This
woman’s hypocrisy and lying is legend
Hillary
Clinton’s Energy Initiative Pressed Countries to Embrace Fracking,
New Emails Reveal
26
November, 2014
BACK
IN APRIL,
just before the New York primary, Hillary Clinton’s campaign aired
a commercial on
upstate television stations touting her work as secretary of state
forcing “China, India, some of the world’s worst polluters” to
make “real change.” She promised to “stand firm with New
Yorkers opposing fracking, giving communities the right to say ‘no.'”
The
television spot, which was not announced and does not appear on the
official campaign YouTube page with
most of Clinton’s other ads, implied a history of opposition to
fracking, here and abroad. But emails obtained byThe
Intercept from
the Department of State reveal new details of behind-the-scenes
efforts by Clinton and her close aides to export American-style
hydraulic fracturing — the horizontal drilling technique best known
as fracking — to countries all over the world.
Far
from challenging fossil fuel companies, the emails obtained by The
Intercept show that State Department officials worked
closely with private sector oil and gas companies, pressed other
agencies within the Obama administration to commit federal government
resources including technical assistance for locating shale reserves,
and distributed agreements with partner nations pledging to help
secure investments for new fracking projects.
The
documents also reveal the department’s role in bringing foreign
dignitaries to a fracking site in
Pennsylvania, and its plans to make Poland a “laboratory for
testing whether US success in developing shale gas can be repeated in
a different country,” particularly in Europe, where local
governments had expressed opposition and in some cases even
banned fracking.
The campaign
included plans to
spread the drilling technique to China, South Africa, Romania,
Morocco, Bulgaria, Chile, India, Pakistan, Argentina, Indonesia, and
Ukraine.
In
2014, Mother
Jones reporter
Mariah Blake used diplomatic cables disclosed by WikiLeaks and other
records to uncover how
Clinton “sold fracking to the world.” The emails obtained by The
Intercept through
a separate Freedom of Information Act request provide a new layer of
detail.
The
Clinton campaign did not respond to a request for comment. During the
April 15 Democratic
debate in
Brooklyn, New York, Clinton insisted there was no inconsistency
between her positions:
Q: OK. Secretary Clinton, as secretary of state, you also pioneered a program to promote fracking around the world, as you described. Fracking, of course, a way of extracting natural gas. Now as a candidate for president, you say that by the time you’re done with all your rules and regulations, fracking will be restricted in many places around the country. Why have you changed your view on fracking?
CLINTON: No, well, I don’t think I’ve changed my view on what we need to do to go from where we are, where the world is heavily dependent on coal and oil, but principally coal, to where we need to be, which is clean renewable energy, and one of the bridge fuels is natural gas. And so for both economic and environmental and strategic reasons, it was American policy to try to help countries get out from under the constant use of coal, building coal plants all the time, also to get out from under, especially if they were in Europe, the pressure from Russia, which has been incredibly intense. So we did say natural gas is a bridge. We want to cross that bridge as quickly as possible, because in order to deal with climate change, we have got to move as rapidly as we can.
Industry-Backed
Launch
The
Global Shale Gas Initiative, Clinton’s program for promoting
fracking, was announced on April 7, 2010, by David Goldwyn, the State
Department’s special envoy for energy affairs, at the United States
Energy Association (USEA), whose members include
Chevron, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Shell.
In
a widely covered event in Krakow three months later,
Clintonannounced that
“Poland will be part of the Global Shale Gas Initiative,” and
that the State Department would “provide technical and other
assistance.”
Goldwyn,
who did not respond to multiple requests for comment, spoke
toNational Journal last month, explaining that,
“[Clinton’s] instruction to me was that it was OK to talk about
helping other countries get access to their own resources, as long as
the focus of our engagement was how they could do it safely and
efficiently, and that’s why the program had almost an entirely
regulatory focus.” Goldwyn emphasized that the shale gas initiative
was not designed to help the private sector and instead should be
seen as “a really very modest government-to-government.”
But
the emails show an aggressive effort to engage private energy
companies and use Poland as part of a larger campaign to sell
fracking throughout the region.
An
email dated December 3, 2010, shows that the State Department had
Poland firmly in its bull’s-eye and that companies such as
ExxonMobil, Chevron, Marathon Oil, Canadian firm BNK Petroleum and
Italian energy company Eni expressed
interest in
tapping into Polish shale. One officialsuggested “enlisting
Eni” to help organize the pro-fracking campaign in Poland, as well
as bringing in U.S. companies. Earlier that year, in April, Poland’s
then-Minister of Foreign Affairs Radoslaw Sikorski also took a trip
to Texas to visit a fracking production site.
“I
think we should be open to working with the Poles to spread knowledge
and understanding of Poland’s (and Europe’s) shale gas
potential,” wrotethe
State Department’s Chuck Ashley, who now works in the Office of the
U.S. Ambassador to Israel.
“Poland,”
Ashley wrote, “is a laboratory for testing whether US success in
developing shale gas can be repeated in a different country, with
different shales, and a different regulatory environment.” Ashley
also noted that “popular and political support is strong now, but
this could change when shale gas wells come to their backyards.”
In
fact, that did change. As drilling rigs transformed from prospect to
reality, Polish citizens attempted — as it turns out, successfully
— to fend
off companies interested
in fracking in Poland, including
Chevron.
A group called Occupy
Chevron formed
in reaction to the potential for shale drilling in Poland and
Chevron filed a
lawsuit against the occupiers. Facing the backlash and low global oil
prices, in January 2015, Chevron announced it would halt
operations in Poland.
Public-Private
Partnerships
Despite
Goldwyn’s recent assertion that the fracking campaign was a modest
effort, the emails show what Goldwyn referred to as a “whole of
government” approach that included deploying assistance from a
range of agencies. At least 13 different
government agencies were part of the effort.
Take
Morocco, for example. A joint program with Clinton’s Global Shale
Gas Initiative and the State Department’s International Visitor
Leadership Program (IVLP) event for visiting Moroccans involved
several U.S. government federal agencies in the
proceedings. That
included the
EPA, National Security Council, USTDA, USGS, BLM, FERC and
the Commercial
Law Development Program.
After
signing the agreement, Moroccan officials visited the U.S. for a
series of meetings with the National Security Council, U.S. Trade and
Development Agency, Bureau of Land Management, along with meetings
with the American Gas Association and America’s Natural Gas
Alliance, a lobbying group for the largest American fracking
companies.
The
emails reveal that the NSC had a “biweekly
shale gas call”
in which it offered the State Department its input on Global Shale
Gas Initiative priority countries.
Moving
Forward
The
Global Shale Gas Initiative eventually became enveloped in the
broader and still-existing Bureau
of Energy Resources,
a special wing within the Department of State devoted to the
geopolitics of energy. “You can’t talk about our economy or
foreign policy without talking about energy,” Clinton said,
announcing the new
bureau in
2011.
The
office, staffed by 85
people,
focuses on a range of energy development, but with a special focus on
unconventional gas development and infrastructure, such as fracking
and liquefied natural gas terminals, to support the development of
the international gas market.
Now
called the Unconventional
Gas Technical Engagement Program,
the Global Shale Gas Initiative lives on under Secretary of State
John Kerry (though they’ve taken
down the website)
but with the prospect of a commercial-scale global shale gas boom
greatly reduced. Only the U.S.,
Canada, Argentina and China have
commercialized the controversial horizontal drilling technique.
The
pause in fracking, however, might be momentary. A number of
energy companies that worked closely with the State Department now
employ lobbyists that are fundraising furiously for Clinton’s
campaign. ExxonMobil’s top lobbyist, as well as lobbyists for
liquefied natural gas terminals designed to connect the U.S. to the
global gas market, are amongthe
most prolific fundraisers.
Goldwyn,
too, is still actively promoting similar policies in the private
sector through his consulting company
Goldwyn Global Strategies, as counsel to the energy lobbying
firm Sutherland
Asbill & Brennan, and through his association with the Atlantic
Council, a think tank thatpromotes fossil
fuel development.
The
State Department’s shale gas initiative “was clearly driven by
the promotion of Big Oil’s expansion,” Charlie Cray, senior
researcher at Greenpeace USA, told The
Intercept.
“That it was one of State’s highest priorities undermines their
credibility as leaders in the global effort to prevent the calamitous
threats of climate change.”
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