We’ll get to the encounter with Mr. Gerard below, but first, some context:
Gas prices! Everyone’s talking about them, including our government at a Congressional hearing today held by the House of Representatives Energy & Power Subcommittee featuring, among others, Mr. Jack Gerard of the American Petroleum Institute. As API’s president, Jack Gerard is Big Oil’s top lobbyist, and today he was doing what companies like Exxon and Shell pay him the big bucks to do – justify government subsidies and giveaways to Big Oil.
Also attending the hearing: referees raising the red flags on misleading statements and calling attention to the $5.97 million that oil companies have given to current members of the Energy & Power subcommittee since 1999 (data provided by the Center for Responsive politics through DirtyEnergyMoney).
activist refs call foul on Jack Gerard at a hearing on gas prices
This particular meeting of the subcommittee exposed some of the more blatant absurdities that API and their oil funded buddies in Congress like to propagate. Take gas prices – Jack Gerard likes to say “we need more American energy,” by which he means we need to open up every square inch of soil and water to oil and gas extraction. His argument is that gas prices would be lower if we sacrificed our land and investment capital to Big Oil’s drill.
Luckily Congressman Edward Markey was there to point out how ridiculous it is to assume anything extracted by multinational oil corporations is “American.” Once multinationals like BP and Exxon get oil from American sources, it becomes their oil, to sell on the open world market for the best price. The fact is, letting companies drill for oil on American soil won’t result in any drop in price at the gas pump because the amount of oil American sources would produce is miniscule in comparison to the amount consumed globally. Allowing companies like Shell to drill off Alaskan shores or in other high-risk ways wouldn’t save American consumers a dime, but would add many millions of dollars to Shell’s bottom line. Gerard’s refusal to acknowledge this belies a truth about API that he doesn’t want the public to know – the American Petroleum Institute does not want to lower gas prices for Americans, API wants to increase the political power and profits of their member organizations.
That’s why Rep. Markey suggested some more appropriate labels for Gerard’s group than the American Petroleum Institute; like the “World Petroleum Institute” due to multinational members like BP and Shell who will sell oil from America to the highest bidder, the “Wall Street Petroleum Institute” because Gerard and API refuse to acknowledge the role speculation plays in driving up oil prices, or the “Caymen Islands Institute”, because of API’s dedicated defense of tax breaks, subsidies, and other loopholes which keep oil corporations from paying their fair share.
If Gerard meant it when he said “The more transparent the discussion, the better off we’ll be,” he would take one of Rep. Markey’s suggestions. That way the American public would know that API’s attacks blaming the president for high gas prices, repeated lies about Keystone XL’s affect on gas prices, or blocking rules to protect air and water from the dangers of fracking are all part of an extensive dirty energy PR campaign.
Short of re-branding his organization, Jack could at least be transparent about the amount of oil industry money he is using to influence elections through the Vote 4 Energy ad campaign. The Vote 4 Energy campaign has blanketed cable television and much of Washington DC in misleading pro-drilling, pro-fracking propaganda in an attempt to further Big Oil’s political agenda by misleading voters. API wants you to vote for ExxonMobil and Shell instead of yourself.
In spite of Mr. Gerard’s lip service to “transparent discussion,” when we repeatedly asked him how much oil money he is using to influence the upcoming election with Vote 4 Energy propaganda, he didn’t want to be part of the discussion. If Mr. Gerard is so proud of the ad campaign, why won’t he talk about how much of API’s $200 million budget is going toward Vote 4 Energy?
And if you haven’t seen our own Vote 4 Energy commercial mocking API’s prized public relations campaign, compare both Vote 4 Energy ads yourself.
