Robert Redford, longtime environmental activist and founder of the Sundance Film Festival, was the target of protests this week at Sundance. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) called Redford and the environmental lobby "racist" for its opposition to oil and gas drilling on formerly protected wilderness land. CORE’s leader Niger Innis said that opposition to drilling keeps home heating prices beyond the reach of poor minorities.

Protect the environment or protect the poor? It seems like a real moral quagmire, an ethical puzzle. Dig a little deeper, though, and who can be found crying wolf, or rather, racist? The oil and gas lobby.

From Gristmill.org: “CORE is known for running anti-environmental campaigns, and has taken $275,000 from Exxon since 1998. The book by its leader Roy Innis, “Energy Keepers, Energy Killers: The New Civil Rights Battle,” was published by the right-wing Heartland Institute and leads off with a foreword from Fox commentator Sean Hannity.”

Also present at the Sundance protest was one Bishop Harry Jackson Jr. of the Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Maryland, and chairman of the High-Impact Leadership Coalition. The High-Impact Leadership Coalition is characterized by Consumer Energy Report as “a petroleum industry advocate.” That's putting it mildly: the Coalition's website sports a banner proclaiming DRILL, BABY, DRILL. Now where have we heard that before?

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