When: June 14, 2018
Where: Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee
Title: “Legislative Hearing on Enhancing State Management of Federal Lands and Waters Act”
What Happened: Many coastal states’ economies depend on tourism and a clean environment, which bring in more jobs, tourist spending and tax revenue than they would expect to make from offshore oil and gas extraction. While Texas and a few other states have accepted offshore drilling as part of their economy, lawmakers of both parties from Florida to Virginia to California have promised to keep their beaches clean and their horizons free of drilling platforms. Most residents seem to like this approach. Nobody wants to get hit by the next Deepwater Horizon-style disaster.
Republicans on the Committee don’t like it when state officials and local residents ask to be spared from the Trump administration’s simplistic “energy dominance” agenda. So they held a hearing on a bill that, if it becomes law, would allow the federal government to extort enormous sums of money from coastal states that want to protect their oceans and beaches from the threat of offshore drilling. The theory, apparently, is that these states should apologize for “hurting the oil and gas industry” — and they should have to pay for it with state funds.
Who came to testify at this hearing? The two parties had different ideas about who belonged in the room.
Democrats invited Ben Cahoon, the mayor of Nags Head, N.C., a coastal town with a heavy tourism and offshore fishing economy that would be wiped out not just by a spill or other catastrophe but even by routine spills and the onshore infrastructure needed for drilling and seismic testing procedures.
He explained that for towns like Nags Head — there are many of them up and down our coastlines — the risk is never worth any rewards the industry could promise. Visitors to Nags Head, he said, wouldn’t be interested in the beaches, historic buildings and outdoor activities his town has to offer if tar balls started washing up on shore. Just as seriously, he said, constant seismic testing by oil and gas companies would disturb fishing habitats and severely damage the sport fishing economy that many local businesses rely on.
Republicans weren’t interested in the local perspective. They invited:
-Myron Ebell, director of the Competitive Enterprise Insitute’s Center for Energy and Environment
Ebell led the Trump transition team at the Environmental Protection Agency and is publicly known as an architect of the president’s climate denial strategy.
It was Ebell’s idea for the White House to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, and he was the one who successfully pushed Trump to pull the trigger.
He’s so wide open to damaging quotations on climate change that offering a list would be a waste of time. Typical of his outlook was his January 2017 remark:
“In all of this discussion of the impacts of global warming, the benefits of higher carbon dioxide levels and of warming…are completely minimized by the alarmist community.”
What does Myron Ebell know that Congress needed to hear? It wasn’t clear. But Republicans on the Committee didn’t disagree with anything he had to say.
- Nick Loris, Fellow in Energy and Environmental Policy at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Free Markets and Regulatory Reform
Mr. Loris’ mouthful of a title somewhat obscures his role as a rank-and-file spokesman for the climate denial industry. Author of Heritage Foundation articles with headlines like “Climate Budget Cuts are Smart Management, Not an Attack on Science,” Loris — whose qualifications are in economics, not environmental studies or any other field relevant to climate change — frequently claims without evidence that scientists’ climate warnings are overblown. He wholeheartedly endorsed Scott Pruitt’s appointment to head the Environmental Protection Agency, claiming that Democratic concerns about deregulation, industry favoritism and wise use of public resources were just politically motivated nonsense. We know how that turned out.
What Mr. Loris knew about why states should pay to protect their own coastlines wasn’t any clearer at the end of the hearing than it was at the beginning. But he did say a lot about why we should let the oil and gas industry drill more.
- Matt Anderson, director of the Sutherland Institute’s Coalition for Self-Government in the West
The Sutherland Institute is based in Salt Lake City, which — it hardly needs to be said — does not have a coastline. Republicans decided to invite Mr. Anderson to offer his group’s perspective on aspects of the bill other than the offshore drilling provision. The Sutherland Institute has taken more than $1 million over the years from a variety of right-wing think tanks and donor organizations and follows a strictly deregulatory agenda on environmental and land use issues. It is widely seen as a driving force behind President Trump’s unpopular decision to shrink Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument.
The majority’s members weren’t any more insightful than their invited witnesses. In a conversation during the hearing, Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.) and Chairman Rob Bishop (R-Utah) mocked Mayor Cahoon’s concerns by comparing Nags Head tourism numbers with those of New Orleans. (See here.) Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.) opened his remarks by dismissing “the whole climate scare thing.” (See here.)
The rest of the hearing was equally misguided, especially for those who looked forward to a serious conversation about offshore drilling — or an acknowledgment that climate change is real.
Congress needs to consider the future of offshore oil and gas drilling, especially in light of its environmental and safety risks and the unsustainable climate impacts of unchecked fossil fuel burning. This hearing didn’t offer that consideration, and the big questions got ignored.
Far from being a benign player that just wants to create jobs, the offshore oil and gas industry is well known for weak labor protections and a corporate culture that ignores safety controls. A New York Times feature earlier this year highlighted Trump’s rollback of the industry’s financial, environmental and safety regulations “written with human blood” — rules passed only after disaster struck, sometimes more than once.
Trump’s director of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which oversees offshore oil and gas drillers, is Scott Angelle. As the Times reported, when Angelle ran for governor of Louisiana in 2015, a political action committee supporting him called Louisiana Rising received more than $1 million from “a top executive at an oil and gas company that then had hundreds of Gulf platforms.” Angelle has done industry’s bidding at every turn, including proposals to weaken safety regulations and loosen requirements on a piece of drilling equipment called a blowout preventer, which — as the name suggests — is designed to prevent blowouts of the sort that occurred at Deepwater Horizon in 2010.
We don’t have to guess at the economic costs of this kind of industry-friendly negligence. Louisiana lost $247 million in “leisure-visitor spending” — i.e. tourism — in 2010 thanks to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Even without a catastrophe of that magnitude, embracing offshore oil and gas drilling with open arms is often not the best move for a state. Jobs in the industry can disappear by the hundreds of thousands depending on the price of oil. It’s now seen as so unappealing that the American Petroleum Institute has taken to paid advertising targeted at millennials to convince them the industry is cool.
Republicans didn’t raise these issues at the hearing. They were more interested in repeating their climate denial talking points and blaming President Obama for not drilling more.
There was a lot going on that week, and Republicans could have held a number of important hearings on topics of real substance.
One June 11, new research was published strongly suggesting that climate change will damage our future ability to grow the foods we currently rely on to survive. By the end of this century, the study found, the combination of expected changes in water availability and ozone concentration in the atmosphere will reduce the average vegetable crop yield by 35 percent.
How should our public lands be managed to address this likelihood? What impact will this have on demand for natural resources? Under the Republican majority, we won’t even be asking those questions.
On June 14, a report underscoring climate change’s impacts on the world’s fish populations pointed out the likelihood of future conflicts as countries dispute access to fishing resources: “Climate change is forcing fish species to shift their habitats faster than the world’s system for allocating fish stocks, exacerbating international fisheries conflicts. . . . Conflict leads to overfishing, which reduces the food, profit and employment fisheries can provide, and can also fracture international relations in other areas beyond fisheries. A future with lower greenhouse gas emissions, like the targets under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, would reduce the potential for conflict, the study says.”
The Committee on Natural Resources oversees the nation’s fisheries and the laws that govern them. Republicans haven’t offered a peep on climate change’s fisheries impacts.
On June 11, news came that a mature lion living in South Africa’s world-famous Kruger National Park was baited to cross the park’s boundary so a trophy hunter could shoot and kill it. The story raised echoes of the notorious killing of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe in 2015, which led — under the Obama administration — to stepped-up enforcement of trophy hunting limitations through the Endangered Species Act. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, in contrast, created the so-called Hunting and Shooting Sports Conservation Council at the Interior Department earlier this year; the group, which has not promoted conservation, has been widely denounced as a front for anti-regulatory groups like the National Rifle Association and Safari Club International, which — along with smaller industry players like the Archery Trade Association — now dominate the board.
The week of the hearing, Democrats were busy trying to get Republicans to pay attention to issues more important to the American people than penalizing states with strong environmental laws.
On June 11, the Committee’s entire Democratic caucus sent Chairman Bishop a letter asking for a hearing on pervasive reports of sexual harassment at the Interior Department and its agencies. (The request was ignored.) The letter followed the January release of #InteriorToo: Addressing Sexual Harassment Across the Department of the Interior Starts With Strong Anti-Harassment Policies, a report by the Democratic staff of the Natural Resources Committee that identified a number of clearly needed policy reforms at the agency and DOI level. That report is available at here.
On June 12, Ranking Member Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) highlighted new findings by the Department of the Interior (DOI) Office of Inspector General that showed the Trump administration couldn’t back up its explanation of why it canceled a study on the health impacts of mountaintop removal mining, a practice common at coal sites in the Eastern United States. The administration, the IG found, couldn’t document its claim that the study was canceled as part of a broader “review” of studies being conducted through DOI grants and agreements. Indeed, the watchdog found no evidence of any such review, concluding that canceling the study wasted the more than $450,000 of taxpayer money that had been spent to date because no final product was produced.
In his statement, Grijalva noted the constantly shifting explanations Secretary Zinke and his staff had offered over the months Grijalva had been seeking information about the study and its fate.
Aug. 18, 2017: The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement sends the National Academy of Sciences a letter saying in part, “[T]he Department of the Interior has begun an agency-wide review of its grants and cooperative agreements in excess of $100,000, largely as a result of our changing budget situation.”
Oct. 19, 2017 (E&E News): “Interior spokeswoman Heather Swift maintained yesterday the study was put ‘on hold’ as part of a department wide review of grants and cooperative partnerships exceeding $100,000 that began in April. ‘The Trump Administration is dedicated to responsibly using taxpayer dollars,’ she said in an email.”
Oct. 28, 2017 (100 Days in Appalachia): “Interior’s Deputy Press Secretary, Alex Hinson, explained in an email that the review is meant to ensure the proper and responsible allocation of taxpayers’ money. Although Hinson stated that ‘in April the Department began reviewing grants and cooperative partnerships that exceed $100,000,’ he failed to provide any studies that are undergoing similar review.”
March 21, 2018 (West Virginia Gazette): “A spokeswoman for the Interior Department did not answer questions about why the study was terminated, and if there were plans to revive it in the future. ‘Your paper covered this in September 2017. Nothing has changed since,’ Interior spokeswoman Heather Swift wrote in an email.”
On June 13, Ranking Member Grijalva denounced a Republican vote approving Chairman Bishop’s “Tribal Recognition Act.” The bill makes the legal status of Native American tribes depend on a vote of Congress rather than the process typically used today by Department of the Interior experts who rely on historical, linguistic and cultural analysis. Federal recognition of a tribe comes with legal and economic benefits that Bishop wants to restrict to groups with Congressional approval, regardless of the merits of a community’s case for recognition. Grijalva called the bill, which was roundly condemned in Indian Country, “a Republican shakedown disguised as legislation.”
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