Not Quite the Energy Task Force

by emptywheel

I get the feeling today's installment of Cheney started out as a story about the Energy Task Force. It also tells the story of the Klamath fish kill and snowmobiles in Yellowstone. The big news, though, is Christine Todd Whitman's side of several issues, where Cheney blindly put business issues ahead of environmental requirements. In some ways, last week's Rolling Stone article on Cheney's involvement in climate change--which relies heavily on FOIAed documents--provides a valuable complement to the WaPo story, so I'm going to read them in conjunction. Doing so, I believe, closes the circle, shows how Cheney's unwavering ties to the energy industry drive the rest of his actions.

The WaPo describes the Energy Task Force as an unquestioning affirmation of business assertions that environmental regulations hamper business and energy development.

Sitting through Cheney's task force meetings, Whitman had been stunned by what she viewed as an unquestioned belief that EPA's regulations were primarily to blame for keeping companies from building new power plants. "I was upset, mad, offended that there seemed to be so much head-nodding around the table," she said.

Whitman said she had to fight "tooth and nail" to prevent Cheney's task force from handing over the job of reforming the New Source Review to the Energy Department, a battle she said she won only after appealing to White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. This was an environmental issue with major implications for air quality and health, she believed, and it shouldn't be driven by a task force primarily concerned with increasing production.

Directly out of that effort, Rolling Stone suggests, arose the propaganda campaign that served to undercut EPA itself.

Bush's do-nothing policy on global warming began almost as soon as he took office. By pursuing a carefully orchestrated policy of delay, the White House has blocked even the most modest reforms and replaced them with token investments in futuristic solutions like hydrogen cars. "It's a charade," says Jeremy Symons, who represented the EPA on Cheney's energy task force, the industry-studded group that met in secret to craft the administration's energy policy. "They have a single-minded determination to do nothing - while making it look like they are doing something."

Cheney did two things. He made sure his people occupied important positions, as with Paul Hoffman, Cheney's former Congressional aide appointed as deputy assistant interior secretary for fish and wildlife and now deputy assistant secretary for performance, accountability and human resources. With the Hoffman's of the world, Cheney didn't need to give instructions, from the WaPo.

Hoffman, now in another job at the Interior Department, said Cheney never told him what to do on either issue -- he didn't have to.

"His genius," Hoffman said, is that "he builds networks and puts the right people in the right places, and then trusts them to make well-informed decisions that comport with his overall vision."

But Cheney also let Exxon-Mobil reshape the institutions that might counter-act his goals, specifically the Council on Environmental Quality. After implementing Exxon-Mobil's changes, Cheney used it as his own "shadow EPA." From Rolling Stone:

Prior to joining the Cabinet, she sought personal assurance from Bush that the EPA would be able to call its own shots without deferring to the CEQ - the Council on Environmental Quality, a policy arm of the White House. As Whitman recalls it, Bush made no effort to mask his bureaucratic ignorance. "What's CEQ?" he asked blankly.

Cheney took full advantage of the president's cluelessness, bringing the CEQ into his own portfolio. "The environment and energy issues were really turned over to him from the beginning," Whitman says. The CEQ became Cheney's shadow EPA, with industry calling the shots. To head up the council, Cheney installed James Connaughton, a former lobbyist for industrial polluters, who once worked to help General Electric and ARCO skirt responsibility for their Superfund waste sites.

Industry swiftly took advantage of its new friend in the White House. In a fax sent to the CEQ on February 6th, 2001 - two weeks after Bush took office - ExxonMobil's top lobbyist, Randy Randol, demanded a housecleaning of the scientists in charge of studying global warming. Exxon urged CEQ to dump Robert Watson, who chaired the IPCC, along with Rosina Bierbaum and Mike MacCracken, who had coordinated the National Assessment.

[snip]

In the end, each of the scientists on Exxon's hit list was replaced.

Note: some day we're going to need to come back and reassess whether Abramoff was part of this, or only a piker operating amateurishly in the field that Cheney already dominated. Sad thing is, whereas we're incarcerating Abramoff's plants, Cheney's bribers--and Cheney himself--remain at large. I only hope Griles--who surely participated in both schemes--gets chatty during his 10 months in prison.

Both articles are worth reading in depth, particularly the Rolling Stone one. But one important takeaway: a big part of Bush's unitary executive theory is premised on the notion that the voters' primary opportunity to act as a check on Presidential prerogative is at the voting booth, in expressing their vote. Never mind that Bush lost the 2000 election and received no mandate in 2004, after disenfranchising slews of African-Americans. These two articles read together (as well as the details of tax policy in yesterday's WaPo article) make it clear that Cheney countermanded the goals Bush espoused on the campaign trail. Witness the was Cheney's folks reversed Bush's plans to do something about carbon emissions.

Two days later, the climate "rethink" was laid out in a memo by a team of advisers loyal to Cheney - two of whom, Andrew Lundquist and Karen Knutson, would go on to lead the vice president's energy task force. The memo - provided to Rolling Stone by a former administration official - concluded that Bush's campaign promise to regulate CO2 "did not fully reflect the president's position" and that "it would be premature at this time to propose any specific policy or approach aimed at addressing global warming." [my emphasis]

This is no small matter. While Cheney continues to hide his actions in this area behind his executive privilege claims, these documents appear to prove that Cheney was not implementing Bush's policy, he was not deliberating to support Bush's stance. Rather, he was bypassing normal channels to implement his own policy.

Christine Todd Whitman was clearly a big source for both of these articles (and probably provided the memo mentioned in the last paragraph). While she remains intransigent over her actions following 9/11, she
appears ready to provide details of how she got completely rolled by Dick Cheney, including in the Energy Task Force. Hopefully, she and others will come forward now to offer the details that Cheney and Scalia have refused us so far, so we can finally demonstrate how our government--and our national security--got hijacked by big oil.

Comments

[Neil]

Hopefully, she [Christine Todd Whitman] and others will come forward now to offer the details that Cheney and Scalia have refused us so far, so we can finally demonstrate how our government--and our national security--got hijacked by big oil.

Amen.

[Canuck Stuck in Muck]

Marcy!
I don't know if you saw my post here yesterday. No matter. The gist is: Cheney is pulling our chain. He's making us look like fools. He's toying with us. Either that or he's desperate. Or mad. Not much to choose from, is it?

[lll]

interesting. i read the RS article prior to the WaPo piece, and watched Whitman's disturbing stonewalling in Congressional testimony in between. methinks her intransigence re: 9/11 failures may well have a lot to do with the fact that she is currently a defendant in a lawsuit, and can therefore not indulge in self-incriminating comments.

however, her open distress with how the epa and her efforts there - however minimal from a real needs perspective - were shafted is pretty compelling, and i agree she is likely the biggest source for a lot of this and the RS article. which places her on quite the tightrope. some good lawyer is going to be able to trip her up somewhere along the line.

[emptywheel]

Someone someday might make a play about Faust and Whitman. She did a terrible thing after 9/11, a decision I presume she wishes she had back, but she didn't get over her beaten Administration Official syndrome until it was too late to reclaim any high ground.

[grayslady]

I wasn't aware of the whole Klamath issue until I read the WaPo Cheney installment this morning. (So much for Dick the sportsman.) However, I recall that when Sara Taylor testified before congress recently, one of the questions was whether she knew of any Rove correspondence involving Klamath. Apparently, many of our representatives wondered whether Rove was involved in this disaster since it was so obviously political. But all the time it was Cheney. Who knew?

[JEP]

With the WaPo stories coming out now, and the Rolling Stone article laid next to it, I am wondering if anyone on the web has put together a Cheney linksite, if one were to paste together a chronological link list of what the media has already exposed, maybe the preponderance of evidence would finally add up to a total work that would inspire our congressmen, and the ignorant R's who enable these rogues, to take a look at the whole truth...

I have said since February 2001 that Cheney's top-secret "Energy Industry Task Force" was the first in a long line of RICO-eligible events that, scrutinized in any court of law would prove without a doubt there has been a conspiracy by and between the energy industry and the executive branch to fix energy prices and create an artificially profitable market. Along with the price fixing and money-changing, there was also no doubt a conspiracy of RICO proportions to tamp down investment in alternatives, remember Cheney's quite public "drilling for more oil is the only answer" Halliburton mentallity?

But, unfortunately, the DOJ would have to be tasked with filing those RICO charges, and we all know that is about as unlikely as Gonzales apologizing for trashing the DOJ, as he resigns...

Anyone who lived through the engineered blackouts in California in the summer of 2001, that were probably orchestrated and spawned by the Energy Industry Task Force meetings knows just how deceitful, greedy and pernicious these energy industry execs can be, especially when they have their own men in the White House (Cheney, AND Bush).

They must have all been hired away from the tobacco companies...

[JEP]

Marcy;

tried to email you a typo alert, your YAHOO email's not working...

[clem]

emptywheel:

Cheney is indeed a bad man: "While Cheney continues to hide his actions in this area behind his executive privilege claims, these documents appear to prove that Cheney was not implementing Bush's policy, he was not deliberating to support Bush's stance. Rather, he was bypassing normal channels to implement his own policy."

But isn't everything the vice president has "implemented" (I can think of a cruder term) over the course of this administration Bush's policy, by definition? I'm reasoning that the vice president's only authority for any of the actions chronicled in the Post and Rolling Stone--as well as those that remain hidden--derives from the president. The president can delegate authority, but not responsibility. He could stop Cheney's outlaw hijinks today, exercising the power and authority of the president (not the vice president) under the Constitution. No one even has to come up with some legal hymn to the president's all-encompassing unitariness.

Am I wrong about this? Don't Bush and Cheney go down together on this? (No Gannon jokes, please.)

[orionATL]

this fourth installment provides support for what i have long suspected might be the case:

that cheney meddles in domestic policy as well as foreign policy.

while the focus here is on epa and dept of interior,

i would be astonished if cheney 's meddling did not include some of the other regulatory agencies -sec, fed trade comm, fcc, food and drug, etc.

one area cheney seems not to have played in involves right-wing social issues like abortion and church and state issues.

another involves white house activities aimed at suppressing democratic votes and using federal lawsuits to harass democratic candidates and office holders.

but then, who knows?

cheney knows.

everything.

[Marie Roget]

Great post on this, EW. What is truly amazing is that Cheney lives/fishes/hunts in & near Jackson, WY (never heard a local use the extra "Hole" appelation). Area is so breathtakingly beautiful & natural in all seasons, also the gateway to Yellowstone. If I could hike Yellowstone forever including dead of winter, I'd consider it heaven. How can this guy live there & still be the way he is in choosing against our natural resources? Only explanation I can come to- he must be completely insensate...

[emptywheel]

JEP

email me at emptywheel at gmail dot com.

[earlofhuntingdon]

No one outside the palace is supposed to know about Cheney's coup. Even Shrub doesn't know about it.

Bush remembers from his Harvard days the business manager's one-page rule: you should be able to summarize a key decision, department, policy, what have you, on one page. If you can't, you don't understand it or it's not yet understandable as is and needs to be revised. The problem is that Shrub thinks that's the end of it. He never gets beyond the summary - and doesn't think it's the CEO's job to do so. That's what the hired help is for. He's taken a tool for promoting clearer thinking and mutual understanding into one that disguises his inability to think.

That's a gaping hole in Bush's intellect and ego you could drive a Cheney through. But as Marty Lederman, Publius and Hilzoy ask in different ways, why is this so, and why did the entire cabinet go along with it? "9/11" is not an adequate answer.

Is it that Cheney arrived in DC with his network already intact, supplemented by Rumsfeld's, et al? Was it the allure of power vs. the certainty of professional destruction if you crossed Cheney (O'Neill)? That resignation would change nothing (Whitman), only further enable Cheney, so keep fighting and try to limit the damage (Colin Powell), no matter how much wishful thinking that involved? Or, is it prolonged disbelief that Cheney was that informed, persistent, ruthless, and able to get the president to agree with every proposal he made?

The tasks now seem to be expose, document, inform. And limit further damage. Cheney and Rove have not given up; they are pushing ahead - Iran, energy policy, federal courts, you name it. We may be longing for January '09, but they intend to accomplish quite a lot before then. One of those things is likely to be a vast array of election games. Just as the Spanish "manana" doesn't quite capture the proverbial Irish sense of urgency, "chutzpah" is an order of magnitude or more below what Rove and Cheney are willing to do.

[earlofhuntingdon]

The Klamath River water release/fish kill has been on the blogs since 2002. It seemed as much Rove politicizing the federal bureaucracy for election purposes as much as Cheney. Good to have more info about it.

[Brecht]

There was a prescient post (somewhere) a week or more ago, about how hard it will be to undo all the extreme changes the neo-cons have pushed on government. Pundits and politicians on both sides will argue for comity and calmness, for letting bygones be bygones. But we must re-level the playing field.

The last 'Angler' article underlines this. Cheney's '"genius," Hoffman said, is that "he builds networks and puts the right people in the right places, and then trusts them to make well-informed decisions that comport with his overall vision.' And most of those minions will still be there in 2010.

Which means Cheney and other lobbyists, all well-trained in secrecy, will be able to call their friends on the inside and undermine any government initiatives they disagree with. Or, as Hoffman implies in his quote, these officials may not even need a phone call.

Indeed, if Rove can give his Republican strategy talk to 15 agencies before anyone complains about it, there must be a lot of 'good soldiers' throughout government, a lot of people who will serve neo-con agendas no matter who runs the government. The Cheney linksite JEP mentions above is going to need a lot of pages.

[KdmFromPhila]

Brecht makes a key point. The same holds true, I fear, for the Justice Department where moles from Regent University will interfere and disrupt long after Bush leaves. The legacy of Cheney could last a long time unless someone takes drastic remedial action. Preferrably legal action and that raises my questions:

Is there clear evidence of a crime committed by Cheney? an impeachable offense? Prosecution looks like the only way to expose the truth and to psuh the Cheneyviks out of the way.

[John Lopresti]

The Union of Concerned Scientists evidently still is running a contest for cartoonists, some of which artwork touches on matters like the energy taskforce, treating information as if TopSecret, greenhouse gas science, though the inspiration of the cartooning is the sole responsibility of the respective authors.

[my too sense]

After reading this series and expose, I can't help think of a comment that the dark one Richard Perle said in describing Junyah.

Perle said, "the first time I met Bush 43 ... two things became clear. One, he didn't know very much. The other, that he had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know very much."

I can't help but think that it was that type of thinking, that attracted Cheney to him. I don't doubt that many, many others also knew and utilized this to their advantage. Don't get me wrong, Junyah is totally responsible and complicit in this whole mess as are many that surround him and support him. Ignorance combined with arrogance is also dangerous, combine that with incuriousity and laziness, well that spells disaster when you're the POTUS.... but that is certainly no excuse. I don't have pity on him. Stoopid Junyah, not smart, humble, and/or inquisitive to actually do his job...unless that was the prearranged decision he had with Fourthbranch from the get go. Still wondering, do you think Junyah has read this series or has he been "sheltered" from this by his handlers? Wonder if that prozac zombie looking wife of his has read this?

[The Confidence Man]

Very interesting point regarding Abramoff et al: some day we're going to need to come back and reassess whether Abramoff was part of this, or only a piker operating amateurishly in the field that Cheney already dominated

I don't think it's outside the realm of plausibility that the Abramoff prosecutions have been allowed to go forward because Abramoff wasn't the prime mover, but was a parasitic gang moving in on Cheney's kickback turf. They also provide ample distraction, both for the public and prosecutors.

[Dee Loralei]

JEP, from a posting today at All Spin Zone, I think it was Richard, said that in an undiscussed SCOTUS decision one can not charge the government under RICO. So there goes my hopes of getting them all through thatPOTUS, OVP and DoJ.

This cancer on the constitution has metastisized long enough, time to excise all of it through surgical criminal charges and with impeachment. That's the only way we will ever get our country beck. Too many sleeper cells in place in every government agency and department. We need a de-Bushification and a Cheneyectomy. The only chemo and radiation we have left is shining the light of public scrutiny in all those dark recesses.

Time to destroy this seeping pistulant boil on the ass of our country.

[JEP]

"one can not charge the government"

I thought Cheney was an independent entity nowadays...

[JEP]

"one can not charge the government"

Are you suggesting that the energy executives are covered by executive privilege? Maybe that's what the Bushes think "executive privilege" means.

ANyone who conspired with Cheney to create a phony energy crisis, using California electricity rates or gas prices across the nation, could be charged in a RICO case. When a government entity dceides in its own ranks to commit a conspiracy, they have some protections, but when outside parties take a big part, it is a whole new RICO ballgame.

Are you suggesting Cunningham couldn't be charged in any sort of conspiracy case? Is there any doubt all the RICO requirements applied? So what is the difference... if Cheney and Rove conspired to "do something" they might have some immunity according to your qa=ualifications, but the minute those power execs sat down with Deadeye, that safety net was removed.

[homer simpsons dad]

Males should be allowed to go shirtless at home only - Or vary with places for another persuasive speech topic

[archive florida lottery]

Blame the parents of a murderer parents for the crime

[casino gambling guide]

Children in ... fill in the nation of your choice ... are living better

[bed frame poster]

Sex offenders should be, should not be castrated

[dealer discount tire]

An integrated, segregated society is better

[nastyfetishpass]

I've basically been doing nothing to speak of. Basically nothing seems worth thinking about. I feel like a void, but that's how it is. I've just been hanging out doing nothing.

[career engineer mechanical]

Global Warming Isn't A Threat

[mercedes]

A one-night stand is wrong, is not wrong

[ring]

meu site... queria que avaliassem e dessem opinioes!

[TUCKER]

Riding shotgun

[ISABELLA]

The sky's the limit

[ADRIAN]

Shot in the dark

[COOKIE]

Rabbit and pork