overseas — $700 billion a year annually — a lot of that money ends up in these organization’s hands.”

Having helped to open up the Roan to drilling, AAE is now focused on clearing regulatory hurdles to ramping up oil shale production in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, despite what critics argue is a lack of existing technology and water needed for production, as well as the necessary infrastructure to refine and transport any crude that’s produced.

“We need to wait until we find out if the technology is viable and we’re not there yet,” the Wilderness Society’s Magill said. “We shouldn’t lease until the technology is proven and until they can prove that they can do this in an environmentally sound manner.”

Tilton counters there are workable oil-shale technologies close to coming online or already online in other countries and that not nearly as much water is needed as when the oil-shale industry boomed then just as rapidly busted on Colorado’s Western Slope in the early 80s.

Tilton cites an independent Rand Corporation study that estimates there are about 800 billion barrels of oil trapped in the shale rock of what’s known as the Green River Formation in the three-state region — or roughly three times the known reserves of Saudi Arabia.

But the same report goes on to detail the technological uncertainties associated with extracting the oil and the potentially huge financial and environmental costs, including massive disturbance of the landscape, air and water-quality degradation and at least a 20-year timeframe before as much as 1 million barrels a day could be produced.