US energy providers love to spread horror stories of what it would cost to actually clean up America’s power supply and slow global warming. But they certainly don’t mind spending money when it comes to keeping American covered in soot, coal ash, mercury, and all the other byproducts of a dirty energy industry. As a new study shows, the fossil fuel industry has spent over $2 billion fighting to make sure that America stays dirty.
That expenditure, coming in just the period since 2000, means that over 10 times as much was spent by fossil fuel companies lobbying Congress to resist making any changes to address climate change than by all science, health and environmental groups pressing to take action.
Despite the introduction of several major bills to limit carbon emissions in the USA, none of them have been passed.
None of them have passed not because there wasn’t evidence to back their actions, or popular support for addressing the issue. As the paper shows, legislators have tended to make a simple equation: More lobbying means a higher level of interest. And fossil fuel companies have poured money into making sure that their products can be burned with increasingly fewer restrictions. Even as scientific consensus was developing and the world waking up to the size of the threat, oil, gas, and coal companies worked diligently to make sure that no substantial action would be taken.
And that’s true even of companies that were publicly mouthing belief in climate change, even as they were putting down their dollars to fight it. Companies didn’t “come to the table” to negotiate with environmental groups as a means of finding the best way to deal with global warming. They didn’t sit down to hear what those groups had to say. They came to those meetings for the same purpose that they lobbied Congress: To make sure nothing happened.
Their apparent “support” for climate change, was just a feint designed to make the public think that these companies had at last agreed to take action. When they were really just sitting to the same table with environmental groups to weaken and slow reaction under the guise of being reasonable.
What’s the best way to tell that these companies had no real interest in working with groups dedicated to warding off the worst effects of climate change? Not only where they slowing down and watering down groups that welcomed them to the table, as soon as the lobbying efforts were successful in scrapping potential legislation the fossil fuel companies pulled their representatives from these “moderate” groups. Their interest in accepting weak climate change legislation only existed so long as they feared there might be stronger legislation. Relieved of that threat, their “interest” in dealing with issue and acceptance of the reality of climate change … went up in smoke.
… as soon as the threat passed, lobbying for climate legislation by the corporations associated with USCAP ceased.
Under President Obama, fossil fuel companies massively ramped up their lobbying effort. In 2009 and 2010, those groups spent more than nice percent of all money spent on lobbying for anything. That includes health care, even though this was right in the midst of the shaping of the ACA legislation.
And how much did the pro-fossil fuel forces overwhelm environmental groups in lobbying in favor of legislation to regulate greenhouse gases during this critical period? By almost 50 to 1. Environmental groups have continued lobbying before and after this period, making the overall ratio closer to 10 to 1. But when actual legislation was in the offing, industry stepped up to kill it. Kill it dead.
And they did. The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, which was the long-promised plan to set up trading in carbon along the model that had worked successfully to limit sulfur emissions under the Clean Air Act, failed in the House 219-212. And that was in a House with a 235 vote Democratic majority.
With that threat past, and the election of more Republicans in 2010, lobbying dollars from fossil fuel dropped steeply. In 2016, the industry spent well below what it spent lobbying under the final years of George W. Bush. Because there’s no need,
After all, the current head of the EPA is Andrew Wheeler. Wheeler was one of those lobbyists.
In 2009, Wheeler actually left his job as a staffer to Republican Senator Jim Inhofe and took a position at lobbying firm Faegre Baker Daniels expressly to lobby against the American Clean Energy and Security Act. While there, he collected more than $300,000 from Donald Trump’s favorite coal mine owner—squirrel-whisperer Bob Murray—to make sure that carbon remained unregulated.
And he won. Democrats were so concerned about the effect of voting in favor of protecting the climate, that they listened to Wheeler, not the scientists, or the environmental groups, or the public. The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 was supported by over 80 percent of Americans.
By this time, the Democratic Party controlled both houses, as well as the Executive Branch, and moved to fulfill its promise of passing climate legislation in this session. This session marks the peak of Congressional attention to major climate legislation.
Let that sink in again. In 2009, Democrats held a large majority in the House, and had an opportunity to take genuine action against global warming with a bill that enjoyed huge support among the public. But, with the help of $2 billion from fossil fuel companies and lobbyists like Andrew Wheeler, Democrats voted it down. What did they get for pledging their loyalty to the fossil fuel industry? The next year, the Democratic Party suffered the biggest defeat in a Congressional election since the Great Depression. Leaving Republicans in charge of both the Congress and the environment.
That’s not just a lost opportunity. It’s not even political suicide. It’s just plain suicide.
And Andrew Wheeler, hero of the successful fight to keep coal flowing, is now running the EPA. Where earlier this week he weakened regulations on coal ash. As the Washington Post reports, Wheeler yesterday rolled back a rule that President Obama spent years working out with both industry and local landowners. But Wheeler will allow coal ash ponds to be left in place longer, take away requirements to monitor groundwater, and “give flexibility to the states” by ending most federal regulation of these toxic sludge heaps.
Because Andrew Wheeler was on the winning side of a PR game that made the public think that industry was trying to be more reasonable, and environmental groups think they were ready for compromise — while at the same time those industries were spending billions to convince Democratic congressmen that voting to protect the world from climate change was politically risky.