Documents Show Energy Official Met Only With Industry Leaders
The New York Times
March 27, 2002
By DON VAN NATTA Jr. and NEELA
BANERJEE
ASHINGTON, March 26 - As he
helped the Bush administration
write its national energy report last
year, Energy Secretary Spencer
Abraham heard from more than 100
energy industry executives, trade
association leaders and lobbyists,
according to documents released by
the Energy Department.
Mr. Abraham did not meet with any representatives of environmental organizations
or consumer groups, the documents show.
In a press release on Monday night, the Energy Department summarized the
secretary's calendar by saying that Mr. Abraham met with 36 industry
representatives on task force matters. Most news organizations reported that figure
today.
But Mr. Abraham actually met with 109 representatives of energy industry
companies and trade associations, according to a comprehensive review of his daily
calendar from late January 2001 to May 17, 2001, the day the White House
released its national energy report. Many of the executives were leaders of
corporations that were among the most generous financial supporters of President
Bush's presidential campaign and the Republican Party.
Among the individuals and groups that met with Mr. Abraham, 18 contributed a
total of $16.6 million to the Republican Party since 1999, nearly three times what
they gave to the Democratic Party, according to an analysis of data compiled by the
Center for Responsive Politics.
Jill Schroeder, spokeswoman for the Energy Department,
said the department came up with its figure of 36 industry
representatives meeting with Mr. Abraham based on
executives who had asked to discuss the work of the task
force with Mr. Abraham, who was an influential task force
member. But many of the other meetings not counted by
the Energy Department also dealt with the executives'
interest in topics covered by the national energy policy.
"He's the energy secretary, he meets with these folks
about energy issues," Ms. Schroeder said. "It's his job."
Energy Department officials also pointed out that Mr.
Abraham occasionally rebuffed energy industry
executives. Officials said 23 requests for meetings from
industry leaders were denied. Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey
K. Skilling, the former top executives of the Enron
Corporation , were among the executives who
were turned away, officials said. But on March 29, 2001,
Mr. Abraham met with two other Enron executives, Joe
Hartsoe and Linda Robertson.
And Mr. Lay met with Vice President Dick Cheney, who
headed the task force, on April 17, 2001, to discuss
energy policy and the California energy crisis. David
Addington, counsel to Mr. Cheney, has said that
altogether, Enron executives had six meetings with task
force staff members in 2001.
A coalition of nearly 30 environmental groups asked to
meet with Mr. Abraham to discuss the energy policy on
Feb. 20, 2001. Energy Department officials declined the
request, citing Mr. Abraham's "busy schedule,"
department officials said.
But in the days following, Mr. Abraham met with
numerous industry representatives, including a top
executive of the American Coal Company; the chairman of
UtiliCorp United , a power company now
known as Aquila Inc.; executives from a half-dozen utility companies;
executives from a half-dozen nuclear power corporations and the corporate leaders
of ExxonMobil, BP/Amoco, Shell, ChevronTexaco, Anadarko Petroleum
and Ashland Inc.
Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, said today: "News flash - no
surprise to anybody, the secretary of energy meets with energy-related groups."
Over three days in late February 2001, Mr. Abraham met with six petroleum
executives, a railroad executive and the leader of a coal producing company. On
Feb. 21, he met with executives of five oil companies, including David O'Reilly, the
president of ChevronTexaco, and Steven Miller, the president and chief executive of
Shell Oil Company.
The next day, Feb. 22, Mr. Abraham met with John W. Snow, the chief executive of
the CSX Corporation (news/quote), one of the nation's largest railroad companies.
According to Mr. Abraham's calendar, the meeting's topics included "the role coal
plays in electric utility generation, mountaintop mining and the National Energy
and Environmental Technology Act."
Mr. Abraham also met with a number of energy industry lobbyists, including Haley
Barbour, who represents utility companies, and Tom Kuhn, the executive director
of the utility industry trade group, the Edison Electric Institute.
Mr. Abraham's calendar was among the 11,000 pages of documents that
Democratic lawmakers and environmental groups said today demonstrated that the
administration sought the advice of utility companies, oil companies and the
producers of natural gas, coal and nuclear energy in developing its energy policy.
Congressional Democrats and environmental groups have long argued that the
administration relied on advice from industry leaders while spurning
environmentalists who were arguing for conservation, renewable energy sources
and energy efficiency measures. Today, the groups said that Mr. Abraham's
calendar has proved that suspicion.
"The documents indicate that great deference was given to energy industry
executives and lobbyists and almost none was given to the environmental industry
and the concerns of consumer groups," said Larry Klayman, chairman and general
counsel of Judicial Watch, the legal watchdog group and one of several groups that
sued executive branch agencies for the documents' release.
The boxes of documents released by the Energy Department include hundreds of
internal e-mail messages that are heavily edited. Other apparently benign e-mail
messages are entirely blank; some blank pages have tantalizing titles like,
"Importance: High." The Energy Department also failed to print out e-mail
attachments; one was titled "proposed energy policy language."
Energy officials cited an array of exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act,
including internal deliberations about policy and personnel matters.
Leaders of the two groups that sued to get the documents said today that they
would ask federal judges to review the full texts of the edited documents and press
for their complete release. They also complained that the Energy Department
refused to release an additional 15,000 pages of documents.
"There is a lot missing," said Sharon Buccino, a senior lawyer at the Natural
Resources Defense Council, another organization that sued to get the records. "We
have 11,000 pages of scrubbed, purged and sanitized documents. Even despite
those efforts to hide the documents, they are littered with evidence of industry
access."
Ms. Schroeder said that all outside documents submitted to the Energy
Department were made public. "What we have withheld is not any kind of
communication between D.O.E. and anyone on the outside but discussions inside
the administration about what the report should say," she said. "It is standard
practice not to produce information about such discussions."
The documents include papers from industry representatives about the
relationship between gasoline consumption and air pollution. The Alliance of
Automobile Manufacturers noted in a report to the Energy Department on March
22, 2001, that "fuel economy standards are an ineffective energy policy."
The federal task force essentially accepted that argument. Instead of calling for new
fuel efficiency standards, it recommended only that new standards receive further
study.
And the energy policy report warned that increases in fuel efficiency had to be
done "without negatively impacting the U.S. automotive industry."
The Energy Department noted that the National Mining Association asked for an
overhaul of the New Source Review program, an Environmental Protection Agency
regulation that requires power plants, oil refineries and other industrial plants to
meet new emissions standards when they undertake a major upgrade of
operations. The energy industry has fought the regulation for years, claiming it
lacks clarity.
The Bush administration is now trying to overhaul the rule, a move that has
touched off debate between the Energy Department and the Environmental
Protection Agency, and within the agency itself.
Ms. Schroeder said that other Energy Department officials met five environmental
and consumer groups - the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy,
the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense, Resources for the Future and the
American Wind Energy Association. And she said five other groups did not respond
to a request for comments, including the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace.
Gary Skulnik, a Greenpeace spokesman, said yesterday that "a low-level staffer
called us on March 22, 2001, and gave us 24 hours to provide any input we had on
energy policy." The organization decided not to scramble to meet the tight
deadline.
"If they were serious about getting input," Mr. Skulnik said, "that was certainly not
the way to go about it."
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