Thread by @curious_founder

For the last month I've been reporting on a group of people who travel across America blocking wind and solar projects.

This group has passed clean energy opposition laws in states across the country.

Here's the story of one man who has been doing this for 10+ years.

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For more than a decade, Kevon Martis has traveled the country with little more than a 100 slide PowerPoint presentation.

His goal: Stop America's transition to clean energy.

Martis spent most of his career in the construction industry. But in 2011, he rebranded himself as an energy expert.

He quickly learned that, armed with enough studies and facts, people would listen to him.

In 2012, after successfully blocking a project in his rural Michigan town, Martis was invited to a meeting in D.C. with some of the country's most influential climate deniers.

The event was organized by John Droz of ATI, a think tank funded by fossil fuel companies like Arch Coal.

At the meeting, Droz laid out a strategy to stop clean energy projects across the country.

(More on Droz below)

https://twitter.com/curious_founder/status/1587581943763587072

Key to the strategy was the spread of misinformation, something that Martis proved very effective at.

Over the next few years, Martis traveled everywhere from North Dakota to Ohio to D.C. with a presentation full of misleading facts and cherry-picked studies.

In his presentations, he often cites a London School of Economics study that found wind turbines decreased nearby property values by 11%.

The study had a sample size of 3 parcels of land.

Studies with larger sample sizes have shown little to no impact on property values.

Another common tactic is playing a video of a solar inverter that makes a high-pitched screech. Martis claims all solar farms make this noise.

But that isn't true. It's a video of a single inverter that broke — a rare event made to seem regular.

Some tactics are just strange.

Once he and a few other people traveled around the Midwest to energy forums dressed up as a “death turbine.”

The idea was to convince people that wind energy is dangerous, another falsehood.

This strategy often works. Martis has helped pass anti-clean energy laws in Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana.

He's convinced 10 local governments to pass highly restrictive wind and solar ordinances that make it almost impossible to build projects.

Following some of these successes, ATI — the think tank funded by fossil fuel companies — brought Martis on as a Senior Policy Fellow.

(ATI later rebranded to E&E Legal).

In recent years, Martis has become something of a guru to other clean energy opponents. He regularly advises resident groups around the country.

When I recently joined 40 local opposition Facebook groups, I saw his name and presentations all over.

https://twitter.com/curious_founder/status/1586084131942932482

One executive at a clean energy company told me that if Martis gets to a community before them, their project is almost destine to get delayed or blocked.

This spread of misinformation and the fear that it evokes in local residents and lawmakers is that effective.

And it appears the number of groups using these tactics is quickly growing. Most of the groups that I joined were started in the last two years.

As I've written before, in order to meet our climate targets, we're going to need to build a huge amount of clean energy.

The misinformation spread by Martis and think tanks like E&E Legal is making that already daunting task much harder.

Next week, I'm teaming up with one of my favorite climate journalists to publish the next story in this series.

Subscribe to my newsletter below to get that in your inbox.

Or if you think Twitter will still be around by then, you can follow me here.

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