A Year in the Life of Spencer Abraham

When Spencer Abraham was the junior senator from Michigan, he wanted to do away with the Department of Energy, a federal outpost that the Republicans have railed against since its creation under Jimmy Carter.

Now that he finds himself in charge of the DOE, Abraham has become entranced by its political utility. The DOE, Abraham soon discovered, was not some green bunker plotting the solar conquest of the energy market. No. It was a clearinghouse for the oil and nuke industry, a kind of federally-endowed lobby, which occasionally dispensed token handouts to the energy conservation crowd. In recent months those tokens have gotten even smaller.

Let's review Abraham's first year directing the energy policy of Big Oil's newest favorite administration. At the top of the list is the ceaseless maneuvering to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to exploration and drilling. Last month, in a desperate attempt to secure enough votes to invoke an override of a Senate filibuster of the bill to open the refuge, Abraham played the Iraq card, alleging that Saddam Hussein's threat to cut off oil sales to Israel's allies necessitated opening the refuge to Exxon and Chevron. Of course, Abraham didn't explain that Saddam's threats would have not the slightest impact on US oil supplies, which have maintained an embargo against Iraqi crude since the Gulf War.

Even former CIA head and Iraq hawk James Woolsey didn't buy that one. "The bottom line is that we'll be dependent on the Middle East as long as we are dependent on oil," said Woolsey, who served as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1993 to 1995. "Drilling in ANWR is not a recipe for America's national security. They only answer is to use substantially less petroleum."

But Abraham wasn't through. He hatched a scheme with Senator Frank Murkowski to lure Democratic senators by proposing to add a bailout for steelworkers to the energy bill. While the measure may have attracted the attention of some Dems from the steel belt, it foundered when conservative Republicans condemned it as a boondoggle for big labor.

Last month his department also launched an attack on the G'witchin, the Arctic tribe that has opposed drilling in ANWR out of concern for the impact on fish and wildlife, particularly caribou, that they depend on for sustenance. Abraham dredged up a 20-year-old exploration arrangement on the Venetie Reservation outside the small town of Arctic Village, signed off on by some tribal members. The exploration site was not in caribou habitat and proved to be lacking in oil reserves, but Abraham went out of his way to portray the impoverished tribe as a band of duplicitous hypocrites in the press.

At the same time Abraham was bashing the G'witchin, he was going to bat for the big boys in Detroit, helping to defeat once gain new fuel efficiency standards for American automobiles. Under the rosiest scenario, ANWR will yield roughly 3.2 billion barrels. And it would take 10 years for that oil to reach the pump, and even when production peaks--in 2027--the refuge would produce less then 2 percent of the oil Americans are projected to use. By contrast, Detroit automakers have the technology right now to increase fuel economy standards to 40 miles per gallon. By phasing in that standard by 2012 the nation could save 15 times more oil than the Arctic Refuge is likely to produce over 50 years.

When tougher fuel efficiency standards came up for a vote before the Senate in mid-March, Abraham was there to denounce the measure and lobby senators to defeat the package. He was so persuasive that 16 democrats jumped over to his side--Baucus-MT, Bayh-IN, Breaux-LA, Byrd-WV, Carper-DE, Cleland-GA, Conrad-ND, Dorgan-ND, Feingold-WI, Kohl-WI, Levin-MN, Lincoln-AR, Mikulski-MD, Miller-GA, Nelson-NE, and Stabenow-MI. (Nearly all of these Democrats were certified as good greens by the League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club's political action committee.)

Then there's Enron. Even after the Enron scandal blew up, the DOE and the State Department have continued to go to bat for the energy conglomerate, particularly on the issue of the Dabhol natural gas plant in Maharashtra State, India. This monstrosity was neither needed nor wanted by the Indian people, but came about through a combination of bribes and arm-twisting, led by Frank Wisner, Jr. (son of the famous CIA official and suicide victim) who served as Ambassador to India under Clinton and then hopped on Enron's board. When the plant went under, Enron began desperately trying to badger the Indian government to cover its estimated $200 million in losses. Cheney and Abraham were recruited to do the shattered company's bidding. And they did, even as India was being recruited as a fellow traveler in Bush's war on terror.

A couple weeks ago, the Bush team was still going to bat for Enron, as the State Department and the DOE warned the Indian government that its failure to "live up to its contractual agreements" on the Dabhol plant might limit future investments in the nation by US energy firms. (A prospect that the Indians must be greeting with a sigh of relief.)

On the nuclear front there's Yucca Mountain, the stretch of Mojave desert 100 miles north of Las Vegas where the DOE and the nuclear industry wants to dump the radioactive waste that is piling up at the nation's commercial nuclear reactors. During the 2000 campaign, Bush pledged to Nevada voters that he would hold firm against any attempt to make Yucca Mountain a nuke waste dump.

That promise certainly helped Bush win Nevada and the election. But it turns out that Bush was just kidding. Within weeks of taking office, the leaders of the nuclear industry were given free access to the White House and the DOE and quickly went about writing a game plan for seizing Yucca Mountain. Anyone who'd taken the time to look at where the nuke industry's political money was flowing couldn't have been surprised at the stunning turnaround.

A new report by Public Citizen spells it out pretty clearly. The nuclear industry contributed $82,728 to Abraham during the 2000 election cycle, when he was a US senator, and spent even more money lobbying on issues dear to the industry's bottom line, including the ill-conceived nuclear waste dump proposal. In 2000 alone, leading nuclear energy interests that helped bankroll Abraham's unsuccessful Senate campaign spent more than $25 million to hire some of the highest-powered lobbyists in Washington DC, including top officials from the Reagan and Clinton administrations, records show. Eight of the lobbying firms hired made Fortune magazine's recent list of the 20 most influential firms in Washington.

But the nuke industry didn't stop there. They also spent more than $25 million lobbying Congress and federal agencies on the matter--that's about a half-million a week, every week of the year. The nuclear industry flooded Washington with a strike force of lobbyists, totaling some 53 different lobbying firms, for a combined total of 199 individual lobbyists working for utilities and other nuclear industries.

And these were no ordinary K-Street lobbyists. Nearly half the lobbyists hired by Abraham's top nuclear contributors previously worked for the federal government. The roster includes seven former members of Congress; former acting Energy Secretary Elizabeth Moler, who also was former chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission; Gregory Simon, the chief domestic advisor to former Vice President Al Gore; Haley Barbour, political affairs director in the Reagan White House and former chair of the Republican National Committee; and James Curtiss, who served on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Just last month Abraham and Homeland Security head Tom Ridge came to the remarkable conclusion that shipping high-level nuclear waste across the nation by rail and truck presented no special terrorism risk. No wonder Ridge doesn't want to answer any questions during his appearances before congressional committees.

Then there's the Bush/Abraham/Cheney energy plan, the creation of which has been the subject of litigation between the White House, the General Accounting Office, and environmental groups. Two recently released documents give an idea of how closely the Bush energy plan followed the industry's script:

A March 20, 2001 e-mail from the American Petroleum Institute to an Energy Department official provided a draft Executive Order on energy. Two months later, President Bush issued Executive Order 13211, which is nearly identical in structure and impact to the API draft, and nearly verbatim in a key section.

In March 2001, a Southern Company lobbyist e-mailed a DOE official suggesting "another issue" for inclusion in the energy plan: so-called reform of the Clean Air Act and related enforcement actions. The suggestion was incorporated into the energy plan, launching the Administration's controversial effort to weaken the Clean Air Act and retreat from high-profile enforcement actions against the nation's largest polluters, including the Southern Company.

While Abraham, Cheney, and the other Bush bigwigs huddled repeatedly over a period of months with the energy elite, environmentalists were largely locked out. Abraham himself met with more than 100 representatives from the energy industry and trade associations from late January to May 17, 2001, when the task force released its report. But when enviros, lead by the conservative Environmental Defense Fund, asked for a meeting with Abraham, his scheduler, Kathy Holloway, stiff-armed them, saying that Abraham was too busy.

One of the DOE documents released by order of a federal court on April 10, 2002, shows that the Energy task force gave one of its staff members 48 hours to contact 11 environmental groups to obtain their policy recommendations. The environmental groups were given 24 hours to provide written recommendations. Another DOE memo notes that staffers should endeavor to closely scrutinize the greens' comments and "recommend some we might like to support that are consistent with the Administration energy statements to date."

There was a final blow. In order to print up the oil/nuke energy plan, Abraham chose not to waste a cent from his multi-billion dollar drilling budget. Instead, he plundered $135,615 from the DOE's mothballed solar, renewables, and energy conservation budget to produce 10,000 copies of the White House energy plan released last May.

But Abraham's going to have to find a new printing account next year, because those funds probably won't be around much longer. The energy plan that the solar funds financed the printing of calls for slashing the renewable energy program by more than 50%.