"If You Were King, or Il Duce"

Meet Joseph Kelliher. The name may ring a bell, even though for the past two years the Bush administration has tried to keep him in the shadows. He's the man who spearheaded Dick Cheney's National Energy Policy Development Group, which wrote up a dream list for Big Oil, turned it into administration policy and then invoked executive privilege to keep the whole affair concealed from public scrutiny.

This was the task force that recommended, among other things: oil drilling in ANWR, the Rocky Mountain Front, and the Outer Continental Shelf; relaxed clean air rules for power plants; expanded subsidies for nuclear power; eased regulations on strip mining and mine safety; more natural gas drilling and associated pipelines; reductions in spending for solar energy and other renewables; tax breaks for energy companies along the lines of those exploited so cleverly by Enron; and further reductions in the pittance the oil companies currently pay the federal treasury in royalty payments for crude extracted from public lands.

There's a reason the Bushies have worked so sedulously to keep Kelliher's mission hidden. It's exactly in sync with those Clinton coffee klatches.

>From the limited amount of information that has leaked out about the work of the task force (largely the result of dogged legal pressure from Judicial Watch), it appears that Kelliher eagerly solicited the advice of oil industry lobbyists and merely cut-and-pasted their fervent desires for less regulation and more opportunities for unfettered exploitation directly into the text of the president's energy plan.

One of Kelliher's chief conduits was an oil industry lobbyist named Stephen Craig Sayle. Sayle and Kelliher are old pals. They both worked as chief legislative counsel for Rep. Joe Barton, the Texas Republican who watches out for the oil and gas industry from his perch on the House Commerce Committee. Sayle left Barton's office in 1993 and landed at the Dutko Group, a DC lobby shop specializing in advancing the interests of energy companies.

One of Sayle's prime clients was a group operating under the dubious banner of the Clean Power Group. The Clean Power Group wasn't an environmental outfit, but a cabal of five natural gas companies: Calpine, El Paso Corp., NiSource, Trigen, and--you guessed it--Enron. (Both Enron and El Paso are under investigation by the Justice Department--Enron for its accounting hi-jinks and El Paso for illegally withholding gas from California during the height of the energy crunch.)

On March 3, 2001, Sayle sent Kelliher a long e-mail enumerating the desires of his client (who had contributed more than $5 million to the RNC) for a more "flexible" approach to the regulation of emissions from power, including mercury, nitrogen oxide, and sulfur dioxide. Sayle said the companies would prefer "voluntary caps" instead of the more rigid limitations on these toxins currently enforced by the EPA. He called his requests a dream list." Some dreams come true. Indeed, Sayle's wish list was incorporated almost verbatim into Cheney's energy plan and later resurfaced as the basis of Bush's "Clean Skies" initiative, which jettisons regulatory limits and replaces them with voluntary caps, phased-in reductions and pollution trading credits.

To top it off, one of Sayle's clients, Trigen, was picked by the EPA as a founding partner of Bush's Combined Heat and Power Partnership, an endeavor of "flexible environmental permitting" that comes along with a $52 million grant from the Bush budget. Trigen is a subsidiary of Suez, a France-based energy conglomerate.

Another group of companies that caught Kelliher's ear was energy firms that operate coal-fired power plants. Since 1977, these companies have chafed at the requirements of a Clean Air Act rule known as the New Source Review, which limits the amount of power that can be generated from old power plants. The Southern Company is the second largest operator of coal-fired power plants and has long sought to emasculate the New Source Review rules.

It has emitted tons of campaign contributions to this end: more than $3.2 million to Republican candidates since 1999, the most by any energy concern. In 1999, Southern had been sued by the EPA for routinely violating the NSR guidelines.

On March 23, 2001, Kelliher had an e-mail chat with Michael J. Riith, Southern's chief lobbyist. Riith casually suggested that the power company would look favorably on a move by the Bush administration to "exclude" its plants from compliance with this troublesome requirement. Presto! Riith's recommendations appeared almost verbatim in Bush's National Energy Policy Statement.

Instead of trying to maneuver this change through Congress, Riith suggested simply imposing the plan through administrative fiat. In November 2002, EPA director Christie Todd Whitman announced that factories, oil refineries, and coal power plants could ask her for an exemption from the rule. Ask and ye shall receive.

Another of Kelliher's chums is Jim Ford, the top lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, the main trade association for the nation's top 200 oil and gas companies. Ford didn't beat around the bush offering philosophical nuggets for inclusion in the Cheney energy plan. His clients wanted immediate action. In a March 20, 2001, e-mail to Kelliher, Ford demanded that the new administration issue two executive orders. Ford wanted Bush to order federal agencies to curtail any new regulation or rule that might "adversely affect the energy industry."

The breathtaking sweep of this request didn't give the Bushies much pause. The substance of it was incorporated in an Executive Order on May 18, 2001. Ford's second request was that Bush deploy "a strike force" of pro-drilling bureaucrats to intimidate Forest Service and BLM land managers into approving pending applications for oil and gas drilling on public lands. Bush, at Kelliher's urging, leapt at the chance to implement this request, signing another executive order creating a task force to "expedite" and "accelerate" oil drilling activities on national forest lands.

Here's another example of Kelliher at work. On March 18, 2001, he sent an e-mail to the natural gas industry's top lobbyist, Dana Contratto, head of the energy group at the big DC law firm Crowell & Moring. Kelliher asked Contratto to imagine that he was Mussolini and could impose any new plan he desired.

"If you were a King, or Il Duce, what would you include in a national policy, especially with respect to national gas issues?" Kelliher wrote. "Should I look at any of the gas pipeline provisions in the House EPAct bill that were dropped in conference? I am just looking for your immediate thoughts, please do not put a lot of time into this. I am working up the policy elements, and am less confident of my judgment on gas pipeline issues than other areas and thought I would pick your brain. With respect to the Alaska Natural Gas Transportation Act of 1976, I am operating on a suspicion that law would have to be substantially amended to serve as a basis for licensing an Alaskan gas pipeline. Do you agree?"

Contratto rose to the challenge and pondered rapidly what Il Duce would do. He told Kelliher that the key was "to expedite pipeline permitting." The easiest way to do this was to get more pipeline-friendly commissioners on the Federal Energy Regulatory Agency, or FERC. Contratto's first goal magically materialized in the energy task force's recommendations, which called for speeding up the approval of pipeline permits regardless of safety or environmental consequences. Then to seal the deal Bush recently nominated Kelliher to fill one of two recent vacancies on the FERC board. His nomination must be approved by the Senate, which has shown little sign of impeding this final fulfillment of the energy cartel's dream season.