When a small handful or Republican Congressmen staged a political stunt on the floor of the House of Representatives to draw attention to the issue of offshore drilling, they may well have hit the law of unintended consequences and created an online space where serious debate about U.S. energy policy could take place.

In 2001, the National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG), lead by Vice President Cheney to “develop a national energy policy designed to help the private sector, and, as necessary and appropriate, State and local governments, promote dependable, affordable, and environmentally sound production and distribution of energy for the future."

This task force met in secret and still has not disclosed information about its activities, despite Freedom of Information Act requests and other efforts by congress. Since then, energy has become a much larger issue as energy prices have soared and it has affected other parts of our economy.

In response to current concerns about energy, a small group of Republican Congressmen staged a pep rally on the floor of the House of Representatives to call for expanded off-shore drilling in the United States. To promote this, they used Twitter to get their message out.

In Twitter, you can aggregate content by using hashtags. A hashtag is a word or abbreviation in a twitter message, that starts with a hashmark, #. Various sites will aggregate all of the messages with the same hashtag.

The message was of these Representatives was to call on Congress not to go on home without voting on off shore drilling. So, they started tagging their twitter messages with the hashtag, #dontgo. They even set up a website, dontgo.us.

Progressive activists felt that this activity on Twitter was little more than astrotruf. Astroturf is a derogatory term for an effort that is manufactured to look like a grassroots movement. So, they responded with a real grassroots effort and started posting their own messages with #dontgo in it. Some of these messages were meant to be humorous, finding ways of putting the phrase #dontgo into a completely unrelated topic.

However, other people saw this as an opportunity to engage in a serious discussion about U.S. Energy policy, an opportunity that they felt had been denied them by the NEPDG. They note it would take 10 to 12 years from the ban being lifted on offshore drilling to actual oil flowing. They have noted to shortage of ships available for offshore drilling. Existing ships are already booked solid for the next five years. They site the business article in the New York Times about the shortage of ships.

They note that the United States consumes 21 million barrels of oil a day, yet only produces 6 million barrels per day. At our current rate of consumption, offshore oil would last for around ten years.

However, an open discussion about energy policy seems not to be of interest to the operatives behind the dontgo website. They set up a ‘NEW SPAM FREE #dontgo TWITTER STREAM’. Apparently, any efforts to have a serious discussion about energy policy is as repellent to the Republican operatives behind dontgo as it was to Vice President Cheney.

Nonetheless, people continue to use dontgo as a space where energy policy can be discussed.