The goal was to make wind politically "toxic,"...

[kristopher]

39. The FF industry isn't the only source.

The fossil fuel industry has a network of think tanks that put out propaganda, and they've organized a rather passive internet presence that presents a shallow image of grassroots activism against renewables.
The post people are poking fun of in this thread is a good example of the nature of that effort.

The nuclear industry sees its last opportunity to become the mainstay of global energy being obstructed by the growth of the renewable sector.
In 2003 the Bush's White House Chief of Staff started coordinating with the nuclear industry to organize their workforce along the same lines the military uses for crisis response. The idea was to protect the nuclear industry from bad publicity when negative events occurred and to that end they created teams of industry scientists and public relations personnel who were tasked with responding to any bad publicity with 'facts' that were favorable to the industry.
I use the military designation for these teams and call them Crisis Action Teams. A CAT has all the normal tools of a world class PR organization at its disposal. But in addition it has access to one thing no other group I've seen has - a dedicated network of working professionals who (again modeled on the military) have been inculcated with the philosophy that they are "ambassadors" for the nuclear industry. Through their professional organizations and employers they are charged with going out into all venues of information exchange and representing their industry to a public being led astray by "greenies".
Of course, that is their right - just as it is the right of the fossil fuel industry to promote the interests of their members. But just as we see with the fossil fuel industry, the nuclear industry has problems finding the ethical line separates what is acceptable participation in public debate from can best be termed deceptive propaganda.
In the case of the fossil fuel industry it is largely a top down problem; something we see exemplified by the Koch brothers machinations and the output of groups like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute.
This is where the nuclear industry is most different from the fossil fuel industry - their ethical lapse resides in the unsupervised and tacitly encouraged behavior of the legion of 'ambassadors' they've sent created and unleashed. Originally envisioned as a tool functioning to maintain a sense of reality during crisis' such as Fukushima, this cadre of nuclear evangelicals has morphed into a global presence that dogs the comments sections of newspapers and online publishers of anything positive about renewable energy. They exploit the product of the fossil fuel think tanks in a way that must warm the hears of the members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (in case you don't know ALEC is on a mission to roll back public policy support for renewables at the state level across the country).
DU is a great example of this effort in action. I see virtually no activism against renewables here that I would attribute to the fossil fuel industry. But the efforts of the nuclear industry are unceasing for they (correctly) view renewable energy deployment as an existential threat from a fundamentally incompatible energy system.

FWIW.