F Minus

Where's the water, where are the trees, and where the hell are the bubblers? These were my panicked thoughts when my parents' divorce took me away from the lush Oregon of the late 70s and landed me on the sooty east coast. This same feeling of shock and disbelief is at the heart of today's exposé in the Oregon Capital Chronicle, which lays bare an "ethical wasteland" in which lobbyists for NW Natural gas are playing both sides of the climate crisis. "Not A Natural Fit," our new report co-authored with Breach Collective, exposes NW Natural and other lobbyists who are furthering Oregon's dependence on gas while also getting paid to lobby for climate-stricken clients who're trying desperately to protect people, wildlife, and Oregon's wild places from the climate crisis. I'll be in Portland next month for some exciting next steps for our work in Oregon. We will be hiring an Oregon Organizer and paid canvassers, and we'll be getting our F Minus oil derrick out of storage and resuming drilling for oil in front of the Portland Art Musuem, which shares a lobbying firm with two fossil fuel companies. This beautiful & monstrous contraption was made by sculptor Lou Pederson from materials they salvaged from the state's 2021 wildfires. Please reach out if you are in Oregon, or know folks in Oregon, and I'd love to connect. https://lnkd.in/dG4334Zx

Maryland and Washington State both have a reputation for climate innovation and a reasonable degree of government transparency--but both are failing to make fossil fuel lobbyists tell the truth in their activity disclosures, finds this Public News Service piece about our F Minus audits of these two states and our 50-state report card. Here's the damning timeline for Maryland: January: two bills that would limit the use of gas in new construction are introduced. March: lobbyists for the American Petroleum Institute, Maryland Realtors, Maryland Multi-Housing Association, and Baltimore Gas & Electric testify against the two bills and help to defeat them. May: one month after the MD legislative session ends, lobbyists for these groups file their first disclosures of 2024, and none of them mention their work on these bills. Time for a mid-session reality check that forces lobbyists to make full and accurate disclosures in March, not false ones in May. Time to audit fossil fuel lobbyist disclosures in all 50 states. https://lnkd.in/e75v7xJe

Thanks to Dan Petrella of the Chicago Tribune for snapping me out of my post-election, not-now-I'm-doing-a-jigsaw-puzzle funk with his incredible deep dive into the history of lobbying corruption in Illinois, including the wrenching example that one of the few serious attempts to crack down on bribery happened after someone tried to pay a state senator $1,000 to support the Equal Rights Amendment in 1980. As the Trib reports, our F Minus 50-state report card finds that Illinois has the most backward lobbyist disclosure system in the country, with lobbyists filing lots of reports (every two weeks) about little or nothing. Looking forward to working with groups like Common Cause to lift the curtain and expose the double agent lobbyists who work simultaneously for BP and the City of Chicago, or the University of Illinois and multiple coal companies. https://lnkd.in/eaG9vAhq

It's a small honor roll as the first F Minus report card on state lobbying transparency is out today, giving one state (Colorado) an A, and failing 27 states. The cover says it all. Disclosure systems that are supposed to help people hold lobbyists and public officials accountable are so fragmentary, weak, and poorly designed that you may as well be reading a stack of heavily redacted, classified documents. Pennsylvania's Lobbyist Directory is a 238-page, 991-MB file containing 1,400 lobbyist photographs but nothing about their clients. The most prominent piece of information disclosed about Georgia's lobbyists is their nickname, if they have one. Texas will tell you if a lobbyist gave a legislator a gun or a Waterford Lismore Pie Server, but not the actual bills on which they were lobbying. Two states that should have gotten good grades, Maryland and Washington, don't because an F Minus audit of fossil fuel lobbyists in each state found them making incomplete and inaccurate disclosures. We did this using video and written records of them lobbying before legislative committees, then demonstrated when and where they had failed to disclose this activity. Yes, corporate lobbyists and elected officials who are the recipients of their campaign contributions, gifts, and offers of post-legislative employment as lobbyists are largely to blame for these disclosure failures. But environmental and good government groups have also failed to make lobbying disclosure a priority. See the report card and Inherent Vice, the 50-state write-up, at https://lnkd.in/erqwU_wZ

Check out this year's F-List from Clean Creatives, which calls out ad agencies and PR firms for profiting off our climate catastrophe. Grateful to CC for advising us as we created our list of fossil fuel lobbyists, and the brilliant Duncan Meisel for inspiring me to go back and read Moby Dick. And coming October 1, F Minus will be releasing a 50-state report card on lobbying transparency in which only one state gets an A, 27 states get failing grades, and we conclude that the true purpose of Texas's system is to help lobbyists monitor members of the public who show their faces in Austin. https://lnkd.in/gAVduk2w

I'm only 54 but I'm retiring the term Gen X in favor of Gen F- after last week's embrace of Chevronism by the Supreme Court. In overturning the 1984 decision Chevron v. NRDC, the court undermined not just the federal government's ability to enforce climate laws, but meaningfully enforce laws meant to protect our other basic rights. Organizations that climate activists like and love shares lobbyists with Chevron. I'm in Seattle this week where a lobbying firm represents both Chevron, the Pacific Whale Watch Association, and King County, for whom it lobbies on parks and recycling. In Oregon, where Chevron is one of more than a dozen fossil fuel companies named in a $52 billion climate lawsuit filed by Multnomah County, Chevron has just hired a former lobbyist for the City of Portland to help it do damage control. It's been a rough week but the answer to Newsweek's question here is yes. Activists in Portland have been calling on the Tualatin Hills Parks and Recreation District to cut ties with its lobbyist over their simultaneous representation of BP America. And THPRD has told F Minus that they are re-evaluating this relationship and their standards for hiring outside lobbyists. https://lnkd.in/eNb2nVcK

https://lnkd.in/eJkZmY58

Grist's story of the heroic work of Drew Wilkinson and Holly Alpine to challenge Microsoft's embrace of AI as the world's smartest oil derrick is inspiring--and a cautionary tale about how Big Tech is trying to distract climate activists with the bright shiny objects of "Net Zero" and "Carbon Negative." Real change in the Tech sector means cutting corporates ties with fossil fuel companies and fossil-fuel-focused trade associations like the U.S Chamber of Commerce. It also means stripping lobbyists of the Big Tech Hat they like to put on when legislators are turned off by their Gas Hat or Fracking Hat. Current data from F Minus finds that Microsoft shares lobbying firms with fossil fuel companies in 17 states. In New York, it shares lobbyists with ExxonMobil and Enbrdige, and in Texas it shares them with NextEra Energy and oil driller Bepco. Amazon's embrace of fossil fuel lobbyists is tighter still. F Minus data finds Amazon sharing lobbying firms with fossil fuel companies in 30 states, the most of any Big Tech company and the most of any American company, period. https://lnkd.in/gHNfgrYH

Sculptor Lou Bernadette made this derrick from materials salvaged from Oregon's 2020 wildfires and set it up to drill during our protest in front of the Portland Art Museum last weekend, calling on the museum to cut ties with lobbyists who work for fossil fuel companies. And now it's going on the road. Check out our lobbyist list and tell F Minus where we should be drilling next in Oregon or Washington. (Or other states, but we'll need to build additional derricks.) Thank you to activists from 350PDX and Extinction Rebellion and many other groups for bringing their incredible and renewable energy to this "drill site"!

Join F Minus at 3pm on Saturday, April 27 as we strike oil (actually organic goo) across the street from the Portland Art Museum and protest PAM sharing a lobbying firm with Cascade Natural Gas and the Williams Companies, whose pipelines carry one-third of the gas in America. And with our partners 350PDX and Sunrise PDX, we'll also be calling out lobbyists for NW Natural. How do you strike oil in Shemanksi Park? With a derrick built out of found charred wood and equipment salvaged from the 2020 wildfires. https://lnkd.in/erwcG8HU