23
votes
More than 1,500 US fossil fuel lobbyists serve as “double agents”
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- Authors
- Oliver Milman, Nina Lakhani, Emily Pontecorvo, Alexander C. Kaufman, Kate Sheppard, Damian Carrington, Julia Métraux, Abigail Weinberg, Dharna Noor, Dan Friedman, Kiera Butler, Chance Townsend
- Published
- Jul 6 2023
- Word count
- 1363 words
All lobbying is legalized bribery. It corrupts no matter the intent.
As much as I hate that kind, there is also a kind of lobbying where folks who have little to no rights or visibility need to "squeaky wheel" those in power.
That elected officials grant greater access to paid actors than average citizens is the root of the problem. That paid actor access is legal in any democracy is incomprehensible.
This system is broken.
Look man, i don't disagree with you but I'm trying to point out specific examples when they are not only benign but are beneficial to us all.
I visited a provincially protected area today, with sensitive old growth Douglas fir coastal forest. ONE MAN spent 35 years of his time lobbying for this land to be protected. He wasn't paid and he was a special interest and he didn't get special treatment. But he was persistent and he spent more time than you and I.
That's how lobbying is supposed to work.
Others I know work for non profits to raise awareness about refugee claimants. The claimants themselves don't have the language or legal know-how or time or connection to make those pleas themselves.
And what about animal groups? Environmental groups? Those are all lobby's.
In Australia, we are soon going to have a referendum on whether or not to introduce "The Voice" which, as far as I can tell, would be a system for establishing officially designated lobbyists elected by the Aboriginal population to ensure that their needs and interests don't go forgotten or misunderstood.
That, plus reading your comment, has made me wonder what it would look like if lobbying was always an elected position. For example, could you have different lobbying "parties" (like a lobbying party to protect the old growth coastal forest), and citizens could vote for several such parties? I do think it would work better with a more Australian-style voting system (which has extremely high turnout, even for local elections, and ranked choice makes third parties actually viable and influential) than with an American-style voting system.
And I feel like that's how it got started originally, the evil big corp bullshit lobbying: you get a union that represents workers of that industry and they lobby for getting heads up on new taxes or changes or new regulations and whatnot.
And then money makes everything ugly
At which point third party would come in and ranked choice ballots would save the day.
We have first past the post here in Canada as well and we really need to support our own lobby group on electoral reform, like fairvote.ca
I think you may misunderstand the role of lobbyists, to an extent. First, let's get this out of the way - there are instances in which lobbying is legal corruption, no question. There are instances in which a politician is asking a lobbyist "how should I vote on this," which is bad for the system.
But generally speaking, lobbyists are specialists who help elected officials understand a law and/or the system. It's a strength of democracy that anybody off the street can get elected into office, right? But what happens when the newly-elected former teacher is asked to vote on a complicated law dealing with, say, fishing rights in the country's coastal zones? Does the average citizen really have a helpful opinion on that?
Politicians turn to lobbyists because lobbyists are experts in whatever topic they are representing. Governance in the modern world is impossibly complicated, and no single person can understand all the issues at play.
Then, on the other side, lobbyists help people navigate the complexities of government. Let's say you're a member of a certain group of people and you want to get something changed - fight against a pipeline, invite a company to come put in a pipeline, whatever. How are you going to do that? You need a lobbyist to help you navigate the system - to represent you, to find sympathetic ears, to make sure that you're presenting your arguments in the right way.
I'm sympathetic to the philosophy behind this, but in practice this doesn't work. How would it benefit the citizenry if paid lobbying were illegal? What would that even look like?
Among the many, many unintended consequences: only those who didn't need to be paid would function as lobbyists. In other words: the rich.
Seriously, why the hell do fossil fuel lobbyism exist!? And why are there more than a thousand of them?
You’re buying their connections and experience. And if anyone has connections, it’ll be an oil lobbyist (autocorrect said locust lol).
If anything, the time they spend trying to increase a university’s funding is time they didn’t spend advocating for oil companies. Plus, assuming that university is doing climate science, maybe it’s funding that eventually goes against oil companies.
TL;DR: Cities, companies, universities known for being progressive and environmentally conscious work with lobbyists that also represent fossil fuel interests.
Also:
What do you think: problem or non-issue?
P.S.—First saw this on Threads 😅
I don't immediately see this as being an issue.
There was one retired DoD official who made news a while ago, I forget his name, talking about how the government was being scammed by various defense contractors and how it was part of his job to ensure that the contracts were fair. Prior to him accepting this job he'd been employed by some defense contractor, and worked on their team to ensure that they got the best deals possible from the government.
So while some initial skepticism that he may have accepted the government job to continue his original mission may have been warranted, in the end it seems like he did a very good job in his DoD position helping to fight against the inflated contracts.
The dynamic between the oil and gas industry and the environmentalists isn't too different, and there's plenty of reasons that people would want to switch sides. Maybe they worked for oil and gas, felt bad about it, and decided to switch sides so they could feel better about their job. Or maybe they just hate their boss. Or maybe they're very good at their job and the environmentalist group notices this and offers to pay them a competitive salary, so the person just treats it like a new job with no moral reason for switching. Or some combination of the above.
Idk how other people think of this, but bringing in things from threads, Reddit or other places is great. I’d much rather engage with people here about these things, which I’m less likely to find on Reddit and absolutely certain to miss on threads.