 The David Feldman radio program is made possible by listeners like you. You sad pathetic humps. Welcome to the broadcast. Who really won last November's election? Obviously Hillary did, but who really, really won it? Today's guest says it was ExxonMobil. On today's show, we're going to look at Trump's new cabinet through the prism of how they benefit ExxonMobil. Jenny Roland is Research and Advocacy Associate for Public Lands at the Center for American Progress and I contacted her after reading a piece she wrote entitled How Exxon Won the 2016 Election. I'll link to that article over at my website, but you should instead go to AmericanProgress.org and read the piece over there. She joins us today from Washington. Jenny, how big is ExxonMobil? It's been described as its very own nation. ExxonMobil is one of the largest companies. It is actually the largest publicly traded oil company in the U.S. and is I think the eighth largest company in the world. And they, as far as energy development is concerned, they kind of have their hands in everything, oil, natural gas, tar sands, you name it, and that's kind of the largest of this company is why we felt like they were really the ones that won the 2016 election. I see their ads all the time. They're all about clean energy and alternative energy. According to the ads, they're good people. They ran into some problems about two years ago. The price of their stock went down. Why was ExxonMobil in danger during the lead up to the election, quote unquote, of Donald Trump? So in 2014, their Security and Exchange Commission, their SEC filings, showed that they might be in a little bit of trouble. And primarily that has to do with the fact that the price of oil was falling well below $100 per barrel. That's primarily how the company makes money. And so with that falling that low, they had predicted that for every dollar it fell below $100 per barrel, they would lose $150 million in earnings. So that's probably the biggest reason that they were feeling in some trouble then. President Obama was also making some moves on some environmental regulations, which they had been fighting against. They were in a little bit of some hot water for investigations into what they knew about climate change that really were just starting to get going. But primarily it is the price of oil and their price of oil that I think about 17% over over two years. And was that across the board for the entire sector? Or was it specifically ExxonMobil? Were other energy stocks in trouble? Yes, overall energy stocks were specifically oil, natural gas, and the US was doing pretty well. If the price of oil goes down, that means Exxon can't charge as much for it. But if we open up drilling rights, offshore drilling rights or up in the Arctic, doesn't that increase the supply? So if there's an increase in supply, wouldn't the price go further down? It would also drive up demand, though, here. There's a number of things that could happen to drive up demand. And that's kind of how they make their money. And when oil prices are high, then they make more money. Right. So more drilling actually increases demand. Yes. OK. That's for another show. That's that's one of the reasons my listeners hate me is I go off the beaten path and ask a stupid question that was irrelevant. Jenny, the former CEO of ExxonMobil is Trump's choice for Secretary of State. I call him Rex Spillerson. In reading your article, I realize there's more to the story than what happens when the former CEO of Exxon becomes Secretary of State. In fact, he may not even get confirmed. Marco Rubio was grilling him last week on Russia and Aleppo and suggests that he may not even vote for him. But who knows what that's really about? He might have been grandstanding. But I'll get to Rex Spillerson becoming Secretary of State and how it's a windfall for Exxon and a disaster for our planet in a few minutes. By the time this interview is over, his name may have been withdrawn. Let's first tackle the Justice Department, the EPA and the Department of Interior. I want to first get to the EPA, but let me read what you wrote. This is what you and your colleagues wrote in how Exxon won the 2016 election, which you can read over at AmericanProgress.org. You should go there every day. This is what you wrote. At no time in recent US history has one company been at the brink of attaining so much power and influence over US policy, both domestic and foreign. If the Senate confirms most or all of the five cabinet nominees whose backgrounds and positions would most benefit Exxon, the company will have acquired substantial direct and indirect control over the regulatory, law enforcement, lawmaking and diplomatic powers of the American government. Wow. So, you know, I think Rex Spillerson is almost a distraction from all the other guys. I want to talk about the EPA, the pick for EPA, Scott Pruitt. But first, the Rockefeller family announced they are divesting themselves of all their holdings in Exxon. Tell my audience why they're divesting themselves of their holdings and they'll better understand Scott Pruitt. Some of the hot water that I talked about earlier that they've been in for denying climate change, science and kind of high even hiding the fact that they knew that they've known about the dangers of climate change for years and have been hiding that are some of the reasons that I think they are divesting as they don't want to be associated with that kind of name and that those issues there. They've had some kind of publicly they've said that they, you know, would support the Paris Climate Agreement, things like that, that the company believes that climate change is real. But, you know, more secretively and covertly, really, they've been funding climate science denial groups and different scientists, contrarian scientists that will basically say that the dangers aren't real and that it's not happening. And so that's not something that the big names like the Rockefellers want to be assisted with. Yeah, I read their letter. The Rockefeller family wrote an official letter. It was published in the New York Review of Books. One of the things I came to understand is that Exxon Mobile for the past 40 years hired the top climate scientists in the world. You know, you always think NASA has the top client scientists, but it was really Exxon. And about 40 years ago, they realized they were heating up the planet and knew there was a problem. And like the cigarette companies, they chose to bury that information. And the Rockefeller family is their fortune was built from Exxon Mobile. And they're walking away from it. There are two attorney generals, state attorney generals, investigating Exxon Mobile's role in hiding climate science. There is an attorney general from Oklahoma who Trump has nominated to be the new EPA administrator. His name is Scott Pruitt. Who was Scott Pruitt and what has he done for or against Exxon Mobile as attorney general of Oklahoma? Yeah, so as he said, he is the attorney general of Oklahoma. He has been nominated by Trump to be ahead the Environmental Protection Agency. Environmental Protection is not exactly something that he's known for. He sued the EPA a number of times in his career as AG of Oklahoma. But in regards to Exxon, as AG, he's gotten a number of campaign donations from the oil and gas industry, including more than $6,000 from Exxon specifically. And then you mentioned he wrote a letter defending Exxon actually against these charges that they had funded fraudulent, fraudulent climate science, that they have been denying the dangers of climate change that they have known about for decades, about 40 years. So he's come to their defense time and time again and not necessarily surprisingly, because they're funding his campaign. The EPA is a more recent cabinet position. I think it came about during the Nixon administration. And there's a lot of presidential power associated with the EPA. President Obama has has proven that that with the pen, without consulting Congress, he can do many things. What are some of the things that Trump could reverse over at EPA that would benefit Exxon Mobile? So I think the first thing would be the climate rule, the clean power plan. Right now, that's in the courts. And so that that might not be directly under EPA right now, but that's where it came out of. And it could definitely go back there and prove it could. That's one of the things that he has sued to get rid of. So presumably he would get rid of any attempts to curb carbon pollution. A couple of other things that are might be in danger with a Pruitt nomination is the EPA methane rule. Methane is a lot stronger than carbon dioxide, but causes the same issues with global warming just at a more concentrated amount. And EPA has recently made a rule that we would have to capture that. It's natural gas that can be burned, just like other natural gas and sold, but when it's just let to vent, it causes a lot of pollution. So that's one of the things that would be in danger. The ozone rule, ground level ozone is a bad for people's health. Common in cities, that's another thing that would probably be targeted. And lastly, the clean water rule and the Exxon has publicly opposed all three of these rules. They've lobbied against them and put out statements that that they would hurt their businesses. And they so presumably getting rid of them would help their business. What is Exxon's role in fracking? They definitely participate in fracking. It's one of their biggest businesses within the U.S. It's been growing and you can drill for both oil and natural gas using fracking. You wrote that they're one of the largest holders of natural gas in America, right? They are one of the largest holders of natural gas, as well as one of the largest holders of Canadian tar sands, which is another fuel source. Right. And fracking involves water, shooting water deep below the earth's surface and the runoff, we are told, poisons wells, poisons groundwater. At first, the EPA said it didn't pose any harm to our drinking water. They've since reversed that, right? Recently, the EPA said, no, this could be bad for the drinking water. So we don't have good drinking water in America anymore. We have infrastructure problems. And it's not in Exxon Mobil's best interest for us to be able to use tap water anymore. OK, for Attorney General, we go to Jeff Sessions from, I believe, Alabama. It looks like he's going to be our Attorney General. The Senate has been very kind to him because he's a senator. They tend to take care of their own. Has he been a friend of Exxon Mobil? He has. He's been really a long time friend of Exxon Mobil. Also has, as a senator, has gotten many political contributions from Exxon, up to, I think, ten thousand dollars from Exxon Mobil and then even more when you count kind of the entire oil and gas industry at large. And similar to Scott Pruitt, he's also written letters in support of Exxon Mobil. This is specifically in relation to the investigations going on by the state Attorney Generals in Massachusetts and New York, the investigation that we discussed earlier, and he wrote a letter to the Department of Justice, which it looks like he'll be running soon, asking them to basically quash any investigation into Exxon on their knowledge of climate, the risks of climate change, which would just be a windfall for Exxon Mobil to their bottom line. It would be like saying when the state Attorney Generals were ganging up on the tobacco industry a couple of decades ago, and there was this amazing settlement that supposedly went to to state states to help with health care to pay to pay damages for for cigarettes. It would be the equivalent of an attorney general in a justice department trying to stop the tobacco companies from being sued by state Attorney Generals for hiding the evidence that they were manipulating nicotine levels and that they knew cigarettes were cancers before the public did. Exactly. Yeah, this is go ahead. I was just going to say, and there's there's a lot of parallels between this investigation and the settlement reached with the tobacco industry about, you know, just kind of fundamentally misleading the public about the harms of its products, carbon pollution being for Exxon Mobil. Another thing that settlement, recent settlement, very recent that we compare this to is the Volkswagen case where they were polluting and cheating the system basically on their pollution. And they just settled for fourteen point seven billion dollars. Now it's for lying about polluting over seven years. And so if you kind of multiply that by the 40 years, the Exxon has allegedly lied about the knowledge of climate change. Then then that's a pretty hefty sum for them. We didn't really give the Obama administration enough time. Eight years wasn't enough. There was something beginning to happen that started under holder and then Lynch at the Justice Department where they began to prosecute corporations. You know, they put the private colleges. They didn't necessarily put them out of business, but they put a lot of private universities out of business. They're kind of putting private prisons out of business. And I was getting really optimistic that if Hillary became president, this would continue. And we'd see something that we really have not seen for decades. I don't even think we saw it under the Clinton administration where the Justice Department began to say, OK, if corporations are people, then the people in those corporations are well, not going to go to prison, but they're going to be fine. We're going to go after them. We were beginning to see that recently, weren't we? Yeah, absolutely. And we're not going to see that now. This is a new he's basically putting people in charge of cabinet positions that they want eliminated. For example, Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, the longest serving governor of Texas. He's been nominated to run the Department of Energy. That's the department he couldn't remember. He had three departments he wanted to eliminate during his 2012 debate. Oops, moment. So it's always good for Exxon when a mouth breather is running energy. Why is this specially good for Exxon? If this specific intellectual light weight, Rick Perry is running energy. Yes, running, running energy and and our nuclear weapons as well. A lot of what nuclear energy is what they they work on a lot there. So as kind of we've talked about a lot, all of all of these nominees in these kind of critical cabinet positions have been funded in their political roles by Exxon Mobile and Rick Perry's no different. He has taken $40,000 just in his most recent gubernatorial election from Exxon Mobile and in his role at Department of Energy. If he's confirmed, he would be, you know, over overseeing a lot of research into Exxon Mobile's competitors in alternative fuels and electric vehicles. And so that kind of stuff could really go away without funding being directed towards it. I read in your article that Exxon is against electric vehicles because because the ads that I see, they're they're championing all these alternative fuel sources. And your article says that they they're against electric vehicles. In the United Kingdom, at least they have lobbied pretty hard against electric vehicles there. And in their SEC reports here, they've noted that alternative fuels are a threat to their business. So their ads, they're not telling the truth in their ads. Surprising. One of the things I do, I'm probably going to get kicked off Twitter. I keep getting these promoted tweets from Exxon on my feed. So I tweet back to them, you know, you're destroying our planet, your pathological liars, the only government building Rex Spillerson should be invited into is a prison cell. I have a feeling Twitter is good. I have I have not been successful on Twitter. I've been more successful on Facebook. Hey, I've turned this conversation. It's all about me, not the planet. It's my Twitter followers, my number of Twitter followers. OK, this is going to I'm going to get to Rex Spillerson in a second. Let's eat our vegetables. This is going to be hard. So we're going to this is I don't know if I'm going to understand this. President-elect Trump's nominee to lead the Department of Interior is Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke. This involves the leasing of public lands and royalty rates. My eyes glaze over. I it's hard stuff. And when it's hard stuff, that's when the Republicans they insinuate themselves in the the difficult stuff. So we don't we can't pay attention and they steal everything from us, so we need to know this help me. But what is the Department of Interior do? What are what are public lands and royalty rates? What's going on here? Because I know this is where we're going to wake up one day and find out that's where all of the damage was done. Absolutely. And I you know, I work on public lands primarily is what I work on. And I think you're right that some of these things can be very confusing. And that's really where they try and get you on it when when it's a little bit too confusing to figure out right away. And so one of the things that the Department of Energy does is they manage all tax, but the Department of Interior Department of Interior apartment interior. Sorry, I misspoke. They manage all taxpayer owned natural resources on public lands. So public lands, most people know national parks, national forests, things like that, wildlife, refugees, those are all public lands. And then there's Bureau of Land Management lands, which are also public lands and they're popular for hiking and outdoor recreation. But they also are used for oil and gas production for alternative energy production as well. Is the Bureau of Land Management underneath the Department of Interior? Yes, it's part of the Department of the Interior. And so the they lease these lands to companies like Exxon Mobile to drill and get oil and gas from. And we charge royalties on those that go to taxpayers. And those royalties are very low and haven't actually been changed in over 30 years. Exxon Mobile is one of the companies that leases lands. And they I think a couple of years ago, they leased about almost four billion dollars of taxpayer resources. And we get about 12 percent is what taxpayers get on that. And so if those royalty rates are either not changed, the Department of the Interior under Obama has been looking to increase those to kind of make it more fair for taxpayers, because those numbers are very, very low when you compare them to, say, state or private land leasing. And so if those numbers under Representative Ryan Zinke are lowered, the royalty rates numbers are lowered or they are left the same, then that can put a lot of money back into the pockets of Exxon and other oil and gas companies. But if you listen to CNN or Fox or even MSNBC, except for Rachel Maddow, when they talk about the Department of the Interior and they talk about the Bureau of Land Management, they'll only tell us about the Bundy standoff Clive and Bundy and his grazing rights and sovereign nations and people seceding a great distraction from what's really important, which is the pillaging of our natural resources. All right, thank you for explaining that to me. And, you know, it's just something you have to just stick with it and read read about it every day. And some eventually it begins to make sense. Let's get to Rex Spillerson. I didn't realize this until I read your article and everybody should read this article, it's over at the American progress dot org. I realized after reading your article that Rex Spillerson being named to be Secretary of State was a red herring, a distraction. So people wouldn't notice the the the other Exxon mobile puppets who are being installed within the cabinet. So Rex Spillerson, if he becomes Secretary of State, how does that benefit Exxon Mobile? So I think, yeah, in in the obvious way that he has been a lifelong Exxon employee most recently, their CEO, he it's tough to believe that maybe he would be looking out for the best interests of everyday Americans rather than still holding on to some of his corporate interests. And so as Secretary of State, his relationships with other countries is primarily how he could benefit Exxon Mobile while he's not there. Exxon produces oil and gas in twenty two countries. And I think most recently have had plans to expand that. We also know that Rex Spillerson has close ties to Russia. That's what during his confirmation hearing that he got questioned on that a lot. And there is a lot of oil and gas in Russia and a lot of oil and gas that Exxon Mobile would like to be further producing, but haven't been able to right now because of US sanctions against Russia. We put in sanctions against Russia after they seized Crimea, which maybe they're entitled to. Some say they had every right to take Crimea. And we ended up blocking a pipeline that Putin wanted and Exxon wanted. If he becomes Secretary of State, pipelines fall under the purview of state like the big pipeline from the Canadian tar sands that we're still waiting to hear about. Right. Exactly. So international pipelines are also under the purview of the Secretary of State. And the most famous one is I think that you reference is the Keystone XL pipeline that President Electron has talked a lot about as Secretary of State. Tillerson could speed up the approval of international pipelines. And that would help Exxon because they have a lot of stock in the Canadian tar sands. I think about 35 percent of their holdings most recently were in tar sands. So getting those to market could really be a windfall for them. So aggravating. It really is. It is. And I think you're right that in some ways, you know, a little bit of a red herring, it seems so obvious that Rex Tillerson might help benefit Exxon Mobile, but really Trump has seemed to try and stock his cabinet with as many people funded by the oil and gas industry and even Exxon Mobile, in particular, that they could really have some impactful decisions for the future of the company. Yeah. How do you keep from being overwhelmed by all this information? How do you keep your head on straight? Because it's definitely a concerted effort by Trump and Bannon and Kushner. They're really manipulating the public, just throwing so much stuff at us. It's like a document dump. There's just so much corruption you can't. Your head is spinning. How do you stay focused and not just how do you get out of bed? Yeah, I don't know that I do, but I don't know that I have a great answer for that, except for that you're completely right. I mean, this Wednesday, they had Trump's first press hearing and so long, and they had Tillerson going and Sessions going and Congress doing a Voterama trying to repeal Obamacare. We're seeing almost every single one of these cabinet nominees that I mentioned are having hearings one day after the next. They get Zanky on Tuesday, Pruitt on Wednesday, and Rick Perry on Thursday. And so it really is just a document dump that try and get a handle on and try and pick out what's what's really most important. Before you go, I want to look up Halliburton, which was Dick Cheney's company. I'm going to find out its price performance. Let me just see for a second. So Halliburton was was Dick Cheney's company. And he was made vice president. And he left Halliburton. All right. So when in 2000, in 2000, the price of Halliburton stock was $19 and 22 cents. When Dick Cheney on January 18th of 2002, it dropped to $5 a share. By 2005, it was up to $36. It hit a new high by June 27th of 2008. It went up to $52 a share. So when he left office, when he left office, it was worth $52. So when he took office, it was $21 a share. When he left, it doubled in eight years. That's not nothing. That's not nothing. Well, and you're not nothing. Jenny Rowland is research and advocacy associate for public lands at the Center for American Progress. Her recent piece, How Exxon Won the 2016 Election, is available over at AmericanProgress.org. She joined us today from Washington. Thank you for being so generous with your time. Yeah, thank you for having me on. The David Feldman radio program is made possible by listeners like you. You sad pathetic humps.