Of all things, the administration of US President George W. Bush stands accused of-dare anyone utter the words?-taking policy advice from experts.
How brazen!
And the experts were-gasp!-energy companies.
How utterly shameless!
BIG energy companies!
Anyone feeling faint over these disclosures should immediately sit or, better yet, lie down. Lower the head. Try to be calm. The trembling will subside. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.
Better now? On, then, to the shocking facts.
Revelations
"Big energy companies all but held the pencil for the White House task force as government officials wrote a plan calling for billions of dollars in corporate subsidies and the wholesale elimination of key health and environmental safeguards."
This is John H. Adams, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, describing his group's revelations that advice from energy companies and trade groups found its way into policy. NRDC won a court order for release by the Department of Energy of documents from the White House task force that produced a set of energy-policy proposals last year.
The documents, says an NRDC press statement, "confirm the intimate, secret relationship between huge, politically connected corporations and theellipsetask force." It sounds like a scandal, doesn't it? Or is it just the whining of an advocacy group that didn't get its way?
It's whining, of course, obligingly reported in the national news media as though the NRDC had really discovered something of substance. The group sifted through 11,000 pages of what it described as "heavily censored" and "heavily redacted" material turned over by the DOE and found evidence that communication from energy companies and groups influenced policy proposals.
One of what its press releases labeled "the more significant revelations" was a March 2001 e-mail from the American Petroleum Institute suggesting an executive order similar to one Bush signed on May 18. The order directs agencies to consider effects on energy of environmental and other regulations. It included wording from the API draft.
Another NRDC revelation was a March 2001 e-mail from Southern Co. recommending reform of the Clean Air Act and related enforcement. The administration's energy-policy proposal incorporated the suggestion. NRDC says that began the administration's "controversial effort to weaken the Clean Air Act and retreat from high-profile enforcement actions against the nation's largest polluters, including the Southern Co."
Thus did big energy companies wield the metaphorical pencil for the energy task force. NRDC further complained in its press release that its lawyers had to stand in line behind reporters at the DOE press office to get the papers. Gosh.
NRDC deserves credit for its exertions on behalf of disclosure. The administration's secrecy over the energy task force looks suspicious and hasn't done its energy proposals any good. And the group's investigative zeal did produce results: e-mails from lobbyists whose words showed up in policy documents.
But so what? It happens in policy-making. It happens frequently. As revelations from Washington, DC, go, this one bears no significance at all.
The oil and gas industry might easily ignore NRDC's fussiness. That press-release complaint about lawyers waiting in line creates reason to wonder if there's anything the group won't turn into a political grievance. What might NRDC reveal next? That somebody on the task force forgot to tip the pizza-delivery kid?
Deeper problem
There's a deeper problem for the oil gas industry in all this, however. It was association with energy, especially oil and gas, that enabled NRDC to give routine activity the appearance of scandal. Without the suspicion that shadows energy in politics, the NRDC "revelations" would have been laughed away before they made the news. That suspicion mutes the industry in policy-making to the detriment of both its ability to conduct business and national interests where energy is concerned.
Energy is a complex and dynamic subject. Effective energy legislation and regulation must be grounded in expertise that governments can't get from opinion polls, focus groups, or pressure groups like NRDC. Energy expertise has to come from the energy industry, communication with which should bear no political risk for government officials. The country needs more e-mail traffic, not less, between people who make energy policy and people who know the most about energy.
