Beyond Oil: The Oil Industry and Partisanship
Editor's note: Any hope that the Deepwater Horizon would mark a turning point in the fight for a climate bill quickly evaporated. But the spill still offers us a "teachable moment" on many critical issues. In a series of essays in our magazine and online, some of the nation's leading environmental writers and thinkers reflect on our two national disaster areas: the one in the Gulf and the other in Congress. Here, the author of The Republican War on Science argues against the blame game and for continued investment aimed at combating the oil industry.
It was just one more note in a familiar tune. In March Greenpeace revealed that the Kansas-based oil and chemical conglomerate Koch Industries had pumped nearly $50 million into global warming denial groups and think tanks. Koch is a loyal Republican ally, having also donated 86 percent of its political contributions in the current campaign cycle to GOP candidates. Their donations amounted to well over half a million dollars.
Republicans, oil, climate change inaction: Whether you’re talking about conservative think tanks, lobbyists, politicians, or political action (527) groups, the correlation between funding source and position is impossible to mistake. GOP candidates have received almost three times as much money in oil industry campaign donations as Democrats from the 1990 election cycle to the present -- nearly $108 million versus $39 million. In turn, many of the candidates and think tanks supported by Big Oil gladly regurgitate an anti-regulatory and fossilized fuel ideology -- including opposition to strong action on climate change.
But if the GOP-oil relationship is well known and predictable, staring too closely at it can also blind us. It can make us overlook Democratic complicity, the increasing diversity of industrial interests, and most of all, the need for new grassroots ways of shaking up our political system.
What of that $39 million given to Democrats by oil and gas companies? Mary Landrieu (D-LA), for instance, has received over $750,000 of it. In turn, she has opposed fuel economy improvements and helped to frustrate strong climate action (she was, for instance, one of four Democrats who joined Republicans in thwarting the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act in 2008). Her example suggests the real issue with our politics is not finding one party in bed with one industry, but rather political parochialism -- catering to interests in one’s backyard to ensure reelection. The problem is the system.
And if the politicians who support entrenched interests are diverse, so too are corporate views on the environment. Many companies, like General Electric, have gone increasingly green, and the new generation of tech billionaires, like Bill Gates and Larry Page, are as appalled by our retrograde energy system as anyone. But though the entrepreneurs are salivating over it, there’s not yet any Google or Microsoft-sized titan of the green energy industry. The market capitalization of industry leader First Solar is about $11 billion, compared with ExxonMobil’s $297 billion. If and when there’s a truly powerful green energy company, its influence would tip the political scales away from the negative influence of fossil fuel interests.
Finally, if we’ve got a broken system we should go back to the basics, thinking as a game theoretician would and focusing on punishment and reward. There are abundant carrots to entice politicians to support wealthy polluting companies, and there are few sticks to punish them for it. "Right now, if you vote against climate or clean energy, there’s no penalty," says the prolific climate blogger Joe Romm. "You’re not going to lose votes, not going to lose money."
In the sticks department there have been some intriguing efforts lately, like Bill McKibben’s 350.org movement to energize the grassroots. But as with the green energy industry, such efforts haven’t yet attained the scale necessary to outweigh the industrial behemoths of the past. We don’t just need innovations in clean energy, we need continuing innovations in activism -- using all the tech tools available to network citizens into the information channels that will help them better appreciate why climate change threatens everything, and why we need dramatic and immediate change.
The core problem is, and always has been, that oil and gas interests have greater resources and a greater investment in having things go their way. But the clean energy transition will create its own momentum as we continue to urge it forward. Green companies will change the energy system, and their influence will feed back into politics; even as activists will change our politics, in turn advancing the clean energy transition. It’s a positive feedback loop, or it could be. Let’s kick-start it.
