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InsideClimate News created a graphic that shows that, like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), these bills were passed as law in a nearly copy-paste manner in those statehouses. In fact, ALEC liked the resolution so much that it adopted it as one of its own.
Is IOGCC Lobbying?
While the InsideClimate News article mostly centers around IOGCC’s anti-Safe Drinking Water Act advocacy, numerous other examples exist—several of them touched upon within InsideClimate’s piece—of IOGCC working to derail federal regulatory safeguards on the most pressing oil and gas-related issues of the day.
The stories of those efforts, the names of the people who made it happen and the victims of those efforts will receive space here soon on DeSmog.
It is fairly safe to say—based on the thousands of historical documents, court documents, documents obtained from interlibrary loan and documents obtained and reviewed from public records requests—that IOGCC has sat at the epicenter of the oil and gas industry’s battle against the myriad U.S. environmental laws passed in the 1970s.
The facts raise a simple question: Is it lobbying? IOGCC told InsideClimate News it doesn’t think so.
“IOGCC does not lobby,” IOGCC Spokeswoman Carol Booth told InsideClimate. “It does inform and educate state regulators, federal officials, policymakers and the public at large.”
IOGCC’s former Washington, DC Representative (read: lobbyist) Kevin Bliss, a former industry attorney who worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Department of Energy before landing the gig at IOGCC, claimed to Song that by definition IOGCC cannot lobby. Bliss, in the 2005 IOGCC newsletter published by InsideClimate News first discovered by DeSmog, gets credit along with a few others for working on the IOGCC subcommittee that inserted the Safe Drinking Water Act loophole into the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
“States don’t lobby,” Bliss told Song. “We were just communicating, state government to federal government.”
According to lobbying disclosure records, some IOGCC member states—including California, Oklahoma, Utah and North Dakota—register to lobby the federal government on other issues.
And what about all of the IOGCC industry members and representatives, Song asked Bliss, are those the “states” too?
“As far as I was ever concerned, the only people I ever paid attention to were the state oil and gas regulators,” Bliss answered. “Those were the ones that carried the punch.”
Yet IOGCC’s own newsletter boasts that Bliss pushed alongside fellow subcommittee member and industry attorney and Executive Michael Linn, founder of Linn Energy, to get the Safe Drinking Water Act exemption placed into the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
DOJ Weighs In
The U.S. Department of Justice didn’t agree with IOGCC’s assessment of its activities, according to historical documents cited in the InsideClimate piece and originally tracked down by DeSmog. Those documents center around a 1978 congressional testimony given by then-DOJ Antitrust Attorney Donald Flexner, now the namesake partner of the powerful law firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner.
In short, Flexner stated that IOGCC was no longer living up to the spirit of the original mission of its compact—conserving oil and gas—and should not receive congressional blessing to exist as a lobbyist organization.
As history would prove, Congress itself did not care quite as much about this notion and the DOJ has done nothing by way of actual enforcement or legal accountability to date as it relates to IOGCC. DeSmog has dozens more documents pertaining to this historical episode, with obvious contemporary relevance and they will be the focus of future articles on DeSmog.
Climate Denial
InsideClimate News also got IOGCC on the record to convey its organizational position on climate change, with Spokeswoman Carol Booth claiming IOGCC does not have a stance on the issue.
“We’re not scientists,” IOGCC’s Carol Booth told Song, with Song pointing out that this talking point has become commonplace among GOP politicians asked about whether they think climate change exists and is caused by humans. “[A]nd we cannot comment on things we don’t know.”
DeSmog also got IOGCC on the record on climate change back in October, when IOGCC Executive Director Carl Michael Smith wrote us a letter in response to questions sent through email. As with InsideClimate News, IOGCC claimed not to have a stance on the issue.
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