Billionaires
Are Behind Efforts to Slow America’s Energy Infrastructure
Source: AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, file
Summer
travel season is officially underway. For many Americans that means road trips
in the car or heading to the nearest airport to catch a flight. According to
AAA, nearly 50 million Americans had plans to travel for Independence Day, and
with several weeks until Labor Day the number of travelers is likely to remain
high.
Whether it’s a road trip or plane ride, travel during
this time of year is a great reminder of how North American energy helps make
efficient and easy travel possible for so many of us. Having reliable sources
of safe, affordable energy sources here in the U.S. is a critical part of
fueling our everyday life – including our summer travel plans.
One key component of making sure we have access to
North American energy is through a strong national energy infrastructure,
including reliable and safe pipelines. Pipelines provide access to affordable
energy by helping to deliver energy products like gasoline, jet fuel, and
natural gas efficiently to meet the nation’s energy needs. Pipelines are also
largely recognized as the safest way of transporting oil and gas, compared to
railroads or other ways of transport.
Over the past several years, the number of pipeline
incidents has decreased even as pipeline miles and barrels delivered have both
increased. Pipelines remain one of the safest and most efficient ways to
deliver energy across the U.S., delivering their energy products safely 99.999% of
the time. Some reports also
show that pipelines are better for the environment than transporting crude oil
by railroad and pose far fewer public health and environmental risks.
That’s why it’s so alarming that protestors are
increasing efforts to prevent current pipelines from being safely updated and
improved, and therefore threatening our nation’s energy infrastructure. Honor
the Earth is one of the groups working to prevent pipelines from being used as
a safe, reliable source of transporting energy to Americans. For example, Honor
the Earth was one of the leaders in opposing the Dakota Access pipeline being
built, and it’s currently trying to block updates to
a pipeline (called Line 3) running through Minnesota, North Dakota and
Wisconsin.
These pipelines have been a critical means of providing
needed energy to Americans, especially in the Midwest, but Honor the Earth is
focused on undermining our energy infrastructure and preventing safe updates to
improve aging pipelines even through it’s safer than transporting oil by
railroad. Honor the Earth even recently petitionedMinnesota’s
Supreme Court claiming the environmental review of the Line 3 pipeline didn’t
adequately review railroads as an alternative to transporting oil by
pipelines.
This seems odd given the environmental track record of
railway vs pipeline. But you need only look at the organization’s biggest
donors to make sense of it all. Honor the Earth presents itself as an
organization intended to protect the environment, but its funded by
billionaires like Warren Buffet, who has substantial interests in
the railroad industry. In 2017, Honor the Earth listed NoVo
Foundation as a top donor, which is funded solely by Warren Buffett and run by
Buffett’s son and his wife. But Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway owns Burlington Northern
Santa Fe, the largest freight railroad network in North America.
While Honor the Earth is masquerading as
environmentalists, it’s clear they are only doing so when it fits the agenda of
their billionaire funders. In the meantime, they are undermining our nation’s
energy infrastructure and threatening all Americans’ ability to access safe,
affordable, and reliable energy to power our everyday lives. Let’s remember
that when we’re on the road this summer.
Is
Corporate America Selling Out Our Country?
Within
hours of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt began summoning the heads
of American industry to Washington. Roosevelt knew the country would need an
unprecedented buildup of planes, ships, and other war materiel. Without
hesitation, American companies responded. Ford, Packard, Chrysler, 3M, Hormel,
General Mills, Pillsbury, Cargill, Boeing, and many other major U.S. companies
gave their all to the war effort. At Roosevelt's request, the president of
General Motors even left his company to oversee the war production effort as a
lieutenant general in the U.S. Army. Roosevelt's initial request for 50,000 new
airplanes per year was openly mocked by the Germans as outlandishly high and
impossible to achieve. But the mighty U.S. industrial base roared to life and
pulled it off. By war's end, the United States was producing 100,000 warplanes
a year. U.S. industry literally transformed itself to save our country. It's
fair to wonder if our current CEOs would do the same.
Would
American companies in a new globalized economy drop everything for their
country? Do American companies even consider themselves American anymore? The
Daily Caller News Foundation asked 19 of the biggest names in corporate America
if they saw themselves as "American" companies. It shouldn't be a
very hard question to answer. But 10 of the 19 -- including Amazon, Apple,
Chevron and General Electric -- refused to answer altogether. The others mostly
gave weasel answers. Only General Motors and the bank JPMorgan Chase were
willing to clearly identify as American institutions. And even with them, the
actual record is cause for concern.
Billionaire
tech investor Peter Thiel brought this issue to light recently when he accused
Google of "seemingly treasonous" behavior for cozying up to the
communist Chinese government. Amazingly, Google has been working on a censored
search engine: Project Dragonfly, built for the Chinese government and designed
to keep the Chinese people from seeing the free flow of information. At the
same time, Google refused to work with the U.S. military. Thiel suggested that
the FBI and CIA should investigate Google, which seems like a good place to
start. More broadly, though, can we really call Google an American company?
Google
and many other U.S.-based companies have operations, sales, and customers all
over the world. They think of themselves globally. They value the bottom line
above all. A dollar made in China is the same as a dollar made in America.
The
question for America is whether this is sustainable. Every big company has a
Washington office dedicated to influencing U.S. government policy and
regulation. With our increasingly powerful government and regulatory regime,
it's smart for companies to do this, and there is nothing wrong with it in
theory. But now that corporate America is pushing Washington for its often
globalist positions instead of for policies that benefit Americans, we may have
a real crisis on our hands.
We're not
talking about just a few corporate offices. Washington is completely dominated
by corporate America. Big companies fund the influential trade associations all
over Washington and hire lobbyists all over Congress and the regulatory
agencies. These lobbyists understand our increasingly complex labyrinth of
regulations. And they are often writing the laws Congress enacts.
Think
tanks are supposed to be independently analyzing and commenting on our
policies. But who do you think funds the think tanks in Washington? Corporate
America dominates in this sphere as well. When they want a new law or to stop a
law or regulation they don't like, these companies go even further, hiring
public relations firms and ad agencies to convince us of their positions. All
of this is a multibillion-dollar business.
Lately,
when senators and representatives leave Congress, they go to work for the
corporate influence machine. Over two-thirds of the congresspersons who retired
or lost their seats this last election cycle is now corporate lobbyists. That's
a record level. A seat in Congress has become an extended tryout for a
high-paying corporate influence job.
All of
this would be of less concern if corporate interests still aligned with actual
American interests, but those days seem to have ended sometime between the
great industrial ramp-up for World War II and Google's recent siding with
communist China over the U.S. military. Where does this leave the American
people?
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