Hiroko Tabuchi

But in recent years, some of these same companies have significantly increased their flaring, as well as the venting of natural gas and other potent greenhouse gases directly into the atmosphere, according to data from the three largest shale-oil fields in the United States.

The practice has consequence for climate change because natural gas is a potent contributor to global warming. It also wastes vast amounts of energy: Last year in Texas, venting and flaring in the Permian Basin oil field alone consumed more natural gas than states like Arizona and South Carolina use in a year.

Exxon’s venting and flaring has surged since 2017 to record highs, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of gas produced, the numbers show. Exxon flared or vented 70% more gas in 2018 than it did the previous year, according to the data, bringing an end to several years of improvements.

Flaring and venting are legal under state laws, and oil companies acknowledge the practices are wasteful. Typically, venting or flaring occur because there aren’t pipelines close enough to a well to capture and transport the gas, or because gas prices are so low that it’s cheaper to discard the gas than to try to sell it. Venting can also occur during equipment breakdowns.

Since 2011, the period for which reliable numbers are available, Exxon has flared or vented more gas overall than any other operator in the three oil fields, which include the Eagle Ford and Permian basins in the Southwest, and the Bakken straddling the Canadian border. Companies often treat natural gas as a byproduct when drilling for oil, which is far more lucrative.

The data also shows that BP this year acquired some of the most polluting sites in the Permian and then allowed flaring and venting to increase. BP burned off 17% of the gas it produced in the Permian between April and June of this year (the first full quarter after the acquisition) making it the worst performer in percentage terms among the top 50 producers. In the year-earlier quarter, BP had burned only 10%.

When asked about its practices, Exxon Mobil said it was committed to a 25% reduction in flaring globally by 2020, compared with 2016 levels, to address environmental concerns.

BP said it was investing in upgrades at its Permian wells that would eliminate much of its flaring. The company also said it was not putting new wells in the area unless they had access to a gas pipeline, reducing the need to burn off or vent excess natural gas.

The analysis provides one of the clearest pictures to date of the companies behind the vast emissions of natural gas that have resulted from America’s shale oil boom, fueled by the use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to unlock fossil fuels from shale rock.

Last year, operators across the three basins together flared or vented a record 320 million cubic feet of gas, more than 40% above levels seen just five years ago. The pace for the first two quarters of 2019 has been even higher.

Rystad Energy, an energy analytics company that compiles industry data from state-level corporate disclosures, provided the venting and flaring data to The New York Times, which performed an independent analysis. Separately, an organization affiliated with Greenpeace, Unearthed, also did its own initial analysis of a similar set of data.

But flaring releases carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, where it traps the sun’s heat, driving climate change. Venting directly emits methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas in the shorter term.

Both practices are “a tremendous waste of a natural resource,” said Riccardo Puliti, global director for energy at the World Bank, which leads a global public-private partnership that aims to reduce the practice. The World Bank estimates that flaring last year emitted more than 350 million tons of carbon dioxide globally, equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions of almost 75 million cars.

“We can’t afford for this to continue unabated,” Puliti said.

Shale oil has made the United States the world’s largest oil producer. But shale wells tend to dry up more quickly than conventional oil fields. That means producers must drill constantly to keep their oil production steady, while venting or flaring off the gas before pipelines can catch up.

The increase comes even as a group of the world’s biggest oil companies, including Exxon and BP, announced last month on the sidelines of the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York that they had made progress in reducing global methane emissions, and that its members were on track to meet a target of keeping methane emissions to below 0.25% of global production by 2025. BP separately said this year that it had already met an even more stringent target of 0.2%.

But environmental groups have urged companies to provide a better accounting of how they measure their emissions and tally those percentages, which are not easily calculated from flaring or venting statistics.

“They’re saying, ‘Here’s our number. Trust us,’” said Ben N. Ratner, a senior director with the Environmental Defense Fund, a group that works with oil companies to track and reduce methane. “There’s been no breakdown of how they arrived at that number. And we don’t have all the facts, the transparency, to assess whether that’s accurate or not.”

When an energy company strikes oil and begins to pump, less-valuable natural gas comes up alongside the oil. That gas could be gathered into pipelines and sold, but drilling has far outpaced pipeline construction, particularly in the booming oil fields of the Permian and Bakken.

Rather than delay drilling, producers will choose to vent or flare.

Many smaller oil producers flare or vent 100% of the gas their wells produce, the data shows. In those cases, “gas becomes more like a liability,” said Artem Abramov, an industry analyst at Rystad Energy. “It’s just much cheaper for companies to get rid of it.”

Shale-oil producer Exco Resources highlights this trend. This year it applied with Texas regulators to flare almost all the gas it produced in South Texas, even though a pipeline already exists to move it away, because it is cheaper to release the gas than pay the fees to pipe it off and sell it.

In an unusual showdown, the pipeline’s operator, Williams Cos., is now challenging Exco, saying that allowing it to flare even though its wells were already hooked up to a pipeline would lead to “unnecessary and wasteful flaring of billions of cubic feet of natural gas.” Still, Texas regulators granted Exco’s flaring permit. Williams is urging the state to reconsider.

The Trump administration, as part of its wide-ranging rollback of regulations to fight climate change, is moving to eliminate Obama-era rules that would have required oil and gas producers to more aggressively detect and fix gas leaks, and to rein in flaring or venting. Fossil fuel companies have been divided on how to respond, with some arguing the rules were too costly.

Among other worst performers are independent petroleum producers, like Marathon Oil, that drill almost exclusively for oil and treat the natural gas that comes up alongside it as a byproduct.

Last year, Marathon Oil vented or flared almost half of the gas produced at its wells in the Bakken. In this year’s first half, that proportion increased to more than half. And since 2018, Marathon Oil’s overall venting and flaring has surpassed even Exxon’s.

A Marathon spokeswoman said the company was “actively pursuing" ways to reduce its emissions.

Chevron, on the other hand, has demonstrated more discipline over the past three years, keeping flaring and venting to less than 3% of the gas it drilled, the data shows. Analysts said the company appeared to have stricter internal rules that discourage drilling in areas that offer few prospects of economically recovering the natural gas produced.

“We built a strategy early in our Permian development that, whenever possible, we would not flare to produce,” Veronica Flores-Paniagua, a Chevron spokeswoman, said in a statement.

In an interview, Brian Pugh, chief innovation officer at BP’s onshore oil and gas business in the United States, said the company was investing in new, centralized gathering and compression facilities in the Permian that would enable it to capture and sell more gas instead of flaring and venting it. Nearly all new wells there will connect to the new facilities, the first of which will go online in the first half of 2020, Pugh said.

“If you look at us this time next year, we’ll be starting to look very, very different,” he said.

This article originally appeared in

Gas Flaring on the Rise Even as Energy Giants Promise to Cut It Back

When leaders from Exxon Mobil and BP gathered last month with other fossil-fuel executives to declare they were serious about climate change, they cited progress in curbing an energy-wasting practice called flaring — the intentional burning of natural gas as companies drill faster than pipelines can move the energy away.

Hours later, at a hotel where Saetre and fellow oil executives were gathering to defend their industry — a major contributor to global warming — climate protesters weren’t buying it. Using lights, they projected “MAKE BIG OIL PAY” on the facade.

On Monday, as world leaders gathered at the United Nations climate summit and discussed the urgency of slashing carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, 13 of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies presented their defense at a forum across town. But most of their proposals appeared designed to perpetuate the use of oil and gas for decades to come, rather than transition quickly to cleaner options.

The companies promised a program to invest in technologies to scrub carbon dioxide from the air, although big questions remain about scaling up that technology. They also promised to cut down on leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from wells and pipes, and reaffirmed support of a tax on the burning of oil, gas and coal.

“The change that needs to take place — the trillions of dollars of investment — is only going to come from companies with resources and scale,” said Ben van Beurden, chief executive of Shell.

“This is certainly a first step. It’s a down payment. But this is a time we need a Hail Mary pass, not these modest steps,” said Andrew Logan, senior director for oil and gas at Ceres, which works with investors to address the impact of climate change on their holdings.

According to the United Nations, oil and gas production needs to fall by about 20% by 2030 and by almost 55% by 2050 to stop Earth’s temperature rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. That is the target set by the 2015 Paris Accord, a landmark agreement among most of the world’s nations to fight global warming.

However, new data from the financial think tank Carbon Tracker indicates that, since 2018, major oil companies have invested at least $50 billion in fossil fuel projects — like Shell’s $13 billion liquefied natural gas project in Canada and BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil and Equinor’s $4.3 billion deepwater oil project in Azerbaijan — that would not be financially viable if the world were to meet the 1.5-degree target.

Meanwhile, the world’s biggest energy companies last year devoted just 1% of their capital investment to low-carbon energy sources, a separate study from the Carbon Disclosure Project found. Equinor, among the top performers, put only about 2% of its investment in renewables; Exxon Mobil’s investment in renewables was one-fifth of 1%.

With prices for renewable energy like wind and solar falling faster than even the most optimistic projections, the reasoning behind backing new oil and gas exploration has started to wear thin. “You can sense there was angst in the room,” said Jules Kortenhorst, the chief executive of the energy think tank Rocky Mountain Institute, who attended a Sunday cocktail party for the executives. “I think they are struggling to reconcile in their minds what that means for their industry.”

Oil companies aren’t facing only questioning from protesters. Investors are pressing them to transition more quickly to renewables, and some are divesting from oil and gas altogether.

Fossil fuel companies face lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in compensation for the damage caused by climate change. Even the pope has weighed in, warning oil executives that energy use should not “destroy civilization.” The recent attack on Saudi Arabia’s largest oil refinery has underscored the vulnerability of oil and gas to geopolitical shocks.

At the historic Morgan Library in New York City on Monday, the 13 oil companies announced an investment of “multibillion dollars” in carbon capture technologies, while declining to be more specific. The idea behind this technology is to capture the carbon dioxide produced when burning fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide is a major contributor to global warming because when it is in the atmosphere it helps trap the sun’s light.

“Our industry has gone through transitions over the decades. I don’t see it as a threat. It’s an evolution,” said Darren Woods, the Exxon chief executive. “We know from past experience that evolution is typically driven by technology,” he said.

In practice, however, major questions remain about scale, cost, speed and energy requirements of the technology. In a report last year, the European Academies Science Advisory Council said carbon removal offered only “limited realistic potential” to have a climate impact, and its authors argued that the world should not count on removal technologies to make up for a failure to reduce or eliminate emissions in the first place.

Oil companies have also made a concerted effort to plug methane leaks. Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide in the short term. But there are concerns that methane emissions are far larger than official estimates. Leaks undermine the energy industry’s argument that the burning of natural gas should be encouraged because it is cleaner than coal and can serve as a “bridge fuel” between fossil fuels and renewable energy.

The industry’s support for a carbon tax has raised hopes for a plan that could fight climate change by putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions. One proposal for the United States would set an initial tax of $40 per ton of carbon dioxide produced and would increase the price over time.

Still, that plan also envisions that climate change regulations on businesses would be rolled back, and that oil companies would be protected against lawsuits holding them accountable for climate change, angering some climate activists.

Ahead of climate week, 200 major investors managing a combined $6.5 trillion in assets also demanded that companies stop lobbying for policies that harm the climate, both directly and through their trade groups. For example, even though major oil companies including Exxon Mobil and Shell have publicly cautioned against a move by the Trump administration to do away with methane emissions regulations, powerful industry lobbying groups still back the plan.

Similarly, while oil companies have largely stayed silent on the Trump administration’s plan to weaken auto emissions standards, an oil-industry group has lobbied behind the scenes in support.

Christiana Figueres, the former U.N. climate chief, told the gathered chief executives that they have the power “to either put a nail in the coffin of global efforts, or be the industry to deliver the solution.”

She added, “On Jan. 1, 2051, I don’t think you have a business unless you have achieved one of two things,” she said: either a new business model that is “completely free of fossil fuels,” or a technology that makes using fossil fuels emissions-free.

Equinor might be among the closest to making an energy transformation. In recent months it has won contracts to two of the biggest wind power projects in the world — one off the shores of New York, the other in the North Sea. By 2030, it says, as much as 20 percent of its capital spending will be in renewables.

At the same time, though, Equinor intends to keep drilling for oil.

“I think young people see that we are moving far too slowly to addressing climate change,” Saetre, the company’s chief executive, said. But while renewables and carbon capture are necessary, he said, “We’re going to need oil and gas for a long time. It has to be developed. We need to find more oil and gas.”

Oil Giants, Under Fire From Climate Activists and Investors, Mount a Defense

From the deck of a boat in New York harbor, the chief executive of Equinor squinted toward a stretch of sea where his oil company will soon build a giant wind farm. “We are doing all we can” to fight climate change, said the executive, Eldar Saetre.

At first, families put the illnesses down to misfortune. But as cases mounted, parents started to ask: Could it be something in the air or water?

Their questions led them to an old industrial site in Franklin, the Johnson County seat, that the federal government had ordered cleaned up more than two decades ago. Recent tests have identified a carcinogenic plume spreading underground, releasing vapors into homes.

Now, families here in a county that voted overwhelmingly for President Donald Trump are making demands of his administration that collide directly with one of his main agendas: the rolling back of health and environmental regulations.

On Wednesday, a group representing dozens of concerned parents plans to call for a federal investigation by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General — the same watchdog that examined the government’s slow response to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan — into why Franklin’s toxic plume of trichloroethylene, or TCE, persists.

The group accuses the EPA of “serious mismanagement” and “significant delays” at the site, even after the dangers became apparent this summer, according to a draft letter it provided to The New York Times.

But the parents’ demands also reach well beyond immediate concerns about the chemicals under their feet.

Families across the political spectrum here have also spoken out against the Trump administration’s drive to weaken restrictions on TCE, a colorless fluid with a subtle, sweet odor used by as many as four-fifths of the nation’s 65,000 dry cleaners, as well as about 2,200 factories and other facilities. Decades ago, it was used at the Franklin site.

Twice last year, parents from Johnson County traveled to Washington to urge the administration to stick with stronger controls.

“We are done begging,” said Kari Rhinehart, the mother of Emma Grace Findley, the 13-year-old swimmer who developed brain cancer and died in 2014. “We are demanding the EPA finish what it started and place these restrictions on TCE and other dangerous toxins.”

The EPA confirmed that the chemicals were present near the Franklin site and said that fewer than 10 of 37 homes tested had potential air quality issues. The agency said its testing was continuing and that, if necessary, homes would be fitted with devices to clean the air. The EPA’s previous administrator, Scott Pruitt, had promised to speed cleanups; that effort is now led by a former lawyer for Dow Chemical.

Declaring TCE “carcinogenic to humans by all routes of exposure,” the Obama administration had sought to restrict two of its riskiest uses, as a stain remover and as a degreaser, and had marked it for further review, potentially to ban the chemical altogether. It had also moved to strengthen cleanup rules for hundreds of sites nationwide believed to be contaminated.

But at the urging of industry groups, the Trump administration has stalled some of those moves. In 2017 it indefinitely postponed the proposed bans on risky uses, leaving as many as 178,000 workers potentially exposed. It also scaled back a broad review of TCE and other chemicals so that it would exclude from its calculations possible exposure from groundwater and other forms of contamination — the problems present in Franklin.

In Johnson County, a parents group co-founded by Rhinehart, If It Was Your Child, has traced at least 58 childhood cancer cases since 2008. At 21.7 cases of pediatric cancer per 100,000 children, Johnson County’s rate puts it in the 80th percentile among counties nationwide, according to data for 2011-2015 from the National Cancer Institute. Both the national and Indiana average are fewer than 18 pediatric cancers per 100,000 children.

“You don’t expect to see so many cancers in a relatively small community,” said Dr. Paolo Boffetta, professor in environmental medicine and public health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. Even so, he stressed that there was little research linking childhood cancers to TCE. “This doesn’t mean an association doesn’t exist,” he said. “But studies have not been able to confirm it.”

There have been efforts at the national level to better study suspected cancer clusters. In October, Trump signed off on $1 million in federal funding to help communities investigate them.

Motria Caudill, a scientist at the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, which investigates environmental hazards, said at a community meeting in Franklin in November that it was still too early to draw conclusions there. Her agency was still working with others, she said, “just to see what is what is going on.”

The TCE contamination here has been traced to a former factory that, for years, discharged industrial wastewater into a municipal sewer. Amphenol, an electronics maker based in Wallingford, Connecticut, became responsible for the cleanup after acquiring the site, although it no longer owns the property.

In June, tests by an environmental group, Edison Wetlands Association, working with parents, detected the chemical in the air at two homes and in outdoor air near the site. The findings prompted more tests by local and state government officials, including one by Franklin that found levels more than 250 times state limits around a sewer near the homes. In November, the EPA identified a plume of contamination stretching beyond the site toward nearby homes.

Joseph Bianchi, an Amphenol spokesman, said the company was working alongside federal and local officials “to help ensure the well-being of residents in Franklin who live near the former site which remains under EPA’s full control.”

The EPA has promised to work with the company on a cleanup plan. But at the November community meeting, patience wore thin.

“When will this cleanup be done and gone,” asked Sonya Hallett, a local philanthropy consultant and mother of one, “and not hazardous to people who are living around it?”

Trouble Beneath the Grass

The state investigators who descended on Jennifer Clark’s house in October drilled into her basement floor. They sought signs that chemicals in the ground were turning into a vapor and rising into her home, a phenomenon known as “vapor intrusion.”

Her daughter Chelsea learned when she was 12 that she had acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow. After chemotherapy, Chelsea, now 18, is in remission; she dreams of working in the beauty industry.

But over the summer, the Clarks received daunting news. Tests at their home on behalf of the Franklin parents group detected TCE levels more than 18 times federal limits.

Testing is tricky. Results can be affected by the weather or even by doors left open, said Kelly Pennell, associate director of the federally funded Superfund Research Center at the University of Kentucky. Indeed, later tests showed lower levels in the house.

Still, the Clarks remain worried. Their youngest daughter is 12. “This is our forever home right here, where the kids are going to come back with the grandkids,” Jennifer Clark said.

They live about a mile and a half from the former industrial site in Franklin, now a patch of grass bordered by old railroad tracks to the north and neat rows of homes to the south.

For years, TCE was stored here in a 500-gallon tank, according to regulatory filings made shortly before the site closed.

Amphenol agreed to a cleanup in 1990, installing a “pump and treat” system that was supposed to control the contamination. For two decades Amphenol pumped out groundwater, but contamination remained.

The technology’s apparent ineffectiveness raises questions about hundreds of other sites using it, said Shannon Lisa, program director at Edison Wetlands.

“How many other communities across the United States are facing these very same issues?” she said.

One Home, Two Families, Two Cancers

Two girls lived, several years apart, in the same Franklin apartment about a mile from the toxic site. Both developed cancer, one at age 8 and the other at 14.

“You can’t go anywhere, or do anything, without meeting someone who’s been affected,” said Angela Brennan, whose daughter, Karley, was one of those girls. In 2012, the family learned that Karley had cutaneous T-cell lymphoma, a rare cancer affecting the skin. Later that year, 14-year-old Madison Newton was told that she had an aggressive form of pilocytic astrocytoma, which causes tumors in the brain and spinal cord.

Karley, who turns 15 this week, is in remission. Madison died in 2015. And across Franklin, If It Was Your Child yard signs dot the city, where a local TV station, WTHR, Channel 13, is doggedly tracking the concerns.

There are conflicting views here of the administration’s environmental rollbacks. There is talk that the federal government should get out of people’s lives, even as local officials have called on the EPA to take over the response to the contamination.

“When it comes to public health, we can go against party lines. And I don’t agree with trying to roll back the EPA’s role,” said Steve Barnett, Franklin’s mayor and a Republican. “Back in the day, there weren’t any rules. That’s why there was so much contamination,” he said. “That’s why we need the EPA, and that’s why we need rules.”

Many members of If It Was Your Child in the Franklin area play down the politics, noting that both parties have let the cleanup fall by the wayside. Nevertheless, their demands come at a time when the Trump administration has weakened the very rules that could prevent another Franklin.

“We should not have to fight Republicans or Democrats to save our children. It’s not a political fight for us,” said Stacie Davidson, who hails from a decidedly pro-Trump household and who co-founded the parents group with Rhinehart, who didn’t vote for Trump. Yet “his loosening of EPA regulations, it’s infuriating,” Davidson said. “We’re ruining the environment for money.”

Davidson learned in 2014 that her stepson, Zane, who was 10 at the time, had a rare form of leukemia. He is in remission. She has traveled to Washington to speak in favor of stronger TCE regulations. “What we’re fighting for is seemingly being undone right now,” she said.

Still, she said, she would not change her vote. “Trump’s a businessman. There are great things he can do for our country. But he’s used to building high-rises for money,” she said. “He’s not as environmentally savvy. Our hope is that he surrounds himself with people who are more knowledgeable.”

Trump’s administration is in the midst of a historic weakening of environmental and safety regulations, including loosening rules designed to limit emissions from industrial polluters. And it has stalled action on TCE, despite the emergence of alternatives.

“There have been greener alternatives to TCE for years,” said Tom Forsythe, an executive vice president at Kyzen, a Tennessee cleaning-materials company, who joined EPA officials in a conference call in August 2017 to lay out other options.

But a few months later, in October, when EPA officials visited the Integer medical devices factory in Minneapolis, the agency received a different message.

“According to Integer, there are no effective alternatives,” read an EPA memo about the visit, which was arranged by a chemicals group, the Halogenated Solvents Industry Alliance. Dry cleaners have also lobbied against a tightening of protections, arguing among other things that substitutes could harm clothing.

“Yes, we have spoken to EPA about our desire not to have TCE banned — as is our right of free speech,” said Faye Graul, the chemical group’s executive director. TCE “is used in tightly controlled industrial settings,” she said, “with controls in place so that no workers are harmed.”

Looking to the Future

Johnson County bills itself as the festival county. In December, it hosted a holiday parade and a drive-through Nativity with live actors. And the economy is strong. A technology park measuring nearly 1 million square feet is soon opening in Franklin.

“I see good things that Trump has done,” said Barnett, the mayor, emphasizing his town’s future. “The economy’s good. There’s been a lot of investment into our city.”

Recently, though, Rhinehart has been thinking of the past. Four Christmases ago, her daughter Emma Grace suffered two severe seizures.

“She said, ‘Mommy, something’s not right,’ and I knew we weren’t going to get much more time,” Rhinehart said, recalling their final conversation. “I gave her some medication and she drifted off to sleep.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/climate/tce-cancer-trump-environment-deregulation.html" id="9dff5f18-100b-3044-a312-40285144f803">The New York Times</a>.

A Trump County Confronts the Administration Amid a Rash of Child Cancers

JOHNSON COUNTY, Ind. — The children fell ill, one by one, with cancers that few families in this suburban community had ever heard of. An avid swimmer struck down by glioblastoma, which grew a tumor in her brain. Four children with Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer. Fifteen children with acute lymphocytic leukemia, including three cases diagnosed in the past year.

But it turns out that there was a hidden beneficiary of the plan that was pushing for the changes all along: the nation’s oil industry.

In Congress, on Facebook and in statehouses nationwide, Marathon Petroleum, the country’s largest refiner, worked with powerful oil-industry groups and a conservative policy network financed by the billionaire industrialist Charles G. Koch to run a stealth campaign to roll back car emissions standards,a New York Times investigation has found.

The campaign’s main argument for significantly easing fuel efficiency standards — that the United States is so awash in oil it no longer needs to worry about energy conservation — clashed with decades of federal energy and environmental policy.

“With oil scarcity no longer a concern,” Americans should be given a “choice in vehicles that best fit their needs,” read a draft of a letter that Marathon helped to circulate to members of Congress over the summer. Official correspondence later sent to regulators by more than a dozen lawmakers included phrases or sentences from the industry talking points, and the Trump administration’s proposed rules incorporate similar logic.

The industry had reason to urge the rollback of higher fuel efficiency standards proposed by former President Barack Obama. A quarter of the world’s oil is used to power cars, and less-thirsty vehicles mean lower gasoline sales.

In recent months, Marathon Petroleum also teamed up with a secretive policy group within the Koch network, the American Legislative Exchange Council, to draft legislation for states supporting the industry’s position. Its proposed resolution, dated Sept. 18, describes current fuel-efficiency rules as “a relic of a disproven narrative of resource scarcity” and says “unelected bureaucrats” shouldn’t dictate the cars Americans drive.

A separate industry campaign on Facebook, covertly run by an oil-industry lobby representing Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Phillips 66 and other oil giants, urged people to write to regulators to support the rollback.

The Facebook ads linked to a website with a picture of a grinning Obama. It asked, “Would YOU buy a used car from this man?” The site appears to have been so effective that a quarter of the 12,000 public comments received by the Department of Transportation can be traced to the petition, according to a Times analysis.

Gary R. Heminger, Marathon’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement that the company supported “sound fuel economy standards” and wanted to “help ensure they are achievable and based on existing technology.”

He added, “We appreciate the administration’s willingness to conduct a thorough review in order to ensure future standards are achievable and will actually benefit American consumers.”

A spokesman for Koch Industries, the energy conglomerate led by Koch, said the company had “a long, consistent track record of opposing all forms of corporate welfare, including all subsidies, mandates and other handouts that rig the system."

The oil industry’s campaign, the details of which have not been previously reported, illuminates why the rollbacks have gone further than the more modest changes automakers originally lobbied for.

The standards that the Trump administration seeks to weaken required automakers to roughly double the fuel economy of new cars, SUVs and pickup trucks by 2025. Instead, the Trump plan would freeze the standards at 2020 levels. Carmakers, for their part, had sought more flexibility in meeting the original 2025 standards, not a categorical rollback.

The Trump plan, if finalized, would increase greenhouse gas emissions in the United States by more than the amount many midsize countries put out in a year and reverse a major effort by the Obama administration to fight climate change.

The energy industry’s efforts also help explain the Trump administration’s confrontational stance toward California, which, under federal law, has a unique authority to write its own clean-air rules and to mandate more zero-emissions vehicles.

California has pledged to stick to the stricter standards, together with 13 other states that follow its lead. But President Donald Trump’s plan challenges California’s rule-writing power, setting up a legal battle that threatens to split the U.S. auto market in two.

That is a prospect automakers desperately want to avoid.

But for gasoline producers like Marathon, a shift toward more efficient vehicles poses a grave threat to the bottom line. In October, the company acquired a rival, Andeavor, making it the biggest U.S. refiner, with sales of 16 billion gallons of fuel a year.

Even while doubling down on gasoline, Marathon has projected an environmentally friendly public image. “We have invested billions of dollars to make our operations more energy efficient,” Marathon said in a recent report. The company’s Twitter account recently highlighted a gardening project and the creation of a duck pond at one of its refineries.

On a conference call with investors last week, Heminger, the Marathon chief executive, was already counting the extra barrels of fuel a Trump rollback would mean for the industry: 350,000 to 400,000 barrels of gasoline per day, he said.

“However, you have another side who doesn’t want to pivot away” from the stricter rules, Heminger said. “So we have a lot of work to do to keep this momentum going.”

Marathon’s Early Start

Marathon began its outreach to the Trump administration early, asking to meet with Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency soon after he became its administrator in early 2017. Marathon had been a top donor to Pruitt in Oklahoma, a state where oil is so prominent that a well stands on the grounds of the capitol building.

“Our CEO, Gary Heminger, would be very glad for an opportunity to visit with the Administrator,” a Marathon lobbyist wrote in an email to Trump’s transition team on May 8, 2017. “I believe this would be a constructive dialogue.” The EPA helps oversee fuel economy rules along with the Transportation Department.

Pruitt was scheduled to meet with the Marathon chief at least twice — once in June 2017 as part of a meeting with the board of a powerful fuel-industry group, American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, and again in September for a more private talk, according to emails and schedules released in a lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club.

A Marathon spokesman, Chuck Rice, said Heminger did not discuss auto-efficiency rollbacks with Pruitt. An EPA official did not respond to a question about whether the auto rules were discussed.

Marathon then turned its focus to Congress, hiring the firm Ogilvy Government Relations to lobby legislators in Washington on fuel-economy standards, according to Ogilvy’s disclosure forms. The firm did not respond to a request for comment.

Over the summer, Marathon representatives also approached legislators about an industry talking-points letter, according to six people familiar with that effort. The file properties of a Microsoft Word version of one letter, provided by a Congressional delegation, show that it was last edited by a Marathon lobbyist, Michael J. Birsic, on June 11, 2018.

Rice of Marathon said the company did not write the letter, and the company declined to say who did. It did not offer an explanation for Birsic’s digital fingerprint on the document file.

Nineteen lawmakers from the delegations of Indiana, West Virginia and Pennsylvania sent letters to the Transportation Department that included exact phrases and reasoning from the industry letter. The lawmakers’ letters, sent in June and July, all make the point that oil scarcity is no longer a concern.

The Trump administration’s proposed rollback echoes the post-conservation theme. While energy conservation is significant, the proposal says, the downside of additional petroleum consumption would be dwarfed by the rollback’s benefits.

Representatives from the three state delegations either declined to comment or did not respond to requests.

Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, criticized the industry’s campaign. “It appears as though oil interests are cynically trying to gin up support in Congress for the weakest possible standards to ensure that cars and SUVs have to rely on even more oil,” he said.

“If this attempt is successful, the outcome will be a blow to the auto industry, consumers, and our environment.”

The Facebook Campaign

The Facebook ads, featuring Trump waving alongside the message, “SUPPORT OUR PRESIDENT’S CAR FREEDOM AGENDA!,” appeared the week after the administration made public its fuel economy plan in August. At least 10 times during the two-month public comment period on the plan, the ads, which did not state their oil industry origins, asked people to write to the government to back weaker emissions standards.

Public comments matter in federal rule-making. The law requires that citizens’ views be taken into account before a rule is finalized.

“File an official comment to SUPPORT our President’s plan for safer, cheaper cars that WE get to choose,” read one ad, which ran for seven days in early October. The ad leads to a page that provides basic language to submit.

More than 3,300 of the 12,000 public comments that DOT has made public contain language identical to that petition, an analysis of the files showed.

The campaign was a product of the fuel and petrochemical manufacturers trade group, widely known as AFPM. However, neither the Facebook ads nor the site identified the industry group. Instead they name a group called Energy4US, which describes itself as “a coalition of consumers, businesses and workers” promoting affordable energy.

Energy4US has close ties to the industry group. According to internet domain records, Victor Adams, listed as an AFPM web manager, registered Energy4Us.org in 2015 using his work email address. Energy4US lists the group as a coalition member, along with about 50 other groups including energy interests, labor groups, a sheriff’s association and even a recreational fishing alliance.

The AFPM board includes representatives from Exxon, Chevron, Phillips 66, Marathon and Koch Industries. The companies all referred queries to the group.

Derrick Morgan, a senior vice president at AFPM, said the group “regularly works with policymakers, coalition groups and individuals to promote shared goals,” and also will “lead and join groups like Energy4US.”

The Department of Transportation said it was “generally aware” that there were groups urging the public to make comments through online campaigns, but said it does not regulate them.

Taking the Fight On the Road

House bill 1593 is just eight words long: “To repeal the corporate average fuel economy standards.” Koch Industries, a petroleum empire with interests as diverse as gasoline, pipelines, fertilizer and Stainmaster carpets, is the bill’s sole corporate backer.

The measure, which would eliminate fuel standards altogether, is not expected to go far. But it underscores the company’s stance on the matter. And Koch interests are fighting that battle not only in Washington but increasingly in statehouses and even local policy meetings nationwide.

In Dearborn, Michigan, at a September meeting on the Trump fuel-efficiency rollbacks, Annie Patnaude of Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-funded group, spoke in favor. “This is a step in the right direction to protect consumers and workers against government mandates that would limit choice,” she said.

In Iowa, Americans for Prosperity joined the fight over whether to make it easier for gas stations to install chargers for electric vehicles. In Illinois, it discouraged state officials from considering subsidies for electric vehicles.

And last month an Americans for Prosperity representative trekked to a public hearing in Colorado, where regulators were thinking about becoming the 13th state to follow California’s stricter standards. The representative, Shari Shiffer-Krieger, a field director for the group, argued that people in the rugged state wanted SUVs, not tighter emissions rules. “Coloradans deserve much better,” she said.

The oil industry lost that fight. Colorado allied itself with California.

But Americans for Prosperity said fights like these get to the heart of its free-market philosophy. “We believe in a level playing field so all Americans have the equal opportunity to succeed,” said Bill Riggs, a spokesman for the group, in a statement. The organization will keep fighting “mandates that unfairly pick winners and losers in any industry,” he said.

Drafting Pro-Oil State Legislation

On August 6, a Marathon lobbyist, Stephen D. Higley, emailed a Wisconsin state representative an explainer of U.S. fuel economy law. The memo didn’t mince words.

“It’s a relic,” the memo said, particularly at a time when the United States was “poised to become the largest oil producer in the world.”

The Wisconsin representative, Mike Kuglitsch, participates in the American Legislative Exchange Council, a Koch-funded group that helps companies write model legislation for state lawmakers to use as a basis for their own laws.

Emails obtained by the Times show that Marathon has been working with members of the legislative exchange council to build support for the Trump fuel-efficiency rollback in state legislatures and to denounce California’s power to write its own rules for cars. The emails were made public under Wisconsin’s open records law to Documented, a watchdog group that tracks corporate influence in public policy.

California’s special authority could effectively split the U.S. auto market in two, since 13 other states — representing roughly 35 percent of nationwide car sales — have agreed to follow California’s stricter rules. That means automakers might find themselves making cars to two competing standards.

“Who should decide what cars and trucks consumers should buy, consumers themselves or unelected bureaucrats in Sacramento, California or Washington, D.C.?” the memo sent by Marathon said.

In a statement, Bill Meierling of the legislative exchange council said that mandating fuel economy was a rule that “many state legislators believe doesn’t make sense for working Americans.”

Just days after the emails between Marathon and the Wisconsin lawmaker, some 1,500 state legislators and other officials from across the country gathered in New Orleans to cheer on Elaine Chao, the Secretary of Transportation, at the legislative exchange council’s annual convention. Marathon sponsored the event.

The Transportation Department was determined to cut government regulations, said Chao, a former fellow at the Heritage Foundation, which has received Koch funding and has long opposed the fuel economy rules.

Trump’s proposed rollback, she said, “ranks as one of the most significant regulatory reforms that this administration is undertaking.” The room erupted in applause.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/climate/cafe-emissions-rollback-oil-industry.html" id="afe96b98-5f5b-3d1e-aa01-fc73b3ed81d7">The New York Times</a>.

When the Trump administration laid out a plan this year that would eventually allow cars to emit more pollution, automakers, the obvious winners from the proposal, balked. The changes, they said, went too far even for them.

The Oil Industry's Covert Campaign to Rewrite American Car Emissions Rules

<h1>Two dozen governors from across the country, including two Republicans and governors of four states that voted for President Donald Trump in 2016, are set to urge his administration Tuesday to halt one of his biggest climate policy rollbacks: the weakening of federal clean car rules.</h1>

The governors will also call on Trump to honor California’s legal right to write its own clean air rules, something the administration has said it is set to challenge, according to a draft statement by the governors.

“Strong vehicle standards protect our communities from unnecessary air pollution and fuel costs, and they address the largest source of carbon pollution in the United States,” the governors wrote. “We must unite to ensure a strong, science-based national standard, in California and across the country, that increases year over year.”

Even automakers have balked at the Trump administration’s plan, which in its most extreme outline proposes to substantially weaken Obama-era standards that would have doubled the fuel economy requirement of new cars, pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles by 2025.

Last month, 17 automakers asked Trump to soften his approach, saying his plan threatened to hurt their profits and produce “untenable” instability given that California — as well as 13 other states that follow its lead — is expected to stick with the stricter standards. That raises the specter of a national auto market split in two, and a messy legal battle.

Now, the governors’ demands add pressure on the Trump administration to reconsider what has become a highly fraught rollback of environmental rules. According to the draft statement, its signatories represent 52% of the United States population and include two Republican governors — Charlie Baker of Massachusetts and Phil Scott of Vermont — as well as the governors of four states that voted for Trump in 2016: Montana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The broad call, led by Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, creates an awkward moment for Trump, who has also withdrawn the United States from the Paris climate accord and sought to weaken more than 80 environmental regulations but nevertheless talked up “America’s environmental leadership” in a speech Monday.

Assuming the Trump administration’s rollback of clean car rules is finalized and survives legal challenges, America’s cars and trucks would emit as much as an extra 321 million to 931 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by 2035 as a result of the weaker rules, according to an analysis by the research firm Rhodium Group.

Mary Nichols, California’s clean air regulator, said California was already winning the battle.

“We have the largest group of states ever coming together to back our position,” she said. “The fact that we now have over half the U.S. auto market supporting us indicates that we are going to stick with the standards. The auto industry will not build two sets of cars.”

Nichols rejected any possibility of compromise on the Obama-era goals for fuel efficiency that would require automakers to put vehicles on the road averaging roughly 36 mpg by 2025, a pace some automakers had called unattainable.

However, she said, California was open to negotiating on ways to make it easier for automakers to meet those targets, including the use of more credits to reward fuel-saving technologies.

The White House did not immediately return requests for comment.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/climate/trump-governors-clean-car-rules.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Governors call on Trump to halt rollback on rules for clean cars

The governors will also call on Trump to honor California’s legal right to write its own clean air rules, something the administration has said it is set to challenge, according to a draft statement by the governors.

<h1>In the early months of the Trump administration, automakers pleaded for — and appeared set to receive — some relief from fuel economy standards that they said were too difficult to meet.</h1>

But newly released government emails show how a coalition of groups that reject established climate science quickly muscled into the picture, urging the administration to go much further and roll back the rules entirely and characterizing the automakers as their opponents in achieving that goal.

“The automakers are not going to help and may be part of the opposition,” wrote Myron Ebell, a senior figure at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank in Washington that disputes that climate change is a problem, in a May 2018 email sent to supporters and an official at the Environmental Protection Agency.

The administration must stick with the rollback, he said in the email, addressed to members of the “Cooler Heads Coalition,” a loose-knit group of climate-change doubters that Ebell leads.

Hiroko Tabuchi

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