On Friday, Benjamin Storrow of E&E reported that thanks to Trump’s weakened ethics rules, there are now at least 15 political appointees at EPA, DOI and DOE who work on issues they lobbied for industry on. A top ethics official for the George W. Bush administration didn’t mince words when describing to E&E why this is so deeply problematic.
"Their area of expertise is persuading the government of what their client wants done,” Richard Painter told E&E. “That's a mentality that's hard to get out of. You've been selling a certain policy agenda for a long period of time. How do you go back to the folks in industry and say, 'I was shoveling bullshit for all those years; now I'm at the agency and have to look out for the public'?"
If anyone actually believes that such a turnaround is possible--that Pruitt and these various former lobbyists are actually putting the public ahead of polluters--we’d guess they’re probably dumb enough to fall for the other shenanigans the fossil fuel industry has been up to lately.
Case in point: the latest effort from the National Association of Manufacturers, which makes no bones about its pro-industry stance and membership. The group’s latest venture is called the Manufacturer’s Accountability Project, which is running defense for ExxonKnew lawsuit by spinning conspiracy theories about the forces reporting on and bringing the case. To the group’s credit, industry doesn’t seem too concerned about hiding its identity while advancing a baldly pro-industry message.
On the other hand, a new report from the Public Accountability Institute reveals Enbridge’s influence on an April ‘17 paper about the economic benefits of the Enbridge pipeline. The study was ostensibly produced by the University of Minnesota Duluth, but the PAI report shows the study was paid for by Enbridge and uses data supplied by the company. But UMD and media covering the report weren’t up front about this biased provenance, giving an undue sheen of neutrality to a study that is clearly one-sided.
The most egregious recent example of industry pulling tricks comes from a group called Protect Our Pensions. A piece at Bloomberg BusinessWeek last week peeks under the astroturf of this supposedly grassroots group of police, firefighters, and teachers concerned about the impact of divesting from fossil fuels to their pensions. As Bloomberg reports, the group has only barely concealed its true identity as an industry PR effort. Bloomberg chronicles op-eds supposedly written by authors who had no clue how their name got on a byline, to members who don’t remember signing up, to website domain registration information: all signs point to the group being less a grassroots campaign of concerned public servants, and more a classic astroturf operation run by public relations groups. The money behind the campaign is unknown, but looking at their pro-fossil fuel message, one can only guess...
In a way it’s sad that industry still has to resort to these fake astroturf campaigns. Given that lobbyists are now “shoveling bullshit” from within the government, you would think they could grow some grassroots of their own.
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