So, you had — first you had the Trump administration
say, and Trump himself say, “We’re going
to design a bail out specifically for the oil
and gas industry.”
And there was tremendous pushback against
that in the public, and Democrats in Congress
said, “No, that’s not going to happen.”
So, instead, what we ended up getting is three,
essentially, stealth mechanisms that have
really heavily tried to prop up this industry,
that, left without that support, we would
see a much greater shrinkage than we’re
seeing right now, although we’re already
seeing a good deal of shrinkage.
But so, these three mechanisms were, first,
in the CARES Act, the Paycheck Protection
Program, documented — a research organization
did research for me for my Sierra magazine
articles, that found 7,000 oil and gas companies
receiving as much as $7 billion in Paycheck
Protection Program money.
Because the oil and gas industry is dominated
by white men, globally and nationally — those
are the people that own the companies, and
in the U.S. a good deal of the workforce is
white men — that also contributed to the
overall bias of the PPP program towards white
male-owned businesses, so they got Paycheck
Protection Program money, which has propped
up a lot of companies that wouldn’t — certainly
wouldn’t have made it on their own.
Then you had tax loopholes snuck into the
CARES Act, which Democrats are trying to close
in this next version of the CARES Act, that
allowed over $3 billion to go to at least
50 publicly traded oil and gas companies,
and probably many, many more, because we only
know about the publicly traded ones because
they have to report it in their reports to
the Security Exchange Commission, and private
companies don’t have to do that.
But I would say the most problematic pot is
this unprecedented move to have the Federal
Reserve, for the first time — so, excuse
me, the American taxpayer, through the Federal
Reserve, for the first time, now become owners
in oil company debt.
So, the Federal Reserve set up, through BlackRock,
several different mechanisms to try to prop
up the economy.
And through two measures, the oil industry
has received inordinate support.
And the research group InfluenceMap looked
at one of these mechanisms and found that
the Federal Reserve’s funding is overweighted
in fossil fuels.
So, through BlackRock, you and I, the American
taxpayer, are now owners in debt, through
the Fed, of Exxon, of Chevron, of Energy Transfer
Partners, of Phillips 66, of Schlumberger,
which is a company that just moved itself
out of U.S. fracking altogether, after we
bought up their debt.
So we are literally, through the Federal Reserve,
propping up the oil industry at a time when,
you know, for a huge host of reasons — climate
crisis, environmental justice, the lives of
people who live next to oil and gas facilities
— that we need to allow this industry to
do what it would be doing on its own anyway,
which is going away, because the world is
trying — and succeeding — in moving away
from this resource.
