As the National Wildlife Federation predicted last month, big polluters and their allies have launched a major blitz against clean energy & climate legislation. And now CQ reports the latest wave comes from a mysterious group called the "American Energy Alliance":

The lobbying and advocacy group, which was formed last year, is headed by Thomas J. Pyle, a former energy policy aide to onetime Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas (1985-2006). It is affiliated with the Institute for Energy Research, a public policy center advocating what it terms “freely functioning energy markets.”

So what is the "American Energy Alliance"? The New Mexico Independent tried to find out and didn't get far:

Information on the group is hard to come by. There are no online Federal Energy Regulatory Commission filings, no Internal Revenue Service filings and no way to contact the group. The latest news on an American Energy Alliance comes from 1996, in a Washington Post article describing the group as "a coalition of the National Association of Manufacturers, American Petroleum Institute and Edison Electric Institute." [...]

In the mid-’90s, at least, the group was a group funded by oil companies. David Halvarg wrote an article in The Nation that described the group’s strategy as "’the Tobacco Institute strategy’ of alleging scientific uncertainty."

Tobacco campaigns paid off doctors and scientists, successfully confusing the public for decades. Now big polluters are following in big tobacco's footsteps, trying to muddy the waters on global warming.