Leading coal and electricity companies on Friday won a billion-dollar chunk of stimulus money from the Obama administration, highlighting once again how President Barack Obama’s anti-lobbyist and anti-big business rhetoric is divorced from his actions.
Obama’s subsidy for a coal project called FutureGen shows the hollowness of a favorite primary-season attack: assailing Dick Cheney’s 2001 energy task force as the embodiment of the Bush administration’s coziness with big polluters. Just before the Montana primary, for instance, he put it this way: “Dick Cheney had an energy task force that came up with an energy policy that just served the interests of Big Oil and Big Gas.”
This was a familiar refrain of Bush critics. As Sierra Club lawyer Alex Levinson put it in 2002, the task force “laid out the red carpet for Big Oil, Big Energy and Big Coal to formulate energy policy.”
Obama’s $1 billion grant also shows that lobbying will still get you everywhere. And FutureGen exposes as meaningless Obama’s “no earmarks” promise on his stimulus bill.
You may notice, in the quotation above, that Obama omitted Big Coal from his list of bad guys. That’s because Big Coal supported FutureGen.
Conceived in 2001 and started in 2003, FutureGen is a multibillion-dollar, Illinois-based, mostly taxpayer-funded coalition of the biggest power and coal companies, deploying unproven but enticing technologies (including underground burial of carbon dioxide) aiming to reduce emissions to almost zero.
In 2004, the Energy Department named former lobbyist Mark Maddox assistant secretary of fossil energy and assigned him to promote FutureGen to Congress, to companies and even to China.
But in early 2008, the Bush administration reversed course and pulled funding for the project, arguing there were better ways to test these technologies. Critics charged that Bush was angry Illinois had been chosen over Texas as the site for the FutureGen plant.
By the time the Senate took up Obama’s stimulus this year, that same Maddox was collecting a check from coalition member Anglo American, a mining and natural resource giant, lobbying to restore federal funding to FutureGen. Maddox was part of a lobbying blitzkrieg by the FutureGen coalition, its member companies and the state of Illinois (see chart).
Rod Blagojevich, the now disgraced Democratic ex-governor of Illinois, hired K Street firm Cassidy & Associates in mid-2007. The FutureGen coalition hired former House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt. Everyone lobbied up.
The coalition’s opportunity came in the massive stimulus bill. No clean coal funding made it into the House’s version, but the fossil fuels section of the Senate bill included $2 billion “for one or more near zero emissions power plant(s).” Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., argued that this could apply to only one project: FutureGen. It was a non-earmark earmark.
The final bill was less expensive and more opaque, reducing the amount to $1 billion, and changing the wording to “fossil energy research and development.” But Senate appropriator Dick Durbin, D-Ill., was confident that even without his earmark he would get his funding. And on Friday, he did: Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced he supported $1 billion in stimulus funds for FutureGen.
Did the Energy Department conclude FutureGen was the most stimulating way to spend the billion-dollar “fossil energy research” money? Or did the lobbying blitz carry the day for this Cheney-created subsidy to Big Coal?
Forget the end of lobbyist influence — Obama hasn’t even ended Cheney’s influence.
