Separation of Oil and State
In 2005, the U.S. oil industry recorded revenues of $1.6 trillion. Fortune magazine’s top three most profitable industries were all oil: refining, production and oil & gas equipment. Profits for the industry totaled almost $140 billion.
The world’s most profitable industry is also one of the most polluting. For the last 100 years, oil has systematically polluted our waterways and our air. This pollution is due to negligence and disdain for environmental and safety concerns. The oil industry would rather invest in defense lawyers than in safety and compliance.
But not all of Big Oil’s environmental impact is illegal. Much of oil’s toll on the environment and human health is in fact perfectly legal. Why? The oil industry also writes the law. As a leader in lobbying and campaign finance they make sure that their interests are well represented in Washington and in state houses around the nation. Their influence can be seen from the weakening of pollution control laws to the suppression of scientific concerns about global warming.
But the environment for energy has changed dramatically in Washington over the last year. An Inconvenient Truth, legislation that proposes an 80 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, and a windfall profits tax proposal threaten oil’s long held lock on our government. The barriers to a clean energy transition are political, not technical. The biggest barriers to change — the most entrenched interests — all trace their roots to the oil industry.
Enforcing our laws and closing the loopholes and exemptions that oil industry lobbyists have inserted, is a good place to start holding the industry accountable. But if we’re truly going to break our nation’s oil addiction, we’re going to have to defeat the companies, agencies, lobbyists and corporate stooges — we’re going to have to demand a Separation of Oil & State.
Waterkeeper asked me to identify the worst of the worst. It was difficult; there are simply too many to name here. But these are truly the worst of the oil industry.
Enemies of the Environment
The Worst Corporation: ExxonMobil
The biggest is also the baddest. The world’s largest publicly traded and most profitable company, which brought in more than $410 billion in revenue last year, and reported $9.28 billion in profit in the first quarter of 2007 is still posting record-setting environmental crimes.
The company has used much of this booty to buy a close relationship with Congress, providing over $9 million in campaign finance to federal candidates since 1990. In 2006 Exxon set a new record for lobby expenditures by an oil company, more than doubling their previous expenditures and shelling out $14.5 million to influence legislation and stave off the wave of consumer anger over high post-Katrina oil prices.
From Valdez to the millions of dollars funneled to the junk science of global warming skeptics to providing a lucrative new home to discredited Bush appointee Phil Cooney, anyone watching is again and again reminded that Exxon doesn’t care, because Exxon doesn’t have to.
But perhaps most ominous is what Exxon’s got in the pipe. While they are the only major oil company that doesn’t even have a token investment in clean energy, they’re betting their billions on the Alberta tar sands.
The Worst Project:
Alberta Tar Sands
Squeezing oil from Alberta’s tar sands makes standard crude oil look like solar energy in comparison. Each barrel of oil produced from the mixture of sand, clay and silt that holds the thick, oily bitumen requires two to four times more water than a comparable barrel of crude, and produces three times as many greenhouse gases.
Tar sands operations are destroying thousands of square miles of one of North America’s last remaining wild forests, the Boreal, along with the wetlands and wildlife that depend on this fragile sub-arctic ecosystem, including many of America’s migratory birds.
Most of today’s tar sands production sites include massive open pit mines, some as large as three miles wide and 200 feet deep. Because only a small fraction of the oil-producing bitumen deposits are close to the surface (less than 20 percent), the rest of the deep reserves must be extracted by injecting steam underground and pumping the melted bitumen back to the surface. Once separated from the sand, clay and silt, the bitumen is a low-grade heavy oil that must undergo yet another energy-intensive refining process to turn it into a crude oil that more closely resembles conventional oil.
At 960 miles (1,538 kilometers) long the Athabasca River is Alberta’s longest river and one of the few undammed rivers left in North America. Up to four and a half barrels of water are drawn from the Athabasca to produce each barrel of tar sands oil. This water ends up in huge toxic tailings ponds. Currently planned oil sands projects will increase water withdrawals more than 50 percent to 529 million cubic meters per year — more water than Toronto uses each year.
The Worst International Public Institution
World Bank / Paul Wolfowitz
Our nation, as President Bush famously said, is “addicted to oil.” It turns out we’re not only the main users, but the Bush administration is using our tax dollars to actively push an oil addiction in the developing world.
Every year, in a practice known as “oil aid” begun by the Reagan administration, billions in tax dollars meant to alleviate poverty are diverted to subsidize oil company operations in poor countries. In 2005, publicly backed institutions like the World Bank Group, the Export-Import Bank of the United States and the United States Overseas Private Investment Corporation provided more than $3 billion in financing to the international oil and gas industry.
And the World Bank Group, under the leadership of Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz, is dramatically increasing its lending for oil. Last year we saw a 77 percent increase in oil finance from 2005 from the World Bank Group — an institution that the Bush administration and other G8 nations are pushing to play a leading role in combating global climate change. In fact, their lending for oil is increasing much faster than their lending for clean energy — which already lags far behind financing for fossil fuels.
The World Bank’s own Extractive Industries Review called, in late-2003, for an end to oil subsidies when it recommended that “The World Bank Group should phase out investments in oil production by 2008 and devote its scarce resources to investments in renewable energy resource development…” Tragically, the World Bank ignored this recommendation.
Worst Spin Meisters
American Petroleum Institute/Red Cavaney and Richard Wirthlin
It’s not a fun time to represent the oil industry in Washington. Responding to polls that consistently show the American public’s strong mistrust of Big Oil, bashing the industry has become a bipartisan sport. One public relations industry insider told The Wall Street Journal in December 2006 that oil’s image was “in free-fall,” with ratings “as low as they’ve been in a long time — maybe ever.”
At the request of Red Cavaney, CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, enter Richard Wirthlin stage right. The former Reagan pollster is an expert in public relations campaigns for industries in crisis, having flacked for the plastic industry.
Their primary goal for the campaign, which is now in full swing on television, radio and print, is to convince the public that oil is a misunderstood giant, and that while mistakes may have been made, oil makes our American lifestyle possible. Disturbingly, API hasn’t set a budget for the effort. “We will spend what’s necessary to achieve the objective,” Mr. Cavaney says. They certainly have plenty to spend.
The Worst Domestic Public Institution
Minerals Management Service
Bobby Maxwell, an auditor who had worked for many years for the Minerals Management Service, had the job of ensuring that oil companies were paying the federal government the royalties they owed. He discovered that the oil company Kerr-McGee Chemical Worldwide was underpaying its royalties by millions. According to Maxwell, his superiors in the federal agency discouraged him from pursuing the money from Kerr-McGee.
In 2005, Maxwell filed a lawsuit against Kerr-McGee in federal court. The suit accused the company of cheating the government out of $7 million in royalty payments. Maxwell contended that the Interior Department ignored audits which clearly showed Kerr-McGee’s wrongdoing. Soon after, the Interior Department eliminated Maxwell’s job in what it termed “reorganization.”
ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and ConocoPhillips all tried to block Maxwell’s suit, arguing that the case would “open the floodgates” to suits by other federal auditors. The court, however, rejected their pleas and on January 23, a federal jury found that Kerr-McGee Corporation knowingly underpaid the federal government by $7.56 million in royalties.
Created in 1982, the Minerals Management Service has been widely known as a revolving door with the oil industry. J. Robinson West, the Reagan era architect of the agency, is now CEO of Washington’s largest oil industry consultancy PFC Energy. Since the early 1980s, every year the Minerals Management Service has proposed new drilling in our nation’s coastal waters — most recently offshore Virginia and in Alaska’s Bristol Bay. And since the early 1980s, every year Congress has passed a bipartisan moratorium stopping them from doing it. Isn’t it about time Congress simply eliminated this Reagan era oil welfare agency?
In March 2007, Maxwell testified before the House Natural Resources Committee. According to his statement “I served the American taxpayer with over 30 years of service, including three years in the U.S. Army... My only regret is that my career was cut short due to exposing the federal government’s current cozy relationship with the oil and gas industry.”
Biggest Addict
U.S. Auto Industry / Ford
Automobiles are the single largest consumer of oil in the U.S. If we want kick the oil habit, we need sustainable, petroleum-free transportation. Among automakers, Ford is the worst actor. Ford has the worst fleetwide fuel efficiency and the highest average vehicle greenhouse gas emissions of major U.S. automakers.
Of Ford’s 68 different 2007 models, only two get better than 30 miles to the gallon in city driving. The average fuel economy for Ford vehicles is 18.2 mpg in city driving and 23.6 mpg on the highway. Since the oil crisis of the 1970s, Ford has ranked worst in overall fuel efficiency of all major automakers for 20 out of the last 30 years.
The Fix is In
One glance at polls will tell anyone that the vast majority of Americans are fed up with the oil industry and hunger for alternatives. It’s clear that sweeping change on the energy front is very likely over the next five years. It is less clear whether or not the answer will increase domestic drilling, further militarize the Mideast and leave us saddled with nuclear power and liquefied coal.
Reasons for public concern are many, including rising gas prices, global warming, pollution, national security, the war in Iraq, corporate corruption, debt and poverty in developing nations and human rights abuses associated with the oil industry worldwide. Not all those reasons are shared by everyone, nor is the oil industry solely responsible for all of these crises, but our addiction to oil plays a central — and negative — role in each.
The political space that has opened on oil and energy — particularly since George Bush’s “moment of clarity” at the State of the Union address regarding oil addiction — is larger than it has been for a generation. But it would be a grave mistake to assume that this space meant that positive change is inevitable.
This is not the time to demand a tinker or a tweak of our energy system, this is the time to demand transformation. Our demands must be broad, bold and visionary. We must insist on a Separation of Oil & State at both the domestic and international levels. Perhaps most importantly, we must organize to ensure those demands cannot be ignored.
