(This post is from our new blog: Unofficial Sources.)
The National Petroleum Council includes top executives from Exxon Mobil, Shell and BP America. It has an annual budget of $4.5 million collected from members, and pays its executive director $750,000 in salary and benefits. And it regularly “makes recommendations” to the U.S. Secretary of Energy — as in its recent report “Arctic Potential: Realizing the Promise of U.S. Arctic Oil and Gas Resources,” which advocates changes to regulations that “are limiting Arctic exploration activity.”
So the NPC looks, walks and quacks like lobbyists. But legally it’s a “federal advisory committee,” a little-known type of organization that in appearance and often in reality provides yet another way for corporations to get what they want out of the government.
There are more than 1,000 federal advisory committees, including one about organ transplantation. The Department of Energy alone has 21 others in addition to the NPC. In theory all these federal advisory committees could provide a useful way for a range of experts and regular people to provide feedback on complex issues like the fossil fuel industry. In practice, the NPC is dominated by the industry itself. Of the NPC’s 210 members (all selected by Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and his predecessor), 173, or 82 percent, are from oil and gas companies, corporations that provide them support services, and large utility consumers.
You don’t even have to be a U.S. citizen or represent a U.S. corporation so long as you’re a big enough player in the oil industry — other members include Russell Girling, Canadian CEO and president of Transcanada (the company behind the Keystone XL); Canadian president and CEO of Enbridge, Al Monaco; and Michel Bénézit of the French multinational Total S.A. Members of the financial industry, such as the managing director of JPMorgan Securities, have a seat at the table as well.
So it’s no surprise that, according to a 2004 report by the Center for Public Integrity, Dick Cheney led an NPC committee that pushed for shielding energy company information from FOIA when he was an NPC member and Halliburton CEO during the 1990s. During Cheney’s time there, the council also published a report recommending opening up federal lands in the Rocky Mountains for drilling. By mid-2003, with Cheney in the White House, leasing regulations were indeed lifted and thousands of new wells surveyed.
And while the NPC categorizes its remaining 37 members as “Non-Industry and Not-for-Profit,” they tend to be people like John Deutch — who’s not just the MIT chemistry professor that the NPC lists him as, but also the former head of the CIA. The very few who might be skeptical of the fossil fuel industry’s agenda include Conservation International co-founder Peter Seligmann, Conservation Fund founder Patrick Noonan, and Rocky Mountain Institute founder Amory Lovins. However, their brands of environmentalism have long included partnering with large, polluting corporations, and Seligmann, Noonan and Lovins did not respond to requests to discuss their involvement with the NPC.
The Energy Department’s other advisory committees include a coal council, a nuclear committee, one committed to ultra-deepwater drilling and another to “unconventional” extraction technology like fracking. Although an Energy Department spokesperson pointed out a few advisory committees whose work touches on efficiency and renewable issues, no single federal committee advising the agency exclusively represents a renewable industry like wind or solar the way the NPC reps big oil.
“Multiple administrations, both Democrat and Republican, for almost 70 years have found that it is useful to have this advisory committee function available to them so they can get the consensus advice of a significant and broadly represented set of industry representative,” NPC director Marshall Nichols told The Intercept when asked why the oil industry deserves this special advisory role. “You have to ask them.”
Next up: what the “Arctic Potential” report said, and why.
Photo of Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz: AP/Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call
Good article. It’s deeply refreshing to see *any* coverage of these charming, smart-looking vehicles of elite self-dealing. There are so very many…… all with sparkly clean titles like this one’s. And they have such well laid out, sharp and elegant websites. They bristle with equally well designed PDF brochures that tell you all you need to know.
Well anyone who fuels up at Chevron/Exxon has paid and extra $4,000.oo to $8,000.oo by 100K+/- miles rather than elsewhere so they pay for all this.
Yes, indeed. The three conservationists you mention are all free-marketeers and pro-business hacks. The link you give to Seligmann just says it all, where he shares the board of directors’ table with Walmart, Defense contractors, Goldman Sachs, and all types of top business execs. Also, in an interview in Mother Jones, the other fraud, Amory Lovins, opens up and unveils his own proclivities by saying: “those problems—climate change, oil dependence, and the spread of nuclear weapons—go away if we just use energy in a way that saves money, and since that transition is not costly but profitable, it can actually be led by business, and in its coevolution with civil society is the most dynamic force we have.” Only a free market fundamentalist would confuse sustainability with coevolution with big business….
If Amory Lovins is a free market fundamentalist, we need more like him. He gets the fundamentals right. All of them. Not just the economics of energy, but more importantly the physics and the math. I suspect that a lot of the business leaders do too, thanks to their interactions with him. He’s working, in this case, inside an obviously pathological structure, but I’m betting he is more effective than 100 of us here kvetching about it from the outside.
It is lobbying and it does not belong in a democracy.
Manchmal habe ich den Eindruck, dass wir das, was wir in der Dritten Welt als “Korruption” bezeichnen,
in Deutschland als “Lobbyismus” bezeichnen.
Corporatism, crony capitalism, corruption.
Corruption … crony capitalism and entrenched limited-liability corporatism.
bah.,
sole proprietor @ SBBT (Sell, Buy, Barter & Trade)
An offering for those interested in reading an analysis written by someone who’s able to bring these seemingly disparate issues, covered here at TI, together in a way even someone as dense as I can be can understand. His name is David DeGraw, and I imagine many here already know of him. Here’s the link.
http://daviddegraw.org/
Yippee. Yay. Bernie Sanders is running for President. Everything is going to be alright now. He’ll fight for truth, justice, and the American way. For the denser readers, that’s sarcasm. Thanks, Allen, for showing just how corrupted the process is. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or even a dozen such minded people will NOT be able to change the status quo in any meaningful way. I’m not pessimistic, I’m a realist. I am hopeful in seeing a groundswell of popular uprising in discontent with our present system. As I’ve stated before, I did the math, and if the government had taken the money used to bail out the banks, every home in America could now be generating enough electricity from their new solar systems to be selling it back to the power companies. With lots of money left over. Looking forward to the “Arctic potential” report.
Correction, sorry, Alleen. It’s curious how the mind sees something different than the eye.
I wonder why the government wants consensus advice. Wouldn’t each big oil company be willing to offer “suggestions” individually if the government asked for input? Although a wind and solar advisory committee might seem like a good counter-balance to the big oil and big coal committees, that too would be just another lobbying group looking for special subsidies and special exemptions from the rules that “little people” have to follow.
Indeed, such a system is already in place and already dominated by industry. It’s called “commenting” on proposed federal regulations and is open to anyone. Proposed regs are published in the Federal Register and responses collected and acted on. Of course you’re talking about Congress, and indeed Congresspeople can call, schmooze, or grill anyone they want. Who’s going to refuse their phone calls?
I see nothing particularly wrong with advisory councils except that they pay so well they would have a corrupting influence even if they hired people unconnected with industry. That, and they offer a smokescreen of neutrality as well as operating on top of professional paid lobbyists and corporate spokespeople/advertising. My guess is that if Congress opened up a new, clean venue of public access to their legislative operations it would be clogged with newly-hired 6-figure fluffers within the week.
The ideal would be any transparent mechanism subject to democratic control. But that’s an oxymoron.
if folks here haven’t read Daniel Yergin’s classic The Prize, put it on your reading list for 2015.
He’s a member of the NPC (among other organizations)
https://www.ihs.com/experts/dan-yergin.html
I followed the link but I have exhausted my 2015 budget for books. I did read his cover page though. This guy must be superhuman to be able to attend all the board meetings of all those institutions and think tanks.