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SWAMP THING REV DR SZABO

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Lee Zeldin is a Chair of America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a policy group backed by Christian Nationalist oil baron Tim Dunn, a major Trump donor who has publicly stated he wants to end the classification of CO2 as a pollutant.

But Doug Burgum, who served as governor of the fracking powerhouse state of North Dakota and has deep ties to the fossil fuel industry, stands to be the major player directing Trump’s energy policy. As Interior Secretary, he’ll oversee hundreds of millions of acres of federal land that oil companies are itching to drill on. But even more, he’ll be coordinating the administration’s “energy dominance” agenda as Trump’s “energy czar,” heading up Trump’s National Energy Council and occupying a seat on the National Security Council.

All told, oil billionaires like Hamm stand to benefit greatly from a new Trump administration that promises to be a close ally of fossil fuel interests, even if this means intensifying the climate chaos that’s destabilizing the world and causing massive human dislocation and suffering.

*Potential Fractures in Billionaire Rule?

There are other billionaire and corporate blocs set to benefit from Trump’s rule, such as private prison and detention companies like CoreCivic and GEO (who Trump Attorney General nominee Pam Biondi lobbied for). And there are a slew of massive individual billionaire donors, from the railroad heir magnate Timothy Mellon to ultra-right shipping barrons Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, who gave enormous sums to Trump and other Republicans.

While we face daunting challenges in a period of intensified direct billionaire rule, it’s also worth remembering that there is potential for fissures within the billionaire class. Trump’s cabinet contains blocs that are in tension with each other: neocons versus isolationists, austerity backers who also want vast government subsidies for corporate elites, and people who want to calm markets versus people who want to impose tariffs or just seek political revenge. Trump is notoriously capricious and volatile and is quick to turn on those who were once insiders.

And of course, there’s the fundamental conflict between Trump’s mere rhetoric of populism and his true agenda of billionaire rule that will further immiserate the working class. This will be a challenging period for progressive forces, but the left should seek to monitor and, to the extent possible, exploit divisions among billionaires.

Note: Maps in this post may be updated as new information comes along

This is the first in a new series of LittleSis posts mapping out billionaire power in current U.S. politics, including the new Trump administration. To see the latest posts in this LittleSis series, sign up for our newsletter and follow us on X, Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram.

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AI Overview

Major U.S. fossil fuel trade groups and companies—including entities like the American Petroleum Institute and major oil corporations—spent decades running coordinated public relations and lobbying campaigns that downplayed, questioned, or outright denied the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming. Congressional investigations and extensive archival research show that while internal scientists warned leadership about the warming risks of carbon dioxide as early as the 1970s, the industry publicly promoted doubt to protect profits and delay climate regulations. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Evolution of Industry Messaging

For deep dives into congressional findings on these strategies, read the U.S. Senate Budget Committee Report on Big Oil's Deception. [1, 2]

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IFrame Content

My family’s morning routine is usually pretty ordinary. We wake up early, drink some coffee and get our 1-year-old ready for daycare. But one Wednesday morning last month, I found myself uttering to my wife a sentence that sounded frankly surreal to both of us: “Just to let you know, I’m about to call Trump.”

Then, hoping to avoid any urgent diaper events, I ducked into the next room and dialed up the president.

I’d been trying to reach President Donald Trump for a few days. Each time, my heart would start pounding. After nearly two decades as a journalist, I’m reasonably used to talking to powerful people. But cold-calling the president of the United States — on his personal cellphone — made me feel like a cub reporter all over again.

“Hello?” a voice said on the other end of the line. This time, the president had picked up.

I introduced myself and told Trump I’m a reporter with ProPublica.

“I’m writing a story about a big supporter of yours in the oil industry, Jeff Hildebrand,” I said. “Can I ask what you think about him?”

By this point I had spent months reporting on Hildebrand, a little-known billionaire — and major Trump donor — who owns an empire of low-producing oil and gas wells across the country. “Stripper wells” like these contribute relatively little to the U.S. energy supply but emit vast amounts of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas.

By calling the president, I was hoping for some color on his relationship with Hildebrand. He had, after all, named Hildebrand’s wife ambassador to Costa Rica. My reporting so far had also revealed that the administration was gathering advice from oil industry groups backed by Hildebrand, and that it planned to weaken environmental regulations on stripper wells — potentially making Hildebrand even richer.

“I hear he does a good job,” Trump replied. “Don’t know him very well. OK?”

At first I thought the exchange undermined my story, making Hildebrand seem less central to the president’s energy policies than I’d suspected. But I realized that Trump’s comments illustrated something important about how this administration works. Trump appeared to have little clue about Hildebrand’s business, but when I mentioned that it was threatened by the “Biden methane rules,” the president was quick to respond, “Certainly we do the opposite of what Biden did.”

Trump, in other words, may be only vaguely aware of the people and groups helping to rewrite all manner of consequential policies. But what matters in Washington right now are not so much technical policy details but support for the president and an affinity with the broader ideological project: Deregulate everything.

Even if the president is only loosely familiar with Hildebrand, the oil tycoon is someone you should know about. As a climate reporter, I’m always looking for ways to make the seemingly abstract problem of global warming feel more concrete, approachable and even personal. With Hildebrand, I felt I had found a compelling character who is also the poster boy for a hugely consequential issue: Stripper wells collectively contribute just 6% of the nation’s oil and gas, but scientists have found they’re responsible for roughly half the sector’s methane pollution. That means they play an outsize role in climate change, which is amplifying heat waves, droughts and wildfires.

My previous reporting has shown that a former lobbyist for Hildebrand’s company — who now has a top post at the Environmental Protection Agency — has been rewriting methane regulations with advice from the oil industry. (An EPA spokesperson said the official “fulfilled all his ethical obligations to the letter.”)

The EPA’s press office declined to comment on the details of its plans but confirmed it is working on a proposal to “provide relief” to the oil industry, saying in a statement, “We heard consistently from American oil and natural gas producers (shocker that we meet with stakeholders) that the Biden-Harris Administration’s oil and gas methane regulations were unworkable and unnecessarily restricted American energy dominance.”

In the story we ultimately published, I took a deep dive into how Hildebrand made his fortune, racking up dozens of environmental violations across the country, and now stands to benefit from the rollback that his former lobbyist is carrying out.

I asked Hildebrand multiple times for an interview, even sending a letter to his home, but he didn’t respond. A spokesperson for his company, Hilcorp, said its operations complied with state and federal rules, adding that Hilcorp was “proud” of recent efforts to reduce its methane emissions.

As with many climate change stories, it can all sound pretty bleak. But in a world where global warming fixes can seem impossibly daunting, limiting methane pollution from stripper wells is the rare low-hanging fruit, Andrew Logan of Ceres, a climate advocacy group, told me. “If you could lose 6% of production and cut emissions in half, who wouldn’t make that trade?” Logan said.

Instead, the Trump administration is doubling down on the forms of energy that contribute most to global warming. In January, the president invited Hildebrand and two dozen other energy executives to the White House to discuss investing in Venezuela’s decrepit oil industry — which emits more methane, relative to production, than almost any other major oil producing country, according to the International Energy Agency.

Many of the executives couched their enthusiasm with caveats. ExxonMobil’s CEO called Venezuela “uninvestable” without changes to its legal system. The head of ConocoPhillips wanted U.S. government financing.

But Hildebrand had already seen how loyalty could be rewarded. Even though he had no notable operations outside the U.S., he hunched toward a microphone and said in a halting voice, “Hilcorp is fully committed and ready to go to rebuilding the infrastructure in Venezuela.”

“That’s good,” Trump said. “You’ll be very happy.”

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ref apr 1 2026

EPA’s Aaron Szabo Once Helped Write Oil Industry Argument Against Methane Rules — ProPublica

The Trump administration official leading an effort to loosen rules on methane pollution was an unnamed author of key industry arguments against those same rules just four years ago when he was an oil and gas lobbyist.

Aaron Szabo, an assistant administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, is listed in PDF metadata as the author of a January 2022 comment letter objecting to proposed controls on methane emissions in the oil and gas industry. The letter was submitted to the EPA by the American Exploration and Production Council, which represents some of the industry’s largest emitters of the planet-warming gas, including ConocoPhillips, Diversified Energy and Hilcorp. Szabo’s name does not appear in the document itself, but it can be found in information embedded by the software used to create the PDF file.

Szabo was registered as a lobbyist for one of the AXPC’s lesser-known members, Ovintiv, when he drafted the arguments against the restrictions, which were finalized later in the Biden administration. He has also lobbied for other clients in the oil and chemicals sectors. While he did not hide that work during his confirmation last year as head of the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, he described it in terms that avoided any mention of efforts to influence climate policy: “I learned how regulated entities comply with the federal government’s thousands of regulations and policies. I also saw firsthand that the people working in these companies want to ensure the environment is properly protected.”

In his current role overseeing federal climate rules at the EPA, Szabo has been soliciting input and even specific regulatory language from oil industry groups that stand to gain from watered-down methane rules, according to internal emails, calendar entries and records of closed-door conversations reviewed by ProPublica.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., the ranking Democrat on the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, pointed to Szabo’s previous lobbying as evidence that the EPA had effectively been captured by the oil and gas industry. “Now he can do Big Oil’s dirty work from inside the EPA,” Whitehouse told ProPublica in an email.

As part of its plan to “unleash American energy,” the Trump administration has waged an unprecedented campaign against regulations on fossil fuels, the main cause of global warming. One of its biggest moves was to repeal the “endangerment finding” that classified greenhouse gases as pollutants — the basis for the EPA’s authority to limit emissions at all. Rather than throw out the methane rules entirely, however, Szabo’s office is working to revise them, emails and documents show. It has already delayed many of the compliance deadlines until next year.

Methane, the main component of natural gas, is a climate superpollutant, responsible for one-third of the rise in global temperatures since preindustrial times, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. When it escapes into the atmosphere without being burned for energy, it can trap 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide, research shows. The oil and gas business is the largest industrial source of U.S. methane emissions, in part because of leaks from poorly maintained equipment. If it is uneconomical to collect the gas for sale, companies sometimes intentionally release it in a process known as venting.

To cut down on methane discharges, President Joe Biden’s EPA imposed much stricter controls on oil and gas operations, including requiring increased monitoring for leaks and equipment upgrades. According to agency estimates, the new rules would have lowered the industry’s methane emissions by nearly 80%. And, given that the gas breaks down relatively quickly, this would have been one of the fastest ways to reduce global warming.

Industry groups pushed back. In the January 2022 letter that Szabo helped to draft, the AXPC used the word “burdensome” 10 times to describe the new requirements and pushed for more “flexibility” to allow for less expensive leak-detection methods and less frequent monitoring, among other requests.

The group also cast doubt on the rules’ expected climate and health benefits, highlighting what it called “the importance of communicating the significant uncertainties within the estimates.” The AXPC’s chief executive, Anne Bradbury, added in a later statement that the rules risked “undercutting US production in the near and long-term — which will lead to increased energy costs and reduced energy security.”

Do you have any information we should know about Trump’s EPA, oil industry lobbying or methane pollution? Alex Cuadros can be reached by email at alex.cuadros@propublica.org and on Signal at alexcuadros.63.

The AXPC failed to persuade the Biden administration to change its approach. But it renewed its push after President Donald Trump returned to office and ordered federal agencies to “suspend, revise, or rescind” any “undue burden” on domestic energy production.

Szabo, after two years as a fellow at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, joined the administration on Day 1 as an adviser to EPA chief Lee Zeldin. He immediately signaled that he planned to weaken the regulations he had argued against as a lobbyist. His staff met with AXPC representatives as early as Feb. 6, 2025, less than three weeks after Trump’s inauguration, to discuss its petition to “reconsider” the methane rules, according to emails and calendar entries obtained through public records requests and shared with ProPublica by Fieldnotes, a watchdog group that investigates the oil and gas industry. His staff went on to meet with them at least twice more, and Szabo himself was listed as a required attendee for a meeting with Bradbury last July.

The AXPC didn’t respond to emails from ProPublica seeking comment.

According to records of closed-door conversations reviewed by ProPublica, other oil industry representatives have described their meetings with Szabo and his staff as highly favorable to their interests. “Mr. Szabo assured us that the EPA is focused on these [methane] rules and doing everything that can be done to limit the damage they will cause,” the leadership of a major trade group wrote to its members last year in an internal newsletter.

Lee Fuller, of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, also spoke glowingly about his meeting with Szabo’s office on a conference call with industry representatives last year.

“It was one of the more fascinating meetings that we’ve ever had, just because they were suddenly willing to talk to us,” he said. “And they’re also suddenly willing to talk about things that we’ve been trying to get them to do for years, and they’ve never even let it kind of come onto the radar screen.”

The IPAA declined to answer specific questions from ProPublica but linked to a September 2025 letter in which the group publicly asked the EPA for exceptions to the methane rules.

Szabo’s office has even invited oil industry groups to offer specific wording for the revised rules. “We had a call several weeks back re. pneumatics on temporary equipment,” Mike O’Connor of the American Petroleum Institute wrote to an EPA official, referring to devices that are a major source of methane emissions. “EPA had informally requested input on this topic and any suggested reg. text language. We are providing the attached draft document as informal input to EPA’s inquiry.” The draft called for a number of exemptions.

The shift in priorities under Szabo can also be seen in communications from the EPA itself. In a June 2025 email reviewed by ProPublica, an agency official asked O’Connor to meet and discuss alternative leak-detection methods. Echoing the language in the AXPC comment that Szabo helped to draft, the official spoke of “the additional flexibility we would like to pursue.”

“I think their agenda was, from what I could tell, to do what industry wanted,” one former EPA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe confidential discussions, said of Szabo and other Trump appointees at the agency.

“Since when is it a bad thing for public officials to ask the public what they think?” the EPA said in an emailed statement, referring to Szabo’s interactions with oil industry representatives. Szabo “fulfilled all his ethical obligations to the letter. He met with EPA career ethics staff when he started at EPA to ensure he is aware of and complies with federal ethics requirements.”

Szabo’s affinities are hardly a secret. He is thanked by name in the EPA chapter of Project 2025, the deregulatory blueprint for the second Trump administration. As part of the nomination process for his appointment at the EPA, he also submitted ethics disclosures listing oil, natural gas and chemicals companies he had lobbied for.

Still, at his confirmation hearing on March 5 last year, he repeatedly declined to elaborate on his role in Project 2025, beyond saying he provided “general advice and thoughts” on the Clean Air Act.

I report on climate change and how people and institutions are responding to it.

Need to Get in Touch?

I welcome tips or documents about Trump administration climate policy or actions by private companies or institutions that may impact the climate.

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https://heated.world/p/charlie-kirks-extremism-was-fossil

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Charlie Kirk was a fossil fuel industry plant

Big Oil's money gave Kirk a larger platform to spread baseless climate conspiracy theories—as well as other extremist views.

Emily Atkin

Sep 18, 2025

The term “plant” is often used to describe someone whose success was not solely the result of a grassroots movement, but instead bolstered by powerful corporate interests who secretly poured massive amounts of money into ensuring their fame.

For example: Charlie Kirk was a fossil fuel industry plant. The right-wing activist murdered last week built his massive platform for racism, sexism, transphobia and climate denial in part by using anonymous funding from Big Oil.

Turning Point USA, the group Kirk founded to ignite a culture war on college campuses, has managed to hide much of its funding sources. Roughly half of the group’s $40 million in income in 2020 came from 10 anonymous donors, NBC News reported.

But in 2017, Kirk admitted that some of the group’s anonymous donors “are in the fossil fuel space.” Speaking to The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Kirk disclosed that he’d fundraised for TPUSA at the annual meeting of the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), as well as the 2017 board meeting of the National Mining Association.

In those meetings, Kirk promised oil and gas companies he’d fight “the myth that fossil fuels are dirty,” and target the “leftist professors” on college campuses who “perpetuated” the “myth.”

The meetings “went great,” Kirk told Mayer. The IPAA’s president, Barry Russell, wound up joining TPUSA’s advisory council, where he remains today. (Kirk had said that most advisory council members are also TPUSA donors).

How Kirk tried to re-popularize climate denial

Over the next nine years, Kirk worked to chip away at young Americans’ rising concerns about climate change. He did this by claiming climate science is still debated—and then peddling the conspiracy theory that all climate policies are a Democratic bid for government control.

“A tyrant’s fantasy is to have a massive green economy transition,” he said in 2023. “You can get rid of private property, you can control people’s movements. It’s fundamentally the abolition of civilization as we know it.”

To justify his claim that climate science is unsettled, Kirk would often cite “experts” who downplay the seriousness of planetary heating. For example, in 2023, Kirk claimed climate science is “debated” because “a Nobel prize winning scientist recently came out and said there is no real climate crisis.” Kirk also cited the opinions of John Coleman, the now-deceased founder of the Weather Channel, as evidence that climate change is a hoax.

But the experts Kirk cited were almost always unqualified. For example, Coleman was a meteorologist, not a climate scientist, and his claims were frequently debunked by publishing climate scientists. The Nobel-Prize-winning scientist Kirk referenced, John Clauser, is not a climate scientist, and won the Nobel for physics in the 1970s. No other Nobel Prize-winning physicist denies mainstream climate science; in fact, some of them are climate scientists themselves.

Coincidentally, Kirk never considered the opinions of publishing climate scientists to be credible. Instead, he reflexively dismissed their warnings as "garbage … designed for one thing: power and control.”

A YouTube caption for one of Kirk’s videos calls climate change “nonsense” and “boulder dash” [sic]

Kirk’s final climate segment

Kirk’s continued to frame climate change as a conspiracy in an interview with Trump’s Secretary of Energy Chris Wright three weeks before his death.

In the interview, Kirk and Wright spoke about the Department of Energy’s recently-released 151-page report claiming climate change is not a serious problem. That report was put together by five contrarian scientists personally recruited by Wright, a former fracking executive.

Kirk praised the report, and dismissed all criticism against it as politically motivated. “We think this is all politicized,” Kirk said. “This is driven towards a environmentalist agenda that is trying to weaken American energy dominance.”

Wright agreed, and said all the critics of his climate report only took issue with who wrote it—not the data within it. “They want to impugn the writers or impugn the way we reference people,” Wright said. “They want to find little things. What we want to talk about is the data.”

This, however, was objectively false. The data within Wright’s report was meticulously criticized by 85 publishing climate scientists, who issued a 439-page rebuttal pointing out various misrepresentations, messy citations, cherry-picking, and factual errors. In addition, many of the scientists cited in Wright’s report complained that their data was misrepresented, and explained their complaints in detail.

Perhaps the most mind-boggling part of Kirk’s final climate interview, however, was the argument he used to claim there can be no such thing as a scientific consensus about climate change.

”Science does not have consensus,” he said. “This is a very important thing. Right? Science says nothing. Scientists say things. Okay? Science never talks. Science is silent. This is a good thing that could apply to everything.”

Kirk was certainly correct that scientists say things. But over the course of his life, Kirk was set on ignoring most of them. For example, the vast majority of publishing climate scientists have been saying the same thing over and over for decades: That heat-trapping pollution from fossil fuels, industrial agriculture, and deforestation is steadily raising the average temperature of the planet—and that the warming poses an existential threat to human, animal and plant life.

Kirk ignored those scientists for a simple reason: Because listening to them would mean accepting that fossil fuels harm people. Neither Kirk nor his donors could accept that reality.

The inseparable connection between climate denial and right-wing extremism

The point of this newsletter is not to claim that Kirk was paid by the fossil fuel industry to say things he didn’t believe about climate change. I think most online political commentators genuinely believe what they’re saying, no matter who they’re funded by.

The point is to reinforce what has been true for decades: the fossil fuel industry is behind most of the climate disinformation you see and hear today.

Big Oil has spent billions sowing doubt about the reality and severity of climate change. They’ve done this for one reason: Solving climate change would require using less of their product, and using less of their product would hurt their bottom line.

Pretty much everyone with a massive following who spreads climate denial derives money or power from fossil fuels. The sooner everyone understands that, the better.

The other point here is to remind everyone about the inseparable connection between climate denial and other types of right-wing extremism. Often, you’ll hear climate activists debate whether it’s a good idea to get involved in larger movements for justice, or whether it’s better to just “stay in their lane” of climate policy.

The opposition to climate action is not having that debate. Instead, they are funding right-wing extremists who say things like the Civil Rights Act was "huge mistake;” that Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was "a diversity hire;" that trans people are responsible for inflation; and that Taylor Swift should "submit to [her] husband." As long as “climate change is fake” is part of that rhetoric, they don’t care what the rest of it looks like.

Racism, sexism, and transphobia is being used to build the climate denier base. If you want climate action, you can’t pick and choose which you fight back against.

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nice overview

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/**2021/02**/biden-climate-change-actions-anger-big-oil/

President Joe Biden signed executive actions last week prioritizing solutions to the “existential threat” of climate change, drawing the ire of many key players in the politically powerful oil and gas industry.

Biden’s actions pressed pause on the leasing of federal lands and waters for oil drilling, set a goal of keeping 30 percent of federal lands for conservation purposes and announced the electrification of the federal government’s fleet of vehicles. The move comes a week after Biden revoked the permits for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline just hours after his inauguration, following through on a campaign-trail promise.

Leading up to the 2020 election, the oil and gas industry contributed around $1.6 million more to former President Donald Trump than to Biden. Trump painted himself as an ally to the industry on the stump and throughout his presidency — though industry insiders told Politico in 2020 that the Trump administration was “a mixed bag” and “more like ‘meh’” than the windfall they had hoped for in 2016.  

The oil industry spent millions in 2020 to try to keep a GOP majority in the Senate. Valero, Chevron and ConocoPhillips, among the few corporations that give to super PACs, gave at least $1 million each this election cycle to the Senate Leadership Fund, a conservative super PAC that spent $271 million to campaign against Democrats vying for the Senate.

Pausing land and water leases ‘to the extent possible’

Biden’s decision to halt future leases of federal land, pending a comprehensive review of the climate impact, caused an uproar among oil and gas companies and trade associations. Just hours after Biden formalized the order, theWestern Energy Alliance announced it would sue the Biden administration, alleging the move violates existing law.

Most drilling occurs on private land, rather than federal property. In 2017, approximately 24 percent of oil and 13 percent of natural gas extracted in the United States came from federal lands. According to analysis by the U.S. Geological Survey, around a quarter of U.S. emissions come from the combustion and extraction of resources from federal lands. 

Oil and gas companies rushed to stockpile drilling permits during Trump’s lameduck period — doubling the number of permit requests over the same period in 2019, according to an AP report.Under Biden’s order, oil and gas companies can continue to obtain new permits to drill on land that has already been leased. 

Experts say the executive action likely won’t immediately impact rates of oil extraction in the U.S. As of 2019, there were 38,294 leases active across the country, concentrated mostly in the American West. Once a lease has been issued, companies have 10 years to begin production on the land before the lease terminates.

The oil and gas industry’s leading trade association, the American Petroleum Institute, came out against the order. API President Mike Sommers criticized Biden’s suspension of federal agencies’ authority to issue leases of federal land to drilling companies in a Jan. 21 statement. 

“Restricting development on federal lands and waters is nothing more than an ‘import more oil’ policy. Energy demand will continue to rise—especially as the economy recovers—and we can choose to produce that energy here in the United States or rely on foreign countries hostile to American interests,” Sommers said.

In 2020, API’s PAC spent $88,200 to support Republican candidates, giving $5,000 to the Great America PAC, a Trump-aligned Carey committee.  API also dropped $5.3 million to employ 40 lobbyists, reporting lobbying 66 individual bills. The institute’s lobbying spending fell during Trump’s administration after trending upward throughout former President Barack Obama’s two terms in office.  

Another leading oil and gas industry association, the Independent Petroleum Association of America, has also come out in opposition to the action. 

“We think it was really misguided,” Senior Vice President for Government RelationsDan Naatztold an Arkansas TV news team. “It impacts jobs and economies through the inner-Mountain West, all the way through the country.”

In 2020, the organization’s PAC spent $215,300 in campaign contributions, giving $10,000 each to Sens. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), and former Sens. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) and Martha McSally (R-Ariz.).

Biden framed the executive action as a jobs package,remarking, “today is climate day in the White House which means today is jobs day at the White House,” just before he signed the executive actions. Labor leaders say they are waiting to hear how exactly Biden will replace jobs lost in energy sectors.

“It’s too glib and easy to say someone working in the mines can get a solar job. That is too simplistic,” Jason Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, told the Washington Examiner. “There is a mismatch between where energy jobs are getting lost and where they are created. We have to close that gap, but we also have to be real and help economies diversify their economies in ways based on their own assets.”

Oil corporations emphasize that gap. The Global Energy Institute, a subsidiary of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, came out against some of Biden’s climate actions, claiming it would lead to widespread unemployment.

“Without the prospect of future leases, investment and planning will begin to dry up immediately, thwarting job creation and the economic growth at the worst possible time,” the Institute’s President Marty Durbin said in a statement.

The Chamber of Commerce perennially favors Republicans and dropped $5.7 million in outside spending in 2020.

Keystone canceled, frustrating some oil companies

The Chamber of Commerce also condemned Biden’s action to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline, a project widely opposed by environmental advocates, indigenous communities and scientists.

“This is a politically motivated decision that is not grounded in science. It will harm consumers and put thousands of Americans in the building trades out of work,” Durbin said.

The Keystone XL pipeline was proposed in 2008, vetoed by Obama in 2015 and promptly re-initiated by Trump in 2016 along with another controversial project, the Dakota Access Pipeline. Environmental and indigenous rights advocates are now calling on Biden to cancel the latter pipeline, which abuts the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.

That pipeline is owned by Energy Transfer Partners, an oil and gas conglomerate that gave more in campaign contributions than any other company in the industry. Ninety-nine percent of its donations went to Republican candidates and committees. In 2020, the company’s co-founder and board chair, Kelcy Warren, donated a whopping $10 million to America First Action, a Trump-affiliated super PAC.

Biden’s climate actions are also drawing criticism from Republican lawmakers from oil-rich states who have benefited from industry contributions. Sens. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), Steve Daines (R-Mont.), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), Jim Risch (R-Idaho), John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) and John Hoeven (R-N.D.) announced Jan. 22 that they would introduce legislation to overturn Biden’s executive action and re-issue permits to the Keystone XL Pipeline, which was slated to pass through Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska before connecting to an existing pipeline in Kansas.

“We came so far during the last administration – from prioritizing American energy development to ending the far-left’s war on fossil fuels,” said Inhofe in a statement announcing the legislation.

Throughout his career, Inhofe has received in excess of $2.2 million in campaign contributions from oil and gas companies. Daines and Barrasso have each received $1.2 million from the industry.

The group’s bill is a symbolic gesture to the industry and its supporters without any real hope of passing the Senate, where Democrats wield a majority, albeit narrowly. The oil and gas industry spent heavily to prevent the upper chamber from swinging blue, giving around $600,000 each to Republican Senate candidates in Georgia Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who both lost narrowly to Democratic challengers in January runoffs. The American Petroleum Institute donated $5 million to the Senate Leadership Fund in late November, after every Senate campaign had concluded save the two ultra-expensive Georgia races. 

Faced with pressure from Washington, other corporations look to adapt

Some energy companies are taking a different tact, announcing plans to adapt their business model to thrive in a Biden administration that prioritizes conservation and climate action.

Industry giant Exxon Mobil announced Feb. 1, just days after Biden’s executive order, that it would initiate massive investments in carbon capture technology aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The company, whose employees favored Biden over Trump in 2020 campaign contributions, will spend $3 billion over the next five years to build up a new subsidiary business: ExxonMobil Low Carbon Solutions. 

General Motors has committed to only manufacturing zero-emissions vehicles by the year 2035, inline with Biden’s commitment to electrifying the government’s fleet. Ford’s new CEO has also pledged to restructure production plans, prioritizing the addition of electric vehicles to its portfolio, which currently features only one fully-electric model.

The American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, an oil-refining trade association that spent $3.2 to lobby the government in 2019, responded to that provision by reaching out to an unlikely ally: biofuel manufacturers. AFPM reportedly hopes to create an alliance with the competitor industry to lobby Biden to revise his fleet electrification plans in order to include cars powered by low-emission gasoline made from a mix of gasoline and ethanol.

public cit b buddies

Independent Petroleum Association of America: Public record requests indicate extensive connections between the IPAA and the Interior Department. Bernhardt did legal work for this trade group, which represents producers and refiners of oil and gas, and which has long been critical of endangered species protections, including for the greater sage grouse and American burying beetle, that make drilling on public lands more difficult.  Just months into the Trump administration, the IPAA’s CEO, Barry Russell, noted in a private meeting with his members that Bernhardt had previously led an IPAA legal team set up to challenge federal endangered species rules. “Well, the guy that actually headed up that group is now the No. 2 at Interior,” Russell said, according to Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, which obtained a recording of the event.  “So that’s worked out well.”

Emails obtained by the Western Values Project through the Freedom of Information Act indicate that IPAA lobbyists worked closely at the start of the Trump administration to arrange meetings with key Interior Department officials about their plans for the greater sage grouse,a small bird that has faced severe habitat loss.  In one e-mail, IPAA lobbyist Samantha McDonald requested a call with an Interior Department official and several oil companies, noting that “to ignore the problem could potential (sic) jeopardize several dozen projects in Wyoming.” The IPAA achieved a long-sought goal in March 2019 when the Trump administration weakened protections on millions of acres of sage grouse habitat, rolling back Obama-era protections that were intended to boost the bird’s population and prevent it from being placed on the endangered species list.

In another  case, the IPAA’s McDonald reached out to high-level Interior Department officials on behalf of an IPAA member, Cimarex Energy, to get a drilling permit approved that had been rejected. This incident was first reported by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. And in yet another case, McDonald pressed Trump administration officials on efforts to remove the American burying beetle from the endangered species list, citing “significant impacts on our Oklahoma producers.” In May 2019, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed to downgrade the shiny, orange-spotted beetle from endangered to threatened status, a move the IPAA praised as “long overdue.”

National Ocean Industries Association (NOIA):  Bernhardt has a longstanding relationship with this trade group, which represents the offshore oil and gas drilling industry. At Brownstein Hyatt,  Bernhardt represented NOIA in a lawsuit brought by environmental groups to challenge an Obama administration offshore lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico after theDeepwater Horizon disaster. Bernhardt appears to have been a regular speaker at NOIA’s annual meetings, speaking at a 2011 spring meeting, appearing in photos with former Vice President Dick Cheneyand industry executives at the group’s fall 2013 meeting, and speaking again at the 2014 annual meeting. At the latter event, Bernhardt gave a presentation on regulatory issues in the wake of the April 2010 oil rig explosion, which killed 11 people and triggered an 87-day oil spill. In the presentation, Bernhardt argued that federal rules “do not impose liability on contractors” such as Halliburton, the BP contractor that was found to have used flawed cement at the BP offshore well. “The agency’s actions create a minefield where regulations are applied to an entire class of people to whom the application of the regulations was never contemplated,” Bernhardt wrote. The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017 ruled in  favor of the industry’s argument, holding that the Interior Department’s oil drilling safety division does not have authority over contractors.

Page 1 of David Bernhardt: Offshore Issues a Look Ahead Panel Presentation(4/2014)]

Under the Trump administration, the Interior Department has been receptive to input from NOIA officials and members.  A report from Documented identified 12 meetings between NOIA and Interior Department officials in 2017 and 2018. The Trump administration has been eager to grant the offshore oil drilling industry’s wishes, including rollback of offshore oil drilling safety rules imposed after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. 

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The Interior Department even approved hundreds of onshore and offshore drilling permits and leases during the 35-day government shutdown of 2019, a departure from Interior’s past practice. However, a White House executive order repealing an Obama-era ban on offshore drilling was blocked by a federal judge in March 2019 and, as result, has been delayed indefinitely. Meanwhile, bipartisan opposition to offshore drilling has been growing, with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) temporarily blocking the confirmation of Bernhardt’s deputy, Katharine MacGregor, over concerns about the Trump administration’s stance on oil drilling off the Florida coast...

https://moneytrails.org/issue/independent-petroleum-association-of-america-ipaa/

Independent Petroleum Association Of America’s Website Says It Represents Thousands of Independent Oil And Gas Producers And Services Companies Across the Country. “Today, IPAA represents the thousands of independent oil and natural gas producers and service companies across the United States. America’s independent producers develop 91 percent of the nation’s oil and natural gas wells. These companies account for 83 percent of America’s oil production, 90 percent of its natural gas and natural gas liquids (NGL) production, and support over 4.5 million American jobs:{. A recent analysis has shown that independent producers are investing 150 percent of their U.S. cash flow back into American oil and natural gas development to enhance their already aggressive efforts to find and produce more energy.” IPAA, :(style="background-color:#faf8f5;"):}:[:{accessed:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}: :{10/16/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::{]}:

IPAA Says It Advocates Its Members Views Before Congress, The White House And Federal Agencies. :{“IPAA is a national trade association headquartered in Washington, D.C. It serves as an informed voice for the exploration and production segment of the industry, and advocates its members’ views before the United States Congress, The White House, and federal agencies. IPAA provides economic and statistical information about the U.S. exploration and production industry. IPAA also develops investment symposia and other networking and business development opportunities for its members.” IPAA, :(style="background-color:#faf8f5;"):}:[:{accessed:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}: :{10/16/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::{]}:

The IPAA Has Ties To Several High-Ranking Employees In Donald Trump’s Interior Department

IPPA Tells Oil Executives They Have “Unprecedented” And “Direct Access” To Interior Secretary David Bernhardt

Independent Petroleum Association of America’s (IPAA) Political Director Told Oil Executives They Had “Direct Access” To Interior Secretary David Bernhardt. :{“Just five months into the Trump era, the energy developers who make up the Independent Petroleum Association of America had already watched the new president order a sweeping overhaul of environmental regulations that were cutting into their bottom lines — rules concerning smog, fracking and endangered species protection. […] Dan Naatz, the association’s political director, told the conference room audience of about 100 executives that Bernhardt’s new role meant their priorities would be heard at the highest levels of Interior….’We know him very well, and we have direct access to him, have conversations with him about issues ranging from federal land access to endangered species, to a lot of issues,’ Naatz said, according to an hourlong recording of the June 2017 event in Laguna Niguel provided to Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.” Reveal News, :(style="background-color:#faf8f5;"):}:[:{03/23/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::{]}:

Bernhardt Knew About At Least One Meeting Between Interior Official Todd Willens And IPAA On Proposed Changes To The Sage Grouse Plan

Bernhardt’s Calendar Showed He Recused Himself from a Sage Grouse Meeting Attended By Members of the IPAA: “Interior Secretary David Bernhardt — who is being investigated for potential conflicts of interest with the oil and gas industry, department officials confirmed Monday — recused himself from a Wyoming sage grouse meeting with a Casper oilman in late 2017 due to the man’s ties to the Independent Petroleum Association of America, according to documents obtained by the Western Values Project.” The meeting was found on Assistant Deputy Secretary Todd Willens’ calendar. *Casper Star Tribune*, [:{04/17/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:]

Bernhardt Worked Directly on Sage Grouse Policy During His Time As Deputy Secretary. :{“The secretary had a proactive role in sage grouse management during his time as deputy secretary, and had numerous meetings with energy companies and groups, including the IPAA, according to calendar items recently disclosed and reviewed by Roll Call.” :(style="background-color:#faf8f5;"):}:*Casper Star Tribune*:{, :(style="background-color:#faf8f5;"):}:[:{04/17/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::{]}:

IPPA Has Requested Information, Meetings, And Other Opportunities For Input Into The Sage Grouse Review Process

David Bernhardt has additional correspondence with former client, IPAA, in December 2017 about the coming amendments for sage grouse plans. E&E, [:{08/07/17:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:]

IPAA, A Former Client Of Bernhardt, Thanked Him For His Work On Sage Grouse

In March 2078, IPAA signed onto a “thank you” letter to Bernhardt for his actions “that rescinded and revised mitigation policies that far exceeded statutory authority.” The letter references issues related to Bernhardt’s role in the sage-grouse review. IPAA letter to David Bernhardt,[:{ :{03/17/18:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:]

During the 2018/19 Government Shutdown, Interior Approved 73 Drilling Permits for Companies On The Board Of IPAA

David Bernhardt is Recused from Working on Particular Matters Involving IPAA until August 3, 2019 Under EO 13770. Bernhardt Ethics Agreement, [:{08/15/17:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:]

David Bernhardt is Recused from Working on Particular Matters Involving the U.S. Oil and Gas Association until August 3, 2019 Under EO 13770. Bernhardt Ethics Agreement, [:{08/15/17:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:]

During the December 2018-January 2019 Government Shutdown, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Approved 20 Onshore Permits For Companies That Sit on the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) Board of Directors Or Are Affiliated of the U.S. Oil and Gas Association (USOGA). “Of the 38 onshore drilling permits approved by the Bureau of Land Management during the shutdown, 20 were for companies that sit on the board of directors of the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) or affiliates of the U.S. Oil and Gas Association (USOGA), both former Bernhardt clients. When seeking office at the Interior Department, Bernhardt listed both trade associations on his ethics recusal and noted IPAA was a source of personal income on his financial disclosure.” *Westwise*,[:{ :{01/30/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:]

IPAA Asked Interior To Reinstate Categorical Exemptions to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and Bernhardt Issued A Memo Stating Exclusions Should Be “Fully and Properly” Considered Before NEPA Reviews

David Bernhardt is Recused from Working on Particular Matters Involving IPAA until August 3, 2019 Under EO 13770. Bernhardt Ethics Agreement, [:{08/15/17:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:]

In 2017, the IPAA Asked Interior to Reinstate Categorical Exclusions To the National Environmental Policy Act. The IPAA “praised Bernhardt in a 2017 letter for helping to reform the National Environmental Policy Act and asked that Interior reinstate ‘categorical exclusions,’ which allow the agency to streamline the analysis required to approve projects that could affect the environment, which can save the energy industry time and money.” [SNL Generation Markets Week, 12/19/17]

Bernhardt Authored A Memo Stating Exclusions Should Be “Fully and Properly” Considered Before NEPA Reviews. “[Bernhardt] later authored a memo stating that categorical exclusions should be ‘fully and properly’ considered before such reviews.” *CNN*, [:{03/05/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:]

IPAA’s President Was Nominated to Serve on the Interior Department’s Royalty Policy Committee

Rory McMinn, A Director Of IPAA, Was Nominated For The Royalty Policy Committee (RPC). DocumentCloud, 17 01162ce, pg. 295, accessed[:{ :{06/21/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:]

Other Interior Officials Have Also Met With IPAA

FWS Director Nominee And Former Monsanto Employee Aurelia Skipwith Has Been Involved In Sage Grouse Protection Rollbacks And Spoke At The IPAA.

Skipwith’s Calendars Show She Has Been Involved In The Rollback of Sage Grouse Protections And Spoke At The Independent Petroleum Association Of America (IPAA). “According to her publically released calendars, Skipwith has been deeply involved in the Trump administration’s rollback of habitat protections for the imperiled sage grouse and spoke at the oil and gas association Independent Petroleum Association of America’s (IPAA) regulators’ forum.” DailyKos, [:{09/11/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:]

Current Deputy Solicitor for Parks and Wildlife Solicitor Karen Budd-Falen Met With The Oil Industry Lobbyists Who Helped “Rewrite” Obama-Era Sage Grouse Management Plans

On June 13, 2019, Karen Budd-Falen had a meeting with representatives from the Independent Petroleum Association Of America (IPAA). In a calendar event titled simply, “Meeting,” Karen Budd-Falen met with people with the email addresses mmiller@ipaa.org and dnaatz@ipaa.org. Karen Budd-Falen Calendar,[:{ :{06/13/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:]

IPAA’s Lobbyists Were “Integrally Involved In Rewriting Sage-Grouse Conservation Plans.” “During the Trump administration, IPAA has been integrally involved in rewriting sage-grouse conservation plans. Documents obtained by the Western Values Project indicate that IPAA lobbyists secured numerous meetings with key Interior Department officials, providing an entré for specific companies to give input into sage-grouse plans. In one instance, IPAA arranged phone calls for Chesapeake Energy, ConocoPhillips, and EOG Resources to ask BLM for specific revisions to sage-grouse maps:{. During the process of amending the sage-grouse conservation plans, IPAA submitted formal comments recommending specific policy changes. It appears that certain IPAA recommendations — such as cutting requirements to offset habitat damage from development with conservation gains elsewhere — were accepted by the BLM, either partially or in full, as a part of the agency’s draft plans.” Center For Western Priorities,:(style="background-color:#faf8f5;"):}:[:{ :{03/14/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::{]}:

Current Associate Deputy Secretary of the Interior James Cason Met With IPAA After Rumors Of Bernhardt’s Nomination To Be Secretary Began To Circulate

Cason Served as Acting Deputy Secretary of the Interior until Bernhardt’s Nomination was Confirmed. Rumors of Bernhardt’s nomination to Deputy Secretary began circulating in January 2017. Cason joined the Trump Administration as Associate Deputy Secretary on January 20, 2017, and served as Acting Deputy Secretary until David Bernhardt was confirmed in July 2017. ProPublica, [:{03/08/17:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:; Washington Post, :{07/24/17:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:]

Interior Chief Of Staff Todd Willens Met With IPAA

On April 26, 2018, Todd Willens had an external meeting with IPAA. They topics discussed at this meeting wereMBTA, Mitigation, and the proposed removal of blanket 4(d). In addition to IPAA staff, this meeting included an employee of Noble Energy, which is also on Bernhardt’s recusal list. :{Todd Willens Department Of Influence Profile, :(style="background-color:#faf8f5;"):}:[:{accessed:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}: :{10/16/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::{, Todd Willens Calendar, 04/26/18]}:

IPAA And Its Members Spend Millions On Campaign Contributions

IPAA’s Political Action Fund Has Made Millions Of Dollars’ Worth Of Campaign Contributions

The IPAA Wildcatters Fund Is A PAC. According to their website, the IPAA Wildcatters Fund is a Political Action Committee that “creates avenues for member involvement in achieving and maintaining a pro-business, pro-oil and gas Congress.” [:{IPAA:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}: :{2019:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}: :{Membership:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}: :{Brochure:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:, accessed 10/23/19]

IPAA Members Have Given Money To The Republican Party For Years

Shell Oil Company Has Given Over $30,000 To The Republican National State Elections Committee Between 1991 And 2019. Open Secrets, accessed[:{ :{06/04/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:]

Chesapeake Energy Corporation Gave $100,000 To The Republican National State Elections Committee. :{Source: Open Secrets, Search for Chesapeake Energy Corporation, accessed:(style="background-color:#faf8f5;"):}:[:{ :{06/04/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::{]}:

QEP Resources, Inc. Gave $25,000 In 2015 And $25,000 In 2017 To The Republican Governors Association. Source: Political Money Line, Search for QEP Resources, Inc., accessed[:{ :{06/04/19]:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:

QEP Resources, Inc. Gave $10,000 To Various Republicans Through Their Political Action Committee (PAC). In 2011, QEP gave $2,500 to Wyoming Republican Cynthia Lummis. In 2017, QEP gave $2,500 to Colorado Republican Kevin McCarthy. In 2018, QEP gave $5,000 to Louisiana Republican Steve Scalise. Source: OpenSecrets, Search for QEP Resources, accessed[:{ :{06/04/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:]

PDC Energy, Inc. Gave $555,000 To The Republican Governors Association And $350,000 To The Republican Attorneys General Association in 2018. Source: Political Money Line, Search for PDC Energy, Inc, accessed[:{ :{06/05/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:]

Pioneer Natural Resources Co. Gave $130,000 To The Republican Governors Association between 2010-2018. Source: Political Money Line, Search for Pioneer Natural Resources, accessed[:{ :{06/05/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:]

Noble Energy Inc. Gave $2,000 To Louisiana Republican Steve Scalise in 2018 and $50,000 To The Republican Governors Association In 2016. Sources: Political Money Line, Search for Noble Energy Inc., accessed[:{ :{06/05/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:; OpenSecrets, Search for Noble Energy, accessed:{ :{06/05/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:]

Encana Oil & Gas (USA) Inc. Gave $335,000 To The Republican Governors Association Between 2009-2014.:{ Political Money Line, Search for Encana Oil & Gas, accessed:(style="background-color:#faf8f5;"):}:[:{ :{06/05/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::{]}:

Whiting Petroleum Corporation Gave $100,000 To The Republican Governor’s Association Between 2015-2017 and $1,000 to Louisiana Republican Steve Scalise in 2018. Sources: Political Money Line, Search for Whiting Petroleum Corporation, accessed[:{ :{06/05/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:; OpenSecrets, Search for Whiting Petroleum Corporation, accessed:{ :{06/05/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:]

Concho Resources, Inc. Gave $3,950 To The Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) in 2015 and $200 To Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan in 2017. Sources: Political Money Line, Search for Concho Resources., accessed[:{ :{06/05/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:; OpenSecrets, Search for Concho Resources, accessed:{ :{06/05/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:]

Hess Corporation Gave $2,500 To North Carolina Republican Patrick McHenry in 2018. Source: OpenSecrets, Search for Hess Corporation, accessed[:{ :{06/05/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}:]

IPAA Has Spent More Than $21 Million On Lobbying

IPAA Has Lobbied Interior, Its Agencies, Congress, And The Environmental Protection Agency. :{The IPAA has reported a total of $21,941,479 in lobbying between 1999 and Q3 2019. The entities they lobbied have included the U.S. House, Senate, the Department of Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency as well as Interior’s subagencies, including the Bureau Of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife SErvice and the U.S. Geological Survey. US Senate Lobbying Disclosure Database Search for IPAA, :(style="background-color:#faf8f5;"):}:[:{accessed:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}: :{10/23/19:(style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 0px -0.225em;padding:0px 0.15em;border-style:solid;border-width:0px;background-repeat:no-repeat;position:relative;display:inline-block;z-index:9"):}::{]}:

conf

wheeler (NERO)

amy cook

kudlow

infrastructure Challenges MODERATOR | Kurt Krieger, Steptoe & Johnson PLLC SPEAKER

Chairman Neil Chatterjee Chairman, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Neil Chatterjee was nominated to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in May 2017 and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in August 2017. He served as Chairman from August 2017 to December 2017, and was again named Chairman on October 24, 2018. Prior to joining the Commission, he was energy policy advisor to U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

https://www.ipaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/2019-IPAA-90th-Annual-Meeting-Schedule_members.pdf

https://www.energyindepth.org/exxonknew-attempts-to-reset-flailing-campaign-witha-billboard/?154

[eid a pjt of ipaa it says]

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NATIONAL

#EXXONKNEW ATTEMPTS TO RESET FLAILING CAMPAIGN WITH…A BILLBOARD?

BY SPENCER WALRATH OCT. 25, 2017 

Public Citizen and a new project called the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) have launched a new campaign targeting oil and gas companies in the wake of recent hurricanes. The groups have put up two billboards in Houston asking when “climate polluters” will “pay their fair share” and directing people to visit WhoPaysForHarvey.com. But a peek behind the curtain reveals that this campaign isorganized by the same key players behind the #ExxonKnew campaign and is just the latest attempt to reset their struggling effort to attack the oil and gas industry.

As a refresher, Public Citizen has been active in the #ExxonKnew campaign for nearly two years. Rob Weissman, Public Citizen’s president, attended a secret closed-door meeting in January 2016 at the offices of the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF), which has bankrolled the #ExxonKnew campaign. Activists at that meeting included Kert Davies, Matt Pawa, 350.org’s Bill McKibben, and Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) president Carroll Muffett, among others.

The purpose of the meeting was “to establish in public’s mind that Exxon is a corrupt institution,” and “to delegitimize them as a political actor.” After a quick break for lunch, the group reconvened to ask:

“Does this group want to establish a rapid response and coordination structure to react to new research, revelations and legal developments as they happen? A higher level of coordination with a war room, joint social media, and coordinated organizing and media pushes?”

Nearly two years later, we’ve seen the degree to which these groups have actively coordinated with each other and their allies.

CCI launched last month as a project of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development (IGSD). IGSD was founded by Durwood Zaelke, who was the co-founder and president of CIEL from 1989-2003. Richard Wiles is the director of what is now CCI and is also the publisher of a new climate liability website, Climate Liability News (CLN), which launched in July. CLN has paid particularly close attention to developments in the investigations of and lawsuits against ExxonMobil, devoting a unique page on its website to the issue. Kert Davies, who attended the January 2016 RFF meeting, is listed as a member of CLN’s board, alongside Wiles and Alyssa Johl, a former CIEL attorney.

Matt Pawa,a trial lawyer who attended the January 2016 RFF meeting and serves on the board of CIEL, recently spoke at a conference with Public Citizen’s Weissman. Pawa has chased big payouts from companies for their contributions to climate change for years and is currently leading a climate change lawsuit filed by San Francisco and Oakland against five oil and gas companies.

Following the RFF group’s plan to “establish a rapid response and coordination structure to react to new…developments,” Bill McKibben, a top promoter of the #ExxonKnew campaign, tweeted a photo of one of the Houston billboards as soon as they went up.

Adrian Shelley, the director of Public Citizen Texas, told the Houston Chronicle that the billboards and website are “just the beginning of a larger national campaign.” WhoPaysForIrma.com has already been registered, though that site has not yet launched.

And while theslick website at WhoPaysForHarvey.com features all of eight sentences blaming oil and gas companies for Hurricane Harvey, it does not link to additional information or resources and offers no way to help the victims of Harvey and no solutions to address climate change. Meanwhile, the oil and gas industry pledged over $32.3 million to Harvey relief efforts. [ASKED FOR BILLIONS$ TO FORTIFY SHIP CHANNEL?]It remains to be seen how this new campaign’s billboards and barebones website will help address climate change.

What is clear is that these various efforts to attempt to bring climate litigation against oil and gas companies are being perpetrated by the same handful of activists who have been pursuing these companies for years.The goal isn’t to win the cases; it’s to generate publicity– a goal shared by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman with his investigation of ExxonMobil.

Activists are trying to create a public narrative that oil and gas companies deserve all of the blame for climate change, thereby shifting the blame from the individuals who rely on fossil fuels (including these activists) to the companies providing fossil fuels. The goal, as laid out in their memo nearly two years ago, is to “delegitimize them” and convince the public that oil and gas companies are corrupt. Or, as that memo’s author put it:

TAGS: 350.org, Alyssa Johl, Bill McKibben, Carroll Muffett, CCI, Center for Climate Integrity,Center for International Environmental Law, CIEL, Climate Litigation News, CLN, Durwood Zaelke, Eric Schneiderman, Exxon, ExxonKnew, ExxonMobil, Harvey, IGSD, Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development, Irma, Johl, Kenny Bruno, Kert Davies, Matt Pawa, Matthew Pawa, McKibben, Pawa, Public Citizen, RFF, Richard Wiles, Rob Weissman, Rockefeller Family Fund, Schneiderman, Weissman, Wiles, Zaelke

oddly thin? 2015

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Independent_Petroleum_Association_of_America

Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) "has represented independent oil and natural gas producers for three-quarters of a century. On June 10, 1929, President Herbert Hoover called a national and state conference to discuss and formulate a practical program for the conservation of America's natural petroleum resources. At that historic meeting at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, Colorado, oil operators, royalty owners, and land owners alike formed a new national association, the IPAA." [1]

Documents Contained at the Anti-Environmental Archives
Documents written by or referencing this person or organization are contained in the Anti-Environmental Archive, launched by Greenpeace on Earth Day, 2015. The archive contains 3,500 documents, some 27,000 pages, covering350 organizations and individuals.The current archive includes mainly documents collected in the late 1980s through the early 2000s by The Clearinghouse on Environmental Advocacy and Research (CLEAR), an organization that tracked the rise of the so called "Wise Use" movement in the 1990s during the Clinton presidency. Access the index to the Anti-Environmental Archives here.

Congressional campaign contributions

IPAA is one of the largest energy contributors to both Republican and Democratic candidates for Congress. These contributions total $336,500 to the 110th US Congress (as of the third quarter), the largest of which has been to Rep. John Sununu (R-NH) for $10,000. Rep. Sununu, for his part, has consistently voted with the oil industry on energy, war and climate bills.[1]

Contributions like this from fossil fuel companies to members of Congress are often seen as a political barrier to pursuing clean energy.

More information on oil industry contributions to Congress can be found at FollowtheOilMoney.org, created by the nonpartisan, nonprofit organization Oil Change International.

Directors

Accessed June 2008: ^[2]^

Contact

Web: http://www.ipaa.org

Resources and articles

Related Sourcewatch articles

Oil Change International

FollowtheOilMoney.org

References

  1. ↑ About, Independent Petroleum Association of America, accessed June 16, 2008.
  2. ↑ Directors, Independent Petroleum Association of America, accessed June 16, 2008.

Categories: 

https://archive.thinkprogress.org/**climate-liability-lawsuits-industry-counterattacks**-b2f04bce26bb/

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as more and more cities are filing lawsuits against fossil fuel companies for their role in perpetuating climate change, the fossil fuel industry and its allies are responding with counterattacks in the courtroom and in the court of public opinion.

And while some legal experts characterize the industry’s actions as an attempt to delay litigation and dissuade other cities from taking similar action, public officials from the cities that have filed the lawsuits have a different perspective — to them, the fact that industry has pushed back against the litigation with such ferocity means that it’s working.

“When we filed these lawsuits against these companies that are represented by major law firms, we figured they would try to do whatever they could to draw out the litigation,” Kate Sears, a county supervisor in Marin County, California, which filed a lawsuit against fossil fuel companies last summer, told ThinkProgress. “What they are doing now is so ridiculous that it really makes me think that they are quite concerned about the strength of these lawsuits.”

Since July 2017, eight cities and counties in California, as well as New York City, have filed lawsuits against major fossil fuel companies for their role in climate-fueled consequences like sea level rise and, in some cases, more frequent wildfires and droughts.

In each case, the plaintiffs allege that the fossil fuel companies created a public nuisance when they extracted and sold their product despite internal knowledge that burning fossil fuels contributed to dangerous climate change. If the claims are successful, the cities and counties hope that fossil fuel companies will help fund climate adaptation projects, like raising roads or building seawalls to protect against sea level rise.

Climate activists have cheered the recent wave of litigation as an important tool to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their role in climate change, especially as the federal government continues to pursue a deregulatory and pro-fossil fuel environmental agenda. When New York City announced its lawsuit in January 2018, for instance, Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, told ThinkProgress that the move represented “a major tipping point” in the global fight against fossil fuels.

But the fossil fuel industry — as well as its allies in conservative think tanks and industry trade groups — have responded with counter attacks aimed at painting the actions as activist litigation, based not on sound science or legal precedent but a conspiracy by a group of lawyers, public officials, and environmentalists.

In one instance, Exxon — the largest oil company to be named in all nine climate liability lawsuits that have been filed in the last year — has taken its fight against climate liability lawsuits to federal court.

The motion filed by Exxon in January in a Texas district court, alleges that the spate of lawsuits challenging the company’s role in knowingly perpetuating climate change amount to a violation of the company’sFirst Amendment rights.

In the motion, Exxon also accuses city officials and attorneys of working together in a “conspiracy” to “coerce ExxonMobil…to adopt policies aligned with those favored by local politicians in California.” As part of that conspiracy, the motion also mentions separate cases currently being pursued by New York and Massachusetts state attorneys general, which are investigating whether Exxon broke the law by failing to fully disclose the risks of climate change to its investors.

The list of cities suing major fossil fuel companies over climate change just got longer

Richmond, California — home to a massive Chevron oil refinery — is the latest city to take on fossil fuel companies over climate change.

Michael Burger, executive director of Columbia University’sSabin Center for Climate Change Law, says that, legally speaking, Exxon’s claims of a conspiracy or violation of its First Amendment rights are “nonsense.” But Burger sees something more disturbing in the legal action taken by Exxon against the cities filing lawsuits: another example of a growing trend by companies to try to silence opposition through litigation.

“In my view, it’s quite dangerous,” Burger said of the motion, which he likened to astrategic lawsuit against public participation, or a SLAPP lawsuit, traditionally meant to censor or silence critics by creating an overwhelming burden for potential plaintiffs to overcome. “There is a real risk that these things are intended to and will succeed in chilling speech and intimidating local government officials from taking progressive action.”

Thus far, the strategy does not appear to be working in Exxon’s favor. Just days after the company filed its motion in the Texas court, New York City announced that it would be following in the California municipalities’ footsteps by filing its own lawsuit against five major fossil fuel companies, including Exxon.

“I’ve seen tactics before to try to wear down people representing the public, to have this fight through attrition,” said Marin County Supervisor Sears. Sears previously worked for the California Attorney General’s Office bringing legal action against predatory lenders. “It’s also why I feel so strongly about how important it is to stand up and take action to represent the public when they have been harmed.”

But fossil fuel companies aren’t the only ones working to derail the growing wave of climate litigation: Outside of the courtroom, fossil fuel-associated trade organizations have launched several public relations campaigns aimed at undermining the motives for bringing litigation against fossil fuel companies.

Following New York City’s recent lawsuit against five fossil fuel companies for their role in knowingly perpetuating climate change, for instance, two major trade groups launched a series of public campaigns meant to paint the lawsuits as politically-motivated activist litigation.

Both the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) — nonprofit trade organizations with ties to the fossil fuel industry —have publicly attempted to undermine the lawsuit through tweets or op-edsmeant to call attention to past statements and actions by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.

One series of tweets, sent in late January by Energy In Depth — the public outreach arm of the IPAA — paints de Blasio as both an activist mayor focused on the destruction of the oil and gas industry, and a hypocrite who champions climate action while riding around in SUVs.

Energy In Depth bills itself as an education and public outreach campaign aimed at “getting the facts out about the promise and potential of responsibly developing America’s onshore energy resource base.” It claims the IPAA, as well as numerous regional oil and gas trade associations, among its members. But according to an internal memo obtained by DeSmog in 2011, Energy In Depth [IPAA PJT] was created through funding provided by major oil and gas companies, including BP, Chevron, and Shell — three companies named as defendants in New York City’s climate lawsuit.

Meanwhile, the National Association of Manufacturers’ political action committee has received thousands from Exxon, including a recent $5,000 donation in 2017 from Exxon’s senior vice president Neil Chapman. Of the five companies named in New York’s lawsuit, three have executives that serve on NAM’s Board of Directors: both John Mingé, president of BP, and Andrew Lundquist, senior vice president of government affairs at ConocoPhillips, serve as board members, while Exxon’s Chapman sits on the executive committee.

In California, cities and counties have also been the subject of at least one negative op-ed, published in theSacramento Bee by former Republican Congressman and California Attorney General Dan Lungren. In his op-ed, Lungren accuses the California cities and counties of hypocrisy for suing fossil fuel companies over the cost of climate change while ignoring those same costs in communications with potential investors.

“This is just another example of activists trying to replace the power of the people and their elected representatives with the decision-making of the courts in an area in which judges have no particular expertise,” Lungren wrote. “Whatever their intentions, these cities demonstrate a true legal risk — to their own city budgets and their citizens, rather than to oil companies.”

Lungren currently consults with the Institute for Legal Reform, an offshoot of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. As an organization, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been vocally opposed to climate regulations, like the Clean Power Plan. In 2012, the Chamber received at least $2 million from fossil fuel companies named in some of the California lawsuits, according to voluntary financial disclosures analyzed by the Center for Public Integrity. Lungren did not disclose that information in his op-ed.

Legally speaking, these public relations campaigns are unlikely to impact the outcome the climate liability cases should they proceed to trial.

“These cases, the plaintiffs here are seeking damages for costs they are incurring as a result of climate change. They are viable claims on their face and there’s no reason, legally, for the court to treat them as anything other than what they, on their face, appear to be,” Burger said. “There’s no reason for a court to treat them any differently just because of some op-eds being written impugning the character of those who are bringing the lawsuits.”

But the tactics follow a well-worn pattern used by the fossil fuel industry and its allies before, one dictated by spreading doubt and misinformation to push the consensus on climate issues to the margins.

“I think we saw in the past this unbelievable campaign they supported to create uncertainty about climate change,” Supervisor Sears said. “Raising these absurd allegations is what looks to be yet another campaign to try to mislead the public about these lawsuits and what they are intended to do, and the intentions and the integrity of the elected officials. It’s unfortunate.”

#CALIFORNIA, #CLIMATE, #CLIMATE LAWSUIT, #CLIMATE LIABILITY, #EXXON MOBIL, #FOSSIL FUELS, #NEW YORK CITY

new

https://www.huffpost.com/topic/**fti**-consulting

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/climate-denial-energy-in-depth_n_5df7eff6e4b0ae01a1e59371

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eNVIRONMENT

Fossil Fuel Giants Claim To Support Climate Science, Yet Still Fund Denial

Fourteen oil and gas companies are funding a website that attacks scientists and undermines their work.

Paul D. Thacker

Dec. 18, 2019,

overtime to show that

our climate commitment is

Most energy companies now acknowledge that burning fossil fuels is warming the planet. And yet many continue to fund disinformation about industry’s role in climate change and its harm to human health.

In the latest example, documents and recordings reviewed by HuffPost show that the Independent Petroleum Association of America has spent almost $2 million a year for the last two years on Energy In Depth, a “research, education and public outreach campaign” that regularly attacks scientists whose research is critical of industry. The campaign has received financial backing from 14 different oil and gas companies including Shell, Occidental Petroleum, BP, Chevron and Halliburton.

These revelations come as world leaders adjourn the COP25 in Madrid, an international summit held to discuss detailed ways to address the rapidly warming planet. In a recent review, scientists writing for The Lancet stated that climate change will affect the health of every child born today as populations face weather extremes, food and water insecurity and changing patterns of infectious disease. “The only solution is to get rid of fossil fuels in power production, industry and transportation,” Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, said upon releasing the report.

Announcing Energy in Depth in a 2009press release now removed from its website, theIndependent Petroleum Association of America described EID as a campaign to combat new environmental regulations, especially on hydraulic fracturing. EID’s website includes fact sheets, videos and analysis, and promises to clearly explain oil and gas development while “straightening out the myths you may have heard.”

Although it’s not apparent from the EID website, many of the site’s writers are employees ofFTI Consulting, a global consulting firm that has come under scrutiny for its work for oil and gas companies, Monsanto, Delta Air Lines and the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, a front group created to stop universal health care. The documents reviewed by HuffPost provide further insight into the specific funders of EID and how FTI Consulting helps companies burnish their images.

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At a 2014 oil and gas conference in Brazil, FTI explained how Energy in Depth helped generate and guide media “behind the scenes,” influencing hundreds of articles and opinion pieces. Most importantly, FTI claimed that the site and its surrogates had the ability “to say, do and write things that individual company employees cannot and should not.”

At the IPAA’s 2017 retreat, an employee told members that the site is “a bunch of companies that have come together to fight some of this fake news that’s out there about our industry.” An attendee recorded the session and provided it to HuffPost.

“EID has now grown into what many consider the industry’s lead research and rapid response platform,” states an IPAA report presented at a June 2019 board of directors meeting. The report adds that EID helps beat back attempts to stop fossil fuel extraction and addresses research that finds fracking harmful.

EID has posted several pages attacking the research of Harvard scholars Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran, calling their published study that showed Exxon Mobil misled the public on the dangers of climate change “incomplete” and “activist.” In another example, EID points to Exxon Mobil-funded research to undermine the scholars’ studies.

“This EID case demonstrates that although fossil fuel companies now claim to support climate action, they continue to misrepresent scientific work in order to protect profits and protect themselves from liability or responsibility,” said Supran, a research fellow studying the history of science.

“When science threatens their interest, they attack or attempt to undermine it,” said Oreskes, a professor of history of science. “And when they can’t do that, they attempt to discredit the scientists who produced it.”

“Although fossil fuel companies now claim to support climate action, they continue to misrepresent scientific work in order to protect profits and protect themselves from liability or responsibility.”

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}:

- Geoffrey Supran, Harvard research fellow

On EID’s website, Rebecca Simons, field director for Energy In Depth-Mountain States, excoriated Lisa McKenzie, an assistant professor in the department of environmental and occupational health at the University of Colorado whose published studies find air pollution caused by fracking to be harmful to humans. In a Denver Post op-ed, Simons dismissed McKenzie’s research, writing that it allows “activists” to argue that “energy production is somehow a pernicious threat to public health.” According to her LinkedIn page, Simons left FTI Consulting this year to join Encana, one of the energy firms that helped start EID.

“They attack anyone without using evidence,” said McKenzie. “They respond sometimes before they could even have read a study.” Earlier this month, public health scholars published a perspective in the New England Journal of Medicine noting that fracking is linked to water contamination, air pollution, radiation releases and ecosystem damage.

Jeff Eshelman, senior vice president of the Independent Petroleum Association of America and founder of EID, said in an interview that he was not familiar with the academics whom EID has criticized, but emphasized that America now has the cleanest air in 20 years thanks to natural gas.

“Since 1929, IPAA’s mission has been to tell the truth about the importance of America’s natural gas and oil resources to consumers and policy makers,” said Eshelman. “We are a 90-year-old advocacy association. That’s quite obvious and transparent.”

Several of the fossil fuel companies behind Energy In Depth have made statements avowing the science on climate change and the need to take action.

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}:

“Burning fossil fuels is the primary contributor to CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere,” statesBPin a handout on climate change.

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}:

“The world needs to take urgent action to tackle climate change,”Shell states on its website. “Our ambition is to make sure the energy we sell is in tune with society as it moves towards that goal.”

HuffPost contacted the oil and gas companies that funded EID and asked them to explain their support for a group that attacks researchers working on climate change. Shell, BP and Chevron were asked to explain why they support such actions while simultaneously embracing the science on climate change.

“Your questions are better addressed to EID or IPAA,” said Ashley Alemayehu, a spokesperson for Exxon Mobil, the parent company of XTO Energy.

“BP has not provided funding or been a member of the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) since January 2014,” wrote BP spokesperson Jason Ryan.

The other companies did not respond.

Eshelman told HuffPost that while his organization runs the EID website, he hired FTI Consulting to support it.In the past, FTI Consulting worked on behalf of several companies to defeat fracking regulations in Europe. Earlier this year, a member of the European Parliament complained about potential violations of lobbying transparency after FTI sent mailers to members of Parliament promising to donate 50 euros to UNICEF for answering a “perception audit” and agreeing to a meeting with FTI. FTI sent the letters on behalf of Eurogas, an association for Europe’s gas industry. And over the summer, a columnist at The Guardian referenced dozens of pages of internal court documents that pointed toFTI as part of Monsanto’s plan to destroy the columnist’s reputation.

“We will have to refer you to IPAA for any comment on IPAA or EID,” said FTI spokesperson Matthew E. Bashalany. He added that FTI does not comment on clients, per company policy.

While most Americans aren’t familiar with IPAA, the organization has close ties to the Trump administration, which denies much of the science on climate change. Shortly after Donald Trump took office, theIPAA celebrated when he picked the group’s former attorney David Bernhardt for the No. 2 spot at the Department of the Interior.

“We know him very well, and we have direct access to him, have conversations with him about issues ranging from federal land access to endangered species, to a lot of issues,” the IPAA’s political director told a group of gathered industry representatives at the time, according to a secret recording of an IPAA meeting provided to the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Trump recently appointed Bernhardt as secretary of the Interior Department, and the IPAA has cultivated other powerful Trump appointees. A flyer for the IPAA’s annual conference last month listed two Trump officials as speakers: Larry A. Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, and Andrew Wheeler, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“All of this — both the attacks themselves and individual companies’ efforts to conceal their involvement — tells me the industry is scared,” said Ben Franta, a Stanford graduate student whom EID targeted for noting that the fossil fuel industry has a history of hiding what it knows about climate change. “It’s scared of the truth. And it should be, because the truth doesn’t look good for the fossil fuel industry.”

This story has been updated with comment from a BP spokesperson.

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...t the IPAA’s 2017 retreat, an employee told members that the site is “a bunch of companies that have come together to fight some of this fake news that’s out there about our industry.” An attendee recorded the session and provided it to HuffPost.

“EID has now grown into what many consider the industry’s lead research and rapid response platform,” states an IPAA report presented at a June 2019 board of directors meeting. The report adds that EID helps beat back attempts to stop fossil fuel extraction and addresses research that finds fracking harmful.

EID has posted several pages attacking the research of Harvard scholars Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran, calling their published study that showed Exxon Mobil misled the public on the dangers of climate change “incomplete” and “activist.” In another example, EID points to Exxon Mobil-funded research to undermine the scholars’ studies.

“This EID case demonstrates that although fossil fuel companies now claim to support climate action, they continue to misrepresent scientific work in order to protect profits and protect themselves from liability or responsibility,” said Supran, a research fellow studying the history of science.

...on EID’s website, Rebecca Simons, field director for Energy In Depth-Mountain States, excoriated Lisa McKenzie, an assistant professor in the department of environmental and occupational health at the University of Colorado whose published studies find air pollution caused by fracking to be harmful to humans. In a Denver Post op-ed, Simons dismissed McKenzie’s research, writing that it allows “activists” to argue that “energy production is somehow a pernicious threat to public health.” According to her LinkedIn page, Simons left FTI Consulting this year to join Encana, one of the energy firms that helped start EID.

“They attack anyone without using evidence,” said McKenzie. “They respond sometimes before they could even have read a study.” Earlier this month, public health scholars published a perspective in the New England Journal of Medicine noting that fracking is linked to water contamination, air pollution, radiation releases and ecosystem damage.

Jeff Eshelman, senior vice president of the Independent Petroleum Association of America and founder of EID, said in an interview that he was not familiar with the academics whom EID has criticized, but emphasized that America now has the cleanest air in 20 years thanks to natural gas.

“Since 1929, IPAA’s mission has been to tell the truth about the importance of America’s natural gas and oil resources to consumers and policy makers,” said Eshelman. “We are a 90-year-old advocacy association. That’s quite obvious and transparent.”

Several of the fossil fuel companies behind Energy In Depth have made statements avowing the science on climate change and the need to take action.

“Burning fossil fuels is the primary contributor to CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere,” states BP in a handout on climate change.

“The world needs to take urgent action to tackle climate change,” Shell states on its website. “Our ambition is to make sure the energy we sell is in tune with society as it moves towards that goal.”

HuffPost contacted the oil and gas companies that funded EID and asked them to explain their support for a group that attacks researchers working on climate change. Shell, BP and Chevron were asked to explain why they support such actions while simultaneously embracing the science on climate change.

“Your questions are better addressed to EID or IPAA,” said Ashley Alemayehu, a spokesperson for Exxon Mobil, the parent company of XTO Energy....

"BP has not provided funding or been a member of the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) since January 2014,” wrote BP spokesperson Jason Ryan.

The other companies did not respond.

Eshelman told HuffPost that while his organization runs the EID website, he hired FTI Consulting to support it. In the past, FTI Consulting worked on behalf of several companies to defeat fracking regulations in Europe. Earlier this year, a member of the European Parliament complained about potential violations of lobbying transparency after FTI sent mailers to members of Parliament promising to donate 50 euros to UNICEF for answering a “perception audit” and agreeing to a meeting with FTI. FTI sent the letters on behalf of Eurogas, an association for Europe’s gas industry. And over the summer, a columnist at The Guardian referenced dozens of pages of internal court documents that pointed to FTI as part of Monsanto’s plan to destroy the columnist’s reputation.

“We will have to refer you to IPAA for any comment on IPAA or EID,” said FTI spokesperson Matthew E. Bashalany. He added that FTI does not comment on clients, per company policy.

While most Americans aren’t familiar with IPAA, the organization has close ties to the Trump administration, which denies much of the science on climate change. Shortly after Donald Trump took office, the IPAA celebrated when he picked the group’s former attorney David Bernhardt for the No. 2 spot at the Department of the Interior.

“We know him very well, and we have direct access to him, have conversations with him about issues ranging from federal land access to endangered species, to a lot of issues,” the IPAA’s political director told a group of gathered industry representatives at the time, according to a secret recording of an IPAA meeting provided to the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Trump recently appointed Bernhardt as secretary of the Interior Department, and the IPAA has cultivated other powerful Trump appointees. A flyer for the IPAA’s annual conference last month listed two Trump officials as speakers: Larry A. Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, and Andrew Wheeler, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“All of this — both the attacks themselves and individual companies’ efforts to conceal their involvement — tells me the industry is scared,” said Ben Franta, a Stanford graduate student whom EID targeted for noting that the fossil fuel industry has a history of hiding what it knows about climate change. “It’s scared of the truth. And it should be, because the truth doesn’t look good for the fossil fuel industry.”

https://revealnews.org/article/oil-executives-predicted-expanded-influence-in-trumps-interior-department/

https://revealnews.org/article/oil-executives-predicted-expanded-influence-in-trumps-interior-department/

gathered for a private meeting at a beachside Ritz...Carlton in Southern California, the oil executives were celebrating a colleague’s sudden rise. David Bernhardt, their former lawyer, had been appointed by President Donald Trump to the powerful No. 2 spot at the Department of the Interior. Just five months into the Trump era, the energy developers who make up the Independent Petroleum Association of America, or IPAA, already had watched the new president order a sweeping overhaul of environmental regulations that were cutting into their bottom lines – rules concerning smog, hydraulic fracturing and endangered species protection.

Dan Naatz, the association’s political director, told the audience of about 100 executives that Bernhardt’s new role meant their priorities would be heard at the highest levels of the department.

“We know him very well, and we have direct access to him, have conversations with him about issues ranging from federal land access to endangered species, to a lot of issues,” Naatz said, according to an hourlong recording of the June 2017 event in Laguna Niguel provided to Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

The recording gives a rare look behind the curtain of an influential oil industry lobbying group that spends more than $1 million per year to push its agenda in Congress and federal regulatory agencies. The previous eight years had been dispiriting for the industry: As IPAA vice president Jeff Eshelman told the group, it had seemed as though the Obama administration and environmental groups had put together “their target list of everything that they wanted done to shut down the oil and gas industry.”

But now, the oil executives were almost giddy at the prospect of high-level executive branch access of the sort they hadn’t enjoyed since Dick Cheney, a fellow oilman, was vice president.

“It’s really a new thing for us,” said Barry Russell, the association’s CEO, boasting of his meetings with the Environmental Protection Agency chief at the time, Scott Pruitt, and then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. “For example, next week, I’m invited to the White House to talk about tax code. Last week, we were talking to Secretary Pruitt,and in about two weeks, we have a meeting with Secretary Zinke. So we have unprecedented access to people that are in these positions who are trying to help us, which is great.”

In that Ritz-Carlton conference room, Russell also spoke of his ties to Bernhardt, recalling the lawyer’s role as point man on an association legal team set up to challenge federal endangered species rules.

“Well, the guy that actually headed up that group is now the No. 2 at Interior,” he said, referring to Bernhardt. “So that’s worked out well.”

Now, Bernhardt is in line for a promotion: The former oil industry lobbyist has been nominated by Trump to be the interior secretary. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold a confirmation hearing Thursday. Bernhardt has been running the department since early January, when Zinke resigned amid an ethics scandal. The post gives Bernhardt influence over regulations affecting energy production on millions of acres of public lands, deciding who gets to develop it, how much they pay and whether they are complying with the law.

Interior Department spokeswoman Faith Vander Voort said: “Acting Secretary David Bernhardt has had no communication or contact with either Barry Russell or Dan Naatz.”

The IPAA executives were not available to comment on this story, a spokeswoman said.

At the meeting, the association’s leaders distributed a private “regulatory update” memo that detailed environmental laws and rules it hoped to blunt or overturn. The group ultimately got its way on four of the five high-profile issues that topped its wish list.

Trump himself was :{a driving force:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: behind deregulating the energy industry, ordering the government in 2017 to weed out federal rules “that unnecessarily encumber energy production.” In a :{2017 order:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:, Zinke called for his deputy secretary – Bernhardt – to make sure the department complied with Trump’s regulatory rollbacks.

The petroleum association was just one industry group pushing for regulatory relief – the American Petroleum Institute, U.S. Oil and Gas Association and Western Energy Alliance also were active. But since IPAA created its wish list, the Interior Department has acceded to nearly all its requests:

Rescinded fracking rules meant to control water pollution. Fracking involves pressure-injecting water and chemicals into the ground to break up rock and release oil and gas. In 2015, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management moved to minimize water pollution caused by fracking, setting standards for well construction and proper management of fracking fluids. For the first time, the new rule also required federal permits for fracking, a costly and time-consuming process, the industry complained.

The IPAA sued, contending the rule was not needed because fracking already was regulated by states. Under Trump, the Interior Department sided with the energy industry, and in 2017, the rule was rescinded.

Withdrawn rules that limit climate change-causing methane gas releases. 

An oil strike can release clouds of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. When producers lack the means to capture methane and sell it as natural gas, they either burn it or release it into the air. To fight global warming, the BLM in 2016 issued a rule sharply limiting these practices and imposing a royalty fee on operators that wasted natural gas on public lands.

:{The IPAA sued:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:, complaining producers would face:{ huge financial losses:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:. Trump’s Interior Department sided with the industry and in 2018 rescinded key provisions of the rule.

Abandoned environmental restoration of public land damaged by oil development. To offset the harm of oil production, the BLM often required producers to pay for restoration projects as a condition of their permits. This practice of “compensatory mitigation” is used by many government agencies. In 2015, President Barack Obama ordered the Interior Department to set a goal of “no net loss for natural resources” when issuing development permits.

The IPAA pushed back hard against the “no net loss” standard, arguing that developers might be saddled with exorbitant mitigation costs. In 2017, Trump ordered the repeal of the mitigation rule. Zinke attacked the concept as “:{un-American:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:.”

Ended long-standing protections for migratory birds. 

Every year, millions of migratory birds are killed when they fly into power lines, oil waste pits and other energy development hazards, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says. Since the 1970s, the service has promoted industrial safety practices to protect birds from accidental harm – and has prosecuted and fined energy companies responsible for the deaths of these birds.

The IPAA complained it was unfair to prosecute energy companies engaged in legal activities that unintentionally harmed birds. In 2017, Trump’s Interior Department halted prosecuting companies for the “incidental” bird deaths. Bernhardt :{played an important role:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: in crafting the legal opinion that gutted these protections, emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show.

“The IPAA’s wish list was granted as asked, in the executive order and in the actions taken by the Department of the Interior,” said Nada Culver, senior counsel for the Wilderness Society environmental group, who reviewed the document for Reveal. “It pains me to say it.”

Bernhardt began his career as an aide to then-Rep. Scott McInnis, a Colorado Republican elected in 1992. In 1998, he quit to work at the powerhouse Washington lobbying firm of Brownstein Hyatt & Farber.

After President George W. Bush took office, Bernhardt returned to government as a political aide to Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, a fellow Coloradan. He worked on the administration’s push to reverse a congressional ban on oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In 2006, he was promoted to solicitor, the department’s top lawyer.

In 2009, he rejoined  [360 ]the Brownstein firm and became head of its natural resources department. Over the years, Bernhardt lobbied or provided legal advice to about 40 clients, many of them companies seeking to block the force of environmental regulations administered by the Interior Department. Among his clients were 18 energy concerns, including offshore oil drillers, frackers and operators of coal-fired power plants. [3X5 CARD?] His federal ethics report showed he had worked for the IPAA since at least 2015.

After Trump was elected, Bernhardt served on the new administration’s transition team, then was named Zinke’s deputy. A coalition of 150 environmental groups opposed Bernhardt’s appointment, calling him a“:{**walking conflict of interest**:(style="box-sizing:inherit;background-color:#ff9900;"):}:”because so many of his former clients were subject to Interior Department regulations.

Bernhardt’s Senate confirmation hearings were roiled when a :{collection of his emails:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:, reported by Reveal, showed he had continued to give political advice to theWestlands Water District, a California agribusiness concern, for months after he told Congress he had quit lobbying.

Bernhardt promised to follow the Interior Department’s ethics rules, which call for him to recuse himself for up to two years on matters involving former clients.

“I believe that public trust is a public responsibility and that maintaining an ethical culture is important,” he told senators, and the Senate confirmed his appointment. At the department, to remind himself of conflict-of-interest concerns, Bernhardt carries a wallet-sized card listing former clients covered by his ethics recusals, :{:{The Washington Post:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: reported.

Interior Department lawyers say Bernhardt is permitted to work on matters affecting his former clients, such as the petroleum association, as long as the issues affect a broad group of players, not just the one client. But the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center has :{filed a complaint:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: accusing Bernhardt of ethics violations for working on California water issues favored by Westlands, his former lobbying client.

Bernhardt’s recusal concerning the petroleum association expires in August, and his official calendars do not reflect any meetings to date with IPAA officials.

The oil lobby has had ready access to top administration officials, both inside the Interior Department and out, according to public records and the lobby leaders themselves. Since Bernhardt began work at the department, the IPAA has spent more than $1.3 million lobbying the department and other federal agencies, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

In April 2018, an IPAA contingent led by Naatz, the political director, met with :{Bernhardt’s top aide:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:, Todd Willens, concerning two issues from the wish list: migratory birds and mitigation. Hours later, Willens met with Bernhardt, but a copy of Willens’ calendar doesn’t state the topic of their meeting.

It was the kind of access the group had begun to marvel at the year before in the plush confines of their Southern California resort. In the recording, Russell, the IPAA’s CEO, described an extended meeting he had already had with Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general and climate-change doubter whose tenure at the EPA would be cut short by ethics scandals. What started as a simple meet-and-greet became an invitation to critique the EPA’s air pollution regulations, the oil executive said.

“Scott Pruitt – he came from Oklahoma, and we have a lot of friends in common, and I thought that’s what we were going to talk about. We did that for about three minutes,” Russell said. “And then he started asking very technical questions about methane, about ozone … and if Scott Pruitt thought he was going to go deep nerd …”

The audience began laughing.

“And what was really great is there was about four or five EPA staffers there, who were all like, ‘Write that down, write that down,’ all the way through this,’’ Russell continued. “And when we left, I said that was just our overview.”

The audience laughed again.

“So it’s really a new world for us and very, very helpful.”

Naatz predicted Bernhardt actually would run the department while Zinke would play a ceremonial role.

“What secretaries of interior do is go out to Yellowstone (National Park), go out to Tetons … have big vision for what they’re going to do,” he said. “David is going to be the COO. David’s going to move the pieces. David’s going to be part of that, and we know him well.”

He also warned of what could go wrong in the Trump era.

Trump was slow to make mid-level appointments at the regulatory agencies to carry out the pro-industry policies he ordered, Naatz contended. Without supervision, career federal employees might well slow-walk or resist the sweeping regulatory changes the industry favors, he said.

“If you don’t have the politicals pushing down, bureaucracy is going to take over and push up,” Naatz said.

Another problem was what he called “the gorilla in the room.” The investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia was “hampering everything that is going on,” he said. He groused about Trump’s “inane tweets that come out after midnight” and faulted the entire White House for lack of focus.

:{“They have got to be better on message because they are going to lose the opportunity, ” he said. “It’s an unbelievable opportunity – you have Republicans controlling both houses of Congress and the administration – and so they need to get their act together and start to move.”

}:

When “you are talking about issues that are important to you, the Republicans win,” he continued. “If you are talking about Michael Flynn and Russia, you are going to lose. And so it’s really important to carry that narrative on energy, on infrastructure, on all these issues.”

Reveal reporter Elizabeth Shogren contributed to this story.

Lance Williams can be reached at :{lwilliams@revealnews.org:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:. Follow him on Twitter: :{@LanceWCIR:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:.

ref 2  BS

https://**eid**climate.org/something-tells-us-this-attempt-by-activists-to-make-apiknew-a-thing-is-going-to-fail-again/

anti-energy activists on Twitter are circulating a letter-to-the-editor published in the journal *Nature* which claims to show that the American Petroleum Institute (API), an industry trade group, was informed of the existence of climate change in 1965. 350.org’s Jamie Henn described the news as “criminal” and “immoral,” while *Politico* suggested the revelation may spawn a new front in the #ExxonKnew campaign: #APIKnew.

But in rushing to share this letter, activists and reporters forgot that they’ve tried this before – and failed spectacularly.

Déjà vu, all over again

In April 2016 the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) published a directory of industry documents as part of its support for the #ExxonKnew Campaign. According to CIEL, “In 1968, a report commissioned by the oil industry detailed rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and warned of potentially catastrophic climate risks.” CIEL would issue new press releases in May and July of that same year, though they were ultimately unable to attract much attention.

Now activists hope to make a bigger splash with a document from 1965, three years prior to their previously touted report. But the document they cite, API president Frank Ikard’s speech at the group’s 1965 annual meeting, is not a characterization of the energy industry’s internal understanding of climate change. No: Ikard was instead relaying the findings of President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee’s report, which had been published three days prior. Ikard, it would seem, was telling his members about something many of them had already likely seen reported on in the news. Imagine that!

#EveryoneKnew

As InsideClimate News wrote in 2016: “By the 1960s, the CO2 problem was gaining wider scientific recognition, especially as President Lyndon B. Johnson’s science advisers and leading experts brought it to the attention of the White House in 1965.” VICE News, in its reporting on CIEL’s 2016 announcement, wrote:

“Well before the [1968 report commissioned by API], popular media discussed the likely effects of carbon emissions in terms that will be familiar to today’s audience. In 1956, Time magazine noted that ‘in 50 years or so,’ a CO2 buildup ‘may have a violent effect on the earth’s climate.’ A 1958 science film produced by Bell Labs and Hollywood legend Frank Capra talked about possible melting of the polar ice caps if global temperatures rise ‘even a few degrees.’”

Author Has Ties to #ExxonKnew Campaign

The author of the letter in Nature, Benjamin Franta, has strong ties to the anti-fossil fuel activist campaign. The research supporting his letter was funded by the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), which is a project of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development (IGSD). CCI was launched in 2017 by activist Richard Wiles to support “meritorious climate cases aimed at holding fossil fuel companies and other climate polluters liable for the damages they have caused.” Richard Wiles is also the publisher of Climate Liability News, a dark-money “news” site launched in 2017 to promote those climate lawsuits.

In addition to funding Franta’s research, IGSD also recently published a podcast called *Drilled*, which invites listeners to join them as they “uncover” how the energy industry allegedly “created climate denial and made it viral.” CCI is also funding an activist campaign, Pay Up Climate Polluters, which is pressuring cities like Miami Beach and Houston to file climate liability lawsuits against the energy industry.

Benjamin Franta is no objective researcher, either. Earlier this year he flew to the United Kingdom to give a presentation as part of a panel on “Mobilization for and against fossil fuel development.” You’ll never guess which side of the debate he’s on:

“My name is Ben Franta and I’m from Stanford and I’m a PhD student in the history department there and I’m also a JD student at the law school there. I’m going to talk to you today about both of those things. So, I called it ‘Taking on Big Oil,’ but I really want to call it ‘Kicking Big Oil’s Ass’ – that’s what this talk is about and using history and law and lawsuits. Let’s get started.” (emphasis added)

FTI

December 24, 2019

A HuffPost investigation revealed that FTI Consulting was hired by Energy in Depth (:{EID:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:) to implement a disinformation campaign to discredit scientists who exposed the environmental consequences of fossil fuel extraction and consumption.42

EID received approximately $2 million per year in 2018 and 2019 from the Independent Petroleum Association of America, an industry trade organization that has received support from oil giants such as BP, Shell, Chevron, and Halliburton. The money was delivered in spite of many of IPAA’s member organizations publicly calling for action on climate change.43

EID employed FTI consultants to engage in a campaign of “research, education and public outreach” to dispute factual claims made by scientists and environmentalists, such as dismissing the effects of hydraulic fracturing on water quality.44

May 9, 2014 The Partnership for a Better Energy Future Submits Comments to EPA in Response to Its Proposed Greenhouse Gas Rule for New Power Plants

Posted at 11:04h in Letters and Comments by Staff IPAA

IPAA is a member of the Partnership for a Better Energy Future. All 140 members of PBEF signed on to the following comments submitted to the EPA regarding its proposed GHG rule for new power plants.

1201 15th Street NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20005

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/oil-executives-recording-trump-access-812511/

oil executives have been reveling in all of the access and influence they now have because President Donald Trump is in office. A recording of a meeting of the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA)obtained by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting shows executives bragging about how they can affect change in both Interior Department and Environmental Protection Agency regulations after their former lawyer, David Bernhardt, was nominated to be the number two official at Interior.

“We know [Berndardt] very well, and we have direct access to him, have conversations with him about issues ranging from federal land access to endangered species, to a lot of issues,” Dan Naatz, IPAA’s political director said, in an hour-long recording of a June 2017 meeting

...ed in 'Dozens' of Planning Meetings With Members of Congress and White House Staff

Bernhardt is now up for a promotion: he is Acting Secretary of the Interior and is Trump’s nominee to replace former Interior chiefRyan Zinke.

“It’s really a new thing for us,” Barry Russell, CEO of IAPP said, bragging about his upcoming meetings with Trump officials. “For example, next week I’m invited to the White House to talk about tax code. Last week we were talking to [EPA] Secretary [Scott] Pruitt, and in about two weeks we have a meeting with [Interior] Secretary Zinke. So we have unprecedented access to people that are in these positions who are trying to help us, which is great, "

russell also laughed recalling a meeting with then-EPA administrator Scott Pruitt where Pruitt’s staff wrote down Russell’s criticisms of the EPA.

“Scott Pruitt, he came from Oklahoma, and we have a lot of friends in common and I thought that’s what we were going to talk about, we did that for about three minutes,” Russell said. “And then he started asking very technical questions about methane, about ozone… And what was really great is there was aboutfour or five EPA staffers there, who were all like, ‘Write that down, write that down,’ all the way through this. And when we left, I said that was just our overview.”

This prompted the audience to laugh at how easy it was for Russell to influence policy.

“So it’s really a new world for us and very, very helpful,” Russell concluded.

On the recording, the executives also discussed a “wish list” they drafted and gave to the administration detailing EPA regulations they wanted rolled back, including removing fracking regulations that protect water sources; limits on methane gas releases; restoration of publicly-owned land harmed by the oil industry and regulations to protect migratory bird populations. Each of those requests was granted.

Nada Culver, senior counsel for the Wilderness Society environmental group, told Reveal: “The IPAA’s wish list was granted as asked, in the executive order, and in the actions taken by the Department of the Interior. It pains me to say it.”

And, of course, with Bernhardt’s confirmation hearings approaching, groups like IAPP stand to gain even more as their access and influence within the Trump Administration grows.

recall exxon busted (UK?) and promised to stop funding denial so shift to buffer/front/trade:

https://climateinvestigations.org/exxon-and-friends-still-funding-climate-denial-and-obstruction-through-ipaa-fti-energy-in-depth

many docs grafs

Internal documents and conversations from the fracking lobby, revealed this week in HuffPost, shine new light on a ten year old public relations campaign front group called Energy In Depth. Documents show this front group is designed explicitly to exist without the fingerprints of its fossil fuel funders, giving the oil industry the “ability to say, do and write things that individual company employees cannot and should not.”

This reporting reveals how climate denial remains a key oil industry strategy in spite of their efforts to clean up their image. These shrouded attacks on climate science and solutions, attacks on lawmakers, scientists, lawyers and advocates stand in stark contrast to the seemingly desperate efforts of Exxon and their brethren to retain ‘social license’, gain credibility on climate change and distance themselves from their legacy of climate science denial.

Let’s define “climate denial” up front, as we did years ago in a Guardian interview for a story about Edelman PR: “Our definition of denial is anyone who is obstructing, delaying or trying to derail policy steps that are in line with the scientific consensus that says we need to take rapid steps to decarbonize the economy.” Simple enough. It goes beyond just denying that global warming exists.

HuffPost’s reporting shows that Exxon is a member of the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), an oil and gas industry trade association whose online assets include “news” sites like Energy In Depth (EID) that spew climate denial and attacks on scientists, journalists, advocates, and lawyers. IPAA acts as a pass through, bundling corporate members’ cash that’s funneled to the firm FTI Consulting, which created and manages sites like EID. An ExxonMobil spokesperson, responding to questions from the HuffPost reporter, tried valiantly to keep the veil in place, saying, “Your questions are better addressed to EID or IPAA.”

IPAA’s long history of denial

The IPAA has a long history of funding and proliferating misinformation on climate change, a legacy that continues to the this day. IPAA was named as a potential funder of the infamous multi-million dollar “uncertainty” campaign detailed in the 1998 Global Climate Science Communications Plan, an effort organized by API, Exxon, Chevron, Southern Company and assorted libertarian extremists. You can find that file and others in our ClimateFiles collection.

POTENTIAL FUNDING FOR GLOBAL CLIMATE SCIENCE COMMUNICATIONS (p. 8)

Potential funding sources were identified as American Petroleum Institute (API) and its members; Business Round Table (BRT) and its members, Edison Electric Institute (EEI) and its members; Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) and its members; and the National Mining Association (NMA) and its members. - Potential fund allocators were identified as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), Competitive Enterprise Institute, Frontiers of Freedom and the Marshall Institute.

[View entire document on DocumentCloud]

The IPAA fact sheet on Climate Change released that same year has some pretty alarming climate denial claims — some even more extreme than the Global Climate Coalition was pushing at the time, and includes references to Fred Singer’s Leipzig Declaration and theImperial Oil DRI/McGraw Hill study on carbon taxes. IPAA also blame termites and volcanoes — basically everything but fossil fuels — for altering the atmosphere more than fossil fuels:

“Consider this: the largest source of greenhouse gas may be termites, whose digestive activities are responsible for 10 times more production of CO2 than burning fossil fuels.”

“So, since human-related CO2 is only a small portion of total atmospheric CO2, measures taken to limit it will have little or no measurable effect on overall emissions into the atmosphere. More importantly, there is still no evidence that CO2 emissions are warming the earth’s atmosphere. And we have no proof that man’s impact makes a difference at all.”

By 2008, the IPAA had a more nuanced fact sheet on climate change, but still emphasized uncertainty and denial,

“…no climate change policy action should discard the question of science. Too often, recent arguments for action discard the uncertainties of today’s understanding of global climate science. Global climate science is an emerging field, one that changes as the tools to model it improve.”

They know better…

The Washington Post revealed that in a June, 2019 presentation at an IPAA meeting, influential energy lawyer Mark Barron said the “ship has sailed” on using climate science denial as the first line of defense. Instead, Barron advocated lobbying Congress for climate legislation that benefits the oil and gas industry. He drew a sharp contrast between the industry’s former attacks on climate science and a more recent nuanced approach. He told the oil and gas executives and lobbyists gathered at the meeting sponsored by fracking giants Halliburton, Schlumberger and Oxy that they should be ready to talk about global warming, as long as they position fossil fuels as the solution. Despite this, HuffPost reporting shows that Barron’s audience, the IPAA and its members, are still deploying on climate denial and attacks on scientists through projects like EID and other web organs.

Funding Front Groups – FTI and Energy In Depth

IPAA describes Energy in Depth as the industry’s lead “rapid response platform” for the fracking industry. IPAA created Energy in Depth (EID) shortly after the environmental impacts from the fracking boom began to make national headlines. IPAA member Exxon/XTO was one of EID’s first funders.

Internal IPAA Board documents, published by HuffPost, describe the purpose of the project:

“The main focus of EID has evolved into addressing the “Keep It In The Ground” movement.” (Keep it In The Ground refers to activists and scientists working to keep new fossil fuels from being extracted and burned, commensurate with the conclusion by international scientists that we simply cannot burn even a percentage of known and potential fossil fuel reserves if we want to keep global temperatures from rising to dangerous levels.)

...

Funding for EID comes directly from unnamed oil and gas corporations like Exxon, Halliburton, Schlumberger, Oxy, Marathon Oil, and is funneled through IPAA, which funds the Energy in Depth project on an annual basis.

According IPAA budget documents, the EID campaign costs more than $2 million dollars per year, representing about one fifth of IPAA’s total budget, second only to “Salaries and Benefits” in scale.

BIG QUESTION: What puzzles us is how IPAA is classifying this expense to the IRS.This $2M plus annual payment to FTI does not appear, as required by law, on the IRS 990 form filed by IPAA under “Independent Contractors” “that received more than $100,000 in compensation from the organization.” (see Part VII Section B on page 8 of 2017 990). Perhaps IPAA can provide an explanation.

IPAA 2017 990 Independent Contractors Page 8

The real story of Energy In Depth

Colleagues at DeSmog have been watching Energy in Depth from the beginning, when it was launched to blunt attention to the rapid spread of fracking ten years ago and concerns from community members, lawmakers, journalists and activists.

IPAA’s Jeff Eshelman, described the genesis and purpose of the group in a 2017 IPAA retreat:

The IPAA funding of over $2M a year toFTI/Energy in Depth is spent on five sub-campaigns, meant to undermine the public’s understanding and support of climate and environmental protections:  

EID Climate exists “to counteract the “Keep it in the Ground” movement’s newsiest strategy to use climate change as a weapon to silence dissent and shut down American energy production”. The website pushes back on litigation against oil and gas companies.

EID Health is a “rapid response program” to counter studies linking oil and gas drilling and production to health impacts.

Endangered Species Watch is meant to blunt the Federal Endangered Species Actand is described as “disseminating news, regulations and issue alerts to member companies, affiliated industries and policy makers.”

Energy Tax Facts defends tax subsidies for the fossil fuel industry

Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign advocates against movements asking Universities and pension funds to divest from fossil fuels.

FTI has carved out a specialty in aggressive attacks on foes of the oil and gas industry, doing the dirty work that oil corporations would not want their brands tied to in public.An FTI “Techical Paper” report presented at a 2014 Brazilian oil industry conference describes Energy in Depth’s purpose pretty bluntly, stating that the web asset provides the “ability to say, do and write things that individual company employees cannot and should not.” (emphasis added)

The actual work of running EID is contracted out by IPAA to FTI Consulting, a massive global PR and consulting firm. Here are a few individuals we know are connected to the Energy In Depth project and have written themselves into the wrong side of history:

Matt Dempsey, a Managing Director at FTI, manages Energy in Depth and lists himself as an editorial editor WesternWire, another front group run for Western Energy Alliance, another oil trade association like IPAA. Dempsey and a colleague were recently recorded by a lawyer for EarthRights International who called them out for being agents of Exxon, and pretending to be journalists. Exxon is a defendant in the Boulder Colorado lawsuit that EID and WesternWire have tried hard to malign. Dempsey used to work for Senator James Inhofe.

Steve Everley, is an FTI Managing Director of Strategic Communications and a senior advisor on the Energy In Depth project. Inside Climate News ran a lengthy rebuttal to the work Everley did to trash their actual journalism on fracking in 2014.

Spencer Walrath, who is actually an FTI employee (Director, Energy & Natural Resources at FTI Consulting Inc) but pretends to be an journalist on Energy In Depth. He graduated University of Northern Iowa in 2012. Spencer’s FTI job was announced in his college newsletter.

Katie Brown, PhD, who now works for FTI out of Belgium was a major part of Energy in Depth while working for FTI in Washington DC until a couple years ago. This archived 45 slide Powerpoint presentation from 2014 by Brown lays out the IPAA-FTI-EID connection and details all their work to undermine regulations on ozone, groundwater protection, methane emissions and more. (Brown’s PhD is in English, btw and she is or was working on a book on James Joyce…congratulations, but how does that PhD apply to an energy front group website besides using good grammar?)

More EID denial

FTI’s Energy in Depth Climate front group spends most of its pixelstrying to trash climate lawsuits,promoting natural gas as a climate solution, andattacking science implicating methane’s role in climate change. Methane, a super greenhouse gas and the main component of “natural gas”, leaks from fracking fields in vast quantities making the current natural gas supply much dirtier fuel than it used to be before fracking became a thing. This point was recently illustrated nicely with FLIR images by the New York Times, and news of this Exxon gas well leak which released more methane in a few weeks than many countries emit in a year.

Each of the EID sub-campaigns employ tactics common to climate deniers, like attacking climate models, denying the impact of methane from fracking, repeating debunked myths about a global pause in warming, and claiming that “one in six climate and earth scientists” think human’s impact on climate change is “little or none.”

Most recently, Spencer Walrath wrote a piece in EID going after a peer reviewed scientific study on ocean acidification and the companies connected to the carbon dioxide that has acidified the ocean, the science of which is even harder to deny than climate change.

And this post by Katie Brown, PhD at EID uses sham science and Wikipedia links to attack calls for accountability for companies like Exxon.

EID “Experts”

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On the EID Climate website, the list of experts includes people like Craig Richardson, president of the coal-funded, climate-denying Energy and Environment Legal Institute. Richardson has called climate change a communist plot.

Other experts include Horace Cooper, who is listed as a senior fellow the National Center for Public Policy Research an organization that has received $445,000 in grants from Exxon over the past two decades including several grants earmarked for climate work.

NCPPR CLIMATE GRANT (p. 44)

View entire document on DocumentCloud]

Cooper is also a Fellow with the preeminent climate science denial group the Heartland Institute. Heartland has held a number of gatherings dedicated to outright climate science denial. Heartland was also heavily funded by Exxon until they dropped them after 2006. The Mercer Family stepped in in 2008 and has given Heartland upwards of $6.7M from 2008-2017. In 2018, this grant appears to have been moved through Donors Trust.

FTI work for other industries with legal and political problems

In 2019, court documents revealed FTI was running opportunities for Monsanto on RoundUp and GMO fights, alternately posing as journalists and attacking journalists, complete with an FTI campaign spreadsheet of steps taken to undermine and intimidate journalist Carey Gillam.

Most recently, FTI produced a report on health care for a front group attacking “Medicare for All” proposals by politicians.

IPAA Lobbying With Climate Denial Under Trump

IPAA is a significant lobbying arm of the oil industry, spending 1.4 million on lobbying in 2018. Freedom of Information Act requests have revealed emails from IPAA lobbyists to key political appointees in the Department of Interior, showing an ignorance of basic climate change information and a willingness to disregard climate science when it gets in the way of oil and gas production.

In one set of emails,IPAA lobbyist Samantha McDonald asked DOI appointees to reduce protections on an endangered species of beetle. A key reason IPAA protested the beetle’s protected status? – because its projected decline was based in part on climate change science. McDonald directly questioned the viability of climate change models, but not before admitting she is “not too familiar” with the 30 year old UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). As proof that the preeminent scientific body studying climate change in the world could not be trusted, she cited a Google search and a random Forbes article. MacDonald wrote to DOI appointee Vincent DeVito in 2017:

“All modeling is done using the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. While I am not too familiar with this organization or their work, I did some searching and found this Forbes article discrediting the IPCC, citing irresponsible science practices (intentionally manipulating data, suppressing legitimate opposing arguments, etc.). This may be something to look into and push back on, since most of the climate changes threat analysis in the SSA is based on this work.”

IPAA ON IPCC (p. 214)

View entire document on DocumentCloud]

In spite of her lack of science background, IPAA’s McDonald would go on to testify on endangered species law, and the beetle would eventually be “downlisted” by the Trump administration as reported by the Washington Post.

In sum, the Energy In Depth project is entirely consistent with the 30 year campaign (or back to the 1940s…see CIEL’s Smoke and Fumes) by the oil industry to avoid being regulated for environmental harm caused by their products – climate change, air and water pollution. This covert effort contradicts oil industry leaders’ anxious attempts to portray a greener, climate friendly business model in recent years.

We can see right through it, but the aim is clear. Between Barron, the lawyer’s comments and IPAA’s front group Energy In Depth, the fossil fuel industry clearly is trying to play it both ways – opposing climate action while pushing natural gas as a solution and trying to benefit from whatever climate policies do come to pass and keep drilling away unchecked. All the while refusing to treat the global climate crisis like the real and present danger that it is. While IPAA lobbyists may try to play good cop in meetings on the Hill, they are actually leaning on old fashioned attacks on science to delay and distort any serious attempt to address climate change.

https://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/12/11921/%E2%80%9Cenergy-depth%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%93-reporters%E2%80%99-guide-its-founding-funding-and-flacks

no lnx grafix

"Energy In Depth" – A Reporters' Guide to Its Founding, Funding, and Flacks

Submitted by Lisa Graves onDecember 28, 2012

What is Energy In Depth, really? EID describes itself as "a research, education and public outreach campaign focused on getting the facts out" about hydraulic fracturing, widely known as "fracking." It's a website created by a trade group for the gas industry -- the "Independent Petroleum Association of America" (IPAA) -- and a public relations firm.

Exponentially Increasing Natural Gas Exports

In short, IPAA/EID is a PR operation for the industry's multi-billion dollar financial interests in "unconventional" drilling for what is popularly known as "natural gas." Although this expanded drilling is often described as essential to our "national security," the Center for Media and Democracy/PRWatch has shown that the industry is increasingly exporting gas to be sold in other countries. IPAA/EID's PR efforts pay special attention to the "Marcellus shale" gas that lies deep beneath the surface in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, and neighboring states, which constitutes a lucrative market for multi-national firms and their domestic counter-parts to exploit.

IPAA/EID's "about" page says its "supporting members" are state associations of gas producers [SAAB] .It displays their logos, instead of the global corporations that launched it.

What the logos cloak -- in classic PR sleight of hand -- are the larger interests behind the IPAA/EID operation.

It has been described by some in the press as merely a "pro-drilling group" (in contrast with "anti-drilling" groups or citizens), but here's how IPAA described EID in a leaked internal memo from 2009, obtained by DeSmogBlog last year. IPAA privately told its allies that EID was its new "online resource center to combat new environmental regulations," created with funding fromShell, BP, Chevron,and more.

In other words, IPAA/EID is more accurately described as a front group launched by global gas companies in order to fight a public relations battle against new environmental protections on fracking.

Behind IPAA/EID: Some of the Biggest Corporations in the World

The leaked IPAA memo reveals that the EID campaign was created through the "financial commitments" of some of the biggest companies (with some of the worst environmental records) on the planet. To wit:

Shell, which is the second largest company in the world in terms of revenue, with income of almost a half a trillion dollars in 2011: $470 billion, just behind Exxon. Royal Dutch Shell is a Dutch company registered in London. In 2010, Shell bought "East Resources," which had gas holdings in Pennsylvania and nearby, for $4.7 billion. Shell's environmental record includes the largest fresh water spill of oil in the world (in 1999 in Argentina), a major oil spill near Alaska in 1988, and numerous spills in the Niger delta in Africa. (East Resources' founder, Terry Pegula, and his wife gave at least $300,000 to Tom Corbett's campaign for governor of Pennsylvania.)

BP, which is the sixth largest company in the world in terms of revenue, with revenue of $375 billion in 2011. BP is a British oil and gas company, which took over two US companies, Amoco and ARCO (Atlantic Richfield Company) about a decade ago. Last month, BP and three of its employees were indicted on criminal charges, including manslaughter and obstruction of Congress, in connection with the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and it also agreed to pay a $4 billion fine related to the disaster. (And, although many are unaware of it, BP's decisions also made the Exxon Valdez disaster worse.)

Chevron, which is a U.S. company that is the tenth largest in the world in terms of revenue, with income of $253 billion in 2011. Last year, Chevron obtained gas leases for over a million acres, plus hundreds of thousands of acres of development rights, from smaller companies like Chief Oil & Gas. Chevron and other companies have been sued for damaging our environment through the use of the MTBE gasoline additive that has contaminated water and soil. (Chief's CEO, Trevor Rees-Jones, has been active in politics, giving at least two million dollars to Karl Rove's Crossroads operations.)

The Corporations that Helped Launch EID

Another corporation whose funding helped launch IPAA/EID isXTO Energy, which became a subsidiary of ExxonMobil in 2010. XTO was a billion-dollar Fortune 500 company that became the largest producer of natural gas in the US after it acquired Hunt Petroleum for $4.2 billion in 2008. ExxonMobil is the largest company in the world, with revenue of $486 billion in 2011. (Exxon's environmental record includes the notorious Exxon Valdez disaster, and it has spent millions of dollars over the years funding groups that front industry propaganda, as documented by Greenpeace.)

Other corporations whose funding helped launch IPAA/EID include two Canadian gas companies, EnCana [FTI FLACK?] and Talisman, plus Occidental Petroleum (California's largest gas producer) and Marathon (now Marathon Oil Corporation, which also has major interests in gas).

Other IPAA/EID funders include Schlumberger, the world's largest petroleum field services company, which began long ago as a French firm but has been headquartered in Texas for many years. The IPAA memo also lists Halliburton, one of the world's largest oil field services companies, which helped pioneer "proprietary" fracking fluids and whose Energy Services Group is involved in supporting fracking activities. (Halliburton recently settled a criminal corruption case alleging bribery by its then-CEO, Dick Cheney, and a former subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR), in connection with its natural gas operations in Nigeria.)

IPAA/EID was also launched with the financial support of the American Petroleum Institute (API), a non-profit trade group that represents many of these same interests. API had revenue of over $181 million in 2010 from "membership dues" from corporations and other sources, and it spent one-third of its income on the Edelman PR firm. According to its IRS Form "990," API gave nearly $200,000 to IPAA for "energy education" between 2008 and 2010.

Another IPAA/EID funder mentioned in the IPAA memo isAnadarko Petroleum Company, which has gas wells in Pennsylvania and Texas. Anadarko owned a 25% stake in the Deepwater Horizon, with BP, Halliburton, and others.

Military Counter-Insurgency Manual]

Anadarko made the news on fracking last year after its Public Affairs Manager, Matt Carmichael, promoted the use of military "psyops" in Pennsylvania communities to combat "an insurgency" of citizens concerned about fracking (as recorded by Sharon Wilson of the Oil and Gas Accountability Project). IPAA/EID's Chris Tucker tried to spin those comments by claiming they were meant as a joke, despite all evidence to the contrary. Carmichael is a former senior communications guy for KBR, which was a subsidiary of war contractor Halliburton.

None of these major for-profit companies or API -- the financial underwriters that launched IPAA/EID -- are listed on the campaign's website or in its description of its supporters.

IPAA/EID Targets the Park FoundationWhile Keeping Its Corporate Funders Secret

IPAA/EID has been on the attack against critics of the fracking that is so lucrative for its secretive financial backers.

Here's a recent example of its disinformation: the Capital Research Center (CRC) -- itself part of the CEO-fueled echo chamber -- quoted EID's flack Tom Shepstone this month implying that the Park Foundation spent more than $17 million helping to oppose fracking in just one year. Wrote CRC: "In 2009, the Park Foundation had net assets of $246 million and spent $23 million, which included $17.6 million in grants and contributions to green groups opposed to fracking, according to Shepstone," a Pennsylvanian whose official title is "Campaign Director" for EID's "Northeast Marcellus Initiative."

But, as reported earlier this year, the Park Foundation's public filings show that only a fraction of that amount was spent on grants for projects to educate the public about fracking. The total for 2009 was approximately $700,000, which is 1/25th of what Shepstone claimed. In contrast, the industry's biggest trade group, API, spends over a $180 million a year on its entire budget, including tens of millions of dollars on PR.

This is not the first time Shepstone has had trouble with numbers. In 2000, a court approved his federal bankruptcy after he and his wife racked up more than $725,000 in debt as compared with their assets -- described as a house on five acres (valued at $125,000), a new car loan for a Chevy S-10 Blazer, and $200 worth of clothes, although he attested that they made almost $90,000 annually a few years earlier -- with some personal debt including some debt related to his businesses, described as "Shepstone Management Corp." in Honesdale and "North Country Farm and Gardens Corp.," at 160 Roosevelt Highway in Waymart. They were also subject to an IRS tax lien for more than $20,000 in unpaid taxes attributed to "Tom Shepstake" and his wife in 1996, a claim that was later settled. Americans do, of course, have the right to declare bankruptcy when their financial calculations go awry and get a second chance, like Shepstone.

CRC used Shepstone's recent math on Park to buttress the absurd thesis that "Environmentalists often depict themselves as scrappy underdogs fighting the power of entrenched special interests. But the case of the Marcellus Shale -- and the untold energy resources that could be recovered safely by new drilling technology such as fracking -- pits 'the little guy' against powerful 'green' forces such as the Park Foundation and the Natural Resources Defense Council."

Park Foundation grants]

Like IPAA/EID,CRC keeps many of its big funders secret, although foundation filings show that its funders have included the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the family foundation of the CEO of the multi-billion dollar Koch Industries -- which in turn is led by Charles and his brother David Koch and is one of the richest privately held gas, oil, and chemical companies in the world. Koch Industries has reaped undisclosed profits from ventures benefiting from expanded fracking, such as from the lower cost of the natural gas used as a feeder to make its fertilizer by Koch Nitrogen, one of the Koch companies.

Only in the distorted worldview of CRC does an industry made up of some of the most profitable corporations in the history of the world -- ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Chevron, Koch Industries, Halliburton, and more -- get portrayed as "the little guy" fighting for fracking against a putative Goliath in the form of the Park Foundation.

In contrast to Shepstone's dramatically inflated figures, "[s]ince 2008, the foundation has given at least $2.8 million to groups and publications fighting shale drilling," according to EnergyWire. That cumulative spending is less than a quarter of what Shepstone claimed the Park Foundation spent in one year alone.

But such efforts to discredit the growing grassroots movement of citizens concerned about fracking -- such as by insinuating that it's all about "buckets of money" from Park, according to Shepstone -- are particularly deceptive when made by operations like CRC and IPAA/EID, which don't disclose the identities of their major funders such as the for-profit businesses that paved the way for EID's campaign.

Uncloaking the Revenue Stream of IPAA's PR Machine

Because EID was created as an operation within the IPAA, it does not file its own IRS Form 990 tax form, and so its true revenues and expenses are hidden from public view.

What is known is that, in 2010, IPAA had revenue of more than $8 million ($8,714,606) and spent almost the same. This revenue and expense rate is relatively consistent with the two preceding years.

IPAA is described as a trade association organized under 501(c)(6) of the Internal Revenue Code. It shares space and staff with its "IPAA Educational Foundation" (IPAAEF), a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, which means that in general contributions to the latter can be counted as a charitable tax deduction by its donors. IPAAEF has annual revenue of almost a half million dollars a year, and it reports paying a "management fee" to IPAA of a little more than $200,000 a year. IPAAEF describes its activities as including grants to fund students "as interns at petroleum companies." According to its Form 990, one of IPAAEF's main activities each year appears to be its "Wildcatters Ball," which cost $227,270 in 2010.IPAA also hosts an annual golf tournament that costs almost $200,000.

IPAA has assets worth over $8 million, as of the end of 2010. It invested about $6.5 million of this in publicly traded securities.It did not disclose the identities of these stocks or bonds and whether any of its investments are related to the gas industry. In 2010, it reported investment income of about $215,000.

IPAA at NASDAQIPAA was also listed in a publicly filed licensing agreement in 2002 between the FBR Family of Funds and the "IPAA Energy Index." According to that agreement, "the FBR/IPAA Energy Index Fund is a series of a registered open-end management investment company whose objective is to track the price and yield performance of publicly-traded common stocks of companies represented by the IPAA Energy Index. The Fund is a no-load mutual fund, and its assets are invested by FBR Fund Advisers, Inc." There is little public information about what happened under that agreement or whether or not IPAA has other relationships with investment funds or groups speculating on fracking. It has showcased presentations on capital investment in fracking featuring information from investment bankers like Goldman Sachs.

As a non-profit organization, IPAA's tax benefits under the federal tax code are predicated on it not being "organized for profit and no part of the net earnings of which [can] inure[] to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual." There is no public information indicating whether or not any of its employees invested in the FBR Fund or other energy funds, stocks or other investment vehicles, or whether it has any policy barring its employees from such investments or land speculation in fracking regions. It has no published conflict-of-interest policy on this issue, but there is no legal requirement that it adopt one (other than for conflicts involving payments from the non-profit entity to people related to principals in the organization).

In 2010, IPAA received $3.8 million from membership dues and most of the remainder of its $8 million budget from program fees for nearly two dozen conferences a year. IPAA's annual dues for gas companies are calculated on a sliding scale based on the "Barrel of Oil Equivalents" (BOE) and range from $4,000 to $60,000 per year depending on whether a company's BOE is under 750,000 or more than 50 million BOE. By reference, Anadarko Petroleum, a funder of IPAA/EID that is described as one of the world's largest oil and gas exploration firms, "had production of 206 million BOE" as of 2008.

Companies that pay these dues can deduct 65% of them as business expenses; 35% of the dues are considered lobbying expenses. In 2010, IPAA reports that it spent $1.3 million on lobbying and political expenditures. IPAA also has a related "527"-type organization involved in political campaigns, called the "IPAA Wildcatters Fund," which had $542,639 in receipts in the run up to the 2012 elections. IPAA also told the IRS in 2010 that it had "joined forces with the Business Industry Political Action Committee," whose slogan used to be "Electing Business to Congress" and is now "Powering Business Political Success."

Who Leads IPAA/EID and for How Much?

The portion of IPAA's annual revenues or expenses that fund its EID campaign is not disclosed.

What is known is that in 2010, IPAA paid its president, Barrett (Barry) Russell, more than one-half million dollars in total compensation ($511,000 and a promise of health insurance for him and his wife for life). Russell was elected president of the IPAA in 2000. He also has seat on the board of the Business Industry Political Action Committee and the National Energy Education Development Project. He's been IPAA's "chief legal and financial officer since 1988 and an officer of IPAA's educational foundation since its inception." He previously worked for the EPA, and he also worked for consulting firms, such as Booz, Allen and Hamilton, specializing in mergers and acquisitions.

IPAA paid another nearly one million dollars in total compensation for its next five highest paid employees combined (who each earn over $200,000 a year). This list includes Lee Fuller and Jeff Eshelman, who are specifically listed on the EID website as part of the EID team.

Fuller, a chemical engineer, is IPAA's Vice President of Government Relations, and he is listed on the website as EID's "Executive Director." He began working for IPAA in 1998 after working as a lobbyist for the gas industry for 12 years following an eight-year job staffing the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, where he handled rules on drilling fluids, wells, and Superfund sites.Eshelman is also a Vice President for IPAA and has served as its spokesman for a number of years.

Big Raises

In 2010, these and other IPAA executives got big raises, including a raise of more than $60,000 for the president. The salary increases for other IPAA executives that year ranged from $21,000 per year to $53,000 per year.

There is no information in IPAA's 2010 public tax filings about what the 13 other staffers listed on its EID campaign website are paid per year because only the top highest paid staffers are required to be disclosed (and also some of the EID team are recent hires). There also appears to be no publicly posted conflict-of-interest rule in this field that would require the disclosure of any fracking-related stock or real property holdings that would benefit from limiting restrictions on fracking by any IPAA/EID team member.

Shining a Spotlight on the IPAA/EID Marcellus Team

According to the leaked memo from IPAA, EID's reason for being is to serve as a "major initiative to respond to . . . attacks" on fracking and amplify "coordinated messages." Although IPAA/EID's reach is nationwide, one area where it appears to be particularly aggressive is Pennsylvania, through the blogging and outreach of Tom Shepstone.

Shepstone is described as the Campaign Leader of the EID Marcellus team. Before joining IPAA/EID, Shepstone worked primarily as a consultant writing reports for towns about land planning, at taxpayer expense. Even before he became the gas industry's campaigner in the region, he was apparently recommending industry-friendly land use rules, such as including a so-called "right to mine" in recommendations, expressly urging towns not to interfere with the development of natural gas, and not including recommendations for extra setback distances from property lines for industrial activities versus other structures. Shepstone was previously an IACP certified planner, which has conflict-of-interest rules, but he has said that he stopped paying dues and was not dropped by the American Planning Association.

In the period between his bankruptcy and his public association with IPAA/EID last year, Shepstone was often quoted in the press with the description "local businessman." He also wrote online comments praising right-wing diatribes. For example, he gave the highest review to the book, "The Red Decade: the Classic Work on Communism in America During the Thirties," which he said provided "[g]reat insights for those who recognize we are reliving the 1930s," and showed how those with a "liberal/leftist" mindset are prone to be "manipulated by totalitarian thugs."

Right-Wing Screed Endorsed by Shepstone

In another public review, Shepstone gave the highest marks to "The Liberal Mind: the Psychological Causes of Political Madness," which he said would help readers "completely understand how Obama thinks" and explains the president as well as Bill and Hillary Clinton "in their totality." He also claimed that reading this and Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" -- a favorite boogeyman of right-wing talk show hosts -- would help "predict" President Obama's actions. The "Liberal Mind" book endorsed by Shepstone actually claims repeatedly that embracing progressive values is a mental disorder that is "the product of psychopathology," which undermines "the ability of families to raise children to be self-reliant" and "threatens to destroy the West's greatest achievement: the American dream of civilized liberty."

Given Shepstone's warm embrace of such fringe views, it is not entirely surprising that the IPAA/EID Marcellus website for the campaign he leads takes pains to try to score right-wing points in claiming that "the shale 'revolution' in the United States is impacting our 'friends' in Russia and Iran." It is also unsurprising that some of Shepstone's writings for IPAA/EID refer derisively to his fellow citizens exercising their fundamental First Amendment rights. To take a few recent examples of the tenor of his remarks, he put down an advocate asking serious and legitimate questions about the consequences of fracking in the community as an "aging activist seeking relevance in a modern world" and he also derided a community protest of 150 citizens as "a pathetic failure."

But, beyond his apparent animosity toward progressives and other concerned Americans, it is Shepstone's claims that are particularly astonishing. Here's a sampling of his disinformation sound bites:

"Hydrofracking Improves Water Quality!" – When Shepstone made this claim at a public meeting, he was met with a spontaneous burst of laughter in disbelief, but he claimed it was true because more wells will be tested due to fracking than are currently monitored. In claiming fracking improves water quality, Shepstone conveniently ignores the millions of gallons of fresh water contaminated in the process of fracking each well, resulting in waste water whose "brine" is not even recommended for use on roads because of the risk of ground water contamination. He also ignores concerns that the water may become contaminated with dissolved radium due to the radioactive uranium rock in the region, requiring additional treatment, among other concerns that have been raised across the country about the potential for contamination of America's precious aquifers and the spoiling of Americans' wells.

"Natural gas produces water rather than depleting it" – Shepstone made this claim apparently based on the fact that burning methane gas or heating wet gas releases water vapor, and water is a heavier molecule than methane, but his claim ignores the fact that millions of gallons of fresh water are being pumped from aquifers and rivers to be spoiled with each fracking well, and the industry is banking on drilling thousands and thousands of such wells in the region.

"There is no evidence the development of this resource will damage the environment . . . but plenty of evidence the farm and the woods can be saved with it" – This Shepstone claim is predicated on the notion that rural land can require money for property taxes to maintain, which he says gas leasing revenue will aid, but his claim ignores the effect of industrialization on farms, parks, and rivers, which has been documented by Oscar-nominee Josh Fox and others. Shepstone's claim also ignores other documented environmental hazards from fracking, including the venting of unprocessed methane gas and other carcinogens associated with fracking (as documented in the video at the link).

"Hydraulic Fracturing Is An Open Book" – Shepstone pushed the idea that fracking fluid "is an open book" because some of the chemicals in it have been revealed, even as he sought to minimize concerns about what secret chemicals are in dozens of pounds of ingredients used in each well that companies keep secret under the claim that they are "proprietary," chemicals he says are basically harmless jellies. Because the blend of secret chemicals is proprietary and varies by manufacturer he cannot actually prove his assertion, but that's no deterrent. He also fails to mention that IPAA has lobbied to keep such chemicals secret by opposing the closing of the "Halliburton loophole," -- legislation that was mentioned in the IPAA's leaked memo discussing the need for its EID campaign. (Similarly, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has also pushed for so-called state "disclosure" rules sought by Exxon to keep certain chemicals used in fracking secret from the public, as reported by the New York Times.)

These are just some of Shepstone's many claims on behalf of IPAA/EID. Curiously, but on a much more minor note, he has also written online comments pushing pro-fracking claims sometimes citing as his location towns other than where he actually resides in Pennsylvania.

Shepstone is not the only writer/speaker for IPAA/EID in Pennsylvania; he's just its most visible one. And, his trade group's pro-fracking campaign has many components in its efforts to persuade the public and discredit critics of fracking. For example, IPAA/EID has disseminated attacks on Fox's Oscar-nominated documentary, "Gasland," and his latest film, "The Sky Is Pink."IPAA/EID is also currently promoting its "Truthland" video, complete with a stand-alone website that lists both the EID and IPAA logos as if they were separate entities.

The IPAA/EID Glass House

Still, there is no doubt that Shepstone and IPAA/EID seem obsessed with both Fox and the Park Foundation. Well before Shepstone's most recent spinning of the foundation's grant numbers in a way that inflates the amount of grants for projects on fracking by combining it with the amounts in support of environmental organizations and other groups,Shepstone was attacking Park and its directors in others ways.

At one point, he even made the baseless claim that the foundation was wrongly engaged in "significant political activity," which he defined as "funding opponents of hydro-fracking." Although both his math and his analysis of federal tax law are way out of whack, one of the flaws is his contention that supporting research and public education about the risks of fracking is somehow impermissibly "political," while he ignores the manifold activities by pro-fracking non-profit entities on his side attempting to prevent new laws -- which is one of the very objectives mentioned in the leaked IPAA memo. In his attacks on Park and its grantees (which operate under 501(c)(3) rules allowing for a small percentage of lobbying or which may have separate 501(c)(4) arms to allow for more lobbying and different rules for prospective donors), Shepstone is simply not a credible source for reporters or others on U.S. tax and lobbying laws.

Example of an academic close ties to industry

Moreover, in a feat of astounding hypocrisy, Shepstone attempts to discredit research he claims is supported by an organization that has no financial stake in the outcome of such research, while regularly echoing industry-friendly research and claims shaped by the very interests that have the most to gain from distorting information, the industry he really serves. Meanwhile, investigators have uncovered yet more instances of purportedly independent studies by academics connected to the for-profit fracking industry, as with reports that a University of Texas professor, Robert Chase -- whose studies claimed that "fracking was safe for groundwater" -- had allegedly "pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Texas natural gas developer."

Shepstone has even attempted to defend his own bias by asserting that he held the same views about fracking before he started working on behalf of the industry. Such views are not created in a vacuum, however, and were likely shaped by the natural gas industry's PR machine for which he now works.

In his effort to smear Park and those concerned with fracking, Shepstone sidesteps the proliferation of non-profit groups that peddle pro-fracking claims, as exposed by Dory Hippauf. Beyond IPAA/EID, these includeAPI (which has launched front groups called "Energy Citizens" and "EnergyNation"), the Marcellus Shale Coalition, the Ohio Shale Coalition, America's Natural Gas Alliance, the Center for Liquified Natural Gas, energy Tomorrow, EnergyfromShale.org, energyNow!, EnergyAnswered, LNGfacts.org, SecureOurFuels.org, Oilindependents.org, the Consumer Energy Alliance, Vote4Energy.org, the American Energy Alliance (AEA), the Institute for Energy Research (IER), and others.

Back of the AEA and AFP Bus

Some of these groups work together on campaigns. AEA, for example, joined in a bus tour with David Koch's Americans for Prosperity (AFP) to influence voters about fracking under the jobs frame frequently spouted by Shepstone.Due to inadequate public disclosure requirements, however, it is difficult to know who helped fund that tour besides Koch through his financial support for AFP, which he helped found and helps lead. This is just one of many ways pro-fracking groups coordinate and amplify common messages. They have even had overlapping public relations staff, as with IPAA/EID's Chris Tucker, a former GOP congressional staffer who has been described as a Senior Vice President at Financial Dynamics, as the "managing director of FTI Consulting and as team lead for Energy In Depth." For a time, Tucker was publicly listed as handling communications for both IPAA/EID and IER, "using the same phone number for both," according to DeSmogBlog's research.

Of course, according to the leaked IPAA memo, one of the goals for EID was "coordinated messages."

But, Shepstone is relatively silent on such matters and on how his public messages help facilitate that goal.

Because entities like IPAA/EID, AEA, API, and AFP are not required to disclose their expenditures with the kind of detail that a grant-making foundation is, it is simply not possible to calculate the true amount of money these various non-profit groups are spending advancing the positions of the gas industry. Although their cumulative budgets amount to well over two hundred million dollars a year, the portion funded to support fracking or attack those concerned about fracking is unknown.

But it is clear that the Park Foundation is not a for-profit corporation that would benefit financially from the success of efforts to raise awareness about the risks of expanded fracking. Conversely, the multi-billion dollar corporations and/or some of the wealthy CEOs whose foundations fund organizations like IPAA/IED, CRC, and AFP do have a financial stake in advancing fracking with the least amount of regulation possible, regardless of what may be in the best interests of the public in protecting American families' health and their access to safe drinking water and clean air in the decades ahead.

After all, fracking is big business, as IPAA/EID's Shepstone regularly stresses.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/leaked-audio-exposes-oil-and-gas-execs-laughing-with-joy-over-cozy-access-to-trump-officials/

A  newly-leaked audio recording reveals that oil and gas executives in a private meeting were “giddy” with laughter in the summer of 2017 as they rejoiced over the “unprecedented access” they were being given to the highest levels of the Trump administration, boasting about their ability to have closed-door meetings with top officials and the ascendance of their own industry colleagues to some of the most powerful seats of government.

Among the topics in the recording, reports Reveal at the Center for Investigative Reporting—which was provided the audio—the oil and gas executives who belong to the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) “are heard discussing David Bernhardt, now deputy secretary of the Interior and a former industry lobbyist.” Notably, Bernhardt—described by the executives in the recording as a close friend and industry operative—has now been nominated by President Trump to be the next Secretary of Interior, with his confirmation hearings scheduled for next week.

Lance Williams, a senior reporter for Reveal, detailed the contents of the recorded June 2017 meeting, which took place inside a Ritz-Carlton hotel conference room in Southern California, with an extensive piece for Politico‘s weekend magazine published Saturday. Williams said the “recording gives a rare look behind the curtain of an influential oil industry lobbying group” congratulating itself on their political fortunes under a friendly administration.

Williams reports:

Dan Naatz, the association’s political director, told the conference room audience of about 100 executives that Bernhardt’s new role meant their priorities would be heard at the highest levels of Interior.

“We know him very well, and we have direct access to him, have conversations with him about issues ranging from federal land access to endangered species, to a lot of issues,” Naatz said, according to an hourlong recording…

To a room full of laughter, IPAA’s CEO Barry Russell in the recording described one meeting with Scott Pruitt, the president’s EPA administrator at the time. What was expected to be a simple meet-and-greet, Russell explained, quickly became a friendly opportunity for the fellow industry insiders to provide Pruitt with a wish list for deregulation and agency rule changes. “What was really great is there was about four or five EPA staffers there, who were all like, ‘Write that down, write that down,’ all the way through this,” Russell stated. “And when we left, I said that was just our overview.”

Russell, with the room reportedly still laughing, subsequently bragged: “It’s really a new world for us and very, very helpful.”

Specifically, the IPAA and other allies were holding meetings during that period with the Interior Department, the EPA, and other agencies to reduce regulations on fracking, public lands restoration, methane restrictions, and species protection. From Politico:

At the meeting, the association’s leaders distributed a private “regulatory update” memo that detailed environmental laws and rules that it hoped to blunt or overturn. The group ultimately got its way on four of the five high-profile issues that topped its wish list.

Trump himself was a driving force behind deregulating the energy industry, ordering the government in 2017 to weed out federal rules “that unnecessarily encumber energy production.” In a 2017 order, Zinke called for his deputy secretary—Bernhardt—to make sure the department complied with Trump’s regulatory rollbacks.

The leaked recording comes in the wake of reporting by journalist Andrew Perez of Maplight on Fridayrevealed that Bernhardt and the lobbying firm he once worked for, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, have donated almost a million dollars over the last five years to the very senators who will soon vote on his confirmation.

According to Perez:

A MapLight review of campaign finance data found that Bernhardt, Brownstein Hyatt employees and the firm’s political action committee contributed more than $225,000 to members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee between 2013 and 2018. The panel will hold a hearing on his nomination next week.

The firm and its employees also donated more than $960,000 to current members of the Senate, who will cast the final vote on Bernhardt’s confirmation.

Colorado’s senators, Democrat Michael Bennet and Republican Cory Gardner, were the top recipients of cash from Brownstein Hyatt, which has a major lobbying presence in Denver. The third-biggest haul went to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. Bennet voted to confirm Bernhardt as deputy secretary but has announced he will oppose his nomination to lead the agency.

Asked to comment on the audio recording of the IPAA meeting, Nada Culver, senior counsel for the Wilderness Society, told Politico that the lobby group’s access ultimately resulted in attaining much of what it wanted from the Trump administration. “The IPAA’s wish list was granted as asked, in the executive order, and in the actions taken by the Department of the Interior,” Culver said. “It pains me to say it.”

With Bernhardt’s confirmation hearing set for next week, environmental groups are rallying constituents to call their senators to reject the nominee.

As Anne Hawke of the NRDC told her group’s members this week, “Bernhardt’s sorry record in protecting America’s natural resources, wildlife and waters makes him uniquely unfit for the job, and we urge you to call on lawmakers to reject his nomination.”

President Trump, the Hawke further warned, “is handing over the future of our public lands, wildlife, waters and all they support to a man who has made a living for decades attacking all of that to benefit some of the biggest industrial polluters on the planet.”

==

forbes mag

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/legalnewsline**/2018/**04/27/judge-ca-cities-alleging-doom-in-climate-change-lawsuits-sold-investors-a-different-story/#54681cea10e1

California officials who are suing large energy companies are telling two contradictory stories while taking part in a targeted effort featuring state attorneys general, private lawyers and Rockefeller money, a Texas judge has found.

On April 24, Tarrant County District Judge R.H. Wallace, Jr. signed off on proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law, changing little from what Exxon is claiming – that lawsuits from California cities and counties are the product of an alleged conspiracy and assert that near-certain, climate change-caused doom is coming, even though previous bond offerings made to potential investors say such catastrophes can’t be predicted.

The judge’s filingwas obtained by Energy In Depth, a research program of the Independent Petroleum Association of America.

“While the California municipalities alleged in their complaints against the energy companies that the impacts of climate change were knowable, quantifiable and certain, they told their investors the exact opposite,” Wallace's filing says.

“These contradictions raise the question of whether the California municipalities brought these lawsuits for an improper purpose.”

The California counties of Marin, Santa Cruz and San Mateo and the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Cruz, Richmond and Imperial Beach have filed suit against several energy companies - including Exxon, Chevron and BP - over climate change. The company is also being targeted by the attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York.

Exxon took the fight to Texas in January by asking that it be allowed to depose the officials who filed these cases, as well as Hagens Berman lawyer Matt Pawa. The firm is representing some of the plaintiffs on a contingency fee.

The depositions could lead to a lawsuit alleging the California cases were brought in bad faith.

Statements made to potential investors contradict allegations made by the municipalities when they sued the energy industry, Exxon argued. For example:

San Mateo County’s complaint says it is “particularly vulnerable to sea level rise” and that there is a 93% chance the county experiences a “devastating” flood before 2050. However, bond offerings in 2014 and 2016 noted that the county “is unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm will occur."

At a recent American Enterprise Institute event, an attorney representing Colorado governments in climate change cases noted that the bond offerings came with a statement regarding a final paper from the California Climate Change Center that said property in San Francisco Bay is vulnerable to impacts associated with sea-level rise.

But the cities did not present an opinion on the accuracy of those claims, which was noted by Competitive Enterprise Institute attorney who attended the event.

The California cases came five years after a “playbook” was discussed at a 2012 conference in La Jolla, CA. It is being carried out by Pawa, the AGs of New York and Massachusetts and the California local governments, Exxon said.

The judge’s findings of fact agree.

“During the conference, participants discussed strategies to ‘[w]in [a]cess to [i]nternal [d]ocuments’ of energy companies, like ExxonMobil, that could be used to obtain leverage over these companies,” the filing says.

“The conference participants concluded that using law enforcement powers and civil litigation to ‘maintain[] pressure on the industry that could eventually lead to its support for legislative and regulatory responses to global warming.’ One commentator observed, ‘Even if your ultimate goal might be to shut down a company, you still might be wise to start out by asking for compensation for injured parties.’"

In 2016, Pawa met with members of the philanthropic Rockefeller Family Fund. The draft agenda said the goals of his campaign included convincing the public that Exxon is a corrupt institution that “has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm,” as well as forcing public officials to distance themselves from the company by refusing campaign donations and rejecting requests for meetings.

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund recently awarded a $200,000 grant to the Niskanen Center, which is representing the City of Boulder in its lawsuit against Exxon and another company.

“The draft agenda notes that participants planned to use ‘AGs’ and ‘Tort()’ suits to ‘get() discovery’ and ‘creat(e) scandal,’” the judge’s filing says.

Those AGs attempted to hide their coordination with Pawa, the judge says.

"At the press conference, Attorney General Schneiderman discussed the need to regulate the energy industry's speech on climate change, just as Potential Defendant Pawa had urged at La Jolla and at the Rockefeller meeting," the filing says.

The judge also found that this effort was done to chill Texas-based free speech (Exxon’s statements public statements about climate change), so jurisdiction is proper in his court.

==

...IOPA closing its doors after 113 years representing small oil producers ...

www.taftmidwaydriller.com/.../iopa-closing-its-doors-after-113-years-representing-sm...

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1.

:{Nov 13, 2017 - 31, so independents will have to market their own oil. For more than a century the small oil producers on the West Side have worked together to sell their contracts. The “mom and pop” producers all belonged to the :{Independent Oil Producers Agency:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, which was formed in 1904, to sell the crude oil they ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

[:{ :{IOPA was formed on Nov. 3, 1904, Holmes said and it was in response to having to deal with the Rockefeller oil empire that controlled the rail cars and dictated the price the independents could get for their oil.}:

The small producers banded together and formed IOPA.  Then, working in conjunction with Union Oil, built a pipeline to a terminal on the coast at Port San Luis near Avila Beach.

From there the oil was shipped north to refineries in the San Francisco Bay area “to get a fair price,” Holmes said.

In the 1940s, IOPA turned over its interest in the pipeline to Union Oil in return for a 5-year contract to sell their oil to Union.

That contract was an “evergreen” contract that was automatically renewed for the next 70-plus years.   In 2013, Phillips, which had obtained the contract from Union, told IOPA it would not be renewed when it expired at the end of 2017.

}:](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:K2GZtIjyH00J:www.taftmidwaydriller.com/news/20171113/iopa-closing-its-doors-after-113-years-representing-small-oil-producers+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

==

http://www.alternet.org/environment/rex-tillerson-has-been-misleading-public-about-dangers-fracking-years

...

. It worked. With help from sympathetic (and largely conservative) media outlets and a barrage of propaganda from industry front groups like “Energy in Depth,” the industry was able to brand the victims as liars and charlatans. “Their water was always like that” became a meme—a “sciencey” explanation that let the industry off the hook and blamed the victims. Each new case got the same treatment, and with oil industry PR money behind it, much of the nation believed it.

Central to the oil industry’s branding of fracking as a clean source of energy is the claim that “there’s never been one case of water pollution from fracking.” Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exon (and now Secretary of State) looked straight into the camera and proclaimed in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2013 that after “a million data points,” there had “never been a verifiable case of fracking polluting drinking water.”  The claim was patently false. At that point we knew aquifers had been polluted in Dimock Pa, Pavilion Wyoming and Parker Country Texas.  Texas, Colorado, Wyoming resulting in dozens of water wells being polluted. Testing in all three cases pointed to gas extraction.

In fact, there are documented cases of fracking contaminating drinking water as early as the 1980s. An EPA report from 1987 showed that “fracturing the Kaiser gas well on Mr. James Parson’s property, fractures were created allowing migration of fracture fluid from the gas well to Mr. Parson’s water well.” Industry itself admitted that fracking polluted the well.  During the 1990s when modern fracking technologies were being pioneered in Texas, widespread instances of pollution were acknowledged by Texas regulators.

But with enough people in positions of power and influence repeating it, the claim that there had never been a single case of fracking polluting drinking water became a “fact.” Media figures, oil industry officials, politicians, state regulators and gas and oil PR teams repeated the same story line: Fracking has been around for seventy years and there’s never been one documented case of pollution.

There were numerous problems with this story. First, modern slick-water fracking combined with horizontal drilling is a relatively new technology.  Comparing the “stimulation” of old vertical wells to modern fracks with pressures up to 15,000 PSI and hundreds of chemicals is like comparing a 1960s rotary phone to today's iPhone.

Also left out of the not-one-case story is a clever sleight of hand with the definition of fracking. The oil industry defines “fracking” as only what happens in the horizontal section of pipe thousands of feet underground. According to this reasoning, the only way fracking can pollute drinking water is by migrating through thousands of feet of solid rock. Pollution from the vertical part of the well—where most leaks occur—or surface activity is not in this technical definition pollution from fracking.

Of course, most people understand fracking as the whole process of transporting equipment and chemicals to the site, drilling the well, extracting the gas and transporting it to market. Oil industry PR people are perfectly willing to use this confusion to their advantage. They can cite scientific papers claiming that “there has never been a case of fracking polluting drinking water,” and let the public believe they are referring to the common-sense definition of fracking as the entire industrial process.

Industry leaders like Tillerson know all this, of course. But they just keep repeating the same misleading claim. If enough “experts,” authority figures and media personalities keep repeating it, the big lie becomes a fact in people’s minds. And once it’s embedded, these everyone-knows-it facts are very difficult to dislodge.

An important part of the oil industry drive to control perceptions of fracking is demonizing its critics. Victims are portrayed as greedy fraudsters. Environmentalists are portrayed as hysterical, hypocritical busy bodies inventing scandals about a clean energy technology they should be celebrating. Filmmakers like Josh Fox, whose film “Gasland” shined a spotlight on cases of pollution associated with fracking, were subjected to withering character assassination campaigns.

The IPAA, the oldest petroleum industry association in the nation, funded a film a film to discredit “Gasland” called “Truthland.” It was a shiny spin piece that painted any case of water contamination as naturally occurring. The best known of these fracking-denial films is “FrackNation” by Phelim McAleer. McAleer has made a career out of making films depicting environments as hypocritical elitists and pollution victims as frauds and liars. A darling of conservative news outlets, McAleer has been one of the most effective proponents of fracking-has-never-contaminated-drinking-water meme. Other media figures like Alex Epstein and Ezra Levant have cashed in by writing Ann Coulter-style books popularizing oil industry talking points. Levant is famous in Canada for his shouting-head attacks on oil industry critics.

IPAA also fired up their own PR “news” outlet, Energy In Depth. In a memo announcing the new media group, IPAA stated the group’s goal; “EnergyInDepth.org: a state of the art online resource center to combat new environmental regulations,”. The venture was funded by major gas and oil interests including; BP, Anadarko, Marathon, EnCana, Chevron, Talisman,Shell,Halliburton and Schlumberger and Energy in Depth remains one of the main purveyors of the gas industry’s talking points regarding water, fracking and pollution.

When a reporter or member of the public asks if fracking pollutes drinking water, they’re likely asking if any part of the entire process contaminates drinking water. That’s logical since the entire process will be used as the nation moves forward with the planned fracked gas revolution. When the question is answered with a resounding, seemingly convincing ‘NO’, the reporter or citizen thinks no water has ever been contaminated by any part of the fracking process.

While industry has gotten away with this ruse for a decade, hundreds of cases of water contamination have become known. After a long fight, The Scranton Times got Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection to count the number of letters it sent to residents confirming incidence of water contamination during their fracked gas boom. That number was 243. The Associated Press found at least four states had recorded water contamination also. One troubling fact keeps us from knowing how many cases have actually occurred. When a homeowner settles their case with the operator, they are required to sign a silence agreement that disallows them from sharing any facts about their case. Not only do we know hundreds of cases of water contamination related to the fracking boom have occurred, as it is today, we can never know how many cases there really have been.

restore middle class CA

independent expenditure committee sponsored by the California Independent Petroleum Association.

THe Trump administration intends to scrap and rewrite an Obama-era rule designed to make fracking on federal lands safer.

Drilling has taken place on federal lands for years, with more than 100,000 wells in existence. In 2015, the Interior Dept. issued new standards aimed at making the process safer, including stricter and higher design standards for wells and waste fluid storage facilities to mitigate risks to air, water and wildlife. Companies would also be required to publicly disclose c hemicals used in fracking.

However, U.S. District Judge Scott Skavdahl blocked the Obama rule in June after accepting the argument from energy companies and several states that federal regulators lack congressional authority to set rules for fracking.

The Obama administration appealed the decision to the 10th Circuit, but the rule could be killed for good. The Trump administration said in court filings Wednesday it is withdrawing from the lawsuit.

Justice Dept. lawyers representing Interior and the Bureau of Land Management asked the court to "continue the oral argument and hold these appeals in abeyance pending a new rulemaking" on the issue.

"As part of this process, the Department has begun reviewing the 2015 Final Rule (and all guidance issued pursuant thereto) for consistency with the policies and priorities of the new Administration," the motion reads. "This initial review has revealed that the 2015 Final Rule does not reflect those policies and priorities."

A spokeswoman for Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke confirmed with the Associated Press that the administration intends to submit a new rule.

Neal Kirby of the Independent Petroleum Association of America praised the withdrawal of the rule, calling it "unnecessary, duplicative and would further drive away independent producers from federal lands."

"Every energy-producing area has different needs and requirements, which is why the states are far more effective at regulating hydraulic fracturing than the federal government," he said.

Many environmental advocates felt that the 2015 rule was already too lenient, but the Trump administration's latest action could be even more worrisome to fracking opponents.

"This disturbing decision highlights Trump's desire to leave our beautiful public lands utterly unprotected from oil industry exploitation," said Michael Saul, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. "Backing away from these modest rules is doubly dangerous given the administration's reckless plans to ramp up fracking and drilling on public lands across America."

Other environmental organizations spoke out against the announcement.

"Today's news demonstrates the degree to which Secretary Zinke and the Trump administration are in the pocket of the oil and gas industry," said Earthjustice attorney Mike Freeman.

Earthworks policy director Lauren Page said: "By moving to overturn these common-sense protections, the Trump administration is positioning itself against the disclosure of toxic chemicals, protecting clean water and preserving our public land."

Groundwater contamination is one of the biggest concerns about unconventional oil and natural gas production. While the industry maintains the safety of the process, in December the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released its highly anticipated final report identifying cases of impacts on drinking water at each stage in the hydraulic fracturing water cycle.

The disposal of fracking wastewater into underground wells has also been linked to the alarming increase in seismic activity in states such as Oklahoma and Kansas.

"With [Wednesday's] decision, Trump is making it clear that he thinks we need more fracking operations contaminating our drinking water, causing earthquakes and polluting our environment, not less," Sierra Club Beyond Dirty Fuels campaign director Lena Moffitt said. "The Sierra Club will continue to defend this rule, ensuring that our publicly-owned lands remain protected from fracking and Donald Trump."

President Trump has plans to open up federal lands for more energy development. As a candidate, Trump campaigned on a promise to "unleash America's $50 trillion in untapped shale, oil, and natural gas reserves, plus hundreds of years in clean coal reserves."

He accused President Obama of "denying millions of Americans access to the energy wealth sitting under our feet" by restricting leasing and banning new coal extraction.

Incidentally, the actions of the current administration go against the sentiments of the majority of Americans, who are opposed to fracking and drilling of public lands, according to a new Gallup poll.

The poll, released on Tuesday, determined that 53 percent of Americans oppose fracking as a means of increasing the production of natural gas and oil in the U.S. Only 46 percent support for opening up federal lands for oil exploration, compared to 65 percent who favored it in 2014.

==

“Energy In Depth” – A Reporters’ Guide to Its Founding, Funding, and Flacks [2]

What is Energy In Depth, really? EID describes itself as "a research, education and public outreach campaign focused on getting the facts out" about hydraulic fracturing, widely known as "fracking." It's a website created by a trade group for the gas industry -- the "Independent Petroleum Association of America" (IPAA) -- and a public relations firm.

In short, IPAA/EID is a PR operation for the industry's multi-billion dollar financial interests in "unconventional" drilling for what is popularly known as "natural gas." Although this expanded drilling is often described as essential to our "national security," the Center for Media and Democracy/PRWatch has shown that the industry is increasingly exporting [3] gas to be sold in other countries [4]. IPAA/EID's PR efforts pay special attention to the "Marcellus shale" gas that lies deep beneath the surface in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, and neighboring states, which constitutes a lucrative market for multi-national firms and their domestic counter-parts to exploit.

IPAA/EID's "about" page says its "supporting members" are state associations of gas producers. It displays their logos, instead of the global corporations that launched it.

What the logos cloak -- in classic PR sleight of hand -- are the larger interests behind the IPAA/EID operation.

It has been described by some in the press as merely a "pro-drilling group" (in contrast with "anti-drilling" groups or citizens), but here's how IPAA described EID in a leaked internal memo from 2009, obtained by**DeSmogBlog** [5] last year. IPAA privately told its allies that EID was its new "online resource center to combat new environmental regulations," created with funding from Shell, BP, Chevron, and more.

In other words, IPAA/EID is more accurately described as a front group launched by global gas companies in order to fight a public relations battle against new environmental protections on fracking.

Behind IPAA/EID: Some of the Biggest Corporations in the World

The leaked IPAA memo reveals that the EID campaign was created through the "financial commitments" of some of the biggest companies (with some of the worst environmental records) on the planet. To wit:

Another corporation whose funding helped launch IPAA/EID is XTO Energy, which became a subsidiary of ExxonMobil in 2010. XTO was a billion-dollar Fortune 500 company that became the largest producer of natural gas in the US after it acquired Hunt Petroleum for $4.2 billion in 2008. ExxonMobil is the largest company in the world, with revenue of $486 billion in 2011. (Exxon's environmental record includes the notorious Exxon Valdezdisaster, and it has spent millions of dollars over the years funding groups that front industry propaganda, as documented by Greenpeace.)

Other corporations whose funding helped launch IPAA/EID include two Canadian gas companies, EnCana and Talisman, plus Occidental Petroleum (California's largest gas producer) and Marathon (now Marathon Oil Corporation, which also has major interests in gas).

Other IPAA/EID funders include Schlumberger, the world's largest petroleum field services company, which began long ago as a French firm but has been headquartered in Texas for many years. The IPAA memo also listsHalliburton, one of the world's largest oil field services companies, which helped pioneer "proprietary" fracking fluids and whose Energy Services Group is involved in supporting fracking activities. (Halliburton recently settled a criminal corruption case alleging bribery by its then-CEO, Dick Cheney, and a former subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR), in connection with its natural gas operations in Nigeria.)

IPAA/EID was also launched with the financial support of the American Petroleum Institute (API), a non-profit trade group that represents many of these same interests. API had revenue of over $181 million in 2010 from "membership dues" from corporations and other sources, and it spent one-third of its income on the Edelman PR firm. According to its IRS Form "990," API gave nearly $200,000 to IPAA for "energy education" between 2008 and 2010.

Another IPAA/EID funder mentioned in the IPAA memo is Anadarko Petroleum Company, which has gas wells in Pennsylvania and Texas. Anadarko owned a 25% stake in the Deepwater Horizon, with BP, Halliburton, and others.

Anadarko made the news on fracking last year after its Public Affairs Manager, Matt Carmichael, promoted the use of military "psyops" in Pennsylvania communities to combat "an insurgency" of citizens concerned about fracking (as recorded [10] by Sharon Wilson of the Oil and Gas Accountability Project). IPAA/EID's Chris Tucker tried to spin [11] those comments by claiming they were meant as a joke, despite all evidence to the contrary. Carmichael is a former senior communications guy [12] for KBR, which was a subsidiary of war contractor Halliburton.

None of these major for-profit companies or API -- the financial underwriters that launched IPAA/EID -- are listed on the campaign's website or in its description of its supporters.

IPAA/EID Targets the Park Foundation While Keeping Its Corporate Funders Secret

IPAA/EID has been on the attack against critics of the fracking that is so lucrative for its secretive financial backers.

Here's a recent example of its disinformation: the Capital Research Center (CRC) -- itself part of the CEO-fueled echo chamber -- quoted EID's flack Tom Shepstone this month implying that the Park Foundation spent more than $17 million helping to oppose fracking in just one year. Wrote CRC: "In 2009, the Park Foundation had net assets of $246 million and spent $23 million, which included $17.6 million in grants and contributions to green groups opposed to fracking, according to Shepstone," a Pennsylvanian whose official title is "Campaign Director" for EID's "Northeast Marcellus Initiative."

But, as reported [13] earlier this year, the Park Foundation's public filings show that only a fraction of that amount was spent on grants for projects to educate the public about fracking. The total for 2009 was approximately $700,000, which is 1/25th of what Shepstone claimed. In contrast, the industry's biggest trade group, API, spends over a $180 million a year on its entire budget, including tens of millions of dollars on PR.

This is not the first time Shepstone has had trouble with numbers. In 2000, a court approved his federal bankruptcy after he and his wife racked up more than $725,000 in debt as compared with their assets -- described as a house on five acres (valued at $125,000), a new car loan for a Chevy S-10 Blazer, and $200 worth of clothes, although he attested that they made almost $90,000 annually a few years earlier -- with some personal debt including some debt related to his businesses, described as "Shepstone Management Corp." in Honesdale and "North Country Farm and Gardens Corp.," at 160 Roosevelt Highway in Waymart. They were also subject to an IRS tax lien for more than $20,000 in unpaid taxes attributed to "Tom Shepstake" and his wife in 1996, a claim that was later settled. Americans do, of course, have the right to declare bankruptcy when their financial calculations go awry and get a second chance, like Shepstone.

CRC used Shepstone's recent math on Park to buttress the absurd thesis that "Environmentalists often depict themselves as scrappy underdogs fighting the power of entrenched special interests. But the case of the Marcellus Shale -- and the untold energy resources that could be recovered safely by new drilling technology such as fracking -- pits 'the little guy' against powerful 'green' forces such as the Park Foundation and the Natural Resources Defense Council."

Like IPAA/EID, CRC keeps many of its big funders secret, although foundation filings show that its funders have included the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the family foundation of the CEO of the multi-billion dollar Koch Industries -- which in turn is led by Charles and his brother David Koch and is one of the richest privately held gas, oil, and chemical companies in the world. Koch Industries has reaped undisclosed profits from ventures benefiting from expanded fracking, such as from the lower cost of the natural gas used as a feeder to make its fertilizer by Koch Nitrogen, one of the Koch companies.

Only in the distorted worldview of CRC does an industry made up of some of the most profitable corporations in the history of the world -- ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Chevron, Koch Industries, Halliburton, and more -- get portrayed as "the little guy" fighting for fracking against a putative Goliath in the form of the Park Foundation.

In contrast to Shepstone's dramatically inflated figures, "[s]ince 2008, the foundation has given at least $2.8 million to groups and publications fighting shale drilling," according to EnergyWire. That cumulative spending is less than a quarter of what Shepstone claimed the Park Foundation spent in one year alone.

But such efforts to discredit the growing grassroots movement of citizens concerned about fracking -- such as by insinuating that it's all about "buckets of money" from Park, according to Shepstone -- are particularly deceptive when made by operations like CRC and IPAA/EID, which don't disclose the identities of their major funders such as the for-profit businesses that paved the way for EID's campaign.

Uncloaking the Revenue Stream of IPAA's PR Machine

Because EID was created as an operation within the IPAA, it does not file its own IRS Form 990 tax form, and so its true revenues and expenses are hidden from public view.

What is known is that, in 2010, IPAA had revenue of more than $8 million ($8,714,606) and spent almost the same. This revenue and expense rate is relatively consistent with the two preceding years.

IPAA is described as a trade association organized under 501(c)(6) of the Internal Revenue Code. It shares space and staff with its "IPAA Educational Foundation" (IPAAEF), a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, which means that in general contributions to the latter can be counted as a charitable tax deduction by its donors. IPAAEF has annual revenue of almost a half million dollars a year, and it reports paying a "management fee" to IPAA of a little more than $200,000 a year. IPAAEF describes its activities as including grants to fund students "as interns at petroleum companies." According to its Form 990, one of IPAAEF's main activities each year appears to be its "Wildcatters Ball," which cost $227,270 in 2010. IPAA also hosts an annual golf tournament that costs almost $200,000.

IPAA has assets worth over $8 million, as of the end of 2010. It invested about $6.5 million of this in publicly traded securities. It did not disclose the identities of these stocks or bonds and whether any of its investments are related to the gas industry. In 2010, it reported investment income of about $215,000.

IPAA was also listed in a publicly filed licensing agreement [14] in 2002 between the FBR Family of Funds and the "IPAA Energy Index." According to that agreement, "the FBR/IPAA Energy Index Fund is a series of a registered open-end management investment company whose objective is to track the price and yield performance of publicly-traded common stocks of companies represented by the IPAA Energy Index. The Fund is a no-load mutual fund, and its assets are invested by FBR Fund Advisers, Inc." There is little public information about what happened under that agreement or whether or not IPAA has other relationships with investment funds or groups speculating on fracking. It has showcased presentations on capital investment in fracking featuring information from investment bankers like Goldman Sachs.

As a non-profit organization, IPAA's tax benefits under the federal tax code are predicated on it not being "organized for profit and no part of the net earnings of which [can] inure[] to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual." There is no public information indicating whether or not any of its employees invested in the FBR Fund or other energy funds, stocks or other investment vehicles, or whether it has any policy barring its employees from such investments or land speculation in fracking regions. It has no published conflict-of-interest policy on this issue, but there is no legal requirement that it adopt one (other than for conflicts involving payments from the non-profit entity to people related to principals in the organization).

In 2010, IPAA received $3.8 million from membership dues and most of the remainder of its $8 million budget from program fees for nearly two dozen conferences a year. IPAA's annual dues for gas companies are calculated on a sliding scale based on the "Barrel of Oil Equivalents" (BOE) and range from $4,000 to $60,000 per year depending on whether a company's BOE is under 750,000 or more than 50 million BOE. By reference, Anadarko Petroleum, a funder of IPAA/EID that is described as one of the world's largest oil and gas exploration firms, "had production of 206 million BOE" as of 2008.

Companies that pay these dues can deduct 65% of them as business expenses; 35% of the dues are considered lobbying expenses. In 2010, IPAA reports that it spent $1.3 million on lobbying and political expenditures. IPAA also has a related "527"-type organization involved in political campaigns, called the "IPAA Wildcatters Fund," which had $542,639 in receipts in the run up to the 2012 elections. IPAA also told the IRS in 2010 that it had "joined forces with the Business Industry Political Action Committee," whose slogan used to be "Electing Business to Congress" and is now "Powering Business Political Success."

Who Leads IPAA/EID and for How Much?

The portion of IPAA's annual revenues or expenses that fund its EID campaign is not disclosed.

What is known is that in 2010, IPAA paid its president, Barrett (Barry) Russell, more than one-half million dollars in total compensation ($511,000 and a promise of health insurance for him and his wife for life). Russell was elected president of the IPAA in 2000. He also has seat on the board of theBusiness Industry Political Action Committee and the National Energy Education Development Project. He's been [15] IPAA's "chief legal and financial officer since 1988 and an officer of IPAA's educational foundation since its inception." He previously worked for the EPA, and he also worked for consulting firms, such as Booz, Allen and Hamilton, specializing in mergers and acquisitions.

IPAA paid another nearly one million dollars in total compensation for its next five highest paid employees combined (who each earn over $200,000 a year). This list includes Lee Fuller and Jeff Eshelman, who are specifically listed on the EID website as part of the EID team.

Fuller, a chemical engineer, is IPAA's Vice President of Government Relations, and he is listed on the website as EID's "Executive Director." He began working for [16] IPAA in 1998 after working as a lobbyist for the gas industry for 12 years following an eight-year job staffing the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, where he handled rules on drilling fluids, wells, and Superfund sites. Eshelman is also a Vice President for IPAA and has served as its spokesman for a number of years.

In 2010, these and other IPAA executives got big raises, including a raise of more than $60,000 [17] for the president. The salary increases for other IPAA executives that year ranged from $21,000 per year to $53,000 per year.

There is no information in IPAA's 2010 public tax filings about what the 13 other staffers listed on its EID campaign website are paid per year because only the top highest paid staffers are required to be disclosed (and also some of the EID team are recent hires). There also appears to be no publicly posted conflict-of-interest rule in this field that would require the disclosure of any fracking-related stock or real property holdings that would benefit from limiting restrictions on fracking by any IPAA/EID team member.

Shining a Spotlight on the IPAA/EID Marcellus Team

According to the leaked memo [5] from IPAA, EID's reason for being is to serve as a "major initiative to respond to . . . attacks" on fracking and amplify "coordinated messages." Although IPAA/EID's reach is nationwide, one area where it appears to be particularly aggressive is Pennsylvania, through the blogging and outreach of Tom Shepstone.

Shepstone is described as the Campaign Leader of the EID Marcellus team. Before joining IPAA/EID, Shepstone worked primarily as a consultant writing reports for towns about land planning, at taxpayer expense. Even before he became the gas industry's campaigner in the region, he was apparently recommending industry-friendly land use rules [18], such as including a so-called "right to mine" in recommendations, expressly urging towns not to interfere with the development of natural gas, and not including recommendations for extra setback distances from property lines for industrial activities versus other structures. Shepstone was previously an IACP certified planner, which has conflict-of-interest rules, but he has said that he stopped paying dues and was not dropped by the American Planning Association.

In the period between his bankruptcy and his public association with IPAA/EID last year, Shepstone was often quoted in the press with the description "local businessman." He also wrote online comments praising right-wing diatribes. For example, he gave the highest review to the book, "The Red Decade: the Classic Work on Communism in America During the Thirties," which he said provided "[g]reat insights for those who recognize we are reliving the 1930s," and showed how those with a "liberal/leftist" mindset are prone to be "manipulated by totalitarian thugs."

In another public review, Shepstone gave the highest marks to "The Liberal Mind: the Psychological Causes of Political Madness," which he said would help readers "completely understand how Obama thinks" and explains the president as well as Bill and Hillary Clinton "in their totality." He also claimed that reading this and Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" -- a favorite boogeyman of right-wing talk show hosts -- would help "predict" President Obama's actions. The "Liberal Mind" book endorsed by Shepstone actually claims repeatedly that embracing progressive values is a mental disorder that is "the product of psychopathology," which undermines "the ability of families to raise children to be self-reliant" and "threatens to destroy the West's greatest achievement: the American dream of civilized liberty."

Given Shepstone's warm embrace of such fringe views, it is not entirely surprising that the IPAA/EID Marcellus website for the campaign he leads takes pains to try to score right-wing points in claiming that "the shale 'revolution' in the United States is impacting our 'friends' in Russia and Iran." It is also unsurprising that some of Shepstone's writings for IPAA/EID refer derisively to his fellow citizens exercising their fundamental First Amendment rights. To take a few recent examples of the tenor of his remarks, he put down an advocate asking serious and legitimate questions about the consequences of fracking in the community as an "aging activist seeking relevance in a modern world" and he also derided a community protest of 150 citizens as "a pathetic failure."

But, beyond his apparent animosity toward progressives and other concerned Americans, it is Shepstone's claims that are particularly astonishing. Here's a sampling of his disinformation sound bites:

These are just some of Shepstone's many claims on behalf of IPAA/EID. Curiously, but on a much more minor note, he has also written online comments pushing pro-fracking claims sometimes citing as his location towns other than where he actually resides in Pennsylvania.

Shepstone is not the only writer/speaker for IPAA/EID in Pennsylvania; he's just its most visible one. And, his trade group's pro-fracking campaign has many components in its efforts to persuade the public and discredit critics of fracking. For example, IPAA/EID has disseminated attacks on Fox's Oscar-nominated documentary, "Gasland," and his latest film, "The Sky Is Pink." IPAA/EID is also currently promoting its "Truthland" video, complete with a stand-alone website that lists both the EID and IPAA logos as if they were separate entities.

The IPAA/EID Glass House

Still, there is no doubt that Shepstone and IPAA/EID seem obsessed with both Fox and the Park Foundation. Well before Shepstone's most recent spinning of the foundation's grant numbers in a way that inflates the amount of grants for projects on fracking by combining it with the amounts in support of environmental organizations and other groups, Shepstone was attacking Park and its directors in others ways.

At one point, he even made the baseless claim that the foundation was wrongly engaged in "significant political activity," which he defined as "funding opponents of hydro-fracking." Although both his math and his analysis of federal tax law are way out of whack, one of the flaws is his contention that supporting research and public education about the risks of fracking is somehow impermissibly "political," while he ignores the manifold activities by pro-fracking non-profit entities [24] on his side attempting to prevent new laws -- which is one of the very objectives mentioned in the leaked IPAA memo. In his attacks on Park and its grantees (which operate under 501(c)(3) rules allowing for a small percentage of lobbying or which may have separate 501(c)(4) arms to allow for more lobbying and different rules for prospective donors), Shepstone is simply not a credible source for reporters or others on U.S. tax and lobbying laws.

Moreover, in a feat of astounding hypocrisy, Shepstone attempts to discredit research he claims is supported by an organization that has no financial stake in the outcome of such research, while regularly echoing industry-friendly research and claims shaped by the very interests that have the most to gain from distorting information, the industry he really serves. Meanwhile, investigators have uncovered yet more instances of purportedly independent studies by academics connected to the for-profit fracking industry, as with reports [25] that a University of Texas professor, Robert Chase -- whose studies claimed that "fracking was safe for groundwater" -- had allegedly "pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Texas natural gas developer."

Shepstone has even attempted to defend his own bias by asserting that he held the same views about fracking before he started working on behalf of the industry. Such views are not created in a vacuum, however, and were likely shaped by the natural gas industry's PR machine for which he now works.

In his effort to smear Park and those concerned with fracking, Shepstone sidesteps the proliferation of non-profit groups that peddle pro-fracking claims [26], as exposed by Dory Hippauf [27]. Beyond IPAA/EID, these include API (which has launched front groups called "Energy Citizens" and "EnergyNation"), the Marcellus Shale Coalition, the Ohio Shale Coalition, America's Natural Gas Alliance, the Center for Liquified Natural Gas, energy Tomorrow, EnergyfromShale.org, energyNow!, EnergyAnswered, LNGfacts.org, SecureOurFuels.org, Oilindependents.org, the Consumer Energy Alliance, Vote4Energy.org, theAmerican Energy Alliance (AEA), the Institute for Energy Research (IER), and others.

Some of these groups work together on campaigns. AEA, for example, joined in a bus tour with David Koch's Americans for Prosperity (AFP) to influence voters about fracking under the jobs frame frequently spouted by Shepstone. Due to inadequate public disclosure requirements, however, it is difficult to know who helped fund that tour besides Koch through his financial support for AFP, which he helped found and helps lead. This is just one of many ways pro-fracking groups coordinate and amplify common messages. They have even had overlapping public relations staff, as with IPAA/EID's Chris Tucker, a former GOP congressional staffer who has been described as a Senior Vice President at Financial Dynamics, as the "managing director of FTI Consulting and as team lead for Energy In Depth." For a time, Tucker was publicly listed as handling communications for both IPAA/EID and IER, "using the same phone number for both," according to DeSmogBlog's research.

Of course, according to the leaked IPAA memo, one of the goals for EID was "coordinated messages."

But, Shepstone is relatively silent on such matters and on how his public messages help facilitate that goal.

Because entities like IPAA/EID, AEA, API, and AFP are not required to disclose their expenditures with the kind of detail that a grant-making foundation is, it is simply not possible to calculate the true amount of money these various non-profit groups are spending advancing the positions of the gas industry. Although their cumulative budgets amount to well over two hundred million dollars a year, the portion funded to support fracking or attack those concerned about fracking is unknown.

But it is clear that the Park Foundation is not a for-profit corporation that would benefit financially from the success of efforts to raise awareness about the risks of expanded fracking. Conversely, the multi-billion dollar corporations and/or some of the wealthy CEOs whose foundations fund organizations like IPAA/IED, CRC, and AFP do have a financial stake in advancing fracking with the least amount of regulation possible, regardless of what may be in the best interests of the public in protecting American families' health and their access to safe drinking water and clean air in the decades ahead.

After all, fracking is big business, as IPAA/EID's Shepstone regularly stresses.

The Center for Media and Democracy has received project grants from the Park Foundation that have allowed it to provide greater documentation of fracking issues, but this report was not funded or reviewed by the foundation. The analysis in this report reflects CMD's independent assessments as an expert critic of the techniques used in the field of public relations and propaganda. For nearly two decades, CMD has been a leading investigator of corporate-funded PR campaigns that affect our environment. Its most recent award-winning investigation is ALECexposed.org.

The author of this report, CMD's Executive Director Lisa Graves, received her J.D. from Cornell Law School, in Ithaca, New York. She previously served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice, as the Chief Counsel for Nominations for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, as the Deputy Chief of the Article III Judges Division of the U.S. Courts, and as an adjunct professor of law, among other posts.

PR Watch is published by the Center for Media and Democracy. © Center for Media and Democracy 2013.

Center for Media and Democracy • 409 East Main Street, Suite 100 • Madison, Wisconsin 53703-4929 • (608) 260-9713

Source URL: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/12/11921/%E2%80%9Cenergy-depth%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%93-reporters%E2%80%99-guide-its-founding-funding-and-flacks

http://www.alternet.org/environment/california-drilling-plan-verges-insanity-environmentalists-say

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (CN) -Environmental groups sued Kern County for a zoning revision they say will allow the oil industry to drill 73,000 new oil wells in unincorporated areas - 10 a day for 20 years.

Among the severe and illegal shortcomings of the new county ordinance is that it treats the drilling of 72,490 oil and gas wells on 2.3 million acres for 20 years as a single project, the local and national environmental groups say.

The Committee for a Better Arvin, Committee for a Better Shafter, and Bakersfield-based Greenfield Walking Group sued the county, its Board of Supervisors and its planning and development department on Thursday in Superior Court. The Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity joined as plaintiffs. It is the Top Download at Courthouse News on Monday.

The Western States Petroleum Association, California Independent Petroleum Association, and the Independent Oil Producers Agency are named as real parties in interest.

"The oil industry is trying to fast-track permitting for thousands of oil wells," plaintiffs' attorney William Rostov told Courthouse News.

"It's unfortunate that the Board of Supervisors went along with the oil industry on this. Our clients feel they have no other recourse but to take it to court."

Kern County, at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley, already has some of the worst air pollution in the country, from oil drilling, pesticides, dust and microparticulates, and ozone from auto and farm machinery exhaust.

The rezoning violated the California Environmental Quality Act, one of whose purposes is to educate the public about projects in their vicinity, Rostov said.

He said the new ordinance would drastically transform Kern County and have a "tremendous effect" on water and air quality. The county knows about the impacts, but did not properly analyze them, he said.

"This is a very important case that could affect Kern for decades to come," Rostov said. "We think we have a very good case."

According to the lengthy complaint: "Proposed and paid for by the oil industry, the ordinance and the accompanying final environmental impact report ('Final EIR') purport to authorize the development of up to 3,647 new oil and gas wells and extensive associated construction and operation activities, each year for 20 to 25 more years, without any further, site-specific assessment of those activities' health and other environmental impacts. The ordinance jeopardizes the health and well-being of hundreds of thousands of people across Kern County."

Kern County, population 839,631, at the southern end of the Central Valley. Nearly the size of New Jersey, it extends from Delano, its northernmost city, south to the Tehachapi Mountains, east into the Mojave Desert and west across the San Joaquin Valley.

Its two biggest industries are agriculture and oil and gas development. Kern produces one-tenth of the nation's petroleum and is the top oil-producing county in California, with 81 percent of the state's active oil wells.

That number will surge drastically if the amended ordinance, approved on Nov. 9, is allowed to stand, the environmentalists say...

http://www.prwatch.org/node/326

http://www.prwatch.org/files/pdfs/prwatch/prwv8n4.pdf

Terrorism as Pretext by Sheldon Rampton References to Pearl Harbor prevailed during the first days following the terrorist attacks of September 11. President Bush joined a chain of pundits and government officials in warning that the “war on terrorism” would be prolonged and difficult like World War II and would require similar sacrifices. Whatever those sacrifices may entail, however, the public relations industry is determined to ensure that they do not include wartime frugality. “PR Needed to Keep Consumers Spending,” proclaimed a headline in O’Dwyer’s PR Online on September 24. It cited marketing and PR executive Maureen Lippe’s opinion that the “greatest service PR pros can provide in support of the country is to ensure that the consumer continues to buy.” The world’s largest public relations firms all have offices in New York and Washington, D.C., and their employees felt the same shock, horror and confusion as the rest of the country when airplanes slammed into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Public relations pros joined other volunteers in disaster relief efforts and in raising money for assisting the survivors. America’s home-grown propaganda machine nearly ground to a halt for several days as PR firms advised their clients to hold off for awhile on product launches, news releases and story pitches to reporter...

• U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick used the September 11 tragedy to call for fast-track negotiating authority to help President Bush expand the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) into a Free Trade Area of the Americas. “Trade is about more than economic efficiency,” he wrote in the Washington Post. “It promotes the values at the heart of this protracted struggle.” In a September 24 speech before th...

 The Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) used the terror attacks as a pretext to demand that the U.S. Supreme Court override a Clinton Administration decision blocking drilling for oil and natural gas in Montana. “The terrible tragedy of exactly one month ago and the uncertainty as to the reliability of foreign supplies make clear the importance of the United States developing its domestic natural resources,” said William Perry Pendley of Mountain States Legal Foundation,which represents the IPAA. • 

The San Diego-based SureBeam Corporation took the opportunity to promote its food irradiation technology as a way to kill anthrax — even though it would take years and untold millions, if not billions, to install irradiation equipment in post offices throughout the United States. Worse yet, “SureBeam has made these claims without any supporting scientific evidence that the company’s ‘electron-beam’ irradiation equipment is capable of killing the anthrax bacteria or its spores,” observed a Public Citizen news release. “In fact, radiation is ineffective against anthrax spores, called ‘endospores,’ which are surrounded by numerous thick layers of material including protein and calcium.” • The Cato Institute, a libertarian, corporate-funded think tank in Washington, DC, used September 11 as... [guns on planes]

When the federal government introduced stronger standards for fracking on public lands earlier this month, the oil and gas industry was quick to file lawsuits. On Thursday, the state of Wyoming joined the fray.

Claiming that the new Bureau of Land Management (BLM) set of rules released last week “unlawfully interferes” with the state’s existing fracking regulations, Wyoming filed a suit Thursday against the U.S. Department of the Interior, Sec. Sally Jewell, and BLM, requesting judicial review of the rules.

In the lawsuit, Wyoming claims that BLM cannot put these restrictions on fracking because the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has “exclusive authority” to regulate any underground injections under the Safe Water Drinking Act of 1974 However, under the so-called “Halliburton Loophole,” added to the SWDA in 2003, fracking activities are specifically excluded from the definition of underground injections, unless diesel fuel is being used — which is fairly uncommon.

“It appears the state just has it wrong legally,” Mike Freeman, an attorney with Earth Justice told ThinkProgress. “Wyoming’s petition actually cites the definition of underground injection that excludes fracking.” The new BLM rules require oil and gas companies to disclose all the chemicals used while fracking on protected lands. During the fracking process, a liquid, usually water, is mixed with chemicals and injected into shale, releasing pockets of natural gas or oil. The water generally cannot be recycled and is toxic after use. Under the new rules, companies will be prohibited from storing fracking wastewater in open pits on national public land and required to periodically test the integrity of every well to help prevent pollution. Two oil and gas industry groups,Independent Petroleum Association for America and the Western Energy Alliance,have a lawsuit against BLM on similar overreach grounds, saying that the “final rule as issued is contrary to law.” North Dakota is also reportedly considering a lawsuit. Both Wyoming and North Dakota have experienced an oil and gas boom in recent years.

BLM manages more than 17.5 million acres of public lands in Wyoming, and also has the mineral rights to another 40.7 million acres in the state. In 2013, the most recent year data has been released, 620 new oil and gas wells were started in the state. According to that data, more than 7 million acres of public land in Wyoming are currently under lease by oil and gas developers.

The BLM’s new rules apply only to oil and gas extraction on federally managed land. As of 2013, the United States managed 247 million acres of public land and had another 700 million acres of mineral rights. Some in Congress want that to change, though. A nonbinding amendment introduced by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) would support state efforts to sell public lands, including national forests, wildlife refuges, wilderness areas, historic sites, and national monuments. The amendment, which would require further legislation in order to become law, passed the Senate on Thursday. The amendment echoes similar proposals made by House Natural Resources Committee Chair Rob Bishop (R-UT) and Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz (R-TX).

Tags:

The Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States (IPAMS) is a regional, non-profit trade association that focuses on energy and public lands issues in the thirteen-state Intermountain West of the United States. Founded in 1974, IPAMS represents about 400 independent natural gas and oil producers, service and supply companies, banking and financial institutions and industry consultants. Ninety percent of the natural gas wells in America are developed by companies whose names are often unknown. These companies, known as independents, are small businesses that don’t have refining and  retail operations such as gas stations.

IPAMS advocate the benefits of increased domestic natural gas and oil production from the Intermountain West as a way to reduce greenhouse gases and decrease the U.S. dependence on foreign energy. IPAMS primarily focuses its efforts on federal policy and regulatory interests, including access to federal lands for exploration and production, federal agency permitting, air and water quality, wildlife conservation, health and safety, taxation, and other issues.

IPAMS also provides public and media relations support through a wide variety of media and community outreach efforts. As a regional trade-association, IPAMS has become a source for information and statistical analysis for the natural gas and oil industry in the Western United States.