Oil & Gas Lobbying (i.e., Influence Peddling)26 Feb
My recent blog post noted that Oil & Gas has profited considerably from their donations to political campaigns in contrast to Alternative Energy that did not fair as well based on their unimpressive campaign contributions. This posts summarizes follow up activities to campaign donations, namely lobbying (i.e., “I donated money to your political campaign. Now that you are elected, here is what I want.”)
Although there is nothing new about lobbying per se, lobbying by Oil & Gas has reached epic proportions as indicated in the table below. This table only lists lobbying expenditures in excess of $1M for 2012, where as the total lobbying for that year amounted to more than $138M with 195 Oil & Gas organizations seeking tax and regulatory favors. There were a total of 764 lobbyists. This data was obtained from OpenSecrets.org.
Lobbying (i.e., influence peddling) could be greatly reduced if those in Congress were elected for only one term (e.g., 6 years), along with stringent campaign spending limits. There are such limits in Canada, and without them or something similar in the United States, a smaller, critical industry (i.e., Alternative Energy), will be less likely to achieve independent commercialization status. Germany and China certainly recognize this reality in the Alternative Energy space.
Table: Oil & Gas Industry Lobbying in 2012
|
Client/Parent |
Total |
| Royal Dutch Shell |
$14,480,000 |
| Exxon Mobil |
$12,970,000 |
| Koch Industries |
$10,540,000 |
| Chevron Corp |
$9,550,000 |
| BP |
$8,590,000 |
| American Petroleum Institute |
$7,310,000 |
| Occidental Petroleum |
$6,719,195 |
| ConocoPhillips |
$3,863,736 |
| American Fuel & Petrochem Manufacturers |
$3,714,241 |
| Williams Companies |
$3,300,000 |
| Anadarko Petroleum |
$3,010,000 |
| America’s Natural Gas Alliance |
$2,690,000 |
| Ivanishvili, Bidzina |
$2,194,813 |
| Marathon Oil |
$2,080,000 |
| WPX Energy |
$2,055,000 |
| Apache Corp |
$1,940,000 |
| Noble Energy |
$1,840,000 |
| Chesapeake Energy |
$1,800,000 |
| Oxbow Corp |
$1,600,000 |
| Phillips 66 |
$1,510,000 |
| Spectra Energy |
$1,374,210 |
| Independent Petroleum Assn of America |
$1,304,553 |
| Interstate Natural Gas Assn of America |
$1,240,000 |
| Cheniere Energy |
$1,120,000 |
| Kosmos Energy |
$1,100,000 |
| National Propane Gas Assn |
$1,080,000 |
| Devon Energy |
$1,080,000 |
| Hess Corp |
$1,070,000 |
| Sunoco Inc |
$1,040,000 |
| Murphy Oil |
$1,020,000 |
| Tesoro Corp |
$1,000,087 |