“I feel sorry sometimes for the young people who, you know, believe this. They don't do their own research. ”
- Hillary Clinton, April 3, 2016 Meet the Press referring to young people (known to the Clinton campaign as not-very-wealthy sheeple) who believe Greenpeace’s evidence that Hillary Clinton accepts money from lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry.
First, let me state the obvious. This has all been horrifically bad politics. You don’t yell at an environmental activist in a rope line in NY state during a Democratic primary. You smile politely, say “it’s great to see you so engaged” and you walk to the next young person and shake their hand. And then, I’m not sure who in the campaign said to themselves, “let’s make this all about Bernie lying,” but even if Bernie’s campaign was lying about this particular point (and I don’t think it is as wonderfully pointed out by about half a dozen diaries on this site, my favorite of which was this one: Washington Post Gets Three Pinocchios Should Apologize to Bernie Sanders) why would Hillary ever want anyone to focus so much attention on her campaign contributors. Good lord… She’s had to return the for-profit prison industry donations, but there are lobbyists for about half-a-dozen other shady industries that have donated, and will donate in the future. Plus, her Super Pacs…. Why would you want to have a conversation about any of this? AND THEN WHY WOULD YOU GO ON NATIONAL TV AND INSULT AN ENTIRE DEMOGRAPHIC GROUP?!?
OK…….. deep breath….. everyone makes mistakes. And you know what, this could be a learning opportunity. I should be a life-long learner, or so my middle school English teacher told me. And, since I’m a young person (OK, I’m 35, I’ve got two kids, a mortgage, and high blood pressure, but I’m apparently still young in this election cycle, which is kinda awesome), this might be just the chance I need to educate myself about fossil fuels and Hillary Clinton. So here it goes….
Hillary Clinton Takes Donations from Fossil Fuel Companies
This issue has been hashed, and re-hashed so much on this site I’m just going to drop a few of the most obvious examples of how Hillary Clinton accepts fossil fuel donations and leave you with cites to better, more thorough sources, because thankfully young people **wink wink** on this site have already done most of the research on this issue:
1) Hillary Clinton does accept SOME individual donations from employees of fossil fuel companies, and SOME of this amount is probably organized by bundlers. The total amount is $308,000. We don’t know how much comes from bundlers compared to gas station attendants. This isn’t that big of a deal, nor is it what the Greenpeace activist was talking about. This Washington Post article is essentially right about the individual donation issue.
2) Hillary Clinton does have registered lobbyists that you can look up on the Internet (thanks again to this wonderful diary, Washington Post Gets Three Pinocchios Should Apologize to Bernie Sanders) that only lobbied for big oil companies and oil think tanks. If you’d like to look them up yourself, visit the Senate website yourself. What’s most worrying about this is that these lobbyists are allowed to donate at all. Democrats should not be taking campaign donations from any registered lobbyists. President Obama was absolutely right, and we should listen to him. Remember this wonderful line from 2007?
I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over. I have done more than any other candidate in this race to take on lobbyists — and won. They have not funded my campaign, they will not run my White House, and they will not drown out the voices of the American people when I am president.
But, I’m sure Hillary is right. The last 8 years have certainly shown that registered lobbyists hold no influence over American politics.
3) Super Pacs, the Clinton Foundation, and Dark Money
Although many worthy diaries have touched on the issue of dark money, and how fossil fuel companies appear to be donating to Super Pacs connected to electing Hillary, it’s worth mentioning that dark money is, well, dark. There’s a lot of it we are not seeing. Greenpeace traced $3,250,000 in donations that were disclosed to the FEC by oil and gas companies to Super Pacs that are trying to elect Hillary. Can she legally prevent these Super Pacs from taking this money? No, but it’s also safe to say she hasn’t explicitly denounced accepting such donations.
The most complicated part of all of this is the Clinton Foundation. There is absolutely no evidence that I’ve seen that Hillary Clinton engaged in a quid pro quo from the oil industry that resulted in donations to the Clinton Foundation. The Sanders campaign has never made this innuendo, although some on this site have. I wouldn’t call it good ethical practice to be so engaged with a private foundation while Secretary of State, but so far there’s no fire regarding the Foundation (emphasis on so far). This Grist article has a good overview of the potential problems, and a summary of the potential exposure Hillary has from the Clinton Foundation.
Does Hillary Clinton Do the Bidding of Fossil Fuel Companies?
If we, as an online community, can be honest about this one, the answer is yes, and no. You really can’t describe Hillary as a friend to oil companies. Yes, there is some evidence that, at the very least, Chevron’s CEO believed that Hillary’s State Department was willing to support its attempt to derail a case by environmental activists in Ecuador. In an e-mail to the State Department in May 2012, a Chevron representative requests a follow-up discussion with the Department because “John Watson [Exxon CEO] had a very good dinner discussion with the Secretary [Clinton] … and took the opportunity to express our concerns about developments in the Chevron Ecuador litigation.” Ever since an Ecuador judge ruled that Chevron owed $18 billion in restitution for widespread environmental damage, Chevron has been using American courts, and US diplomatic pressure, to undermine that judgment and avoid paying anything. It’s one of the worst imaginable examples of US corporate malfeasance, and it’s an embarrassment to our country that the State Department should be involved in assisting Chevron.
However, there’s no evidence that after this dinner Hillary engaged in a direct lobbying effort. The sad fact is that I doubt it would matter who was Secretary of State. It’s standard practice for our government to intervene in South American affairs on behalf of our multinational corporations. It would have been nice to have a Secretary of State that said, no, we won’t support such a terrible idea. But it’s hard to personally blame Hillary for not taking a stand when the entire apparatus of US foreign policy assumes that this is standard operating procedure. Of course, Hillary doesn’t come off completely clean. I particularly enjoy this quote from an editorial by the director of a major foreign policy thinktank and Chevron’s executive vice president of policy and planning:
During her tenure, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recognized the unique attributes of the private sector, and, moreover, the importance of engaging them to restore America’s leadership in global development. “[Y]ou cannot have development in today’s world without partnering with the private sector, and that has been our mantra, and we are now creating examples,” she noted.
The opportunity has never been better for the U.S. government to utilize its relationships with the private sector to help build better, safer and healthier societies around the world. The question is whether it will take the initiative in trying to meet what is America’s key leadership challenge for the 21st century.
It makes me visibly shake in anger to see a Chevron employee claiming that the private sector can “help build better, safer, and healthier societies around the world.” Is it an example of Hillary’s corruption that she spearheaded this effort? I see no evidence. It’s just a slimy example of our foreign policy at work in the world.
The same can probably be said for all the disclosures around the U.S. intervention in Libya that has come from Hillary’s unclassified state department e-mails. For those unfamiliar, you can read this summary from Vice news, which I found fairly well-balanced. There have been suggestions that the e-mails show that Hillary was all about regime change in order to get the oil for her Saudi Arabian buddies. I can’t see much direct support, but it does appear to show that one of her key advisers, Sydney Blumenthal, was either passing her ridiculous CTs about the situation that she appeared to consider serious, or there was a lot more going on in Libya than has yet been publicly disclosed. But, of course we intervened in Libya in part because of the oil. The US cares more about oil than human rights. Jimmy Carter may have been president, but nothing has changed in terms of US foreign policy. We like oil. We like it to flow freely to the open market so that our businesses can purchase it at reasonable prices. It would be nice if we didn’t place such emphasis on oil resources, but it’s not Hillary Clinton’s fault.
It’s Really All About Fracking
So why would oil and gas companies invest in a Clinton presidency? It’s all about fracking. This is what Hillary Clinton had to say at the National Clean Energy Summit in September 2014:
There are challenges here to be sure, but the boom in domestic gas production is an example of American innovation changing the game, and if we do it right, it can be good for both the environment and our economy. With the right safeguards in place, gas is cleaner than coal. And expanding production is creating tens of thousands of new jobs. And lower costs are helping give the United States a big competitive advantage in energy-intensive energies. …
But to capitalize on this boom, we have to face head-on the legitimate, pressing environmental concerns about some new extraction practices and their impacts on local water, soil, and air supplies. Methane leaks in the production and transportation of natural gas are particularly troubling. So it’s crucial that we put in place smart regulations and enforce them, including deciding not to drill when the risks are too high.
Now, many Democrats on this site will find this very reasonable. We were told, not too long ago, that we needed a “bridge” to our fossil-fuel-free future, and that bridge had to be natural gas. It is plentiful, it is located in America, and the burning of it emits far less carbon dioxide than coal. It’s such a powerful combination that I imagine almost any Third Way Democrat instantly starts salivating about the possibility of using oil and gas companies to save the planet from climate change (and this is still the prevailing view among political elites throughout the world). To be fair, so did many environmental NGOs that probably should have known better.
Unfortunately, there’s now overwhelming evidence that fugitive methane emissions (which is any methane emission to the atmosphere that occurs the drilling site, pipelines, compressor stations, or during transit) are commonplace at fracking sites (this ThinkProgress article points you to many of the scientific studies, including the 2012 Cornell study that received what I call the leaded gasoline industry shill treatment, but turned out to be pretty accurate, and Joe Romm recently published an even more definitive list of studies showing no net benefit from Methane). Since Methane traps 86 times more heat over a 20-year period than carbon dioxide, there is no bridge by burning natural gas. Methane emissions in the U.S. have increased by 30 percent between 2002-2014, and if fracking continues, we will almost certainly surpass 2 degrees C, and see ocean levels rise by potentially more than 6 feet in less than 100 years.
But, you say, Hillary Clinton knows this, and wants to make sure we regulate methane to prevent fugitive emissions! In fact, the Obama administration is putting in place new regulations that will solve this problem! Well, the EPA is putting in place new regulations. New regulations proposed last summer were intended to reduce methane emissions 45 percent from 2012 levels by 2025. That’s not particularly ambitious given the danger we find ourselves in. The EPA recently announced a new initiative to cut emissions even further, but it will need to go through the rulemaking process before we get a clear sense of whether it will be any better. These types of emissions, which occur from production pipelines and temporary drilling rigs, are next to impossible for the EPA to properly enforce, so even if these rules are put in place, it will take a massive enforcement effort just to ensure minimum compliance. In other words, it will take too long, and be too difficult, to regulate, and the damage from methane emissions is simply too high.
Now, Hillary Clinton has given a very, very convoluted answer to whether she currently supports fracking. Here’s the gist:
1) “I don’t support it when any locality or any state is against it.”
2) “I don’t support it when the release of methane or contamination of water is present.”
3) “I don’t support it ... unless we can require that anybody who fracks has to tell us exactly what chemicals they are using.”
Honestly, I’ve spent a good portion of my life reading legal cases, and even I can’t tell what the fuck this means. If she doesn’t support fracking when the release of methane is present, then I guess she doesn’t support fracking period. Then again, maybe she isn’t aware that no amount of EPA regulations could ever reduce methane emissions to zero. I obviously hope that she didn’t know about the problem of fugitive methane emissions when she was Secretary of State and shamelessly promoting fracking to governments all around the world, because that’s pretty fucking cynical.
But here’s the reality of that statement. The first requirement is largely meaningless. As President, she will have no ability to tell Oklahoma, for example, that they must ban fracking if a local Oklahoma municipality votes to ban it. The Constitution prevents the federal government from stepping in to dictate the political autonomy of local governments (it couldn’t, for example, dictate that New York City control its own education budget). And since states are capable of setting regulations that prevent the practice from occurring, there’s really no reason to even say this, other than it sounds tough.
The second requirement, as noted above, could either be read as a blanket ban on fracking, or a general statement that she thinks it should be safe. I believe it’s signaling that she supports fracking if it’s “safe”, because otherwise why have a discussion about natural gas as a bridge? But the statement is so ambiguous that I can only reach that conclusion by assuming she didn’t do a 360 on her policy since the summer of 2014. Finally, the third requirement is also riddled with potential misinterpretations. Would it be enough for the fracking companies to submit their chemical mixtures to the EPA under the Toxic Substances Control Act, even if they didn’t have to release the mixtures to the public? Or does she want actual transparency? Who knows? The EPA is already in the process of approving new rules to regulate fracking fluid. Would that be enough for her? It wouldn’t do anything about the toxic fracking WASTEWATER that is typically discharged into wells and potentially nearby water sources, which is the real problem with fracking fluids.
The fact of the matter is, I strongly suspect that Hillary Clinton supports continued expansion of oil and natural gas drilling in the United States as part of the “all of the above” energy strategy pioneered, unfortunately, by President Obama. That’s why oil and gas companies donate to her PACs and it’s why registered lobbyists bundle and donate to her campaign. Can I definitely show that this is true? No, I can just do some research.
So, Ignorant, Pathetic Young Person, Why Support Sanders?
“My answer — my answer is a lot shorter. No, I do not support fracking.”