Santa Barbara oil spill
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API officials did not respond to interview requests from the Center for Public Integrity. On its website, the institute says, "We negotiate with regulatory agencies, represent the industry in legal proceedings, participate in coalitions and work in partnership with other associations to achieve our members’ public policy goals."
Neomi Rao at a congressional hearing for her 2017 appointment to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a division of the White House Office of Management and Budget. U.S. Senate]
‘Regulate the regulators’
“I asked my staff for a joke, but it’s still going through cost-benefit analysis,” Neomi Rao said from a podium in October, drawing hearty laughs from a mostly male crowd of lobbyists, lawyers and policy analysts at the Heritage Foundation — a libertarian think tank based in Washington.
It was a tongue-in-cheek nod to the little-known agency Rao has led since July — the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which she called a “small but mighty” division of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Her staff of roughly 50reviews the costs and benefits of all major federal rules, providing the stamp of approval needed to turn proposals into regulations — or spiking them.
“If you are a very pro-regulatory administration, then you are not going to appreciate the work that OIRA does,” Rao warned the audience, likening her office to a “roadblock” against burdensome policies that hurt the economy.“The pace and scope of deregulation that’s occurred is truly unprecedented, and we’re just getting started.”
“The pace and scope of deregulation that’s occurred is truly unprecedented, and we’re just getting started.”
Rao — a constitutional scholar who clerked for conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and often shared pizza with the late Antonin Scalia — has embraced her role as “regulatory czar,” pledging to surpass a Trump executive order to eliminate two existing regulations for each one created. Though she is an ardent supporter of leaner and more restrained government, she plans to staff up OIRA and broaden its powers.
How, exactly, she’ll do this is a mystery — much like the inner workings of OIRA itself.The agency has routinely come up short of basic transparency guidelines recommended by the Government Accountability Office, garnering a reputation on Capitol Hill as a black box that heavily edits or kills regulations with little explanation in Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Cass Sunstein, who led the office during the Obama administration, has since defended the practice of derailing particular rules by putting them on a “shit list.”
While OIRA has resisted public scrutiny, it has held its doors open for industry. Since April 2014, 35 of OIRA’s 712 meetings on proposed EPA regulations have been with API representatives — including a 2015 conference call with institute President Gerard over ozone. The institute, along with the American Chemistry Council and ExxonMobil, ranked among the top 10 groups that met with OIRA from 2001 to 2011. Such encounters carry weight: A 2015 study by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers found the agency was more likely to edit rules when lobbied by industry than by public-interest groups. Rao’s office did not respond to requests for comment, but OIRA notes on its website that it will meet with “any party interested in discussing issues on a rule under review.” [NON-DENIAL DENIAL? I TALK TO TRUMP ALL THE TIME]
The office’s bias toward industry can be traced to its founding. Though OIRA was created in 1980, its roots date to the EPA’s formation in 1970. As a counterweight, President Richard Nixon established the National Industrial Pollution Control Council, an advisory committee within the Commerce Department made up entirely of industry executives.
Frank N. Ikard, former API president]
“Virtually no major move is made in environmental policy without drawing on your advice and criticism,” Secretary of Commerce (and, later, Nixon campaign adviser and Watergate figure) Maurice Stans told the committee in 1971. Members regularly reviewed and commented on draft regulations before they were released to the public, weighing in on matters such as leaded gasoline and the Clean Air Act.
Stans took special interest in the pollution committee’s oil and gas subgroup led by Standard Oil Chairman J.K. Jamieson, who regularly invited API President Frank Ikard and API public-affairs executive P.M. Gammelgard to its meetings. Staff from the National Petroleum Council were also on hand. Together the men coordinated a public-relations effort emphasizing the enormous costs the oil industry claimed it was absorbing to improve the environment.
[Excerpt from the National Petroleum Council’s 1971 summary report to the White House National Archives and Records Administration]
In February 1971, the pollution committee advised Nixon aides to prioritize costs. The White House budget office obliged that October by creating a new program called “Quality of Life Review,” which would assess major environmental, health and safety regulations. Tapped to lead the agency was bureaucrat Jim Tozzi, who had shown a passion for deregulation at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Jim Tozzi describes himself as the father of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
Administrative Conference of the United States]
“Quality of Life” became all about reining in the EPA, Tozzi explained during an interview with the Center for Public Integrity. Occupying a floor of the Executive Office Building next to the White House, his office quickly went to work on the EPA’s proposed Clean Air Act guidelines. “I was like a little despot,” Tozzi said. “Somebody needed to regulate the regulators.”
Under Jimmy Carter, the “Quality of Life” program became OIRA in 1980, with Tozzi as deputy administrator. In 1983, Tozzi left the agency to join a law firm headed by William Ruckelshaus — the EPA’s first administrator, a Nixon appointee and an early champion of cost-benefit analysis. Tozzi now runs the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness, a think tank he founded and staffed with former OIRA employees that assesses regulations.
Tozzi said his plan for policing the EPA — and every other federal agency — has survived nine consecutive administrations and looks bright under Rao. “The Trump administration,” he said admiringly, “has gotten the number of regulations going out to a trickle.”
‘Virtually indistinguishable’
As Nixon’s pollution control committee quietly lobbied on industry’s behalf, the National Petroleum Councilwas doing its part to paint Big Oil as a linchpin of the U.S. economy.
Council members had grudgingly agreed to an Interior Department request to assess the industry’s environmental track record and plans following a 1969 oil spill off Santa Barbara, California. The disaster sent an estimated three million gallons of crude gushing into the Pacific Ocean; television broadcasts showed shorelines littered with tarred birds and dolphins.
The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill in California became a pivotal point in the environmental movement.]
But the petroleum council’s ensuing two-volume report in 1972 was anything but apologetic. Totaling more than 500 pages, it defiantly cast the Santa Barbara spill as an anomaly and urged the government to continue fostering oil and gas development. Echoing economic arguments made by Nixon’s pollution committee, the council’s report cautioned against regulation that would dampen industry’s bottom line.
Among the report’s authors were Union Oil President Fred Hartley, whose company was responsible for the spill, and Standard Oil Chairman Jamieson of Nixon’s cost-obsessed pollution committee.
Citing research by API, the report also played down climate change. “Carbon dioxide concentrations do appear to be increasing for reasons not well understood,” the council wrote, adding that scientists would have to wait until the year 2000 to determine “whether or not a serious problem exists.” Even if the gas were having an effect, controlling such a ubiquitous pollutant could “impose impossible administrative and enforcement burdens,” the report said.
But things weren’t as ambiguous as the council made them sound. API papers on atmospheric pollutants in 1968 and 1969 made it clear that rising carbon dioxide levels came from the burning of fossil fuels and that warming was inevitable. The 1968 paper warned that there could be “melting of the Antarctic ice cap, a rise in sea levels [and] warming of the oceans,” while the 1969 paper noted that carbon dioxide levels would rise “as our combustion economy continues to consume increasing amounts of fossil fuel.”Several authors of the petroleum council’s report likely knew this, given that they were top API officials – including President Ikardand public-affairs executive Gammelgard.
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