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Politics : The Donkey's Inn -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (3084)	3/3/2002 2:41:37 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

Energy Firms Were Heard on Air Rules, a Critic Says The New York Times March 2, 2002 By DON VAN NATTA Jr. W ASHINGTON, March 1 - In considering new rules for enforcing the Clean Air Act, a senior official at the Energy Department consulted 64 energy corporations and industry trade groups and only one environmental group, a Democratic congressman charged today. The congressman, Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, disclosed those findings in a letter to President Bush. Mr. Waxman said the corporations whose industry representatives met with the Energy Department had contributed a total of $6.4 million to Mr. Bush and other Republican candidates since 1999. The energy corporations gave a total of $2 million to Democratic candidates over the same period, Mr. Waxman found. Mr. Waxman argued that the pattern was similar to a report published in The New York Times today that 18 of the energy industry's top 25 financial contributors to the Republican Party advised Vice President Dick Cheney's national energy task force last year. "As in the case of the Cheney energy task force, access to the Department of Energy on this crucial energy and environmental issue appears to be heavily tilted toward industry and closely correlated with campaign contributions," Mr. Waxman wrote to the president. The meetings involved Frank Blake, the deputy secretary of energy, who represents the department in the administration's redrafting of rules for a program called new source review that requires corporations to modernize pollution controls when they upgrade their factories. Jeanne Lopatto, a department spokeswoman, said Mr. Blake had eight meetings over four months with a total of 65 people, including a representative of the Natural Resources Defense Council. She said campaign contributions had nothing to do with the consultations. "That's Blake's job," Ms. Lopatto said. "We interact with a wide array of people - environmental groups, conservation groups, industry representatives and think tanks - in the course of our work, and we will continue to do so." Mr. Waxman said lower-level staff members at the department met with other environmental groups on the issue on July 18, 2001. That same day, Mr. Blake was meeting with representatives of the Sinclair Oil Company, Mr. Waxman said. "I also understand that environmental groups have had two meetings with officials of the Environmental Protection Agency, but according to the groups, the E.P.A. did not seriously engage the environmental groups nor follow up on any of the issues raised," he wrote. Mr. Waxman urged Mr. Bush to reconsider his refusal to disclose the list of executives who met with the energy task force last year, which is being sought by the General Accounting Office in a lawsuit filed against the vice president. Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have refused to identify the industry executives who met with the energy task force last spring before it sketched out a new national energy policy. Earlier this week, a federal judge here ordered the Energy Department to release 7,500 pages of documents related to the task force. Today, Mr. Bush said he was in favor of releasing the material. "I hope the Energy Department gets the documents out there as quickly as they possibly can," Mr. Bush told reporters in Des Moines. But Mr. Bush drew the line at releasing details of meetings between Mr. Cheney, the chairman of the energy task force, and industry executives. "I receive advice and in order for people to give me sound advice that information ought not to be public," Mr. Bush said. ExxonMobil, the second-largest energy industry donor to the Republican Party, confirmed today that its executives met with Mr. Cheney. It was among the handful of companies that had declined to comment earlier this week about whether its executives had met with Mr. Cheney or members of the task force, although it did say that its interests were represented by the American Petroleum Institute, a trade council. In an interview today, company officials confirmed that the ExxonMobil chief executive, Lee Raymond, met with Mr. Cheney for 30 minutes on Feb. 8, 2001. ExxonMobil officials also met with task force staff members for 45 minutes on Feb. 14 and made a presentation about future energy supply and demand, the company disclosed. The company said that on the same day, executives made a similar presentation to the General Accounting Office and to staff members of both political parties on the House and Senate Energy Committees. Explaining ExxonMobil's decision to disclose the meetings, Tom J. Cirigliano, a company spokesman, said: `We decided to talk about it now because there's a lot of misinformation floating out there right now. So we wanted to make clear Exxon Mobil's position on the need for a coherent energy policy." nytimes.com