WATCHING GOVERNMENT: Moments to savor in 2007

Jan. 7, 2008
This year promises to be an exciting and challenging year in Washington, DC, for the oil and gas business.

This year promises to be an exciting and challenging year in Washington, DC, for the oil and gas business. But before it gets too far under way, let’s revisit some of 2007’s more entertaining moments and properly recognize their instigators. Yes, it’s time for the “Watchies,” this column’s annual salute to the past year’s most amusing moments in government.

As in previous years, most of the winners are members of Congress. Roger W. Sant, who chairs the Smithsonian Institution’s board of regents, is not. He still receives this year’s “Good Will and Enlightenment” Watchy for questioning the museum’s acceptance of $5 million from the American Petroleum Institute to help underwrite a major oceans exhibit. API, which senior Smithsonian staffers had approached earlier in the year, quietly withdrew the gift before it could come to a vote before the regents.

Sant reportedly felt that ocean life preservation and petroleum industry activity are incompatible. In addition to being a former chairman of the World Wildlife Fund, he also founded and chaired AES Corp., which is encountering opposition to its planned LNG terminals near Baltimore and Boston.

On to Congress

We move now to the 110th Congress, where members railed against alleged price gouging amid the oil and gas industry’s supposedly obscene profits. While many contended, the “Let’s Not Mince Words” Watchy goes to Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) for declaring on Dec. 13 that “the oil companies are celebrating in their boardrooms” after a cloture motion failed by one vote, dooming the 2007 energy bill’s punitive tax provisions.

The many runners up in the House and Senate were merely tuning up their rhetoric for the 2008 elections. There’s not enough space to discuss what’s at various presidential candidates’ web sites. Let’s just say that competition will be fierce for this Watchy this year.

Committee hearings also were entertaining. Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) wins a “Deja Vu” Watchy for his May testimony before the House Natural Resources Committee urging incentives to stimulate marine renewable energy development. It was reminiscent of calls in the early 1990s to suspend royalties for initial deepwater oil production in the Gulf of Mexico.

Cultural relevance

Finally, Rep. Stevan Pearce (R-NM) wins the first “Cultural Relevance” Watchy for his maneuver during a May 23 Natural Resources Committee hearing. It’s not certain whether he was aware that singer-composer Paul Simon was in town to receive the first George and Ira Gershwin Prize for Popular Song from the Library of Congress.

Pearce nevertheless asked a panel of five federal resource managers which provisions in HR 2337 would lead to increases in domestic oil and gas production. Then he sat back and awaited their responses.

That’s right. It was the Sound of Silence.